Zelda Topic

[Rusty Spy]

I nearly lost it when he complained about being knocked down.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and take that as a joke, but I think the main point is that all the small, 2-3 second shots of doing mundane things adds up really quickly when they happen every other moment. As he says 'waiting is the bane of exploration games'. Though as someone who's never played Zelda I can't really speak to how much it actually affects pacing.

[Sami]

Well that'd be you, Discoid, because Arin would probably be quite the opposite on that, since Dark Souls is a methodical game that requires patience in pretty much every aspect of it, something that he does not posses.

 

Dark Souls is a game that never forces you to wait for an opening in a rigid and mechanical fashion during battle. The Iron Knuckles fight he strongly praises is similar to how Dark Souls plays at all times. Likewise, the combat, puzzle solving, and exploration are all tied together in one cohesive system, rather than compartmentalized like they are in Zelda. 

 

He may not like Dark Souls because of its pacing, but the point I'm trying to make is that every nearly criticism he's throwing at Zelda is something Dark Souls circumvents.

[Conando]

I don't know man, I've played Dark Souls and there's a lot of waiting or baiting your enemy into doing something before hitting them.

[Sami]

I don't know man, I've played Dark Souls and there's a lot of waiting or baiting your enemy into doing something before hitting them.

 

Depends on your playstyle. I play very aggressively - lots of rolling/dodging and without a shield. Part of what makes Souls so good is the freedom it grants the player in how they want to approach combat. If you want to play it like Zelda (lots of parrying, blocking, waiting) you can, but it's not the only option you have.

[Conando]

Well yeah, but what 3D game doesn't have knock down? 3D Mario games have it, Monster Hunter has it, Dark Souls has it... it's not bad game design and it's only really used for heavy attacks, like getting hit by Iron Knuckles or the various bosses.

 

Even some 2D games have knockdown, and it's generally a thousand times more infuriating in those. See: Castlevania.

[Mauro Fonseca]

WELL FOR SOMEONE WHO COMPLAINS ABOUT WAITING SO MUCH

HE SURE MADE ME WAIT A LOT FOR HIM TO GET TO THE POINT WHILE HE MADE STUPID ASIDE JOKES

Piss-poor video. Other sequelitisisises were great, and he even has a good thesis here. But the presentation's crap. The video could've been halved in duration if we didn't need constant "HEY LET'S MAKE A STUPID ASIDE JOKE LIKE GAME GRUMPS NOW".

[Sir Tynen]

Dark Souls is a game that never forces you to wait for an opening in a rigid and mechanical fashion during battle. The Iron Knuckles fight he strongly praises is similar to how Dark Souls plays at all times. Likewise, the combat, puzzle solving, and exploration are all tied together in one cohesive system, rather than compartmentalized like they are in Zelda. 

 

He may not like Dark Souls because of its pacing, but the point I'm trying to make is that every nearly criticism he's throwing at Zelda is something Dark Souls circumvents.

 

And I agree with you, to an extent. I've recently been Dark Souls for a week now, and I like the game a lot myself. Even I want a bit of Dark Souls in my Zelda. But I don't want it to become just 'Dark Souls with a brighter palette'. It's just Arin's comments on context, npcs, z-targeting (which even DS has), and the like, which gives me that opposite perspective for him.

[SuperStingray]

This was a pretty solid video that took a lot of balls to put out there. I don't agree with everything, but his reasoning was fair and if not that, consistent.

I think his most important points were the disconnect between combat and environment and the predictable nature of items. It has become a bit of a tedious trend in modern Zelda games for puzzles, battles and items to have a "lock and key" feel rather than a general purpose open for experimentation. They train us to look at things in a Pavlovian way- Crack in the wall = Use bomb, Unlit torch = Use fire, Big eye = Use arrow, etc. It's much more interesting when games use the affordences of each item to let you use them in ways that seem beyond unilateral intentions, such as the bomb jumps in Metroid. I think a good way to look at them is like the abilities in Transistor; they weren't identified as nouns or items, they were named after verbs and functions like "Get", "Bounce", "Crash", etc. That prevented each ability from being associated with a single purpose and instead granted them an intuitive but still broad range of uses.

My biggest gripe is that he doesn't give much thought to the context Ocarina came out in. He certainly recognized that 2D and 3D are completely different animals, but Ocarina of Time had a burden that Link to the Past didn't. By the time Link to the Past came out there was some solid data on what works and what doesn't in a top-down Adventure game, but Ocarina was not only trying to introduce Zelda to 3D, it was trying to introduce 3D itself. The "shoot arrows at eyes" puzzle seems trivial by today's standards but back then simply looking around in 3D space was a foreign form of reasoning for gaming. Mario 64 was in the same boat; it backtracked on difficulty in order to rework the game's core appeal for a completely new paradigm, which I think is the responsible decision.

I also think he was a bit harsh on the narrative but at the same time I think people are sort of walking away with the wrong idea; he was complaining less about the story itself and more about how it is used to pigeonhole the player in a single direction and discourage exploration and experimentation. In general I think that's a valid complaint, but for Ocarina of Time I think that the extra hand holding was justified since, as mentioned, 3D is a new concept and it may have been much easier for people to get lost. In this day and age though, Skyward Sword has no excuse for it.

As for the waiting thing, I have to disagree with him on that. Slower paced interactions are generally the trade off for more fleshed out environments. Metroid Prime would have lost something if movement was as fast and free as Super Metroid. Also those rooms with the moving pucks let you see their pattern before you even cross them, so I don't know what he's getting at with them.

He made some excellent points, but I think his problem is that he was trying to judge Ocarina of Time strictly based on how Link to the Past worked and not on what the game attempted or did from within its own context. Between this and his philosophy on tutorials in Megaman, I feel Arin is good at identifying a game's individual strengths and weaknesses but bad at extrapolating them to other games. And to be fair, that isn't as easy.

[JezMM]

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and take that as a joke, but I think the main point is that all the small, 2-3 second shots of doing mundane things adds up really quickly when they happen every other moment. As he says 'waiting is the bane of exploration games'. Though as someone who's never played Zelda I can't really speak to how much it actually affects pacing.

 

Since you haven't played Zelda I'll just confirm less than 1% of the game is probably spent with these "frequent" wait times.  The fancy cut-scene of Link opening a chest only occurs during 4 chests in each dungeon.  If that's 10-15 seconds per chest, we're talking 40 seconds to 1 minute per dungeon - spread out across an average of 40 minutes to an hour to beat a dungeon.  If you know what you're doing, dungeons can be beaten in about 20 minutes - though you'll prolly be skipping 2 of those 4 chests to do so anyway.

 

As for getting knocked down, only certain, powerful enemies have the power to do it, and honestly it's probably a deliberate design choice in the sense that it automatically gives the player a bit of distance and a bit of thinking time before they are placed back into a situation where they can get hurt again.  If these enemies were allowed to wail on you with no getting knocked down, you'd be dead in about 10 seconds flat.

 

Finally, stuff like switches... those cut-scenes are rarely longer than a single second, and are essential for drawing your attention to what the switch did in a 3D space.

[Sami]

And I agree with you, to an extent. I've recently been Dark Souls for a week now, and I like the game a lot myself. Even I want a bit of Dark Souls in my Zelda. But I don't want it to become just 'Dark Souls with a brighter palette'. It's just Arin's comments on context, npcs, z-targeting (which even DS has), and the like, which gives me that opposite perspective for him.

 

I don't want "Dark Souls with a brighter palette" either, though. I want a Zelda game that excels at the same things Souls does while still retaining an identity of its own.

 

There's a lot of things the two can do radically differently while still maintaining the same design philosophies for gameplay.

[Conando]

I think the real issue is that he seriously created a Strawman at the beginning of the video. Anyone who can't actually argue effectively does this, you see that shit in webcomics all the time. Fat ugly person who acts like an idiot, representing the people that don't agree with them, while the author is represented as calm, collected, and smart.

[JezMM]

I think the real issue is that he seriously created a Strawman at the beginning of the video. Anyone who can't actually argue effectively does this, you see that shit in webcomics all the time. Fat ugly person who acts like an idiot, representing the people that don't agree with them, while the author is represented as calm, collected, and smart.

 

He wasn't mocking the opposition there, he knew it was already well known that he preferred ALTTP to OoT and thus people might be ready to yell at him the moment the video was up without even finding out the reasons why.  He was mocking people who post arguments without even reading/listening to the other person's first.

 

And he was absolutely right to.

[Captain Fun]

I think the real issue is that he seriously created a Strawman at the beginning of the video. Anyone who can't actually argue effectively does this, you see that shit in webcomics all the time. Fat ugly person who acts like an idiot, representing the people that don't agree with them, while the author is represented as calm, collected, and smart.

To be fair, he clarifies at the end that it's just his opinion and you CAN construct your own argument about the game and put it in the comments. Of course, nobody who does put a comment is going to get a fighting chance.

 

Oh, and he also said that he "hopes the video made us think." What a joke. 

[JezMM]

Oh, and he also said that he "hopes the video made us think." What a joke. 

 

It... did though?  I never thought about half the stuff he said about OoT but agreed with a lot of it.  His praise for the Iron Knuckle in particular made me be like "y'know I always did find that boss way more fun the others and this might be exactly why".

[Conando]

I can say the only thing I agreed on was the Iron Knuckle, but then it just made me realize Skyward Sword's combat is pretty much that. Even so, he spent huge parts of the video shitting all over Skyward Sword.

[Captain Fun]

It... did though?  I never thought about half the stuff he said about OoT but agreed with a lot of it.  His praise for the Iron Knuckle in particular made me be like "y'know I always did find that boss way more fun the others and this might be exactly why".

I guess I just don't feel the same way. I mean I did "think" when watching the video but what I was getting at is that I didn't think his thinking and reasoning changed the way I think about things. His complaints range from complete non-issues to shit everyone knows already. Nintendo themselves addressed a lot of them. 

 

And the thing that kind of bugged me when he said it was that it made me think that he was aware about how people take this shit as game design gospel, like how his Mega Man X video comes up in every discussion about tutorials.

 

Bah. 

[JezMM]

I can say the only thing I agreed on was the Iron Knuckle, but then it just made me realize Skyward Sword's combat is pretty much that. Even so, he spent huge parts of the video shitting all over Skyward Sword.

 

 

Really?  What I remember of Skyward Sword's combat was pretty much just OoT's but instead of pushing B you play these:

 

 

 

Certainly no more connected to the environment than OoT's was anyway.

[VO.SUPER]

You know, Egoraptor made me think here.

 

 A game where you can skip the storyline but are rewarded for actually following it. Let me use Majora's Mask as an example. Say you want to get to the Great Bay temple, and it's completely open to you. The only thing you need to unlock it is your brain for a miniature puzzle. You don't have to listen to the story of the Zoras and what they are going through to get some song that unlocks the dungeon for you, and the dungeon is very open ended with puzzles that have multiple solutions so that you are given options on how you want to approach.

 

However, if you do the story, you are instead rewarded with the dungeon item that will help you throughout the dungeon. You get to know the people and what they struggle with, and how the main villain has changed their lives, but you also get something tangible that helps you progress through the dungeon in another way. You are given more options in how you want to approach puzzles and such, but very few puzzles in a game like this would require you to have a certain item to complete them. 

 

I always have liked the idea of story being a reward rather than a mandatory thing in a video game. It's one of the reasons I simply adore Majora's Mask. If it wasn't for the sidequests, I wouldn't care as much about the world and it's plight. And what makes it brilliant is that I went out of my way to find out these things about the people.

 

The masks often were pretty useless, but I loved the fact that I could peer into the minds of these folks, and they offered me something new to learn about the world, and provided me challenges the main story wasn't offering. If I just stuck to the main path, I would have never gotten the bunny hood and sped up my progress. If I just played the main story, I would have never had fought a bunch of aliens invading a farm. If I stuck to the main path, I would have never discovered the mere existance of certain characters, like the invisible man or the beavers.

 

(Edit: I never played Dark Souls Discoid, so I don't care about it in relation to my comment in the case that it does.)

[Solly]

A lot of what he was talking about sounded like he was describing his ideal Zelda game rather than actually making a fair and unbiased comparison between A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. I agree that overall, ALttP holds up better, but I think that's by virtue of being simpler, not because one is genius and the other isn't. 

 

He talked about how OoT divides the combat and exploration, and gives like, 2 incredibly specific examples of where ALttP made you do both at the same time. Then the rant immediately went back to Ocarina. His point wasn't well-established or backed up at all, but he distracts from this by once again making it about what OoT didn't do. The instances of simultaneous exploration and fighting in ALttP were few and far between, and they didn't really add a whole lot for me.

 

And maybe it's just me having a systematic approach to games, but who explores a room in a Zelda game before beating all the enemies?

 

He also mentioned combat being tied to the environment, and how the Iron Knuckle fight was great for allowing you and the boss to manipulate the arena. I can agree with him on that, and it's definitely something I'd like to see more of, but he once again overstated how well it was done in ALttP. Again, he only really brought up one or two examples. That game was filled with blank, flat rooms, filled with enemies that don't interact with the environment in any way. Enemies like Moldorm (who were fucking annoying by the way) are not part of a majority or anything.

 

I agree that eyeball switches, in Ocarina, that need to be hit with arrows are silly and don't add anything meaningful. He's right in saying that all it amounts to is you pulling out your bow, hitting the switch and opening the door. But A Link to the Past, and every other goddamn 2D Zelda has stuff exactly like this. It's usually in the form of a block that needs to be pushed- often a block hidden among other identical blocks, slightly out of place. And pushing it is the only way to open the door or trigger the chest's appearance. I don't know why this stuff gets a pass if he's not willing to let the eye switches slide.

 

Lastly, he talks a lot about the sense of wonder and immersion you get from doing everything in ALttP, and what OoT does to muddle that. Besides being incredibly subjective, it's kinda hard for him to make a convincing argument about feelings of discovery (what works, what doesn't and why) when he's talking about games that are both over a decade old. Everyone has played these. The sense of wonder and not knowing stuff is long gone. And it's hard to take his opinion on this shit seriously when it looks like Ocarina's a game he's long-since stopped trying to enjoy. 

 

Again, I like both games and agree with quite a few of his arguments, but he would've been a lot more convincing if he toned down the hyperbole and actually drew more legitimate comparisons.

[VO.SUPER]

You want to know something interesting about Majora's Mask? 

Remember this guy from the astral observatory? The place you usually only visited twice in your entire play through.

 

I bet most of you don't know his name. His name is Shikashi, and he only reveals that to you if you happen to visit him as Goron Link or Zora Link. He will then tell you about the myths of of the moon. He tells you that the moon is an idol of worship and fear in Termina. 

 

Even though it's only a small tidbit, it's shit like this that makes me love MM even more. By actually going out of your way to be in another form around an obscure NPC you get rewarded with a greater understanding of the world around you and the people within. I love the reward of information, because it draws you in so much more, and unlike stuff like money which you will max out on eventually, you are rewarded with an added appreciation of the cause you are fighting for. 

[Conando]

Really?  What I remember of Skyward Sword's combat was pretty much just OoT's but instead of pushing B you play these:

 

 

 

Certainly no more connected to the environment than OoT's was anyway.

You weren't really trying then, because the way you attack and the way you move the sword causes the enemy to react. You don't have to wait. In fact, fake outs are the way you're supposed to beat Ghirahim, but many people just complain that he's too cheap and they just wait around until he does something dumb or flail around until they get lucky. And to preempt people saying the game controlled poorly, I can respect that, but I never had that issue. Though I can't say things like the fake out worked 100% of the time, they worked so consistently that when I didn't pull it off that I blamed myself rather than the controls being unresponsive or some other game design quirk. As for any of this in relation to LttP, I'm still not getting his complaint. There are plenty of enemies you have to wait for in order to attack, including bosses. The one that sticks out to me the most is those ice monsters that pop out of the wall, though. They were far more of a pain in the ass than a Stalfos that you could cheese by just spamming slash with the Biggoron sword (and even the Master Sword, though not as easily). Once again, LttP gets a free pass, yet OoT is ripped on.

 

Edit: Oh, Solly. I should give you a little bit more to use for your argument relating to the eye switches. LttP has those two, and they serve the exact same purpose in wasting your time, one instance even has you slowly moving around the room on a floating platform and hitting multiple ones. What happens if you miss? Welp, have fun waiting for the platform to make its way around the room again.

[Phos]

Oh hey a general Zelda topic.  
 
 

I don't know man, I've played Dark Souls and there's a lot of waiting or baiting your enemy into doing something before hitting them.

 
Use the kick, Ralph.  Trust in your feelings.  

OK, anyone who has seen my controversial statements^tm in the status updates will know that I think that the dungeons in basically any Zelda game (With the possible exception of 2, which is a wildcard) are basically the most dull parts of that game.
 
What is a Zelda dungeon?  Really, you're just going into a room and looking for something to make a door open.  Is this a game or some kind of psychological experiment?  Do it enough times and the dungeon coughs out a new item as a reinforcer.  No wonder Majora's Mask is a major fan favorite.
 

WELL FOR SOMEONE WHO COMPLAINS ABOUT WAITING SO MUCH

HE SURE MADE ME WAIT A LOT FOR HIM TO GET TO THE POINT WHILE HE MADE STUPID ASIDE JOKES

Piss-poor video. Other sequelitisisises were great, and he even has a good thesis here. But the presentation's crap. The video could've been halved in duration if we didn't need constant "HEY LET'S MAKE A STUPID ASIDE JOKE LIKE GAME GRUMPS NOW".

Another major point he's driving at is that Zelda games have become pretty rote over the years, far away from their original vision of being about exploring a world, seeing what there is to find.  

[Captain Fun]

I would argue that the non-puzzle shoot the switches on the walls thing were more meaningful in OoT than they were in ALttP. I mean obviously it looks a little weird today but looking at OoT when it was made- players (and developers) where still learning how to think in 3D. It's not a bad way of teaching the player. 

[JezMM]

You weren't really trying then, because the way you attack and the way you move the sword causes the enemy to react. You don't have to wait. In fact, fake outs are the way you're supposed to beat Ghirahim, but many people just complain that he's too cheap and they just wait around until he does something dumb or flail around until they get lucky. And to preempt people saying the game controlled poorly, I can respect that, but I never had that issue. Though I can't say things like the fake out worked 100% of the time, they worked so consistently that when I didn't pull it off that I blamed myself rather than the controls being unresponsive or some other game design quirk. As for any of this in relation to LttP, I'm still not getting his complaint. There are plenty of enemies you have to wait for in order to attack, including bosses. The one that sticks out to me the most is those ice monsters that pop out of the wall, though. They were far more of a pain in the ass than a Stalfos that you could cheese by just spamming slash with the Biggoron sword (and even the Master Sword, though not as easily). Once again, LttP gets a free pass, yet OoT is ripped on.

 

The main combat that stuck with me were the ones where the enemies held their armour in a certain position and you had to swipe in the correct direction perfectly to attack and then do it again at a different angle or take damage if you screwed it up.  I should mention that I felt the sword controlled perfectly too but sometimes it got frustrating when you were punished for human error over and over again in a way that just doesn't happen in casual use of motion control.

 

Also the game did absolutely nothing to teach me of the idea of faking-out enemies because yeah I found the Ghirahim fights to be an exercise in boredom, confusing and frustration.  I THINK I figured it out eventually because I do remember making Link hold his sword out to the right, circle it over his head in an arc slowly and carefully because I knew if I did it too fast it would register as a swing, and then swing from the opposite side.  The entire thing made Link look like an idiot, me feel like I was operating some kind of complex machinery, and neither of us look like badass sword fighters lol.

[G-Force]

The main combat that stuck with me were the ones where the enemies held their armour in a certain position and you had to swipe in the correct direction perfectly to attack and then do it again at a different angle or take damage if you screwed it up.  I should mention that I felt the sword controlled perfectly too but sometimes it got frustrating when you were punished for human error over and over again in a way that just doesn't happen in casual use of motion control.

 

Also the game did absolutely nothing to teach me of the idea of faking-out enemies because yeah I found the Ghirahim fights to be an exercise in boredom, confusing and frustration.  I THINK I figured it out eventually because I do remember making Link hold his sword out to the right, circle it over his head in an arc slowly and carefully because I knew if I did it too fast it would register as a swing, and then swing from the opposite side.  The entire thing made Link look like an idiot, me feel like I was operating some kind of complex machinery, and neither of us look like badass sword fighters lol.

I remember figuring out at some point that the shield stance actually does wonders for that fight.  It almost completely negates how much Link telegraphs his sword strikes, and thus makes it much harder for Ghirahim to block them, simplifying the fight immensely.