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 readingLoZ
I’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 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 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 readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 23
I’ve been replaying The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in my evening game time for the last month or two. I’m trying to re-experience the game without all the urgency I felt last summer and to take the time I feel I need to explore and enjoy it more fully. So far, it has been a better experience. I’m frequently lost and unsure of what I’ve been doing or have already done, but having the Hero’s Path means I can at least check where I’ve physically been. That, plus getting the Korok Mask and Sensor upgrade much, MUCH earlier this time around means that I’m reasonably confident that, for everything but my first twenty-to-forty hours of this file, I found all the Korok seeds and Shrines in those areas. Being on my second pass of the game means I’ve been able to more specifically target my efforts. I can easily prioritize the stuff I encounter because I already know how most it will turn out and I can more directly tailor my nightly gaming experience to what I want. Some nights I focus on shrines and filling up my map of the Depths with marks for lightroots. Some nights I spend trying to explore the depths in a fun but still efficient manner (so it stays fun to explore them rather than getting tedious like it did in my first playthrough). Some nights I focus on running quests, filling out my map, or just exploring interesting looking ruins. It’s a lot more fun this time around, even if I’m not as excited about it as I was the first time around.
Continue readingPicking Through Hyrule In Tears Of The Kingdom
While watching Dimension20, I’ve been playing through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom again. I’ve given up on any hope I had for a Master Mode and done my best to accept the game that was sold to us. It feels unfair to say this, but it feels so much less than I hoped it would be. I understand that my expectations were set sky-high by Breath of the Wild, but I feel like so much went into turning that game into An Experience that just wasn’t kept around for the sequel. The sense of wonder and grandeur that Breath of the Wild builds is spent trying to create a sense of horror around The Gloom and Ganondorf’s return instead. All of the early building in the introductory sequence falls flat because all that accomplishes is setting us at what is the common starting-point for almost all Legend of Zelda games and then none of the freaky gloom, horrific music, or creepy visuals come up again as something to be dealt with or feared for multiple hours. Then, when it finally comes up again, it is a minor environmental hazard tied to The Depths, which is unfortunately the section of the game with the greatest squandered potential of all, or a strange and potentially terrifying encounter that is incredibly easy to flee from. It becomes a minor concern only during the final boss fight and, even then, if you’re set up with halfway decent armor, good food buffs, and tons of hearts, it’s trivial. With none of that to rely on to create a coherent throughline for the game (like the mixed wonder of exploration, grief at finding a decayed world you can’t remember but know you failed to protect, and hope for the future that thread their way through all of Breath of the Wild), all you’ve got is an admittedly fun game to play with an interesting world to explore while building all kinds of weird machines.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 22
It has been almost three months since I wrote the last entry in this series. I thought I’d probably hold off on more entries in this series until I’d spent more time in Tears of the Kingdom, but I’ve yet to have a reason to return to that entry in the franchise. All of my video game time has been spent on new games (or at least new to me, since Ni No Kuni is absolutely NOT a new game), so I haven’t felt much call to return to any old games, other than the sort of on-going repitition of playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (though I’d argue that doing alternate storylines isn’t exactly the same thing) and a desire to do a New Game + of Chained Echoes because I still don’t have anyone to talk to about that game. There isn’t as much beckoning replayability in Tears of the Kingdom as there was in Breath of the Wild. BotW had DLC already planned for it, that you could pre-purchase the day the game came out, after all. It has now been four months since TotK came out and there’s no word on DLC other than Nintendo’s usual “we have no plans at this time” statement. Which, you know, feels like it is misleading a lot of the time, but I’ll admit that this feeling might be a bit misdirected because Nintendo probably doesn’t get asked about unannounced DLC for small games that are unlikely to have it. They probably only get questioned on big games that don’t have DLC already announced, which feels like an incredibly skewed data pool to be used as the basis for drawing any kind of conclusions. So who knows what there will be, if anything, for TotK in the future, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
Continue readingFinally Playing A Pair Of Legend of Zelda Games In Sequence
In one of the latest updates to the perks provided by having a Nintendo Online subscription, the Legend of Zelda games Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons were added to the Game Boy Color section. As a child, I was obsessed with the dual nature of these games. They’d blown my mind by introducing the idea of transferring save data between them by putting in specially generated passcodes or by using a link cable when you started a new game. I was not quite ten when they came out and it had literlly never occurred to me that you might be able to bring something from one game into another one. While a soft continuity (some aspects of a game carrying forward into another in a way that subtly influences your experience) are still fairly common, I don’t know if I’ve played another game that is quite so drastically influenced by including data from another. Technically speaking, I’ve never played any game that is this drastically influenced because while I’ve played both games, I was never able to play them sequentially.
Continue readingWrapping Up The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
I finally beat The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom over the weekend. Took more than one hundred fifty hours of gameplay over the course of two months (with, you know, a three and a half week gap of not playing at all), and I still have tons of quests, Korok seeds, and unexplored areas if I ever want to spend more time in the world before whatever DLC there will be comes out. It feels a little unreal, if I’m being honest, since I wound up doing the last few major portions of the game in a relatively short time. Mostly because I’d accidentally done huge sections of them while wandering around the world in search of shrines or just exploring something that look cool before I got to the part of the game that prompted them. I’ll admit I really struggled to do some of those things when I stumbled across them because it was clear that I wasn’t supposed to be doing them yet (I got the Sage of Spirit as my second sage, because I wanted to see what was inside the permanent thunderstorm and literally just got lucky since my interrupted flight toward said clouds landed me right next to the final shrine of those sky islands), but at least it let me do them when I got there. It was a pretty fun game and I definitely enjoyed it overall, but there was a lot of stuff that just doesn’t really feel like it landed (pun absolutely intended) well.
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