The Legend of Zelda Review

 It's dangerous to go alone...

Oh, you read that right. I'm not talking no 'Link to the Past', 'Ocarina of time', or 'Breath of the Wild'; I'm talking the classic original from 1986 that I've been slowly playing through over the last 2 months. (It was like, two 1 hour sessions a week, don't bully me) Now I can finally consider myself on the same level as maybe tens of thousands of other people who not only love the Legend of Zelda but can boast about having plumbed it's origins. But don't think that iconic status is going to prevent me going off on a fair review where I have complaints and the like. Oh, I have things to say! But there's actually quite a few positives thrown in there as well, and lets just say that coming out of the whole thing I would certainly recommend the title as a stellar, if not exactly representative of the rest of the industry at that time, representative for 1986. It's no wonder that Nintendo became the gaming powerhouse they did when they were on some completely different stuff all the way back in the late 80's.

Playing games from the past here and there, and really bingeing my way through the Nintendo Switch Virtual console, I've become increasingly aware of just how many just crap-tier platformers and space shooters the NES had. I mean there were classics, do not get me wrong, but there were so many clones and parodies and games that bought nothing new to themselves apart from a coat of paint slightly different from that one platformer you played last week. As such, when you play a game like The Legend of Zelda, it really does stand out to you in a big way. How many other games created a whole new genre on the spot, whilst creating the very concept of save slots just to justify it's ludicrous size? There's no doubt about it, the original Zelda is a fulcrum point from which gaming swung from a field of shallow ideas to a bustling stream of new potential horizons. The entire industry would have played out so very different without it.

Now that's out of the way, let me talk about the thing itself. The Legend of Zelda follows a small kid called Link on his journey to rescue the Princess of Hyrule from the Prince of Darkness, Ganon; as straight forward as fantasy settings get. How this plays out for the player is a top down openworld adventure wherein the player is tasked with navigating a dangerous world whilst gathering rupees, tips and clues from the environment in order to track down the various dungeons littered around Hyrule and pick up pieces of the mythical Tri-Force. (It's just a mystical triangle in the lore right now. They hadn't even invented the three triangles, let alone got around to explaining what it even was.) Well, actually you can just head straight for Ganon in Death Mountain, but without the complete Tri-Force you'll just force yourself through the hardest dungeon of the game in order to stand around like an idiot when the final door doesn't open.

Exploration and adventure is the heart written into this game at it's utmost inception, as the spirit of childhood imagination was the key-most influence. As such, a lot of Hyrule is built with this sweeping scale to it, requiring players to travel large distances in order to get to key locations, and always being sent to the beginning field whenever they die. But due to the open world nature of the game, which again was unique at the time, this really just means you can plan your route through the world anew and strategize against the enemies. Having a curious mind and trying out something new is designed to be rewarded in a game like this, and often times you'll find the most incredible secret hiding in plain sight, it's really quite ahead of it's time. But therein actually lies my first gripe.

As this game is so ahead of itself, that means the design choices have a certain lingering... primitive mindset behind them. But that I mean, when it comes to organising secret rooms the developer went for the duel sin of throwing literally no indicator of where they are, and having a great deal of them be essential to progression. Oh, and the only way to open these secret passages is usually with bombs, which are a limited resource that you need to slay monsters and pray to the RNG gods in order to refill. By the end game dungeons, blowing holes through multiple walls is the only way to reach the final boss, and whereas some secret caves will have the odd NPC hidden under a rock who'll point to their location with a really vague clue, inside of dungeons you're on your own, which gives this game a very confrontational vibe to it's design intent. As though the game wants you to try and blow up every wall and waste all your bombs so that you have to spend more time getting extras. Speaking of-

Can I talk about the hearts system a bit? So The Legend of Zelda has an upgradeable heart system whereupon you find heart canisters, or are rewarded them for completing each dungeon, and you get a new addendum onto your health. One of the more cool rewards for this is that the more hearts you have stocked, the more 'experienced' your character is considered, and so special vendors will hold weapon upgrades you can only get with a certain number of hearts. That's a really cool progression incentive. However, one might wonder what the purpose of hearts actually is, when the second you lose even a single half of one, you cannot attack as powerfully anymore. That's right, Link has a ranged sword shooting attack that he can only use at full strength, which makes it instantly less fun to play upon the first piece of damage. These sorts of over-punishing resource management rules is what makes most survival games so unbearable, but I'm very surprised to see it's sire came from this sort of pedigree.

And now the bosses, or specifically the finale. A lot of the bosses in this first Zelda game are okay, they're not particularly special, just slightly tougher mob enemies. Some bosses have little quirks to them that are mentioned by secret room NPCs, one has a quirk which isn't mentioned by anyone, but Ganon had to be the biggest disappointment out of all of them. Why? Because his fight literally just consists of him going invisible and teleporting around the room shooting fireballs. He doesn't even have any animation frames of attacking, you have to go to the places where he's teleporting to and swing at the air in order to hurt him, and after four hits and a silver arrow he's dead. There's were some mobs on the way to him that were hardier than that, talk about an anticlimax.

All that being said, The Legend of Zelda was still a much meatier game than anyone could have expected for the time it came out in, and though there are a lot of features I think aged poorly, the raw game can be a little bit of fun beyond that which naturally comes from satisfying one's own curiosity.  I can't say it enriched my love the Zelda series anymore, but I'm glad I took the time out to play through it and might, potentially, do so again at some later date. What I'm stuck on is how to rate this, either in comparison to other games of the time or modern titles, either seems unfair given the subject matter, so I've settled for a hybrid grade. For lovers of retro who love their old school games, this is an easy A Grade because it's one of the best. For modern game lovers this title is a little wantonly obtuse and unhelpfully designed, so I'd err more towards a C- Grade. (I enjoyed the world, but man would it have helped if destructible blocks were at least a different colour. This isn't an arcade game, you don't need to fleece people for extra dimes.) Bringing those together would give me a B, but that finale was utterly anitclimatic, after a really hefty and promising last dungeon too, and so for that lingering bad taste I'm knocking down to a cumulative C+ Grade. If you simply want to get into Zelda as a franchise, this isn't the place to do it, (Try Ocarina) but established fans might enjoy the simple charm despite the obvious frustrations attached.