Well, for me, it held true. After thirty-nine deaths and about eight to ten hours of game play, I beat Ganon today and completed the main quest of Legend of Zelda. And, oh boy, I definitely had to rely on that IGN walk through to get me through it.
I booted up the game (I was playing using the Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition disc for GameCube) at around 11AM this morning, after finding out that I wasn't going to be recording with the band. I started from the good ol' starting position, collected some rupees to buy a potion, grabbed some recovery hearts from some downed enemies to fill my life gauge back up, and then went back to dungeon six, the bane of my Zelda-playing experience of yesterday. This time, going in fully prepared, I went in and kicked that dungeon's ass in no time flat.
I was doing well in the seventh dungeon too, until accidently pressed X in the start menu. On the Collector's Edition disc, X is equivalent to Select on the old NES controller, so that took me to the continue/save/quit screen. I hit continue, but I didn't realize that selecting it would take me back to the start of the dungeon and removed all but three hearts from my nearly full set of heart containers. Rage ensued.
What kind of design choice is that, seriously? I mean, how many people who have played this game since it came out in 1987 have accidently done that? How many veins have popped from necks from the fury that issues forth from occurences such as this? I sat and pondered this a moment, then resumed my gameplay.
It turns out, dungeon seven was quite the maze and it took me a long time to finally find my way to the boss. But I quickly dispatched him and moved onto eight. I'm guessing I went through eight all right, because I'm already having trouble remembering even playing through it, other than being frustrated with the large number of Blue Darknuts, who are hard to kill, and that was only a couple of hours ago.
I made my way to dungeon nine, the home of the pig-man himself - Ganon. Well, okay, I relied on the walkthrough for this one. When I realized how immense the dungeon was, I decided that, rather than waste hours trying to get through it, I'd make my way toward Ganon that way. I got all the way there with little problem. I saw where it took four blind hits while Ganon was invisible followed by a silver arrow hit. Well, as I hit Ganon the third time, I died.
So, I went out to find rupees for a potion and then ninety more to replace the magic shield I'd lost to a Like-Like. That in itself probably took half an hour. Killing hordes of ghosts in the graveyard helped quite a bit. I made my way back to Ganon, wiped him out and then hit the end. And then I hit the most story-intensive part of the game: a whole two lines of dialogue!
So, what does playing through this game tell me? For one, I can tell you know that, thanks to technological advancements, the series quickly became far more story driven. The lack of dialogue means less opportunities for hints, making the game that much harder. I never owned an NES, and I'd heard from many people that all the good old games were really hard. This game confirmed that notion in my head even moreso than my attempts to play other NES games. I suppose, back then, video games were more of a niche, so the audiences wanted more of a challenge. Now that gaming is more broad, games needed to be eased up for the sake of the layman's sanity. Also, this game allowed for a lot more imagination. It's far less linear than the Zelda games that succeeded it. Granted, you might need a certain item in one dungeon to access something in another, but you could potentially do these out of order because the game doesn't direct you from one to the next. The only hint that you should be playing them in any particular order is that a "Level-#" shows up at the top of your screen when you're in a dungeon.
I'm not brave enough to try to second quest. Plus I would like to continue on to the next game in the series. So, that's game number one down. Six to go. Tomorrow I'll be hitting up Zelda II: The Adventure of Link in Part III of the Zelda Retrospective. This is another one I've never played through, and many call it the worst of the Zelda games. I'll be sure to let you know if I agree.
- Nate
2 comments:
Zelda II is actually a pretty good story-driven Zelda game. Except, as you'll see, it's much, much harder than any other Zelda game. While I was able to make it to Ganon as a child in Zelda, I couldn't beat the second level of Zelda II. So, best of luck, Nate, and the guide WILL be your best friend to the very last detail. I was able to beat Adventure of Link, but it took plenty of devoted man hours, and I used the guide for the final temple, which is probably even larger than the final temple of LoZ (which is nearly the size of the Zelda's overworld, for chrissake).
You'll also notice a few things in the game that have mostly been defunct until Ocarina of Time and as recent as Twilight Princess, such as the downward stab (yup, that didn't originate in TP, it originated from Adventure of Link).
It's definitely a whole new look at the series, and it's probably the most radical departure from a preceding Zelda game than any other (more profound than OoT from the 2-D games, Majora's Mask from the story and mechanics, Wind Waker from the graphical style, and Twilight Princess from the controls).
Also, I hope you come across my favorite line in any Zelda game.. "The River Devil eats those who are weak".
I ended three of the four above paragraphs in parentheses. That's poor style. Oh, and there were two other things I wanted to say.. Firstly, the Select gaffe that you ran into never occurred in the original game. Unless I'm gravely mistaken, you had to press start on the first player controller, enter a controller into the second slot, and then press select. As for the difficulty of the games of the NES and SNES generation, yeah, the games were a lot more difficult. Very, very few of the games were made to be beaten in one day, much less one play through. You're basically trying to speed run through two pretty difficult games without any prior knowledge of the games, so you'll definitely take some additional time to succeed with that.
Post a Comment