Tag: zelda

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Game Ramblings #195 – The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

The big thing that came out of the pre-release press for this was obviously that you get to play as Zelda for a change. However, beyond it being set dressing that didn’t really make a huge difference to the feel of the game. What did was the core hook for the game – that instead of swinging a sword around (technically, kinda sorta….) you get to make copies of things that do the fighting for you. What you end up getting out of that is a 2D Zelda that feels like it’s Link’s Awakening by way of Tears of the Kingdom, and boy is it a lot of fun.

The thing that made this game work for me so well was the little moments. It’s the same thing that really worked for me about Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Sure, the core loop is still fun and classic Zelda – go to a general location, puzzle your way through a dungeon, get a heart container and a shiny upgrade – but the little moments within that are magic.

That screenshot up there is one of those moments for me. You gain nearly immediate access to spawn echoes – copies of things you’ve found or defeated in the world – so my initial instinct for combat was “lol army of bats”. And that is a perfectly valid way to play the game. However, you get to flying things that bats are simply not good against; they’re simply too fast. One of the other powers that you get is the ability to lock onto objects that move and pull or follow them around. They don’t explicitly teach you use it as a combat mechanic, but in typical confounding Nintendo fashion they put the mechanic in front of you so often that eventually it just clicks. I ran into these birds and they were just obnoxious to me because they were fast and swarming, so I locked one down to just stop it for a breather. That’s when the light bulb went off. Lock it down and send an army of whatever after it since it can’t move. And it just works.

Those little moments happen all over. Large gap that you need to clear but is too far to jump? Well, you can use an echo of a classic 2D Zelda flying tile. Or you can build a bridge of beds. Or you can grab a bird echo and float over the gap. Or you can make a chain of spider echoes and climb on their webs. Or you can create a chain of water blocks to swim across it. Swarm of enemies about to attack hiding in grass? Well, you can use your Link transformation and fight them directly. Or you can send a pack of wolves to fight them. Or you can set the grass on fire to kill them. Or you can trap them in water blocks and drown them. Or you can create an elevator block and simply go over the top of them. Need to move a block onto a switch behind a fence? Well, you can use your attachment power and push it along. Or you can use a fan to move it. Or you can create an unnecessarily complicated stack of objects to knock something else onto the switch. Or you can spawn an Armos to path onto it.

If this sounds very much like a “play it your way”, that’s because it is. What I ended up finding the most fun was nearly entirely avoiding using the Link copy powers and focusing entirely on spawning echoes in weird fashions to get through the game. Even on the last fight I went in this direction. My focus there was on spawning echoes to fight for me and avoiding damage, making the experience a defensive dance in minimizing health loss. The game is basically a tool set for you to screw around and find solutions where the end result as a player is laughing because your absurd idea actually worked. In that way, it feels exactly like the building toolset in Tears of the Kingdom.

However, all of these options really gets into what keeps this game in simply “very good” category than being truly great. The UX around selecting your echoes is miserable. The entire selection process is being presented with an enormous growing list of echoes, at least 75% of which are completely useless by end game, and a few basic sorting options (most used, recently used, recently found, category, ….and one I’m forgetting). Finding an echo you haven’t used in a while is a needle in a haystack and there’s really no reason this couldn’t have been at least minimized.

One option they could have taken? Simply reduce the list as the game went on. There’s a whole bunch of spots where you get level 1, 2, 3 variations of the same general monster (ex: Spear Moblin). When you first get the echo, it totally makes sense that they both exist as the newer one is stronger and costs more to spawn. However, one of the upgrades you get throughout the game reduces the spawn cost of specific echoes. Once the level N and N+1 match, there’s no reason that the lower one couldn’t simply be removed from the list entirely.

Another option they could have taken? JUST LET ME TURN OFF SOME ECHOES. There are just so many things you can spawn here, and a lot of them I never found a good way to work into my combat experience. I get that there would probably be some hesitancy that the player would turn off something important to progression, but at the same time Nintendo has shown in the past that they are incredibly capable of tutorializing important things in ways that remind the player that “hey this is important”. But 4 beds? I don’t need 4 beds. I don’t need the 8 or 9 types of moblins that I found. I certainly don’t need the 5 or 6 statues that I found beyond the one dungeon where they were a mechanic.

The game really just ultimately suffers a bit from too many choices that don’t have any impact, and cleaning that up would oddly enough have really elevated the experience, as digging through menus for the thing you want at any specific time is really a grating experience.

That said, the game was still an absolute joy. It’s both a path forward for the 2D entries in the series in terms of overall quality and a great title on its own. It shows that Zelda games can still be full of action without necessarily requiring a sword. It shows that there’s still legs in dungeon-focused experiences instead of an open world. I suppose it also shows that Zelda can be a star on her own, though I’ve never really been convinced that Link being the hero really matters beyond it being set dressing. It’s the perfect title for the Switch where it is in its life cycle, providing something high quality and experimental while we wait for the bigger next console to come out.

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Game Ramblings #171 – The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: Switch

It would be extremely easy to point at this game and just go “it’s a sequel, whatever”. It shares the characters from Breath of the Wild. It largely shares the overworld, which at a glance simply features the changes that come from progression of time. At a glance it looks to be largely the same mechanically. However, it’s just a bafflingly better game than BOTW, which was already a bafflingly good game.

One of the things that struck me was that it felt weird that they threw out the runes from the original game. That felt like such a core part of the gameplay of the original that removing them just felt wrong. When you get the new ultra hand and fuse abilities early on, they kind of feel like a weird replacement. But then you fuse a bomb flower to an arrow and you suddenly don’t miss the bomb rune so much. You start to realize that the utility of ultra hand replaces the use of the magnesis rune. You start attaching rockets to your shields and suddenly using stasis launches just feels like a slow part of the past. Then you’re busy building something stupid like the vehicle I made up there and by that point you’ve completely missed that the system has so well clicked in your head that you don’t miss the systems of the original game.

The thing that is so wild as a developer about the set of abilities in the game is how often I would try something and be surprised that it just worked. There’s obvious things like attaching an arrow and bomb together would do something cool because Zelda games have had that in the past. But attaching an eyeball to an arrow? Well of course it’s now a homing arrow because it can see. Attaching meat to an arrow? Now you’ve got something to lure enemies. Attach a rocket to your shield? Now you can fly. Attach a wheel to a rope? Now you can open gates. Attach a control stick to some fans? You’ve got a flying motorcycle. Those are nothing next to some of the crazy things the community has been up to.

It’s one of those things that I can understand conceptually how they pulled it off. Ultimately it’s more of an issue of scale of problem solving than anything else. However, I’ve never been in the position where I could simply make anything work simply because that’s the core idea of the game. Everything within these systems is so well polished because they’ve spent the last six years just perfecting every interaction that you can have. These interactions are also completely not accidental either, because most of them are covered in some place in some shrine in some corner of the world where it was clear that something was made simply because some developer along the way said “I want to make a puzzle, I want this mechanic, let’s get it working” and it became another potential tool in the chest for the team and ultimately for players.

All this is to say nothing about the fact that the game isn’t just a slightly modified overworld. Yes that’s there, and yes there’s a lot of differences that players of BOTW will appreciate. However, there’s an entire set of new sky islands to explore and puzzle through that offer unique challenges in terms of trying not to fall off of them. The introduction of the ascend ability that allows you to pass through things above you greatly enhances traversal in all situations. You then start going into the depths and quickly realize that there’s an entire second overworld as big as Hyrule to explore and find cool stuff in. The depths’ core change is that it’s completely dark until you light it up, and that change alone transforms the game into the strangest combination of survival horror and ARPG that drastically changed the pace of how I was playing the game. That alone is enough of a reason to warrant this being considered a full new experience instead of simply a retread.

All that said I do have some gripes about combat, which felt like the weakest part of the game to me. There was something about the timing of dodges/parries that just felt off to me and I could never really quite place my finger on what it was. So much of the combat once you get past the intro red enemies is about dodging or parrying to lay in maximum damage and it always felt like I was just a bit early or just a bit late. I would make adjustments and end up on the other side of that, never really getting to the point where I was really ever comfortable engaging in combat in the overworld where multiple enemies were around. I felt like I was often just taking a ton of what should have been avoidable damage, but just never could quite make it work.

The frustrating part is I never had this problem against bosses. I beat all the temple bosses first try and had similar results against Ganon, despite the fight feeling like a callback to Wind Waker in being so heavily based around specifically dodging to lay in damage. The fact that bosses tended to be fine while overworld combat was problematic for me made me think that I was battling some sort of input latency or frame pacing issue since overworld framerate tends to be less consistent than the tailored boss areas. In those situations combat just felt nice. Timing things felt fair and appropriate without being too easy. It was rewarding to nail your dodges and get a flurry rush while laying in huge damage. I guess ultimately my problem with combat was that things like late-game Bokoblins felt like more of a threat than Ganondorf which is something I can’t really reconcile in my head.

My combat issues didn’t really negatively impact my feelings on the game though. This is absolutely a game worth playing and if for some reason you still don’t own a Switch, this is game worth getting a Switch to play. It’s so fundamentally good across nearly the entire experience and just constantly throws things at you that will surprise you. It takes what was originally a top game of all time framework and enhances it in ways that sets a new standard for what open world ARPGs should be striving for.

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Game Ramblings #144 – The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Originally Released On: Wii

Playing remakes is usually a bit weird. They’re typically a mix of nostalgia with enough of a new platform benefit to make replaying worthwhile. Skyward Sword isn’t necessarily different in that regard, although I think a lot of people’s opinion of the original was not great. This one on the other hand benefits from some core things being reimagined – because the Pro Controller is a thing, there’s now a control scheme for this game that isn’t simply motion waggling. While that was a big change that benefited the game a lot, it was interesting seeing where other parts of the game have aged better than others.

The input changes are the obvious focus of this remake, so it’s also the obvious place to start. Waggle sword has been replaced with right analog sword, and in isolation its an interesting and powerful change. The game was able to keep some of the direction based mechanics in an easy to use form factor (ex: scorpion boss requiring specific direction claw strikes). It still has spots where it felt like the responsiveness wasn’t quite there if I didn’t flick at the right speed, but it was a marked improvement over the Wii Remote input system. Nunchuck thrust shield bash has been replaced by a simple click of the left stick. Not having to lift off the movement controls or swing my arms around was a huge boon to shield bashing, and led to me using it to a far greater effect than the original game, despite the fact that my timing still sucks.

On the other hand, having two sticks dedicated to movement and combat means that the camera system is the odd man out. On the one hand, having to hold a button to use the right stick as a camera is still a significant improvement over the original game and other single-analog Zelda experiences. On the other hand, I’m not really entirely sure why they didn’t have an option for a simple L/R camera rotation system. With ZL target locking, having vertical camera movement isn’t super important. Not being able to move the camera at the same time as swinging was definitely a hazard during boss fights to the point where the camera button was frustrating in those situations. It felt like a weird way of trying to blend modern camera systems with a game clearly not built for them when there was likely better intermediate solutions.

On the general gameplay front, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I ended up enjoying the overall meta game. In my original playthrough, I remember being frustrated that there was so much re-traversal of areas that you’d already been to. Compared to previous Zelda games, it felt like a cop out to minimize content production. I don’t know if it’s because Breath of the Wild was so fundamentally different, or that I’ve been playing a whole hell of a lot more Metroidvanias in the last decade, but this go around I really enjoyed it.

Part of this playthrough for me was that I was a lot more intentionally completionist than I typically would be. I was making mental notes of areas that I couldn’t get to, treasures I didn’t have the right tool for, paths I couldn’t make my way through, etc. Because of this, I also had a checklist of new things to do when revisiting an area. Sure there was always a cool new section of the regions to visit, but I also had other things to do – grab heart pieces, grab rupies, grab bugs, get those item upgrades – so revisiting an area never felt like a chore. I think ultimately it comes down to me just playing games differently now than I did at the first release of this game, and the overall meta game setup just hit better for me this go around.

What didn’t hit so well with me was The Imprisoned trilogy of boss fights. The amount of times this thing fell just right to completely block the path, or fell just right to knock me off a cliff DURING ITS OWN CUTSCENE to my doom was obnoxious. I actually died in the second fight because I flippantly started it at low health already, got knocked off the cliff all three times when it collapsed, and died. These fights just didn’t age well, and it was entirely down to bugs.

The other bosses generally worked much better. Some of my frustration with them stemmed from odd camera difficulties that existed in the original game, so in a lot of cases it was expected frustration. I ended up dying my first go around in the final fight against Demise because my shield bash timing was quite frankly that bad. Some of the Ghirahim stuff was mechanically weird in ways I didn’t remember (ex: hold sword to the left as a distraction then QUICKLY do a swipe from the right to damage him?????). By and large though the fights are generally as good as other 3D Zelda games, even if they have the same typically three phase pattern in all of them.

The thing I think I’ve got out of this is that I can recommend Skyward Sword a lot easier than I could before. I always really adored the original game, but I was cognizant of the fact that it was a hard recommendation. The controls were just too inconsistent. However, that’s mostly gone away and the rest of the game has aged well enough that I think it’s worth playing. It’s an interesting transition point between Twilight and Breath where it’s still got the linear dungeon path, but starting to move into some open worldish stuff and upgrade systems, and despite the odd controls it’s a lot of fun to run through. It being readily available on a very popular system also isn’t going to hurt its case. If you’re looking for that classic 3D Zelda itch, you probably won’t do better any time soon.

Also, the cat dog bird thing is a jerk.