Tag: legend of zelda

The Anatomy of Zelda II: XI. One last nuisance

While making the trip from the Maze Palace to the Ocean Palace proved to be a snap — basically as simple as walking directly south from one to the other — Zelda II has one final nasty surprise in store for players. The final standard dungeon, the Hidden Palace, is, well, hidden.

130409-zeldaii-11-02

This should feel familiar to those who completed the original Legend of Zelda. As in that game, many of the hidden secrets here can be accessed immediately if you know the trick, and the Hidden Palace is perhaps the most extreme example of this phenomenon. Once you know the secret to revealing its location, you can also head there immediately from the previous Palace. The initial challenge, of course, lies in unraveling those secrets from villagers who are curiously knowledgeable about ancient mystical secrets.

You use the funny-shaped key from the Ocean Palace, the Flute, exactly twice in Adventure of Link. First, you use it to vanquish the spider-like River Demon blocking the path to the southern half of the east continent….

130409-zeldaii-11-01

Then you use it once again while standing in the center tile of the diamond formed by the palace and the three boulders north of it. But, of course, there’s no way to intuit this without some insanely canny game logic decryption skills, and let’s be honest: You’re not that smart. None of us are. Video game logic in the 8-bit era — before everything was predictable and codified the way it is now — didn’t make a lot of sense.

We can argue at length about whether creative-but-incoherent or rote-and-decipherable is a better approach to game design, but at the end of the day you probably got stuck at this point in the game until Nintendo Power helped you. If only we’d had the Internet back then for sharing tips…

Once you bypass the River Demon — and no, the Boots from the fourth Palace won’t let you walk on the river here — the path south gives you a taste of the nastiness ahead for the remainder of the quest. The “safe” path on the overworld may be free of random encounters, but going forward your critical path is laden with fixed battles that in many ways are much worse.

The most common combat scenario going forward takes the form of a straight march along low, flat ground with a tall wall rising behind it. Lizard men poke their head above the top of the wall and chuck rocks at you as you walk, and believe it or not they have good aim. Their logic routines aren’t your usual “throw randomly in a fixed pattern” affairs so common to games of this vintage; rather, they lead their aim, throwing rocks ahead of Link when you walk full tilt forward so that if you simply try to motor through these phases you’ll take tons of damage.

It’s pretty irritating in practice, but I respect the added effort that went into the hazards here. The developers must have watched play testers (such as they were in the day) make a mad dash for the exit and thought, “No, screw you guys. You’re gonna suffer.” There’s a real dedication to human misery on display here.

Once you pass through these gauntlets and the most frustrating bridge sequences in the game, you reach the town of Kasuto. Ragged and worn down by the preceding combat sequences and the brutally difficult random fights, you duck into the village looking forward to recharging your life and magic. And then you promptly die as the town is empty but for invisible monsters that smash into you seemingly at random and brutalize your life meter. Game Over. The return of Ganon.

  130409-zeldaii-11-03

Kasuto, as it turns out, has been abandoned but for an old man who proclaims, “This town is dead.” This lends a little more credence to the notion that Zelda II took some pointers from Dragon Quest (with its desolate village of Hauksness), but it also leads to a fairly maddening snipe hunt. The Kasuto holdout tells you to look in the forest to the east, and eventually you’ll probably cotton to the fact that he means the forest along the continent’s eastern edge, separated from the main map by a cavern. But no village appears, and no matter where you walk you’ll never find it by simply passing over the correct tile.

Instead, you have to use the Hammer to knock down trees — a secondary function of the tool you’ve never needed to use prior to this point. While I admire the developers for giving one of Link’s treasure multiple functions as opposed to their usual routine of forcing you to track down a tool to use once or twice, this portion of the game can be quite infuriating if you don’t know about the Hammer’s clear-cutting feature. And you probably don’t, as it’s alluded to vaguely in the manual and never in the game.

Should you manage to find your way to the relocated village of New Kasuto, hidden beneath the trees and inaccessible until you raze the forest, you’ll find your final magic upgrade — essential for completing the game! — and the lamest magic spell in the game. In fact, it’s so lame they didn’t even bother giving it a name. It’s just called “Spell.” The only real use of Spell is to access a couple of buildings in New Kasuto, one of which gives you the helpful (but not essential) Magic Key.

130409-zeldaii-11-04

No, the real coup in finding New Kasuto is that the elderly holdout living in old Kasuto will now give Link the Thunder spell, without which you can’t complete the final boss gauntlet. Also, someone tells you the secret to finding the Hidden Palace, mostly.

After all of this, the Palace itself is fairly mundane. It lacks any significant new challenges; the main feature of note is the fact that it features the game’s only recurring boss, the mounted Ironknuckle (Rebonack), who shows up twice. By this point in Link’s murder career, they should be simple, as once dismounted they actually take less damage to dispatch than standard Blue Ironknuckles (two hits with a level-8 sword versus four).

130409-zeldaii-11-05

The Palace treasure this time around isn’t a mere key but rather an essential tool, the Cross. (Nice consistency with the mandatory religious censorship, there, Nintendo.) The Cross does nothing for Link besides rendering the invisible enemies that haunt Kasuto visible. Big deal, you may say, but the entirety of the path to the Great Palace is lousy with the things. I suppose it’s technically possible to reach the final Palace without the Cross, but only if you are very, very lucky. Or very, very unafraid to use a GameShark.

Ultimately, the one tricky part of the Hidden Palace is that to reach the boss, you need to drop down a pit and use the Fairy spell while in midair on the screen below so you can fly into a small passage in the wall. Mandatory use of a high-cost magic can be a real pain in this game, since magic refills are random drops from certain enemies (and once you clear a room of foes they almost never return); chances are good you’ll need to farm drops from the few respawning enemies nearby… or else just kill yourself.

130409-zeldaii-11-06

After all of this, the Palace’s boss is almost laughably anticlimactic. He rises up from one of three lava pits, waits for a few seconds, belches fire, and ducks back down again. If you time it right, you can hit him three times per appearance — and if your Magic and Life ratings are high, the Shield spell will trivialize his fire attack.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the bulk of the difficulty in this portion of the game stems from unintuitive secrets and poor user guidance, not from sheer tests of dexterity. That changes now, though. With the sixth crystal placed, Link’s only remaining task is to reach the Great Palace and conquer it, but that’s easily the most daunting challenge in the game — in fact, you could argue that it’s the most difficult task in any Nintendo-developed game, ever.

Author name:
Discussion:
11 Comments

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.

Author name:
Discussion:
9 Comments

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.

Author name:
Discussion:
7 Comments

Anatomy of a Game: The Legend of Zelda I

I have powerful, lasting memories of The Legend of Zelda. Along with Metroid, Zelda taught me a great deal about the potential of video games and helped cement my tastes in the medium. Exploration, depth, freedom, and just enough challenge to keep things interesting: That’s Zelda. And that’s what I like.

Yet I first played Zelda a quarter-century ago. Games have evolved tremendously in that time. Addictive as I found Zelda in 1987, I think it’s perfectly fair to ask if its design holds up. Sure, I spent countless hours engrossed in Zelda all those years ago, but would the same hold true if I were to discover it for the first time today? Of course, that question is both unfair and impossible to answer; Zelda‘s vintage made it one of the defining works of the medium, and the concepts it put forward eventually became the rules by which video games work. I wouldn’t be able to approach Zelda with the same wide-eyed sense of wonder today, because countless other games have surpassed it by standing on its shoulders.

Still, you can pick apart the game’s workings by objective standards. It may no longer hover at the cutting edge, but does that matter? Good design is good design, regardless of the time and style. And this is the question we’ll be exploring in this Anatomy of a Game series (or die trying).

You know how Zelda begins: Link stands in the middle of a clearing. Paths lead off the screen to the east, north, and west; a cave less than a dozen paces from the starting point also beckons.

Phrased this way, you can see how Zelda derives from the classic text adventures of the ’70s.

You are standing in a clearing, surrounded by high rock walls on all sides. The cliff behind you to the south rises too steeply to be scaled. Winding dirt paths lead through the stone to the west, the north, and the east. Just ahead, the mouth of a deep, dark cave yawns from the rock to the north.

What will you do?

> _

Your opinion of Zelda and the way it handles its quest will likely depend on precisely how much guidance you expect from a video game. Unlike any modern game I can think of save Minecraft, Zelda does nothing to lead you directly. Tips for progress take the form of riddles, some of which don’t necessarily make sense. From the very beginning, you have the freedom to travel any direction (except south) and go anywhere. You’re free to discover, to die, to progress, to fail, to stumble about in confusion. You can complete the dungeons out of order, skip collecting health upgrades, grind for cash: Whatever you like.

 

Heck, once you have bombs — which here take the form of random enemy drops and merchandise on sale at any number of vendors rather than key acquisitions collected in the course of the main quest — you can go directly to the final dungeon. Fortunately, the later dungeons incorporate safeguards (requirements for entry) to prevent Link from just waltzing in and killing the bad guy right away. But it is entirely possible to beat [edit: Rather, "get all the way to the final boss of"] Zelda without ever acquiring a sword: Collect money from one of the “It’s a secret to everybody” Moblins, buy some bombs, crack open key hidden caves where more money is available on offer, acquire the secondary weapons in the first dungeon, and go about the business of killing everything indirectly.

Zelda doesn’t leave you completely in the dark. Besides the riddles you’ll stumble across, it also exercises some smart, intuitively integrated design choices. Every time you die, you restart at the beginning of the game, so if you don’t think to go into that cave right away and collect the sword within, you’ll be thrust back there soon enough when you wander helplessly into monsters and die a swift death. Zelda‘s start point is set in the bottom-center screen of the overworld map, so it’s easy enough to make your way to where you need to be any time you start the game.

Of course, the crux of Zelda lies in its dungeons: You can explore the world map all you like, but you can’t finish the game until you conquer the dungeons and collect the Triforce shards within. The dungeons become increasingly hard to find as you advance through the game, but the very first stage is located due north of the starting point and one screen to the west across a bridge that provides a curious and unique geographical location. This is the first instance of Zelda capitalizing on the fact that its 3/4-down visual perspective naturally draws players to travel up/north, as it places Link’s back to the player, creating a natural sense of advancement when you move upward. Traveling north creates the same sensation of forward progress that contemporary Zelda games express by setting the camera behind Link’s back.

A player probably won’t find the dungeon immediately, but they’ll stumble across it sooner than later due to its placement on the map and the relationship between Link’s design and its northward orientation. Despite its frequent, maddening opacity, Zelda nudges players in the proper direction from the very beginning. It’s up to you to read the hints and put them into action.

Images in this series courtesy of VG Museum

Author name:
Discussion:
11 Comments

Kids are jerks

I was reading Tomato’s Super Mario Bros. Legends of Localization series when I suffered a random memory. Back when I was a kid, a friend of mine bought The Legend of Zelda, and we’d hang out and play it together from time to time.

Midway through the game you begin encountering dungeon monsters called Bubbles. In the main quest, touching these guys (which flash rapidly between red and blue) will cause Link to lose the ability to swing his sword for a few seconds. In the Second Quest, the Bubbles come in separate red and blue variants; touching one color causes you to lose your sword skills entirely until you come into contact with the other.

As is the wont of children everywhere, my friend liked to ignore the enemy names given in the manual and come up with his own. Some of them made sense; others came out of left field.

For whatever reason, he decided to call the Bubbles “AIDS Viruses.” AIDs was big in the news back then — an epidemic sweeping America with no cure in sight. It was a terrible thing that left people crippled and weak before dying helplessly. So, basically: Kids are jerks.

Author name:
Discussion:
10 Comments