Zelda Retrospective: The Legend of Zelda Review

As but a wee lad, one of my fondest and most vivid memories is of tackling the original NES classic The Legend of Zelda. I had no clue what I was doing, but somehow made it to the seventh dungeon before my stupid child brain became too overloaded and eventually fizzled out. In the past decade, as a powerful and immaculate adult, I've since gone through the game twice and feel pretty comfortable with its mechanics and world. Naturally, I've felt I've grown along with the series, watching in marvel as technological advances created more expressive and fantastical entries. Though Zelda has hit roadblocks in recent years, there really aren't too many games that can touch even the worst the franchise has to offer. As we get nearer to the launch of the latest title, Breath of the Wild, I'd like to take some time to look fondly at a few of the games in the series.

Review: The Legend of Zelda

The original Zelda comes from a time when role-playing adventures were still in their infancy, when hardcore stat-grinding provided the backdrop to high-risk, high-reward computer RPGs like Wizardry and Ultima. As a nascent genre, older role-playing games typically fell back on gameplay systems heavily inspired by tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons, providing the player with a toolset to create and customize their own characters.

In the mid-1980s, Nintendo began work on their own role-playing game that aimed to separate itself from the established brand of role-playing games--many may not know this, but though the original Super Mario Bros released first, both it and The Legend of Zelda were developed concurrently, with members of the development team keeping separate documents for "Zelda ideas" and "Mario ideas." What's truly special about The Legend of Zelda, though, is the time frame for development: launched in 1986, The Legend of Zelda would actually see its release months before the weekend-destroying Dragon Quest and over a year before Squaresoft's original Final Fantasy.

Whereas older role-playing games were inspired by the venerated ancestors of the genre, The Legend of Zelda is a far more personal tale for the development team. In an interview, developer Shigeru Miyamoto recalls discussion among video game players involving computer role-playing games exchanging stories about their characters and the adventures they would find themselves in; taking this as a base, Miyamoto drew inspiration from childhood memories of exploring the Kyoto countryside and wanted to imbue the childlike wonder of discovery into his new, majestic video game: The Legend of Zelda: The Hyrule Fantasy.

To contrast the RPGs of the time, Zelda ditches every instance of stat point-based character development and instead firmly places the player in the role of Link, a young adventurer who has suddenly found himself as the final resistance between the kingdom of Hyrule and Ganon, a rampaging beast who has kidnapped Princess Zelda and taken the Triforce of Power. Link, on the other hand, is tasked with locating Zelda's Triforce of Wisdom, shattered by Zelda to keep Ganon from stealing its power. The game instantly starts the player in this role with a subtle but important touch: Link, the only person left to stand up to Ganon, begins his adventure carrying only a shield. In the first screen, the player can enter a cave to pick up a sword from a wise old man, who then vanishes. The first moments of the game encapsulate the very essence of The Legend of Zelda: exploration is the key to growing more powerful.

Miyamoto's vision of a fantasy adventure based on exploration continue throughout the game as Link discovers hidden caves that can offer a multitude of short sidequests. The inhabitants of these caves either improve his equipment, sell him goods, offer side entertainment by way of gambling, or simply contain one of Ganon's minions who will bribe Link to keep his location secret. For an 8-bit game, this gives the world a sense of population and further emphasizes the treacherous state of Hyrule: the resistance against Ganon is down to sages who can only offer assistance or deserters from Ganon's own army, and all of these individuals have taken to hiding in caves to escape Ganon's forces.

Contrasting the caves, each of the game's eight dungeons is filled with deadly monsters and booby traps. Players need to not only be cautious, but also aware of their current equipment and capabilities before tackling the next dungeon as these constitute the major challenges. After defeating each of the dungeon's guardians, Link is given a Triforce shard and a Heart Container, boosting his overall health. Savvy players while have already picked up a few Heart Containers by this point as they're hidden all throughout the wilds of Hyrule; I love that this is such a departure from the typical leveling systems seen in RPGs of the time as it promotes exploration, the biggest theme of the game.

Sadly, I'm not the patient and bright-eyed lad I was decades ago when I first played The Legend of Zelda, so upon repeat playthroughs I've found myself resorting to game guides to get the most out of the game, because without it a game that I beat in an afternoon while watching anime and eating pounds of steak would otherwise have taken weeks. While a majority of this is fairly straightforward--use the ladder on an outcrop to reach a Heart Container or use a raft to reach a vendor for an important item--some of the items can be a downright nuisance to find and more than a few of them are vital to progress through the game. Even one of the game's final dungeons is hidden under an inconspicuous bush; while the candle has unlimited uses, I can't imagine the frustration of a player approaching The Legend of Zelda for the first time without a guide attempting to find this place.

To make matters worse, Zelda was released in a time when translations were far less important than simply bringing the game over to Western markets. While a few cryptic hints actually work, such as the directions needed to navigate through the Lost Woods, otherwise can come off as blatantly nonsensical like "Dodongo hates smoke" or "Eastmost Penninsula [sic] is the secret." While re-released versions of this game have corrected many of the translation errors in the game's opening crawl, it's baffling to me that nobody at Nintendo has gone through this game's fairly minute script and given it a facelift.

Speaking of facelift, I played this game on the Wii U virtual console and I'm a bit miffed at the quality of the port. I can only assume Nintendo put some strange filter on the ROM to make it appear as if it's being displayed on an old CRT, but these games are often far more colorful than the Virtual Console port would lead people to believe. It's a shame, really, as these are otherwise great ways to experience games that look generally worse on the original hardware when played on modern displays. Nintendo has an opportunity to rectify this when the Switch Virtual Console drops, though I have a feeling it'll be the same ugly ports the Wii and Wii U got.

Annoyances with the preservation of this game aside, I actually appreciate The Legend of Zelda for its ambitious scope. I released a blog a few months ago describing my irritation with the idea of games "aging poorly" or the industry "leaving behind" certain titles, and The Legend of Zelda exemplifies many of the reasons why I utterly loathe this train of thought and the people who promote it. On numerous occasions I found myself floored with the level of detail put into the world and its secrets, and in more than one instance I was actually shocked by just how crisp and fluid some of the animations appear--the Patra enemy in particular is extremely impressive in this regard.

Going back through the game with an extremely detailed walkthrough diminished the overall feeling of exploring a strange land by myself, but it is cathartic to rush through a game that took me weeks to even come close to beating as a child and obliterating monsters with a gleaming sword I didn't even know was in the game at the time. The Legend of Zelda took a nascent genre and flipped it on its head while the mainstream was still figuring out how to even approach RPGs of this scale, and for that alone it's commendable. Since then the series has become a staple of the entire video game industry and even sparked the debate about what constitutes a role-playing game.

In my estimation, Zelda is the quintessential RPG: players may not outright pump points into stats or visit towns to upgrade gear and rest for the night, but the functions for that are still there. Link doesn't necessarily level up, but exploration gives players higher health pools and this in turn is used as a proof of worth to NPCs that they are ready to wield better equipment. The delivery may be different, but the outcome is the same; the biggest difference then is the actual gameplay. Zelda employs a top-down action game approach, proving itself to the industry as the forebear of the action RPG genre just as Link proves himself to the wizened sages testing his worth as an adventurer.

The game may have some niggles, but by my estimation this comes in the form of a poor translation and a few overly-enigmatic secrets. It's no wonder Breath of the Wild has been lauding its ties to this original game rather than the typical struggle to emulate fan-favorites Ocarina of Time or A Link to the Past. The Legend of Zelda is an unspeakably important video game, a game full of ambition that meets its potential at heights that games would struggle to achieve in years to come.

Verdict

If you really want to experience the game and have a lot of free time, I highly recommend giving the original Zelda a shot without a map or guide. I wanted to finish the game for a fresh experience in order to write this review, but as a child one of my fondest memories was of playing through Zelda and discovering secrets on my own. The game may be clandestine, but it welcomes all players to explore every nook and cranny of its gargantuan world. It's more accessible than its contemporaries while containing far more depth than later games like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. If you want to see for yourself one of gaming's most important landmark titles, I highly encourage you to check out The Legend of Zelda.