Happy Birthday Legend of Zelda! 40 years old!

[marurun]

This has been all over gaming media but no post about it here, so I'm making one. The Legend of Zelda is 40 years old this year. And in true form, Nintendo has yet to announce anything major to celebrate it. Whereas Metroid is a game that is clearly more popular in the west than in Japan, the LoZ series is well appreciated in both countries, but has the misfortune of being the slightly more serious younger sibling to the Mario games. Link and the LoZ games are historically not as popular as Mario games (up until the Switch, where Breath of the Wild has outsold Mario Odyssey, but of course Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the shining star of game sales and it has Mario right in the title). But they are still tentpole titles, and they are often used to celebrate a new platform. The original Legend of Zelda was the "look what the Famicom Disk System can do!" game. Later titles helped bridge generations, like Twilight Princess for the transition from GameCube to Wii and Breath of the Wild for WiiU and Switch. On the N64 games they benefited from the design practice Nintendo did with Mario 64. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are held up by some fans as the pinnacle of the series and as Nintendo's best work on the system. Asking someone to name their top 3 or top 5 Zelda games is like opening a massive can of worms and flame wars have broken out over whether Zelda 2 or Wind Waker are among the best or among the worse games in the series.

Zelda is a game that people have FEELINGS about. STRONG feelings. And it started with a cryptic little game inspired, likely, by Tower of Druaga and Hydlide. Zelda has a lot of secrets and obscure turns, but it's SO much more reasonable and entertaining than the two games it was probably inspired by. While it's definitely more confusing and less hand-holding by today's standards, the basic gameplay still feels pretty good. Nintendo had stumbled into a pretty good thing, mechanically. And the world was open enough you could do things out of order. You could grab new items and abilities out of dungeons while skipping the bosses and really explore some dangerous territory. In fact, you could even skip your sword, though a swift death awaited those who managed to overlook it.

Happy Birthday Link, Princess Zelda, and Ganon/Ganondorf. Thanks for being one of the NES games I spent the most time with and am most willing to revisit today. Keep doing what you're doing, because it's working.

[stickem]

my favorite game of all time. brings back great middle school memories of me and my friends trying to figure out where to go next, marking our maps, waiting for secrets in Nintendo power. I thought it was more inspired by pc rpgs like ultima more than the two you mentioned. correct me if i'm wrong, but the early concept had no overworld, just a dungeon crawler concept. But, doesn't matter in the end.

[marurun]

I have seen information suggesting western influences as well, but ultimately the finished game lacked any first-person dungeoneering and also any RPG elements. I suspect that early designs were more western-inspired but that Tower of Druaga may have caused a development shift, because there's a lot of Druaga DNA in Zelda.

[Reprise]

My first introduction to Zelda was the cartoon from the late 80s/early 90s. I didn't even realise it was from a video game at first when I was a kid watching.

I love the Zelda series, but my first introduction to the games was A Link to the Past. The first one I owned myself was Link's Awakening. To this day I have never actually beaten the first game or even the second one. Part of me wants to give it a go some time. My son and I started playing through Zelda II a year or two back, but he found it a bit difficult.

[marurun]

Another thing to recognize is just how attractive Zelda was to other developers. There was a period of time where we had a rash of Zelda clones, from Neutopia and Neutopia II to Golden Axe Warrior to Crusader of Centy (which does admittedly have a little extra distance, though not much). And there's been a revival in recent years of the Zelda clone, with many newer titles like Blossom Tales adopting that classic style, though inspired perhaps more by the later Zelda games that retained that 2D overview perspective.