I’ve gotten a bit further in Echoes of Wisdom now, far enough that I’m no longer travelling in disguise (which also apparently means being able to unlock additional outfits, as well as the “special” clothes given to the “Priestess of Legend”). What strikes me is that the entire game feels like someone was told to make a Legend of Zelda game where Zelda is the protagonist but the only stuff they can reuse from previous games is the names of specific characters. We’ve got plenty of familiar faces (Zelda, Link, Impa, the King of Hyrule, and even the bipedal pig/moblin version of Ganon) and even a few less familiar and interestingly odd choices from past games (Such as Dampe being an inventor now, rather than a gravedigger, and Lord Jabu-Jabu who is just sort of there, eating people again), but the power left behind by the three goddesses, in three parts, is called the “Prime Energy” rather than the Triforce or sacred stones or medallions or whatever else has popped up as some kind of source of power in the Legend of Zelda games. Which is to say that it isn’t strange that there’s a new kind of power in these games, just that it feels so strange for them to basically describe the three pieces of the Triforce but never actually call it the Triforce. Really, the whole game feels like it’s a shade off from what I expected. Not in a negative way. In an “uncanny valley” way. It feels like a Legally Distinct Legend of Zelda game and I can’t understand why they might have made something like that.
Continue readingLegend of Zelda
I’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 30
The past week has been incredibly rough. I’m actually writing this the Friday ahead of when it is supposed to be posted, because I’ve fallen super far behind on my blog post buffer and just barely managed to keep my streak of no unplanned skips twice in a row. Two nights in a row, I was struggling to stay awake as I wrote at my computer, giving up on any hope for restful activities in order to keep this blog going and my life in some kind of working condition. I managed it and have begun to slowly rebuild my buffer (I will have two posts ready to go at the end of the day), but I’m just barely keeping my feet under me between still struggling to get enough sleep, the physical therapy I’ve started to help with my back, the intense demands of work (which has gotten super busy again), and my desire to have something I can feel proud of (this unbroken blogging streak and this blog as a whole). As such, rather than prattle on even more about how I’m feeling on a day when I’m struggling to maintain even a neutral expression at work, I’m going to talk about The Legend of Zelda and one of my favorite peoples from the franchise: The Zora.
Continue readingStrong First Impressions In Echoes of Wisdom
After a few days of delay spent finishing Unicorn Overlord, I’ve finally started to dig into The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. While I’ve been mildly excited about it for a while, I purposefully kept my expectations lowered because there’s been just so much interesting fan art for what a Zelda-As-Protagonist video game might look like that any actual implementation of the concept would probably fall short. It was promising that, rather than go with the stylized but fairly proportional look of the two most recent main-line Legend of Zelda games, Echoes of Wisdom was adopting the more cartoony style that was used for the Link’s Awakening remake. I appreciate a game that isn’t trying to take itself too seriously and Echoes of Wisdom’s fairly simple but still highly detailed art has made for a refreshing look at a brand new game. I half-expected to only ever see that art style in future remakes of games from that era (by which I mean all the LoZ games that originally came out on a GameBoy of some kind), so I’m glad to see that they’re continuing to work with the look that they’ve established for that category of Legend of Zelda game on the Switch. In fact, the only issue I have with the visuals of this game (please keep in mind that I’m still not very far into the game, so there might be something up ahead that changes this opinion of mine) is that the game lags pretty heavily when you’re in “busy” towns with water features. I know that they want to make these games look nice, but they absolutely didn’t need to all-in on the water like they did. I’m not entirely sure that this was a “sacrifice performance on the altar of visual splendor” decision, but it sure is starting to feel like they’re expecting these games to be played on a console that’s more powerful than the seven-year-old Nintendo Switch. I’m not really one to dig too deeply into rumors of the Switch 2 or pass around conspiracy theories about making bad games to keep a franchise fresh in everyone’s mind, but I’m starting to feel like ignoring what seems like a bunch of stuff planned for a more powerful console that just hasn’t materialized would be more foolish than contemplating the idea that some new console has been held back for a couple years now.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 29
Another rough week, as you can tell from my recent rant about process, on top of my ever-growing exhaustion from a mixture of my ever-present burnout and what has become increasingly clear is poor quality sleep on a bad mattress, so I’m going to set aside everything else I could write about to talk about the Legend of Zelda once more (also, don’t try to figure the dates out, since my whole writing versus posting schedule is whacked out right now). Today, I bring before you the topic of Fishing in the Legend of Zelda franchise. My introduction to which began with one of those Bass Pro arcade games at my local pizza parlor, which made for a rough introduction to video game fishing in general. Their other arcade machines were down or occupied by other children (some of whom were my siblings), so I wound up giving it a try when I otherwise wouldn’t have. I didn’t care for it much and the generally unpleasant time I had with that game meant I dreaded any amount of fishing in any other video game for years to come. Not that there was much of it. I’m sure there was other video game fishing available on the N64, but my only exposure to it was through The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I also eventually tried it in Link’s Awakening DX and bounced right off it. I technically didn’t really fish in Wind Waker, but I really enjoyed treasure hunting and I’d count that as a fishing minigame in retrospect even if I absolutely avoided having that thought at the time I played the game. I then avoided fishing so hard in Twilight Princess that I didn’t realize you can get rewards from it. I eventually came around a bit later in life, in my teenaged years, but that was only after I no longer had limited video game time and could actually take my time with things.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 28
It has been one hell of a week and while I normally try to pace these out a bit, I’m actually both tired AND sad today, so I’m dipping back into a familiar well in order to either try to get my mind out of the negative spiral I can feel it running in or to just distract myself long enough that it is time for bed. While I am definitely still on the fence about my current short-term bedding solution, my mood has sunk perhaps even further than my physical well-being as the week has gone on for reasons that are only partly the result of work being on the rough side of things. A large part, sure, but not so large that writing about collecting Gold Skulltulas in The Legends of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask couldn’t at least help. I mean, I absolutely loved collecting those little guys. What isn’t to love about them? There’s the distinctive noise the creatures make, their incredibly unexplained appearance in your first dungeon in Ocarina of Time, the way you sometimes need to really think in order to not just kill them but collect the token they drop, and how they were a fun way to push you to really explore the land of Hyrule in OoT when you otherwise might not. Plus, having them be a part of mini-dungeons in Majora’s Mask rather than world-wide collectibles was pretty inspired given that the world of that game is fairly small, time is constantly repeating itself in way that would have made non-respawning enemies feel incredibly strange, and there’s already tons of stuff to collect so adding one more thing would turn the game into an overstuffed mess of things to pick up. Sure, they’re the cliche world-exploration-reward collectibles, but they were also some of the first versions of that type of gameplay that I encountered and they left such a mark on me that I’ve been chasing that high ever since.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 27
I’m not terribly sad right now but am extremely tired. I managed to get a temporary fix to my bad mattress/back issues that has at least worked for one night but has left me feeling the cumulative weight of not sleeping well for about three weeks in a row. We’ll see if it lasts and doesn’t introduce its own issues [it hasn’t so far, as of the day before this goes up, even if it is clearly not an ideal solution], but right now I’ve spend all my spoons on work stuff (to the degree that I bought takeout rather than spend any time or effort on preparing food for myself) and I don’t have it in me to come up with anything thoughtful or reflective of this moment in my life, so I though I’d formally write down why I liked The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild so much and feel so neutrally about its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. I can boil it down pretty succinctly, which is why this will be a relatively normal-length blog post, but I want you to know, reader, that there’s another version of this that takes up a week’s worth of posts because I’ve been thinking about this for over a year now and this sort of critical analysis via comparison and contrasting is the core skill forming the ground on which all my media analysis skills have grown. Which is to say that the reason I like BotW more than TotK is because the first one holds your hand long enough to get you up and walking while the second one holds onto your hand throughout the entire run of the game, which often means you have to drag it behind you as you try to experience the game.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 26
Every so often, I get struck by the urge to go replay an old Legend of Zelda. Right now, I really want to go replay The Legend of Zelda: Wink Waker. It’s been a long time since I played through that game and it has been on my mind recently because I lent my younger sister my Wii U, which has a copy of the digital Wind Waker HD game installed on it. I could set up my Wii and play the GameCube version of the game if I really wanted to, rather than wait for my sister to be finished or bother her about getting my console back, but I currently don’t want to play it enough to actually act on the urge. I mean, I’d probably play the game in a couple months if no new games come up (which I already won’t happen) and I finish all the other gaming I’ve recently been putting off to play Palia (which is unlikely to happen, given just how much stuff I’ve still got on my to-play list), but I remember the game well enough that I’m not really feeling compelled to play it again. It’s only been a few years since I last played it, after all. It was part of the franchise replay I was doing with my ex-roommate back when we were living together, so I even have memories of playing the HD remake version with all of its quality-of-life changes (The Swift Sail is a game-changer for a focused player). In looking back on my memories of the game, though, I think I prefer the original version of the game.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 25
Rather than complain about how tired and sad I am, or about how rough work has been this week, I figured I might as well turn my attention toward my favorite gaming franchise and not only avoid my blog becoming a dour place full of only my sourest feelings but also maybe even lift my own spirits. After all, there’s a new Legend of Zelda game coming out soon (Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom) and you get to play as Zelda in this one! Which is a pretty big deal, considering the only other protagonist we’ve even seen in a Legend of Zelda game is Link. Link’s been our only player character this whole time. Sure, the Hyrule Warriors games muddied the waters a bit, but those aren’t really the same thing since they’re even further from “canon” than even the handful of Capcom handheld games. Even if you moved to include them in this accounting of Legend of Zelda protagonists, Link is still the primary protagonist and all the other characters show up to support and fight alongside him, so that argument is iffy at best. All of which is to say that this is a pretty big deal. I know a lot of people are nervous about what looks like a departure from the norm (dungeons and puzzles and relatively clear progression) as the game touts its world being as open to exploration as your imagination allows and shows Zelda committing mostly indirect violence rather than ever truly dirtying her hands like Link does, but I think it’s almost always worth taking a relatively wild swing. Wild swings got us Breath of the Wild and, sure, they also got us Tears of the Kingdom (which was an enjoyable foul ball, but a foul ball all the same and I could probably make a good argument it for being less of a wild swing and more of an attempt to hit a home run again, which doesn’t really make sense in this metaphor but feels like an accurate description of what the game did), but I’m all for trying new things and desperate to play as Zelda, especially after they took the very gender-neutral Link of Breath of the Wild and solidly masculinized him in Tears of the Kingdom. Let’s move the men aside for a bit and let someone else have a turn at the game, you know?
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 24
When I started this series as an alternative to writing about how I felt and putting myself in a situation where I was just venting all over my blog in a way that wasn’t particularly constructive, I picked this title because I was frequently tired and sad. Most of the time, I was sad because I was tired and not getting enough rest was (and probably still is) the leading cause of periodic depression in my life. I was only occasionally tired because I was sad, though I sometimes descirbed other emotions that were exhausting me as being sad so I could write one of these blog posts to help me get over them, but the two things were always related. I was tired and sad as a result of something specific causing one or the other (or both) and then the missing one would follow immediately behind. These days, though, as I find myself writing these more frequently again for the first time in quite a while (perhaps, as I’ve begun to suspect, that I was too tired and burned out to be anything but physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted), my tiredness and sadness are entirely disconnected and will not be solved by writing about something I enjoy immensely. Which is unfortunate, because there’s a pretty apt metaphor here, somewhere, and I’m way too tired to see it from where I am right now [editing this, I can see it, but I’m going to let you find it yourself rather than call it out]. Instead of continuing to dig for whatever that is, I’m going to write about building weird contraptions in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and the three economies involved in that process. While I’m tempted to make the argument that there are two processes, since things work a bit differently if you’re building something you’ve already made in the past than if you’re putting something together for the first time, it doesn’t really make sense to deal with them separately because you can’t rebuild something if you don’t build it first.
Continue readingModern Game Opinions Poisoned By Rampant Nostalgia
Today, as I took a break from the frenetic pace of my work day and turned my mind toward what I should write for today’s blog post–I landed on writing about my time listening to A More Civilized Age and watching The Clone Wars as a part of my foray into media review and discussion podcasts, a topic I will now be addressing another day–I remembered my first foray into media discussion podcasts and why I not only fell off the train but stayed away from all of them for multiple years. In fact, the only reason I’ve gone back is because the idea behind the current run of Media Club Plus (which I recommend more strongly than I’ve ever recommended anything), of watching Hunter x Hunter with someone who hasn’t watched much anime at all, was so charming that I couldn’t deny myself the opportunity to follow some of my favorite podcasters on this particular journey. It took a lot to overcome the reason I stopped listening, a reason that seems pretty trivial and small when you consider it on its own, but this reason was the final straw of a growing resentment that had been building for a while. You see, the podcast I listened to back then (merely because it cross-polinated with other stuff I listened to) was the video game review podcast “The Besties.”
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