A Brief History of Time (Ocarina of Time)

Wait... do fairies really fill your WHOLE life in this game? I thought they only filled like 7 or so hearts like they do in the other games. It's great that they will bring you back from the dead, but I thought you needed to eventually upgrade to medicine to get full life.

Yeah...

Wow, I completely forgot that. So why would you ever want to buy medicine?

Why indeed?

This has always been the problem with Zelda games, and it's been made worse by the stepped rupee purse (which I want to say started in OoT but that might be a lie). There's really no need to ever buy anything, and it drives the collector in me insane to start with a 200-rupee purse, top that out in the first half an hour of gameplay, and then "waste" every rupee I come across after that.

If I got a chance to ask the design team one thing, it would be: what the fuck are you doing with rupees, man?

Makes you wonder what a Zelda game without rupees would look like. Less shiny, certainly, but otherwise?

Well I figure there'd be a whole lot more of Link opening treasure chests and holding nothing over his head.

*fanfare* "You didn't find anything at all in this treasure chest! NICE!!"

*fanfare* "You didn't find anything at all in this treasure chest! NICE!!"

*fanfare* "You didn't find anything at all in this treasure chest! NICE!!"

*fanfare* "You didn't find anything at all in this treasure chest! NICE!!"

*fanfare* "You didn't find anything at all in this treasure chest! NICE!!"

Because fairies don't restore your magic along with your life. So they aren't completely broken... just kinda.

I'd go insane if I didn't find those precious useless rupees inside over half the chests I ever open in my LoZ games. My OCD would question whether I did something wrong earlier in the game to cause the calamity.

I always get through by eye, because the log tunnels you can pass through look way different from the ones that will dump you at the entrance. Good job, Nintendo!


She's certainly supposed to be, but the music actually fades out once she stops "playing." Good job, Nintendo!


There's also the fact that the Running Man simply doesn't appear yet. I think it's either after the third Spiritual Stone or after the cut scene fulfilling Link's premonition that he first shows up; I remember that much because the GameCube Collector's Edition version of the game has a bug where you can't get the reward for showing the Mask of Truth at the Forest Stage after you've been to the future for the first time, giving you an annoyingly small window of opportunity to get that done.

I seem to remember money being a much more precious commodity in early Zelda games. I think that was before every blade of grass in the world was littered with bombs and arrows. Seriously, who the hell is leaving those things laying around?

Zelda needs to either ditch the money mechanic or go back to making bombs and arrows strictly things you have to buy or pray for a (somewhat rare) monster drop.

I also thought it would be interesting to see what a Zelda game would feel like with an expanded inventory, adding more loot to find, buy and sell. Instead of getting a hammer you use for one kind of puzzle, what if you found knives, axes and several more sword upgrades? (I guess you'd get an RPG...)

At any rate, money is kind of pointless. At least TP gave you the Vending-Machine Armor, dishing out protection for a price!

Isn't that what they did in Twilight Princess?

And didn't they try the expanded inventory in Wind Waker?

If they did it didn't work. I constantly had a maxed-out wallet, which made opening chests in dungeons really annoying.


I guess, but I was actually imagining a true RPG Zelda, with armor with numerical values, status effects, elemental weapons... wait, crap, did I just invent a Zelda Metroidvania?

(actually, I think I just want another Secret of Mana, but with a plot.)

They definitely need to think of something worth putting in treasure chests besides heart fragments and money. And breaking the heart fragments into smaller pieces does not count.

The most obvious thing would be to steal Metroid's smaller ammo upgrades.

Ps. I miss the 5000-rupee wallet from Wind Waker.

They could add in another fetch-quest collectible item type or two!

Yes let's have Silver, Bronze and Copper Skutullas.

The problem of excessive rupees could be solved by giving you something interesting to do with them. Like, let you buy a house in the city, or a fancy new outfit, or something like that. Something that's fun but non-essential, to avoid grinding.

The Fable series, I think, is the Western equivalent to Zelda. Eiji Aonuma and Peter Molyneux need to compare notes, as the most recent of each seem to complement the other's weaknesses nicely.

Nope, you invented a Zelda Dragon Warrior.

A Moblin draws near!

Command?

>Fight
Spell
Run
Item

Link attacks!

The Moblin's life energy has been reduced by 7!

Congratulations, you have done well in defeating a Moblin!

You got 5 experience points!
Collect 635 more experience points to increase Link's life energy, magic energy, attack, defense, agility, strength, and wisdom.
Collect 427 more experience points to increase Shiek's life energy, magic energy, attack, defense, agility, strength, and wisdom.
Collect 514 more experience points to increase Midna's life energy, magic energy, attack, defense, agility, strength, and wisdom.
Collect 211 more experience points to increase Cuckoo's life energy, magic energy, attack, defense, agility, strength, and wisdom.

You got a blue Rupee!
That's worth 5 Rupees.
Not too bad, huh?

You got a fairy!
When a party member's life energy runs out and they collapse from exhaustion, this fairy will replenish their strength.
In battle, select Item to bring up the item menu, select fairy, and choose which party member to use it on.
In the field, press [Start] to bring up the menu screen, select Item to bring up the item menu, select fairy, and choose which party member to use it on.

The thing I like about Zelda is that it gets rid of the trickle of points that RPGs rely on, while preserving the signature character growth of the genre. I don't think Metroid-style item upgrades serve that vision all that well.

Well, Wind Waker had a 9999 limit, and the purpose of that was mostly just the Auction House. Trouble was that 1) most people don't know about it, and 2) you don't actually need that much money to win everything.

WW is probably the worst offender in this, though, because it's easy to hit your previous purse limits (it starts at 200, goes to.. 500? then I think 5000, then 9999.. might be another step in there) and the game is flush with 100 rupee chests in the dungeons. I'd open a silver rupee chest, and already be at my limit, and just think, "Well, that was completely wasted." Treasure hunting runs into this also.

Tingle changed an arm and a leg for triforce charts, and I'm told there were more charts in the jp version. I think that's where the WW developers expected all that money to go.

That's where most of my money went. And that's a problem, since the charts are relevant to finishing the game. I actually had to hunt for money on several occasions. Honestly, I didn't really mind, though, since fishing up treasure chests from the bottom of the sea was fun.

I hate every aspect of the Triforce hunt, from the money problem to the act of tracking them down and dredging them up. But I've been less inclined to volunteer complaints about it ever since Aonuma came right out and apologized for it.

Ohh yeah, I completely forgot about the charts.

Doesn't fix the fact that you can do those one at a time, and you still wind up "wasting" rupees you find until your purse gets maxed out. =p

I've never actually played it, so I don't know, but I think I was picturing something more like WOW.

But I seem to remember playing a Zelda Final Fantasy flash game somewhere (newgrounds?), and despite being terrible, it was a kind of cool idea.

Oh, and paying thousands of rupees for charts didn't solve the economy problem at all!

The first Zelda had it right: I always had to grind out enough money to get medicine and bombs before heading into a new labyrinth. OH, and the second quest I always had a spare 100 for those damn "Leave your life or money" rooms since I forget where they are.

It looks like I won't be able to do a proper update until tomorrow or possibly even Monday. Sorry everyone, but it's coming.

This is true but it’s not what you’re “supposed” to do. When you get close to a path that will lead you out of the woods, you’ll be able to see a faint light at the end of the tunnel. Good job, Nintendo!

There’s also the fact that once you leave the Sacred Forest Meadow after talking to her, the music stays at maximum volume in the Lost Woods rather than getting louder or softer depending on which way you’re going. You’re only given one trip through the Lost Woods with any sort of directional help and then you’re on your own, despite the fact that Saria stays behind in the Forest Meadow and continues playing the ocarina. Good job, Nintendo!

Really? I never had that problem. I did have Majora’s Mask freeze on me multiple times before I eventually gave up on it. ...Which is actually a huge shame because I don’t have my N64/original copy anymore and I was hoping to play through it again.

This is true, but at least they let you put money back in the chest so it wasn’t wasted. This is, arguably, the greatest innovation of TP.

I agree with all of you that rupees are ridiculously plentiful. Nintendo knows it too and they’ve taken a few different approaches towards the problem. Majora’s Mask had a bank for all of your unused rupees (which was absolutely brilliant and I’ve never understood why we haven’t seen a bank in Hyrule yet). Wind Waker had a gi-normous wallet and ridiculously huge rupees to find, but they jacked up the prices on items to compensate. Twilight Princess let you put rupees back in chests, so if you found money with a full wallet, you could always go back and get it when you needed it. Of these, I think MM’s bank solution was the best…but it still doesn’t address the main problem: there’s not much worth buying in any Zelda game.

There are a few titles where you will not run into this problem, however. The Minish Cap and Phantom Hourglass each manage to avoid this by not having rupees in every dungeon and having more things to actually spend rupees on. But even these titles could be better regarding rupee management.

The simple answer is to say that we simply need to have more things to buy. Armor, weapons, etc. The problem is that once you start doing that, it stops becoming a Zelda game. Zelda is not an RPG. It’s not an action RPG. It’s an adventure game. It’s not meant to be about stats or grinding or equipment or any of that OCD nonsense that we get out of an RPG. That’s simply not Zelda’s thang. Zelda is about immersion and exploration. Just like an RPG, there’s a sense of growth…but that comes from finding new tools or enhancing your repertoire of moves. It's not from buying new pants or leveling up.

Well, okay. In Zelda II it's about leveling but that's the only one.

So…what to do? Hell, I don’t know. I think where we’re at now in a post TP world isn’t a bad place to be. Nintendo could make bombs/arrows etc. harder to find in the wild, but that would lead to a lot of annoyance and frustration. I think a good solution would be to start charging for more things. You know those sword moves we learned in TP? Have a dojo like in MM and have the owner charge for each move he teaches you. Or give Link more magic to use and charge for scrolls. Keep the rupees coming but bring back the bank. Keep the "put rupees back"-thing from TP. Charge for a bit more stuff and bam. Money is now somehow useful. Can you imagine?

No, but you did just get closer to making a good 3D Castlevania than Konami's been able to.

Right. Instead of providing more things to buy, just make money more scarce. Go back to how it was in the original game, where you'd be rewarded with five Rupees for clearing out a whole room, rather than twenty for killing one Like Like. If you're going to have red Rupees, make them as rare as they were in A Link to the Past. And instead of sticking big money in chests, bring back the treasure trove rooms from the first four games, so you can see how much is there and just scoop up as much as you might need.

I can't wait to bomb some Dodongos!

I remember at one time hearing a rumor (or perhaps it was just a fanboy wish) that they were going to remake OoT (and maybe MM) with the TP Wii engine, waggle and aiming and all, and put it out at a budget price.

If they put them both on one disc, bug free and maybe added something (like a small bonus dungeon, or just upped the overall difficulty of the enemies) I think that could be really cool.

I really would like to replay this game, but I'm scared that so much of my love for it is through the haze of memory that I'd just be upset seeing the N64 blur magnified on my LCD TV. I'm tempted to drop the money to get the de-glazed version on virtual console, but the rumble-pack bug bums me out, and I hate to pay for a game I still own.

Hmmmmmm, maybe I'll just wait until I have kids and make them play it.