Mmmmmmmm. I love Zeldaspeak.
I think a good Zelda game is like a jigsaw puzzle that somebody has already started. The basic framework is there, and you can pretty much tell what the picture is meant to be, but there's these niggling gaps that you compulsively have to fill. Each item you get and area you find is one more piece on the way to completeness.
My favourite has to be Link to the Past, hands down. To run the metaphor into the ground, you can flip the puzzle over to a whole other picture and placing pieces on that side helps complete the other. The light/dark world dynamic is beautiful and perfectly excecuted. It never hiccups once, which is mind-boggling considering how complex it would have been to develop. To my mind, nothing has trumped that to this day. The central conceit of Metroid Prime 2 apes it, but doesn't really come close.
Link's Awakening is also great. I don't think there was that big a gap between me playing these two, so the experience kind of melds into one. LttP I've played more often since, so that differentiates itself a little better. I think, however that the double whammy (along with Mario World) really opened me up to the possibilities of gaming. Up until that point I'd only had home computers. Some amazing games on them, but, well... Miyamoto.
I think I played through Ocarina about three times in a row. A touch obsessive perhaps, but it had been five years in the waiting and it didn't let me down. The atmosphere of that game was like nothing I'd seen before. I could ride around on Epona watching the sun come up for hours. The dungeons were amazing, stertching my brain into dimensions it never got to before. I was just in awe from start to finish.
Wind Waker, I have to admit that I'm in two minds about it. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot about it that I love but there's also some major flaws that, when piled on top of Mario Sunshine, kind of deflated me. One thing I really loved was the look of it. Closest thing to the 2D Zeldas that you could get, I thought it totally captured the feel of it and connected it to the series' roots. Link's eyes (especially in the dark) were just full of character. One of the things about Ocarina (as I mentioned in a previous post) is that it did seem a little removed from previous instalments. The town stuff was better than Ocarina and there were lots of really fun minigames all about the place. The end fight with Ganon was brief, but one of the coolest and most stylish bits of Zelda ever.
The things I found wrong with it have been well documented by other people. I thought the seafaring stuff wasn't as well implemented as it should have been. I did enjoy tearing through the surf, but combat on sea just wasn't worth it unless necessary. I think we were sold a little short on dungeons (and the less said about the dredging of Triforce pieces and paying to translate their Tingle charts the better). The dungeons that we did get were good but (I think it was maybe said in Edge) they weren't as complex, being focused more on one room puzzles rather that considering the structure of the dungeon as a whole when working through them. I didn't find them as taxing as the other games like the Water temple in Ocarina and (I think) the tower one near the end of Awakening.
Wind Waker wasn't a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it's a fantastic game. It's just that it wasn't quite perfect enough to measure up to the insane levels of quality its forebears had set.
Christ! As you can tell, I'm a bit of a Zelda whore myself. I've not touched on Majora or NES Zelda, but this post is long enough as it is. |
