Tag: adventure

Anatomy of a Game: Zelda XIII

I didn’t mean to give the impression with yesterday’s update that Zelda was the first game with a strong bestiary, or a diverse one, or a well-crafted one. However, what you would typically find in the early ’80s was that RPGs had large casts of monsters with diverse powers, but those unfolded primarily through the abstraction of text and statistics. Action games either had large collections of mindless, homogenous beasts or else smaller collections of more clearly defined critters. Zelda stood apart by giving an extensive, RPG-sized bestiary the definition and clarity of a great action game.

So, on to the dungeon monsters.

Enemies in the Underworld


Gel/Zol: As you might expect from a game that hews to the RPG mold, the Gel is the simplest creature in the Zelda bestiary. They’re weak, easily beaten (they can be destroyed with the boomerang), and observe an utterly simplistic pattern: They quiver in place for a moment, move a single tile of the dungeon, and repeat. However, Gels do have a kind of rudimentary trick up their sleeve: Sometimes they come in the form of large, blob-like Zols, snowman-shaped creatures that split into two Gels when struck by a blow too weak to kill it outright. The split creature trick comes into play later in the game with more devious foes, so these guys aren’t just cannon fodder; they’re a learning experience. Which is just as well, because Gels are otherwise completely worthless — they don’t drop loot when slain.

Goriya: The Goriya is basically the underworld equivalent of the Moblin. They move more or less in the same patterns and attack much the same way. The main difference between the two creatures is that Goriyas chuck boomerangs rather than arrows.

Keese/Vire: The upgrade version of Gels and Zols, kind of. Keese (they’re bats) actually behave more or less like Peahats, with one important difference: You can hit them while they’re in the air. Like Gels, they’re the weakest form of enemy, going down even with a boomerang strike and yielding no loot. However, they also appear in the form of the bouncing, winged, four-eyed demons, Vire, which split like Zols when struck (unless you use the Master Sword, which instantly wipes them out). Vires pose much more of a threat than mundane Zols, though, leaping around dangerously — and the Keese they split into move more chaotically than Gels.

Rope: Simple, weak enemies that can pose a mild threat in groups. A Rope moves in a straight line across the dungeon until it hits a wall and changes direction. When Link crosses its line of sight, it’ll speed up to attack… but only in a straight line.

Pols Voice: The Pols Voice move around more or less like Vires, except they usually appear in greater numbers and soak up a ridiculous amount of damage… unless you know their weakness. That’s the infamous part of these guys, since in the Japanese version they could be killed by shouting into the Famicom’s integrated microphone. On the NES, which lacked a built-in mike, they’re weak instead to the arrow, which pieces them and can kill several in a single shot. Pols Voice seem to drop Rupees (which double as arrow ammunition) quite generously, effectively requiring the same zero resource expenditure as shouting into the Famicom mike. And, unlike Vires, Pol Voice don’t burst into bats when struck. They just up and die.

Bubble: I’ve written about Bubbles, the only enemies in the entire game that simply cannot killed or stunned. These guys float around and do no damage when they hit Link, but they’re the worst regardless. Their touch causes Link to become rendered incapable of swinging his sword for a few seconds. I guess a room full of Bubbles wouldn’t be so bad, but of course they tend to show up with the nastiest enemies in the game, leaving you incapable of fighting back at the worst possible time. Shockingly, they get even worse in the Second Quest, appearing in two colors: One makes Link permanently incapable of using his sword until he bumps into a Bubble of the other color. Horrible!

Wallmaster: Tricky guys. You don’t see them when you first enter their lair. But if you stand near the room’s outer walls, they emerge a few tiles from Link and move toward him. They don’t hurt Link if they touch him, but the result is much worse than mere damage: They drag him all the way back to the beginning of the dungeon. Did I mention they generally only appear in the room directly before the boss? And that you don’t have the Ocarina of Time/Wind Waker-style warps across the dungeon?

Moldorm/Lanmola: I can never keep these guys straight. The Lanmolas are the faster ones, I guess, but basically they’re the same thing: They appear in pairs, scuttle around the dungeon like centipedes, occasionally even doubling back on themselves. Stab quickly and they die quickly. Weirdly, despite how non-threatening they are, the game treats them like bosses: Once they die, they’re gone forever.

Gibdo: These guys show up very front-loaded, because they’re pretty easy to dispatch. They wander along slowly toward Link, marching along straight lines even as they recoil from your attacks. In a nice touch, they’re among the few dungeon enemies who seem particularly vulnerable to fire. Which you’d expect from a mummy, right?

Stalfos: You’d be hard-pressed to find a difference between these guys and Gibdos, at least in the First Quest. They move the same, act the same, and die even more easily.

Darknut: Perhaps the most infamous enemies in Zelda, Darknuts are tremendously daunting… mainly because they’re completely invulnerable from the front. They’re also aggressive in their randomness. You need to strike them from the side or back, but they don’t make it easy; they quickly turn to face Link, marching toward him even as they present their invulnerable side. I’ve written quite a bit about these guys, but suffice to say they’re dangerous whether they appear on their own or in mixed company.

Like Like: Ah, these shield-eating bastards. A Like Like can’t hurt Link directly, but they make a beeline for him and soak up a ton of damage. If you don’t manage to kill it before it reaches you, they eat your shield. This leaves you vulnerable to projectiles and costs you a bunch of money (at least 90 rupees) to replace the shield.

Wizzrobe: Easily the deadliest foe in Zelda, for reasons enumerated in previous entries. The Blue Wizzrobe might also be the cheapest enemy in the game, pinning you down as it advanced on you while firing non-stop magic beams. Dangerous alone, these guys become even more ferocious when you’re juggling multiple enemy types that leave you distracted and less capable of evading their attacks.

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Anatomy of a Game: Zelda XI

And here our story ends, more or less.

Throughout this series, I’ve looked at the ways The Legend of Zelda balanced total player freedom in an open world with subtle (and sometimes overt) clues on how to advance. The game hasn’t always done a perfect job of it, with erratic spikes in difficulty and a few sections where progression comes down to patience, obstinacy, and blue luck. On the whole, though, I have to commend Zelda not only for being insanely massive and ambitious for a console release of its era, but also for doing a great job of training players in a new style of game play.

However, with its final dungeon — Level-9, aka Skull, aka Death Mountain, aka Spectacle Rock — Zelda has long since ceased to help players along and instead says, “OK, sucker. Let’s see what you’ve got.” The result is the game’s toughest dungeon, bar none. It comprises nearly twice as many rooms as the second-largest labyrinth, and its layout is far more complex, consisting of multiple isolated sections connected only by underground routes.

It’s big, and it’s tough. Well, mostly tough. The difficulty is all over the place, actually. Some rooms contain the hated Blue Wizzrobe/Red Wizzrobe/Like-Like/Bubble combination, and they’ll make you hate life. But others contain nothing but Zols or Gels or Vires, which seem laughable at this point. Unfortunately, the bulk of the enemies here have a very frustrating tendency: They don’t drop many items. Wizzrobes are the grand exception to this rule, often leaving behind bombs (or even health, if you’re lucky); but for the most part, you won’t reap much of anything for your trouble.

Level-9 contains two treasures, one of which you absolutely need in order to complete the game. The other is technically optional, but it’s practically necessary: The Red Ring, which reduces the amount of damage Link takes from enemies to a mere 25%. Without the Red Ring, those Wizzrobe rooms will whittle you down in a hurry; with the ring in (or on) hand, you’ll fare far better. In fact, once I acquired the Red Ring, I went from fighting a war of health attrition to steadily gaining health. Of course, it helped that the game decided to start dropping more health pickups at that point. Thanks, random number generator. It also doesn’t help that I played this on 3DS Virtual Console; much as I like the 3DS its D-pad really sucks compared to the NES’s.

Given how powerful it is — really, once you snag it, you can basically blast through the dungeon to the very end without a hiccup — the Red Ring is suitably hidden. It’s actually “outside” the map… which is to say, the dungeon appears in the shape of a skull, and while the eyes obviously contain non-mapped rooms (the compass blinks in the left eye to indicate Princess Zelda’s location) the Red Ring is hidden in the northeast corner in the negative space of the skull’s upper “curve.” You might not think to bomb that wall, even though half the passages in this stage have to be opened by force.

Apropos of nothing, I made a dumb mistake in my playthrough: I didn’t bother to pick up the Magic Key in Level-8. “I have a bunch of keys left over,” I figured. “Who needs it?” And then I got to a bunch of dead ends with locked doors in Level-9 and ran out of keys. So that was cool, leaving and starting the dungeon over. Fortunately, the Magic Whistle has a trick: Blow it while facing east and it will whisk you progressively to each dungeon entrance. Blow it while facing west and you’ll cycle through the dungeons in reverse order. So to get from Level-9 to Level-8, face left, use the flute, and hey presto.

Level-9 isn’t completely without its handy pointers. Despite its size and complexity and the prevalence of hidden passages, Spectacle Rock has a single friendly occupant within — an old man who tells you, “Go to the next room.” Since you enter his chamber from the only available door, it therefore becomes pretty obvious that he’s not saying, “Turn around, kiddo.” So you have a pretty strong clue to bomb open a hole… which, in fact, takes you to the first significant underground passage leading into the true depths of the dungeon. It’s just a hint of, uh, a hint — enough to nudge you in the right direction before leaving you entirely to your own devices.

Deep within the labyrinth, Ganon has one final miniboss to deal with: A new creature, a bee-like creature called Patra. There are several Patras in this stage, and while they’re not insanely difficult they require some caution. A Patra is a core creature surrounded by a ring of smaller yellow bugs that revolve around it and switch their movement between three different patterns. Each smaller Patra-ling requires two hits with the Magical Sword, so you can’t just stand there and smack them as they approach — you have to stand at the edge, predict their movements, and hit more furtively.

The game’s final treasure is the Silver Arrow, without which Ganon can’t be defeated. This isn’t tucked away anywhere near as securely as the Red Ring, but it’s still not directly along the game’s critical path, which means you can very easily make it to the final room without a means to defeat the final boss. There is no way on earth Nintendo would ever allow you to do that in a modern game, and I can’t say that’s necessarily a bad thing: The first time I ever faced Ganon I cycled through every weapon in my inventory, but the wooden arrows just wouldn’t do it.

The Ganon battle is simple and cinematic: He lives in darkness, which the Triforce illuminates, causing him to shrink away from its radiance. Then he vanishes, teleporting around the room in a circular pattern; your only means of fighting him comes by tracing back the origin of the fireballs he shoots at you. Even then, it’s hard to know exactly where he will be jumping to, so you have to stab air and hope for the best.

Each time you hit Ganon, you briefly see him (he’s a fat blue pig-man wearing boots and what appears to be a skull-faced T-shirt — basically he’s one of the gross metalhead dudes who sulked in the corner of my junior high P.E. class). The fourth time you strike him, he becomes stunned, locked in place for a few seconds. This is your cue to whip out the Silver Arrow and fire it at him, at which point he dies instantly, turning into a pile of dust with the Triforce of Power sitting on top.

Game over. You’re the hero of Hyrule!

You know what the best part of the ending is? The credits roll contains a whole seven names, and one of them is Hiroshi Yamauchi, who we can safely say has never done a second of game design in his life. That means this groundbreaking adventure was conceived and crafted by a mere half a dozen people. Think on that as you’re enjoying the 10-minute credit sequences of Black Ops II or Assassin’s Creed III, eh?

But we’re not done yet! The game begins again, with new secrets and more devious dungeon designs. We won’t be exploring the Second Quest in full detail, but it offers enough new tricks to merit some consideration. Thanks for reading this far, and please look forward to the fresh hell of the Second Quest.

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Anatomy of a Game: Zelda IX

As this series of long-dated observations about The Legend of Zelda nears its conclusion, it’s time to circle back around to the very first post on the topic and look at the overworld design again. Zelda admirably points players in the right direction from the very beginning and “teaches” you how to play as you advance through the dungeons, but the entire overworld layout speaks of a thoughtful design process.

To begin with, the overworld works on a macro scale, as you can see here when it’s all strung together. If we continue accepting the assumption that up equals north, what we have here appears to be a land on the east-southeasterly edge of a landmass. It’s bounded by impassable mountains to the west and north, ocean to the east edging around the southeast corner of the land, and (somewhat less convincingly) impenetrable shrubbery to the south. This forms a perfect rectangle broken into a perfect grid, but whatever, it’s a game. Roll with it.

Within the boundaries of Zelda‘s Hyrule, we have forest occupying nearly the entire south half of the land. The centerpiece of Hyrule is a large, oblong lake fed by a mountain stream and flowing to an unseen sea to the south. A few other ponds appear throughout the land as well. The coasts are appropriately rocky, with some thoughtful little details; I’m fond of the narrow, rocky passage due east of the starting point, which suggests the elevated forest giving way to a more treacherous path to the coastline. To the west, further from shore, the forest is brown and dry, conterminous with a cemetary that serves as the sole entrance to the mountains prior to Link acquiring the ladder that  allows him to ford the river and approach the mountain from the east. There’s also a bit of desert at the foot of the mountain to the north — not much, just a small enclosed valley.

Anyway, the interesting thing about the map design is that, technically, Link can go anywhere he likes from the very beginning. Reaching the northerly peaks isn’t easy at the beginning, since the one path forward is blocked by the Lost Woods, which you’re almost guaranteed not to be able to navigate your first time through; but for subsequent adventures, the land of Hyrule is wide open. This is likely the reason Nintendo built health requirements into acquiring the advanced weapons; by making players track down some Heart Containers in order to wield the better blades, they prevent you from skipping straight ahead to the top weapons before ever entering a dungeon. (Though technically, you can snag the White Sword before attempting your first dungeon if you know where to look for upgrades.) Knowing the route through Hyrule from the very beginning serves as a sort of keystone for speed runs and wacky superplay efforts, including the infamous “reaching Ganon without ever finding a sword” endeavor.

Like much of the rest of the game, Zelda’s overworld teases you with intriguing possibilities, enticing you to explore, then rewarding you for seeking out its boundaries. For instance, while wandering around in search of the second dungeon, which has been tucked away in a dead-end nook in the main forest, you’ll probably notice this Heart Container sitting enticingly on a dock. All you need to reach this is the ladder, but you wouldn’t know that at the time; so you wonder, “How do I get that?” Later, once you have the ladder in hand, you’ll probably remember that one upgrade you couldn’t reach before and head over to find it. And from there maybe you’ll use the ladder to cross the river to the north and explore Death Mountain a bit.

The overworld presents a natural sense of progression as you venture to the north. Creatures grow deadlier as you stray further from the opening area, with Moblins to the east and deadly Lynels patrolling the area around the final dungeon in large numbers. The “proper” path to Level-9 takes you through forest, dying forest, a cemetery, foothills, and finally the peaks of Death Mountain: A clear and coherent journey.

Ah, but we get ahead of ourselves.

Zelda’s overworld also operates on an important unstated rule: Every screen of the map can contain a single hidden door. Not every screen does, but no screen contains more than one. (And every once in a while, you’ll find a screen with both an obvious door and a hidden one, though to my knowledge that only happens at the entrance to dungeons, where the secret door serves double duty as the dungeon’s entrance.) Since so many secrets can only be revealed by bombing or burning the scenery, knowing this limitation saves much time and frustration: Once you find an area’s hidden secret, you don’t need to look further.

Secret doors can be just about anywhere.

Touch an Armos statue to bring it to life and you may reveal a door.

Bomb a rock wall and you could open one.

Burn a bush (a breezy task once you have Level-7′s Magic Candle) and a door can appear.

Shove a tombstone, and if a Ghini doesn’t appear to beat you up for disturbing its mortal remains, you just might have found a door.

Move one of those curious rock formations you see scattered around the land. Perhaps they’re related!

There’s even a direct instruction given in the in-game text: Walk into the waterfall.

There’s even a really deviously hidden door in the Second Quest desert that can only be revealed by blowing the Whistle.

This constant detonation and arson can grow wearying if you do it all at once, but hunting for secrets in Zelda works best if you attempt it in dribs and drabs. Have some spare bombs on hand while walking through a screen with no visible doors? That one tree standing by itself in the forest seem a little suspicious? Take a few seconds and poke around. Because most of Zelda’s best secrets — the rarest items, the hidden Heart Containers, the cheapest shop deals — only reveal themselves to those who take the time to look.

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Anatomy of a Game: Zelda VIII

I would like to put forth two possibilities for the design of The Legend of Zelda Level-07, Demon. Either it is meant to be a sorbet of sorts — a palate-cleanser — in the wake of two extraordinarily difficult dungeons, or else someone got their numeration wrong and this was supposed to come much earlier in the game. Demon is one of the easiest dungeons in the game in terms of pure combat logistics; for the most part, it’s more on par with the third dungeon than the sixth. The most difficult mob that appears here is the Blue Goriya, and by and large the bestiary hearkens back more to the second and third levels. No Darknuts. No Vires. No Pols Voice. No Wizzrobes, thank god.

But! Zelda dungeons are not simply a matter of combat. Demon may play out less challengingly in terms of physical threats, especially if you sufficiently armed yourself for Level-06, but there’s more to the game than just killing things. There are two significant factors that make the idea that Level-07 was supposed to come earlier in the game downright fallacious.

First, it’s crammed with repeat bosses. You face off against two rooms full of triple Dodongos, a couple of Lanmola minibosses, and no less than three Digdogger chambers, two of which split into three parts when you play the Flute. Granted, none of these are as nasty as Level-06′s three-headed Gleeok (not even when you have gargoyles pelting you with fire as you battle three Digdogger nuclei), but the fact that half a dozen of the rooms here contain boss-calibre opponents marks a massive increase in the number of heavy hitters to appear in a single stage.

More importantly, though, this dungeon is much more puzzle-like than any we’ve seen to date. Progression through the stage requires liberal wall-bombing to smash open sealed passages, and even armed with a Bomb Bag you’re likely to find yourself running short on explosives. The game kind of front-loads them by offering them as room prizes for several chambers early in the stage, but they’re harder to come by once you clear out the first Dodongo room (for which of course you need bombs); the toughest part of this stage for me was resource management, and I had to duck out briefly to find more bombs before I could reach the final boss area — which, incidentally, requires you to bomb a passage through a chamber that shows up on the map as not being part of the dungeon. The compass and map are easy to come by in this level, and probably not by coincidence. The compass is there to taunt you with the boss location, and the map is there to make you throw you off the actual route to the boss. It’s pretty clever.

Meanwhile, once you get through the “invisible” room, the hidden passage to the boss’ lair appears in a room with a moving block in a configuration that’s never appeared before and doesn’t intuitively communicate itself as such. Furthermore, even though that room appears empty but for a Bubble, you can’t push the moving block right away, because it’s locked away behind several Wall Masters that lurk invisibly out of sight and which you might not even be aware of. Even the dungeon itself is the best-hidden in the game. Granted, it’s a piece of cake compared to dungeon puzzles in modern Zelda games, but you have to give it credit for upping the chin-strokey ante in the original game.

Oh, and it also contains one of the game’s most infuriatingly enigmatic puzzles, too: A non-hostile Moblin, indestructible, who states “GRUMBLE, GRUMBLE” when you enter his lair. I’m sure you probably know the solution by now — feed him the otherwise almost entirely worthless Food item — but back in 1987 that was a heck of a head-scratcher.

Now, once you actually sort out these mysteries, stock up on Bombs, and find your way to the end, Level-07 is pretty easy. The final boss is another Aquamentis, which is no more difficult than the first. A measly two hits from the Magical Sword will do him in. But the trick is in figuring out how to reach him in the first place. I think for gamers well-versed in the ways of this game, Demon seems head-scratchingly simple, but the idea here was to warm players up for some of the more arcane level design challenges ahead. Future dungeons will combine both hard-hitting enemies and tricky layouts, but Level-07 represents the game changing gears.

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Anatomy of a Game: Zelda VII

So, my original intention for the Anatomy of Zelda was to combine multiple later dungeons into single entries. That obviously hasn’t worked out, because, well, the game has more varied and interesting design than I gave it credit for. Which is fine. I’m not going to complain about a well-crafted game, although it does mean this project will last much longer than intended. I hope you’re OK with that.

We move on to the sixth dungeon, whose shape-identity is… I forget. Fetus? Seahorse? Maybe it’s Dragon, since it kind of resembles Adventure‘s duck-looking dragons turned sideways. And Zelda does owe a debt to Adventure! Probably. I guess it might be presumptuous to think Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka played Adventure, given how the Atari 2600 2800 fared over there.

In any case, Fetus here made me eat my words. I said the fifth dungeon was where Zelda removed its gloves and began playing for keeps, but holy crap, I’d forgotten how insane this level is. Blue Darknuts are nasty, no question about it, but they honestly have nothing on Blue Wizzrobes.

Wizzrobes represent this stage’s big addition to the Zelda sandbox, and it’s a brutal addition indeed. As with so many of Zelda‘s elements, Wizzrobes come in two flavors, red (well, orange) and blue. The red ones aren’t too bad; they teleport around the room, materializing on either a horizontal or vertical axis from Link. Once they solidify, they fire a beam of magic and warp away again. Their main strategy is to try and surround Link; a room full of Red Wizzrobes could potentially see Link surrounded on several sides by enemies that try and pin him down with beams. But they’re not too difficult to handle, since they always appear a few spaces from Link and take a second to materialize, giving the player time and room to maneuver out of the line of fire. And the upgraded shield can deflect their beams, so you can dash toward one as it appears, take a swing, block the attack, and then counter with a killing blow.

Blue Wizzrobes, on the other hand, are the biggest bastards in the game. They don’t behave at all like their warm-hued counterparts. They don’t teleport, instead moving in patterns reminiscent of Level-5′s Blue Darknuts. However, Wizzrobes are faster than Darknuts, fire projectiles, and can briefly dematerialize to move quickly at a diagonal angle. The one upside is that they’re squishy from all sides — but actually it’s much worse to be directly in front of a Blue Wizzrobe than a Blue Darknut, because they’re far more dangerous.

The Blue Wizzrobe wanders through the room without much in the way of an aim or pattern until Link happens to wander into its sights. At that point, it becomes the deadliest threat in the game, moving quickly directly toward Link while firing a rapid barrage of energy. Unlike Red Wizzrobes, which fire once before blinking away, the blue ones shoot over and over again quite quickly, making it difficult to do anything but stand there and block or, if your timing is very, very good, move to the side. This attack is easily the cheapest move in Zelda‘s entire arsenal against the player: Spamming you with beams practically locks you in place until the Wizzrobe closes the gap and walks through you, naturally inflicting contact damage on Link. (It never works the other way, does it?) Even with the best sword, a Blue Wizzrobe requires three hits before it goes down, so you can’t just wait for it to come to you; it simply isn’t possible to quickly take down an oncoming Wizzrobe at close range before it bumps into you. Cruel.

If I sound like I’m complaining, it’s because Fetus is the first dungeon to wipe me out. I’d cruised through Zelda just fine until this point, but I had the audacity to head into Level-6 before exploring the eastern edge of the overworld, which meant I hadn’t grabbed either of the Heart Containers over there, nor had I picked up the letter to the old lady. So I didn’t have optimal health, wasn’t wielding the Magic Sword, and didn’t have Medicine. I still managed to make it within spitting distance of the boss, but since the game decided to stop dropping health recovery items for a crucial ten-minute span, I eventually ran out of juice and could go no further. But you’ll be happy to know my second attempt (with more health, a better sword, and backup medicine just in case) fared much better.

Fetus begins with a strange design decision: The first room is locked to the west, and the room to the east has a key but also a locked north-facing door. If you use the key in the room where it drops, you just find an old man in a dead-end chamber. Keys don’t work here as they do in other Zelda games — they’re a commodity, and you can buy them at shops or carry them from dungeon to dungeon — but it still strikes me as strange that you could potentially be forced to go hunting for a shop that sells keys in order to enter the bulk of this stage if you didn’t collect all the keys in previous dungeons. (Though if you did, and you’re taking the dungeons in order, you’ll have two in reserve at this point.)

Pretty quickly, you meet the new Wizzrobe threat with a room full of red ones. They might catch a newcomer off-guard, but they’re really not too difficult thanks to their simple, predictable, easy evaded pattern. No, the real cruelty doesn’t kick in until you travel north a few rooms and meet the Blue Wizzrobes. Zelda doesn’t waste any time in training for these guys; your first Blue Wizzrobe encounter happens in one of the nastiest rooms you’ll encounter in the game. There are only a couple of Blue Wizzrobes wandering around, but you also have to contend with Red Wizzrobes, shield-eating Like-Likes, and worst of all a Bubble whose paralytic touch can leave you vulnerable to the Like-Likes. Let one of those guys catch you and you’ll be sans Magic Shield, which means you’ll be unable to deflect all those magic beams the Wizzrobes are flinging around. The one upside to this room is that everything (except Bubbles, natch) is vulnerable to Bombs. At this point you’ll be glad you grabbed the Bomb Bag in the fifth dungeon.

You’ll encounter several of these rooms in the game; the last throws in a couple of Red Wizzrobes, too. Their simple, predictable pattern becomes a lot less harmless amidst all the chaos of Blue Wizzrobes, Bubbles, and Like-Likes. It’s a real gauntlet for survival.

On top of that, Fetus also pits you against an upgraded version of a returning boss midway through. Level-5 saw a Dodongo triple threat, while Level-6 makes Gleeok a triple threat instead. That third head cranks up the difficulty considerably. It’s easy enough to kill the two-headed Gleeok, but with the third head you’ll eventually be at a point where you’re stabbing the last living head while the ghosts of his slain heads fly around the room, and all three are blasting you with fireballs. The upside is that once Gleeok is gone, it’s gone for good, even if you have to leave and return (for instance, to go find the Magical Sword).

This dungeon’s treasure is, once again, no good whatsoever against the boss. However, it’s invaluable in those rooms of Blue Wizzrobes and Like-Likes. The magical rod fires beams exactly like those of the Wizzrobes, and while the wizards themselves are completely immune to its power most other creatures aren’t. That means if you’re struck by a Bubble, you can still take out Like-Likes from a safe distance; a Bubble’s touch only disables your sword for a moment, not your secondary items.

After all of this, the boss — Gohma — is laughably easy. If you know its weakness (and there’s a huge clue at the very beginning of the dungeon) you can kill Gohma in a single shot. I walked into its lair, loosed an arrow, and took out the boss in about two seconds total time. Hilariously anticlimactic, but given the incredible difficulty level of this stage, it’s hard to complain.

Interestingly, there’s a second clue given in this dungeon to tip you off to the location of Level-7 — possibly the only time the game does that, I think. The seventh dungeon is ridiculously well-hidden, even with the clue, so any help comes in handy.

As always, images in this blog are provided courtesy of VGMuseum.

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Anatomy of a Game: Zelda VI

I can’t believe it’s been a full month since I posted the last of these. My apologies. I was out of town for two-thirds of that time and basically just set the site to auto-publish GameSpite Journal 12 content (aside from the occasional pointless observations about Evangelion). Let us now regroup and return to the task at hand, with the understanding that the demands of review season dictate continued service interruptions.

If the past couple of dungeons featured occasional moments where The Legend of Zelda’s gloves came off and it began to pummel you rhythmically right in the tummy, the fifth dungeon (“Lizard,” not related at all to the worst album in King Crimson’s discography) is where it uses the gloves to slap you in the face before rolling up its sleeves, knocking you to the ground, and beating you in the face. Well, maybe it’s not quite that bad — the sixth and eighth dungeons are far more brutal — but this stage definitely marks the point of no return.

At this point the game design no longer teaches you or strings you along as it did early on. Here you’re expected to understand the fundamentals of the game design and apply them intelligently and in various combinations. Zelda has doled out its invisible guidance until now, but no more. Sink or swim, little elf.

Even reaching the dungeon requires patience, exploration, and honestly a bit of good luck. Level-5 resides atop Death Mountain at its eastern edge, hidden by a place usually referred to as the Lost Hills. The only exit from the Lost Hills is to the west; if you travel in any other direction, the screen simply loops endlessly. That is, unless you happen to know the secret: Travel north five times and the Lost Hills will reveal the dungeon. Unraveling this mystery needn’t be entirely happenstance; the woman living in the waterfall directly west of the Lost Hills will give you a clue to that effect (“Go up, up the mountain ahead”) if you pay her well enough, but even then a bit of deduction is in order since “ahead” may not necessarily mean “to the east” — especially if you happen to be emerging from a frustrating bout of Lost Hills exploration when you find the cave.

When I talk about how secrets and wisdom of NES games made the rounds in the school yard in the olden days, this is one of the mysteries that I’m referring to. Reaching Lizard had us stumped for ages, and when someone finally figured it out, he was hailed as a champion of the common man.

Once inside Lizard, it’s… kind of garish. I think the red-on-green color scheme is meant to imply rivers of magma running through mossy or coppery stone, given that it’s up in the mountains, but since every dungeon uses the same stone tile graphic set it’s hard to be certain.

Two things come to mind about Lizard. First, it introduces an entirely new foe, Pols Voice. These rabbit-like creatures move slowly but soak up enough damage that they’re difficult to destroy via sword alone without taking damage. In Japan, of course, they were infamously vulnerable to loud sounds (that is, shouting into the microphone on the Famicom’s controller) but given the NES’s lack of audio input options this was changed in America. Instead, a single arrow will not only kill a Pols Voice but pierce completely through it, potentially hitting several in a single shot. That’s called “getting your money’s worth” (arrows cost one rupy to fire, you see). The use of an alternate technique to fight these monsters is appreciated, but the change does somewhat diminish the slight music theme this dungeon originally possessed.

Because, you see, the boss — Digdogger — can be defeated only by using the dungeon’s treasure, the Flute. Is a massive circular creature that almost resembles a sort of paramecium, and it can’t be hurt in its standard form. Playing the flute, however, will cause it to shrink in size and become vulnerable to the sword. What we have right here is the ur-Zelda experience. Use of a musical instrument? Check. Using the treasure of a dungeon in order to weaken its boss and expose its vulnerable point? Check. This means something. This is important.

Once you know to trick to Digdogger (and an old man in the dungeon openly tells you what that trick is), it may be the easiest boss so far; the only real danger in its lair comes from the fireballs being lobbed by the statues in the corners. The trick, however, is actually acquiring the flute you need. It’s the single most difficult thing you’ll have done so far in the game.

You’ll probably experience a moment of panic when you head north from the entrance and find a trio of Dodongos, a single one of which appeared as Level-2′s boss. But they’re cake compared to what lies ahead. The Flute rests in a room in the northeast corner of Lizard, but that room is completely isolated and non-contiguous from the rest of the dungeon. It cannot be reached directly. Instead, you have to take an underground passage accessed by pushing a block (something true for the return trip, too). Zelda‘s mechanics require players to defeat all the enemies in a room before they can push a block to open a passage… which wouldn’t normally be that big a deal, except in this case the enemies consist of more than half a dozen Darknuts. And not the friendly red ones that die in two hits of the White Sword. No, these are the upgraded models, the Blue Darknuts. Remember, “blue” means “danger” in Zelda, and Blue Darknuts take no less that four hits of the White Sword before they go down. It is possible to have the Magical Sword here, even if you’re playing the dungeons in order, but unless you know where to find every Heart Container in the game, this is a brutal ordeal — one of the toughest in the First Quest.

The room in which the Darknuts appear makes the going even more difficult, because so much of the floor space is occupied by the barrier around the passage. You can really only maneuver in the corners of the room, chipping away at the bad guys with your sword beam — you did enter this room with full health, right? — or dropping bombs at them if you have any left after the Dodongos. The Darknuts’ invulnerable, shielded front sides and erratic movement patterns make them tough when you’re facing the weaker ones, but these blue guys are just insane.

But the reward for surviving them is the Flute, which not only helps defeat the boss but also make getting around the overworld much easier — on the outside map, the Flute summons a whirlwind that transports Link to various areas of the map, speeding the process of travel considerably.

Also in this pocket of the stage, you’ll find (by bombing the proper wall) an old man offering a bomb bag upgrade for 100 rupies. He’s a shrewd businessman. The triple Dodongo threat and the rooms full of Darknuts should be all the incentive you need to drop some cash on the spot.

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Anatomy of a Game: Zelda ~ ALL OF TREASURES ~

So the big deal about The Legend of Zelda was that it had a ton of items to collect. Some were instant consumables, some were weapons, some were simply passive tools. Some dropped randomly from enemy mobs, whereas others appeared in fixed locations, and yet others were deliberately tucked away as key acquisition points to enable quest progression.

Link’s gear covered a broad gamut of abilities and uses. The sword served as a basic straightforward tool for combat: Hit the button and stab straight ahead, firing a piercing beam across the screen should you be fortunate enough to start out with full health. The sword beam is interesting because it’s apparently intrinsic to Link himself; any sword can fire it from the very beginning of the game. Later games tie it to a sword or make it a learned technique further down the road, but not here.

Speaking of swords, Zelda made a nice effort to replicate the structure of an RPG by giving Link a progressive upgrade system with several of his weapons. The sword advances through three degrees of power, with access to each new level contingent upon Link’s health upgrades. Each sword is twice as powerful as the last. Pretty standard stuff now! But not in 1986. DOOM.

Several sub-weapons also have more powerful secondary iterations, too. The boomerang goes from a slow doodad that travels only half the length of the screen to a faster, more powerful version that spans the full screen. The Silver Arrow is more powerful than the basic Arrow. The Red Candle allows infinite uses per screen whereas the Blue Candle can only be used once. The Blue Ring reduces damage by 50%, while the Red Ring cuts it to 25% total.

The weird thing about the color variations is that they’re reversed for Link. Enemies also come in red and blue variants, but in those cases the blue versions are the more powerful ones. For Link, red equipment is more powerful. Even with the Magical Rod: The rod itself is blue (weak), but the Book of Magic (red) upgrades it to leave lingering flames behind and damage enemies.

I’ve always wondered about that. It seems oddly counterintuitive; why would the color scheme be reversed like this? Does red represent things that are more beneficial to Link while blue items are meant less? I can’t believe it wasn’t a deliberate design choice, but I don’t understand the rationale behind it.

All in all, Zelda did a really great job of giving Link tons of cool equipment that made for a hero with unprecedented (at the time) versatility. You’d expect this kind of range from an adventure game protagonist, but here you don’t have to punch in adventure game text prompts. Just point and shoot. And no adventure game lead had this many weapons: A sword, a magical beam, a boomerang that could be thrown with a bit of english on it, arrows, bombs. A bracelet to allow rocks to be shoved aside to reveal secret passages, a flute to summon a tornado for cross-country transit (see also: Simon’s Quest), a key capable of unlocking any door, a stepladder to cross rivers (!?), even food to serve as bait for monsters (or appease grumbling guards).

The only downside to the interface came in the fact that you constantly had to access the subscreen to toggle between objects. But, heck, I can’t think of any other game that used that setup back then. On the rare occasion you had an action game with an inventory mechanic it would work like Karnov, where you’d acquire a bunch of equipment and toggle between items on the fly in the most cumbersome and counterintuitive manner imaginable.

The Zelda toolset still holds up more than a quarter of a century later. Aside from a handful of later additions like the Hookshot, Link’s loadout hasn’t changed much over the years. You can accuse Nintendo of stagnation if you like, but it’s not like Zelda‘s imitators have particularly upped the stakes in the regard, either. Sometimes, a game just gets it right. Zelda was one of those games.

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