I actually agree with you, more or less. I think the games got less and less open as the series progressed. And while I generally prefer the more open-ended games in the series, I do think there is such a thing as too much open ended-ness. That's why LttP is my favorite and not the original - it strikes the best balance IMHO (though I would argue that sequence breaking in that game is no more difficult in most instances than the original LoZ).marurun wrote: Your point is noted, but it's not entirely true. Look at the original Zelda. While the world itself was fairly open, there were lots of places you couldn't go without the right items. Every dungeon had another important item, and while sequence breaking some dungeons wasn't hard, you really were intended to take the dungeons in a specific order. It sounds like this is the first Zelda where sequence breaking is far less an issue. You can go almost anywhere right out the gate and you're getting your most-used mobility and puzzle-solving tools right from the get-go. That is indeed a change, even over the original Zelda. In fact, according to reviews, there may only be 4 main dungeons, with a hundred or so much shorter dungeons. There's original Zelda, and then there's this, which does sound somewhat different. These reviews have truly made me excited that someday I'll get to play this. This is much more what I've wanted Zelda to become.
And if we're being honest, LttP wasn't really that open. OoT may have made things a lot less open, but the "do these things in order" path had already been set.
And while you're right that there is an intended order to the dungeons in the LoZ, I wonder how many players knew that at the time? It's not immediately obvious in game, though perhaps the manual or included paper map make that more clear? I'm sure a Nintendo Power subscription would have cleared it right up though!
That said, the removal of item-based restrictions isn't unprecedented either and you don't have to go very far back to find it. A Link Between Worlds pretty much does that by giving you access to (almost?) all of the items that might be useful in a dungeon pretty quickly through the rental/purchase system.
Don't get me wrong - I am super excited for this game and I sincerely hope that it supplants LttP as my favorite game in the series. I hope it takes up Skyrim-levels of my gaming time (read: hundreds of hours). But the bizarre levels of hyperbole that always crop up in reviews at the release of a new Zelda game boggles my mind.
(Or if I did, I didn't do it much.)