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Eff It, I'm Going Through The Whole Zelda Series (And Then Some) Until I Get Bored (Now Reading: a bunch of pre-OoT manga)
Mr. Wright is, perhaps, the weirdest cameo in any Nintendo game
OH MY GOD, I never made the connection that this was a reference until just now seeing it spelled out like this. How did I miss this all these years?!?
I believe the demon statue in BotW that rebalances your health and stamina is a callback.
tbf, the concept of transforming tanuki is not something exclusive to, or invented by Mario. It could be a reference, but I don't feel particularly comfortable assigning it as such outside of more concrete proof.
Kzinssie
(she/her)
I didn't know this existed! For all my complaining about BotW, it sure does have a lot of stuff hidden away in it. Anyway...
LINK'S AWAKENING (1993): TURTLE ROCK
It's cute that this is the same penultimate dungeon title as in Link to the Past. The trip up the mountain was fairly uneventful, aside from the aforementioned Mad Batter, but the rescuing Marin sequence was fun even if it's not given a ton of explanation (how the hell did she get up there?), and I like the gimmick of fighting the dungeon entrance. As for the dungeon itself... eh? I was kind of excited for it to be a boss rush dungeon when I fought a Hinox three screens in, but that's barely a factor here. The one new miniboss, the boxer guy, caught me completely off guard when it punched me all the way back to the entrance, but I didn't let it happen again. It's weird they put the Fire Rod this late in the game, especially given it feels like they barely scratched the surface of the sidescrolling puzzle potential, but I guess something had to be the last item. I'm glad the "environmental feature that reads you a novel every time you brush against it" thing got one last hoorah, too, with the ice blocks. I feel like I have a lot to say about the big plot speech the final boss gives you, but I'm going to save that for the finale post - I know I could probably just go beat the game right now, but it's getting late and my endgame plot analysis is probably going to end up running pretty long, so I'm going to call it here for the night.
Ludendorkk
(he/him)
Eagle Tower is a controversial dungeon, arguably the most difficult conceptually in the entire series. But as someone who managed to grind it out (with the help of some graph paper) as a young child without a guide, I still remember the feeling of accomplishment of conquering what seemed to be a truly nightmarish labyrinth. I really enjoyed revisiting it in the remake (and experiencing the reactions of the people taking it on for the first time).
Funnily enough in my very first playthrough Eagle Tower was my last dungeon, as I pulled an unintentional sequence break using the Flying Rooster and did Turtle Rock first
Funnily enough in my very first playthrough Eagle Tower was my last dungeon, as I pulled an unintentional sequence break using the Flying Rooster and did Turtle Rock first
Also the bat guy in Skyward Sword who forces you to do good deeds for other people
Phantoon
I cuss you bad
It might be easier that way. Turtle Rock isn't really hard, it's more of a marathon. Hot Head is a breeze to beat. Now the Eagle's Tower is tricky, both in puzzles and it's the one dungeon I had to farm hearts in in my last playthrough. I played on original hardware and it makes bombable walls harder to spot which really didn't help. And Evil Eagle is a nasty boss.
jpfriction
(He, Him)
Turtle Rock was the only dungeon I really remember being stuck in. There’s a gap you need to hook shot across to get the nightmare key or the fire rod that my little brain just did not see for multiple days.
Eagles Tower remains one of the high points of Zelda Dungeons, especially for a game boy game; sucker is intricate.
Tiny Octo hated Turtle Rock because he couldn’t figure out how to work those moving blocks. Got real good at using the Roc’s Feather for irregular jumps, though
Tiny Octo hated Turtle Rock because he couldn’t figure out how to work those moving blocks. Got real good at using the Roc’s Feather for irregular jumps, though
Kzinssie
(she/her)
LINK'S AWAKENING (1993): THE EGG & FINAL THOUGHTS
Yeah, I'll admit, the ending with the island disappearing got me. I like how the final dungeon's solution is different depending on your save, it's a nice way to circumvent guides, and I also like how the final boss is clearly pulling from Link's memories to some extent. It's funny that this version of Moldorm is significantly easier than his previous appearances due purely to the fact that there's no fucking pit for him to dunk you in. I one-shotted Dethl with the boomerang, naturally.
So, final thoughts... while I had many, many gripes with this game while I played it, they've already faded into the back of my mind in favor of the highlights - murking dudes with the Boomerang, taking Marin around the island and seeing how she reacts to things, seeing weird cameos from Goombas and Kirby and Prince Richard. I definitely think the overworld was too complex and labyrinthine, and the puzzle designs were too ambitious for their own good on a two-button system, but I do respect the ambition of putting a game like this on a system like the Game Boy.
Plot analysis! It's good - like I said earlier, easily the best writing of anything I've played for the thread so far. When I saw Kensuke Tanabe in the credits as Script Writer I nodded - there's definite shades of his later works like Super Paper Mario, Mother 3, and Origami King here. It's also funny that he got his big start at the company working on Super Mario USA, and now he's using the "it's all just a dream" twist again almost immediately. It's much better here, of course. The themes of this game are interesting to me - when you look at the Zelda series as a whole, I think the main theme is "loss" - dealing with having lost something you once held dear, and moving past it into the future. Ocarina of Time and especially Majora's Mask lean into this the most heavily, with Ocarina having an entire world dealing with Ganon's terror, and you seeing both the before and the after, and Majora being extremely unsubtly about childhood trauma. You can also see this in a bunch of other places throughout the series, with just about every Zelda game featuring an ancient lost empire and characters who have experienced it, and many characters experiencing another loss of some sort depending on the game (Midna losing her true form, Medli and Makar coping with potentially never seeing their families and friends again, and so on). This was sort of present in Link to the Past with the lost Golden Land and flute kid's whole "thing", but Link's Awakening is the first game to bring it to the forefront - knowing the twist going in, a lot of the scenes especially involving Marin really twist the knife about what you have to do, and even though Link is as silent as ever, you can really feel his melancholy at the end. Also, I've already made a thread about Everhood, an Undertale-like I recently played through and loved - I'm going to shill for it more here by saying that it's a game you should play unspoiled, and that once you have you'll know why I'm bringing it up here. Once I'm not the only person on this forum who's played it I'll probably discuss the connections in more depth there.
So! Next up: the CD-i games! The infamous ones everybody knows the cutscenes for, not Zelda's Adventure yet. I'd do some overdramatic thing about how I'm going to be playing some trash, but honestly... I played the fanmade remasters when they came out, and I genuinely kinda loved them. They were fun little action platformers to play from start to finish in under an hour, and the cutscenes are genuinely hilarious even without the personal context of Youtube Poops being a hugely formative part of my sense of humor. That said, a recurring theme here is playing these games in their original contexts, so not only am I gonna be getting ahold of a CD-i emulator to play them in their original jank forms, I'm also going to be using a Wii Remote held vertically (assuming I can get it to work with the emulator) to simulate the experience of the original CD-i's legendary "paddle" controller. I may end up regretting this, and if so I'll always have the remasters to fall back on, but let's see.
Yeah, I'll admit, the ending with the island disappearing got me. I like how the final dungeon's solution is different depending on your save, it's a nice way to circumvent guides, and I also like how the final boss is clearly pulling from Link's memories to some extent. It's funny that this version of Moldorm is significantly easier than his previous appearances due purely to the fact that there's no fucking pit for him to dunk you in. I one-shotted Dethl with the boomerang, naturally.
So, final thoughts... while I had many, many gripes with this game while I played it, they've already faded into the back of my mind in favor of the highlights - murking dudes with the Boomerang, taking Marin around the island and seeing how she reacts to things, seeing weird cameos from Goombas and Kirby and Prince Richard. I definitely think the overworld was too complex and labyrinthine, and the puzzle designs were too ambitious for their own good on a two-button system, but I do respect the ambition of putting a game like this on a system like the Game Boy.
Plot analysis! It's good - like I said earlier, easily the best writing of anything I've played for the thread so far. When I saw Kensuke Tanabe in the credits as Script Writer I nodded - there's definite shades of his later works like Super Paper Mario, Mother 3, and Origami King here. It's also funny that he got his big start at the company working on Super Mario USA, and now he's using the "it's all just a dream" twist again almost immediately. It's much better here, of course. The themes of this game are interesting to me - when you look at the Zelda series as a whole, I think the main theme is "loss" - dealing with having lost something you once held dear, and moving past it into the future. Ocarina of Time and especially Majora's Mask lean into this the most heavily, with Ocarina having an entire world dealing with Ganon's terror, and you seeing both the before and the after, and Majora being extremely unsubtly about childhood trauma. You can also see this in a bunch of other places throughout the series, with just about every Zelda game featuring an ancient lost empire and characters who have experienced it, and many characters experiencing another loss of some sort depending on the game (Midna losing her true form, Medli and Makar coping with potentially never seeing their families and friends again, and so on). This was sort of present in Link to the Past with the lost Golden Land and flute kid's whole "thing", but Link's Awakening is the first game to bring it to the forefront - knowing the twist going in, a lot of the scenes especially involving Marin really twist the knife about what you have to do, and even though Link is as silent as ever, you can really feel his melancholy at the end. Also, I've already made a thread about Everhood, an Undertale-like I recently played through and loved - I'm going to shill for it more here by saying that it's a game you should play unspoiled, and that once you have you'll know why I'm bringing it up here. Once I'm not the only person on this forum who's played it I'll probably discuss the connections in more depth there.
So! Next up: the CD-i games! The infamous ones everybody knows the cutscenes for, not Zelda's Adventure yet. I'd do some overdramatic thing about how I'm going to be playing some trash, but honestly... I played the fanmade remasters when they came out, and I genuinely kinda loved them. They were fun little action platformers to play from start to finish in under an hour, and the cutscenes are genuinely hilarious even without the personal context of Youtube Poops being a hugely formative part of my sense of humor. That said, a recurring theme here is playing these games in their original contexts, so not only am I gonna be getting ahold of a CD-i emulator to play them in their original jank forms, I'm also going to be using a Wii Remote held vertically (assuming I can get it to work with the emulator) to simulate the experience of the original CD-i's legendary "paddle" controller. I may end up regretting this, and if so I'll always have the remasters to fall back on, but let's see.
Firstly, nice write up!
Secondly on the CD-i games: hoo boy, good luck to you. My girlfriend bought me a CD-i for my birthday a couple years ago and back toward the beginning of the pandemic we busted it out for the first time (it's barely used and in its original box!) to play her copy of Wand of Gamelon she's had for a while now. Beyond the world map music which is repetitive but still kind of bops, it was... not a pleasant experience. Have yet to try the remaster.
Secondly on the CD-i games: hoo boy, good luck to you. My girlfriend bought me a CD-i for my birthday a couple years ago and back toward the beginning of the pandemic we busted it out for the first time (it's barely used and in its original box!) to play her copy of Wand of Gamelon she's had for a while now. Beyond the world map music which is repetitive but still kind of bops, it was... not a pleasant experience. Have yet to try the remaster.
It's weird, I don't use the boomerang too often in Link's Awakening, I usually just stick with the sword lol. It is overpowered though, the boomerang. I kind of wish there were random enemies in the egg dungeon or something, rather than it just being a maze, but that's an extremely minor complaint, really.
I keep forgetting fans remastered the CD-i games. I should try those eventually.
RE: Everhood - I read your post about it just now, and I should be upfront that I've still not played Undertale (lol, some RPG fan I am), but is it fine to just play Everhood without having played Undertale, or would I be missing some sort of context mechanically or thematically or something?
I keep forgetting fans remastered the CD-i games. I should try those eventually.
RE: Everhood - I read your post about it just now, and I should be upfront that I've still not played Undertale (lol, some RPG fan I am), but is it fine to just play Everhood without having played Undertale, or would I be missing some sort of context mechanically or thematically or something?
Violentvixen
(She/Her)
Oh hey, a coworker just mentioned Everhood to me yesterday, I need to remember to check it out!
Kzinssie
(she/her)
thread update: literally every step of the process for both emulating the game and using a wii remote on the remaster has failed, so i guess im playing the remaster with "remaster mode" off, meaning the bizarre original "crouch to menu" controls are restored and i have to stab rubies to collect them. its the best im gonna get i think
nosimpleway
(he/him)
For all the gripes about the flying rooster and the praise for the boomerang, nobody mentioned how well they play together. Throw the 'rang, lift the rooster, fly safely above all monsters or enemies while a whirling deathblade circles beneath you, unable to return to your grip, shredding any enemy that comes near.
It's not useful in any practical sense but it sure is fun.
You can see the bird key way before you can get it, and there's a twisty crevasse between you and it. Presumably the player is supposed to go "I need to fly over this with some special tool or ability I don't yet have, since the Hookshot and Feather won't work here."
I know the chicken keeper on Tal Tal Mountain mentions that chickens used to be able to fly. There's a rabbit that tells you a flying rooster used to live in Mabe. I think someone else mentions that the rooster was interred under the weathervane. Is it a sign on the weathervane itself? Whatever.
Once you're under there, there's a pile of bones. ...okay? Mamu mentions that his song can "make things feel more alive" but that it's actual frog necromancy (necfrogmancy) might not occur to you. This is the first time you need the Frog's Song of Soul and the first time it can actually do something useful, so I think this is the worst "try everything to see what happens" spot.
I'm pretty sure once you have the rooster the chicken keeper will just tell you outright to pick it up over your head so you start flying, at which point you have to remember to go get the bird key.
...and the Secret Seashell left of the Kanalet drawbridge. Don't forget that one.
It's not useful in any practical sense but it sure is fun.
From what I gather watching speedruns of the game the knights in the original are completely random. Maybe they land right-side-up if they do a knight's move, but how they bounce is random so it's hard to plan for.
I'm pretty sure I already knew the answer before I got to that point in my first playthrough, so I hadn't really thought about it. Yeah, the clues are pretty scattered, and not... really clues, most of the time?
You can see the bird key way before you can get it, and there's a twisty crevasse between you and it. Presumably the player is supposed to go "I need to fly over this with some special tool or ability I don't yet have, since the Hookshot and Feather won't work here."
I know the chicken keeper on Tal Tal Mountain mentions that chickens used to be able to fly. There's a rabbit that tells you a flying rooster used to live in Mabe. I think someone else mentions that the rooster was interred under the weathervane. Is it a sign on the weathervane itself? Whatever.
Once you're under there, there's a pile of bones. ...okay? Mamu mentions that his song can "make things feel more alive" but that it's actual frog necromancy (necfrogmancy) might not occur to you. This is the first time you need the Frog's Song of Soul and the first time it can actually do something useful, so I think this is the worst "try everything to see what happens" spot.
I'm pretty sure once you have the rooster the chicken keeper will just tell you outright to pick it up over your head so you start flying, at which point you have to remember to go get the bird key.
...and the Secret Seashell left of the Kanalet drawbridge. Don't forget that one.
Tarin looks a lot like Mario, eats a mushroom, and transforms... into a raccoon. It only just occurred to me a while back, and I brought it up in Discord at the time. Maybe if he used a leaf to transform it would be easier to make the connection. Or if eating the mushroom made him too big to move and he blocked the passage to the tail key Snorlax-style instead. I dunno.
Kzinssie
(she/her)
LINK: THE FACES OF EVIL (1993)
As said, my attempts to get the original game working with a Wii Remote failed, so I ended up playing the game in remastered form with a fairly normal controller. This is definitely the worse of the CD-i duology - there's this awful mechanic where you need to kill enemies in the snow village of Nortinka to get them to drop snowballs one at a time, which can be used on fire-based enemies that are otherwise immune to harm to get them to drop spread-shot fireballs also one at a time, which are themselves used on certain ice-based enemies in the same fashion. It all comes out to a lot of killing enemies in Nortinka over and over again, which is pretty tedious. That said: this game is pretty fun, even with hobbled controls! It's certainly not going to be winning any awards or topping any best-of lists, but it's a solid enough little action platformer you can beat in under an hour and have a consistently good time with. The music is amazing, even if it's not really Zelda-ish, and the hand-painted backgrounds are pretty great in that "90s PC game" sense. As for the cutscenes: the ones everyone knows are, of course, masterpieces of unintentional comedy, but I actually think some of the more obscure ones are genuinely good. Animation Magic was made up of ex-Soviet animators, and there's a definite influence here from Russian impressionist animation. When it's trying to depict Western fantasy heroes dicking around in castles it falls flat, but the cutscenes showing off the bosses actually do a pretty good job of selling their villainous vibe - Militron is imposing, Glutko is grotesque, Harlequin is deranged. Speaking of, one thing I genuinely have to laud this game for is expanding the boundaries of the Zelda world. Ganon is still the villain, and you still fight enemies like Moblins, Octoroks, and Goriyas, but the major story bosses are all entirely original, and the setting is the never-before-seen island of Koridai. All in all, a surprisingly good time, and the remaster comes highly recommended.
That sounds positively delightful and if I ever pick up the remake I'll have to try it out (hopefully it still works there).
Damn, that slaps. Do we know who the composer is?
Insta-edit: according to YT comments it's Tony Trippi, who's website hasn't been updated since 2007 and is mostly broken now. Looks like he did some other CDi games and then miscellaneous PC games in the early 00's, plus sound design for Frequency on PS2, but I'm not seeing anything he's been up to recently.
A lot of games make the 2nd to last level and 2nd to last boss the hardest one, then make the final ones more of a spectacle.
Sarge
hardcore retro gamin'
You know, for all the niceties that the remake of Link's Awakening brings, I have two major gripes. The less important one is the performance, which dips every time the game is attempting to pre-load assets. The jumping back and forth between frame rates is obnoxious.
But more importantly, it's that it forces you to use the analog stick instead of the d-pad. Why, Nintendo (and Grezzo), why? It feels much less precise than the Game Boy version.
Still, I have to admit that the game's look grew on me, some of the remixed tunes (Face Shrine, y'all) are splendid, and less inventory swapping were really nice. I wonder how much work it would be to try to modify the Game Boy game to be context-sensitive with certain objects? (Probably a lot.) Just the power bracelet being a context-sensitive command would help a ton.
But more importantly, it's that it forces you to use the analog stick instead of the d-pad. Why, Nintendo (and Grezzo), why? It feels much less precise than the Game Boy version.
Still, I have to admit that the game's look grew on me, some of the remixed tunes (Face Shrine, y'all) are splendid, and less inventory swapping were really nice. I wonder how much work it would be to try to modify the Game Boy game to be context-sensitive with certain objects? (Probably a lot.) Just the power bracelet being a context-sensitive command would help a ton.