Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

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Classic
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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby Classic » Tue Jun 10, 2014 4:54 pm

C'mon buddy. You have just enough time to get cup ramen ready to reach the island(s) or point of interest in an adjacent sector.
The problem with the ocean is the same problem that every "Hyrule Field" ever designed has had. Points of interest are usually exhaustible resources, and about halfway through the game the challenges of traversal have probably either become trivial or worn out their welcome and there aren't enough points of interest remaining to make exploration feel rewarding nor does the game provide the tools you need to mark down which points of interest you want to revisit with better tools (actually, come to think of it, those damned chatty fish maps will show if you've "cleared" an island but that is its own :shades: can of worms).
I'm almost certain that's the same for every "Hyrule Field" you've ever trudged through. Except you had to hold forward or mash the roll button and so couldn't snag that cup ramen you wanted.

The main difference of the ship as compared to Hyrule Field is the player's ability to do ANYTHING ELSE while traversing the sea. Would sailing feel better if running ship-to-ship battles in open sea were possible? Would it be better if I could lob cannonballs out to the ocean or look through the telescope without coming to a complete stop?
But I guess I'm no longer a Zelda fan because I didn't play Phantom Hourglass or Skyward Sword. Maybe those games answered that question for me?



PS: If you can make a sandwich that fast, your sandwich is hella boring or you are a Savant of Sandwich and need to share your gift with the world.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby beatbandito » Tue Jun 10, 2014 4:57 pm

Hey guys, remember when Twilight Princess was 'more open world oriented' and that just meant the dumb fetch sidequests were all part of the main story and you had to do them back-to-back?
Image

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 10, 2014 5:17 pm

Hey, I LIKED Wind Waker. I liked it a lot. The art style brought extremely clever nuances to the presentation, it had the best-realized combat in the entire series (including one of the all-time great last boss fights in any game I've ever played), and the grappling hook was fun as hell. It may be my favorite post-Link's Awakening Zelda (at least, up until Link Between Worlds).

But no you are not going to convince me that the boring-ass ocean travel sections were exciting and full of variety and surprises. The game was good IN SPITE of its bullshit world map, not because of it.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby IGNORE ME » Tue Jun 10, 2014 5:20 pm

I feel like all the cloud barriers in Skyward Sword were supposed to lift at some point and reveal the entire surface as being one single huge Hyrule Field, but they never got around to doing that. SS has probably the largest Hyrule ever by land mass, but the fact that it's all cut up and requires a bunch of weird puzzle shit to traverse makes it feel really cramped.

That's a real shame, because the overworld really needs to provide some contrast to the dungeons. The underworld is cramped and foreboding while the overworld is open and free. Had the dungeons in WW not been such weak sauce the big open ocean probably wouldn't get half as much shit.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 10, 2014 5:24 pm

Never got around to Skyward Sword. Twilight Princess had a brief shining moment where I really felt like I was playing an oldschool Zelda game and exploring every nook and cranny of the overworld, but then it went back to mandatory fishing minigames and I decided it could go fuck itself.

LBW does an impressive job of opening up the overworld after you finish the first dungeon, and, in more of an oldschool touch, lets you know what areas you probably shouldn't be in by way of HOLY BALLS THAT LYNEL JUST TOOK 3 HEARTS WITH ONE HIT WHY ARE THERE EVEN LYNELS IN THE LIGHT WORLD.

AND it lets you mark places you want to come back to later. I didn't even realize what a great damn idea that was until I started trying to find all those bombable walls I'd seen before I got the bombs.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby Classic » Tue Jun 10, 2014 6:13 pm

You don't need to review your true-blue colors for me. I spent the bulk of my post trying to better zero in on the problems with Wind Waker's ocean.
The reasons people hate on the ocean travel are not as related to the game being set at sea as many people seem to feel. I'm trying to convince people that the ocean segments are basically the same as Hyrule Field. Flagship Zelda titles have had this problem since Ocarina of Time and since then it's something that each game has found different ways of mitigating.

...
Speaking of Twilight Princess though... I kind of liked the feeling that there were other people doing shit in Hyrule.
Maybe if you could encounter them quasi-randomly on the road and trade a few words the game's exploration would have felt better?

Finally, tbh: I was so annoyed and numbed by the hand-holding that the idiot-style adventure game puzzles slid off of my brain. At least I got to see Midna do some telekinetic magic.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby Classic » Tue Jun 10, 2014 6:14 pm

Which brings me to wondering why I remember tolerating going through Hyrule in Link to the Past as much as I did...

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 10, 2014 7:30 pm

Because there was hidden shit everywhere, most of it was actually beneficial, collecting Pieces of Heart was still novel and hadn't become tedious yet (except the fucking shovel one), there were a shitload of items and almost all of them were useful, you had access to a good big chunk of the overworld from the start with very reasonable item-gates, and the Light/Dark World mechanic made for interesting traversal of both worlds AND was really pretty cool in terms of comparing the differences. And the overhead view makes for faster travel both due to the scale of the world and the speed of combat.

The downsides were that fast travel was lacking for a good big chunk of the game (you had whirlpools and the Save and Quit trick, up until you got the Ocarina -- which you can't get until you've already gone through at least 6 dungeons (counting the two Palace sections separately)), the aforementioned lack of a way to mark points of interest to come back to later, and the frequency with which the Mirror would stick you in the middle of a solid wall and just shoot you back.

LBW remedies a couple of these problems, giving you fast travel almost right off the bat and up to 20 pins you can stick on the map if you want to return to a place, but while its item system does a great job of shaking up the formula of dungeons, it leaves you with precious little in the way of rewards for exploring the world. Oh, another treasure chest full of rupees? You shouldn't have. (Of course, I'm still early in the game, so maybe this changes once I get to, say, Lorule. It's certainly implied that you can get more permanent items as you go.)

Then again, finding things is its own reward, even if it's just another chest of rupees. And LBW is full of stuff to find, in a way that Ocarina with its various pits with Deku Scrubs and bugs in them and Wind Waker with its interminable ocean occasionally punctuated with identical cannon fortresses aren't.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby nosimpleway » Tue Jun 10, 2014 7:53 pm

Thad wrote:Well, that's true in the first three, too but they're still crazy wide-open.

By the "go anywhere from (almost) the beginning" rubric, the most open Zelda would be Wind Waker. It's just an open world that's made up almost entirely of empty ocean.


First game didn't have any item gates. You can start the game and go straight to any corner of the map, assuming you can survive fighting Peahats and Lionels (and you don't need any dungeon items for the white sword and magic shield to help you fight monsters). You have to go through the Lost Woods to get to the graveyard area/Death Mountain without the stepladder, as I recall, but even if you don't know up-left-down-left you can gather rupees and bribe the old woman for the clue. You can get to dungeons one, two, three, four, and six without doing anything special, hit level five if you bribe a different old woman for the clue, and get to dungeons eight and nine with items purchasable in shops (or in the case of nine, random enemy drops). That's pretty fuckin' open, yo.

And if I'm remembering right, you don't get much in the way of open exploration in Wind Waker until you open up the Tower of the Gods. If you try to do anything but sail straight to Windfall, or Dragon Roost, or whatever island it was the Deku Tree was on, in that order, the King of Red Lions would turn back and tell you to quit fucking around.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 10, 2014 8:01 pm

nosimpleway wrote:First game didn't have any item gates. You can start the game and go straight to any corner of the map, assuming you can survive fighting Peahats and Lionels (and you don't need any dungeon items for the white sword and magic shield to help you fight monsters). You have to go through the Lost Woods to get to the graveyard area/Death Mountain without the stepladder, as I recall, but even if you don't know up-left-down-left you can gather rupees and bribe the old woman for the clue. You can get to dungeons one, two, three, four, and six without doing anything special, hit level five if you bribe a different old woman for the clue, and get to dungeons eight and nine with items purchasable in shops (or in the case of nine, random enemy drops). That's pretty fuckin' open, yo.


Technically accurate, I suppose, but what are the odds of anyone deciphering the "GO NORTH, WEST, SOUTH, WEST" clue before getting the ladder on an initial playthrough?

But I get your point -- that it IS actually possible sets it apart from the sequels.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby TedBelmont » Tue Jun 10, 2014 9:04 pm

Probably a red herring, but, Aonuma says that might not be Link in the new trailer.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby IGNORE ME » Tue Jun 10, 2014 10:21 pm

Of course it's not Link. <impossible to tag skyward sword spoiler redacted>

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby TedBelmont » Thu Jun 12, 2014 8:44 am

TedBelmont wrote:Probably a red herring, but, Aonuma says that might not be Link in the new trailer.


UPDATE: it's Link.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 24, 2014 5:19 pm


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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby IGNORE ME » Sun Dec 07, 2014 3:31 pm



"Open world" apparently means "Oblivion without fast travel". Doesn't look too bad though.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby Mothra » Sun Dec 07, 2014 6:08 pm

Had a cringe of secondhand embarrassment every time he tried to do something with the Wii U motion controller.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby IGNORE ME » Sun Dec 07, 2014 7:15 pm

I just realized what's weirding me out about the setup they're playing on. It's not the supposed incongruity of seeing Aonuma and Miyamoto playing with a modern superthin display (it's actually weirder to see them interacting with the black Wii U tablet), it's that they've got it mounted on the exact same industrial stand I've got set up in my bedroom.

Actually, the rest of the room looks a lot like my bedroom too. I guess that's what I get for decorating it like a sterile Japanese office building.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby Thad » Sun Dec 07, 2014 9:06 pm

Brentai wrote:"Open world" apparently means "Oblivion without fast travel".


If the game doesn't start with fast travel, it's bound to show up later. Even The Legend of Zelda: Ocean of Fucking Nothing had fast travel.

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby François » Sun Dec 07, 2014 9:39 pm

The new terrain might lend itself well to new travel ideas too. I'd drop 500 rupees on magic horseshoes that let Epona gallop up cliffs. And heck, do I need to say "longshot"?

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Re: Legend of Zelda: Clever Subtitle

Postby IGNORE ME » Sun Dec 07, 2014 10:18 pm

Thad wrote:
Brentai wrote:"Open world" apparently means "Oblivion without fast travel".


If the game doesn't start with fast travel, it's bound to show up later. Even The Legend of Zelda: Ocean of Fucking Nothing had fast travel.


It probably shows up later - warping is a Zelda staple - but they lampshade the lack of initial shortcuts right in the video:

Miyamoto: So how far away is our destination from here?
Aonuma: Well, it'll still take about four or five more minutes I suppose.
Miyamoto: Four or five minutes more...
*awkward cut*


Why they would want to call attention to that is a mystery. Maybe they're overcompensating for the poor exploration options in Skyward Sword.

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