The Legend of Zelda - Part 3: Here Today, Goron Tomorrow

The Plot
Having met Princess Zelda, we were sent over to the Gorons in order to collect their gift from the gods.  This involves us going through a new village, Kakariko, which I find completely uncompelling, and luckily can pass through without much effort.  Well, except for being killed by chickens once, because that's what you do in Kakariko village.

These ropes sure would be easy to navigate, if the camera didn't suck.

When we arrive at Goron City, it's very quiet.  They're all very hungry, and not that welcoming.  Apparently, their supply of super-tasty rocks has recently been disrupted by a herd of Dingdongos which moved to town.  Incidentally, a brown man of the desert recently came by and offered to help them out... for a price.

After wandering around the city itself, you learn where the village elder is, and playing the royal family's song, he lets you see him.  I am again confused as to how this song is a secret, if everyone recognizes it.  Apparently only fairy-boys and royalty are musical.

It's funny because it's true.

King Goron needs a Snickers, because he is in absolutely no mood to greet messengers, not even from the great Hyrule kingdom.  We offer to slay these Dingdongo creatures for him, in order to save his people, but he just pouts a lot and tells us to go away.  I show him my super-official signed-by-Zelda credentials -- no reaction.  I play him the 'secret' tune of the Royal Family -- he perks up for a second, then returns to his ennui.  Okay...  So, at this point it's obvious that we will need to convince Mr. Grumpypants to give us access to his cave, so that we can earn his trust and steal earn his god-gem, but he's in no mood to let us.

I wander around the village, completing various tasks and puzzles, hoping that one of them will provide a clue as to what we should do next.  After about an hour of this, I turn off the game, because I'm bored.  I contemplate googling the solution, but that seems like giving in, so I leave the game for a few days.

"Oh look, exactly where I left off!"

When I log back on, I wake up in the Kokiri Forest.  My first thoughts are "Well, it's going to take me a while to get back to the Gorons."  So I decide to talk to my fellow Forest people.  They all chum it up with me, and tell me that my best friend Saria misses me, and I can find her in the Lost Woods.

I guess I didn't have to wait long to find out what those Lost Woods were about after all (I traipsed through them in Part 2 thinking they led to Hyrule. They didn't).  I make a quick pit stop in the woods to show off my amazing talent to some weird Skullkids.  They're blown away by my performance, and give me a Piece of Heart.  This is my second Piece of Heart; I collected my first one at Lon Lon Ranch, and they're typically given as minor rewards for quests.  If you collect four of them, then you permanently get another heart (life) for your character.  I currently have 4 hearts, so this is a pretty big deal at the moment.

Hi Saria!  Oh, you want to play too?
What's with you people and ocarinas?

Come on, have a heart.  Play with us!  Maybe just a piece of heart?

This picture is definitely from the woods.

With the Skullkids out of the way, I make my way through the labyrinth that is the Lost Woods.  Well, it would be a labyrinth except that I've done this before, and Mr. Owl came by and told us to just listen for Saria's music.  I meet up with Saria and she tells me that my flute ocarina is magical.  She also misses talking to me, so she teaches me a song that allows the two of us to talk, no matter how far away we are!  Cool, I guess.

I'm tiring of these woods, so I decide to figure out how to convince the Gorons to let me steal their gem get into the Dodongo cave.  Back to the mountains I go!

Hey!  Listen!  Somewhere along the way, Navi decides to tell me that maybe their king is just sad, and he needs to be cheered up -- I could play him a song, or something.  Ahh.  I see.  If only I knew some sort of magical song for cheering people up.    On a hunch, I play Saria's Song for him, and he proceeds to breakdance in his lair.  He can't help but dance his sorrows away.  Literally.

After an awkwardly long dance, he finally tells us that he's feeling much better.  So much better, in fact, that he gives me a Bomb Bracelet, which allows even puny people like Link to pick up bombs and throw them.  Also, since he's going to die without delicious Dodongo rocks, he's going to allow us to risk our life in order to clear out the cave of those pests for him; if we succeed he'll give us the stone.  Good thing if he starved to death I couldn't just take it off his dead body.  Actually, I might not be able to, since he doesn't seem to wear any clothes -- I don't want to know where he keeps it.

This "Cave" looks more like the inside of a dodongo.

Mr. Dodongo, you look like you could use a date.  A date with destiny.

Without too much more fuss, I make it into the Dodongo Cave. This is our second dungeon, and it's filled with bombs and lava. The enemies here almost universally employ one of those two elements in their attacks. One particularly annoying bat actually destroys your shield if you let it touch you. This is a problem because the targeting system and camera can be quite clunky at times. I lose my shield about two-thirds of the way through the dungeon.

Luckily, the cave is relatively straight forward, and I make my way through it and face the Goron's trouble; Infernal Dinosaur: King Dodongo.  He's big, he's mad, and he's not going down as easily as our last boss.  Luckily, I've played a few Zelda games before, and met a few not-King Dodongos in the cave leading up to this fight.  I quickly spot some bomb plants growing, and hurl them into his gaping mouth.  King Dodongo does not look to kindly on this, and tries to roll over me, catch me on fire, and otherwise do nasty things.  Unfortunately for him, I've got a destiny to fulfill, so I quickly dispatch him.  In his dying breath he's nice enough to provide a portal back out of the cave for me.  What a guy; I almost feel bad for murdering him.  Almost.

I'm so happy, I could eat a boulder!  (because I only eat rocks)

Easiest two-man scam ever.
Ganondorf: "Give me the rock, or else DODONGOS."
Link: "I'll save you from those Dodongos, if you give me the rock!"
King Goron: "Okay!"
(I may have just finished reading American Gods.)

With the Dodongo defeated, the Goron Village returns back to its dusty lifestyle it loves so much.  Bombs and Ale for everyone tonight!  The Goron King lives up to his end of the bargain, and gives us the Red Spirit Stone as our reward.  I feel a bit like Jacob stealing Essau's birthright, but I try not to complain too much.  I mean, it is the world we're saving, right?  The Goron are so happy to have food that they even tell me where I can find the last of the God-Stones.  The Zora, water dwelling creatures to the East, keep it.

My Thoughts:
This was not a particularly enjoyable segment of the game for me.  I enjoyed exploring the Goron Settlement, but the camera often got in my way.  If I set the camera to a side, it will start to realign itself as soon as I start moving, making it needlessly difficult to navigate the wires on the top of the settlement.

My complaint, however, is with the Saria's Song plotline.  This is a problem because there is not plotline to it.  I was hoping to hear from Navi (never a good sign), so that she might tell me how to approach the Goron King, but that never happened.  Only when I finally gave up in frustration did the solution present itself.  Who makes a game in which the expected solution is to wait for the player to turn off the game for a while, and give them the answer when they return?  I was never provided with a prompt to return to Kokiri Forest.  This is bad design.  As a concession, the plot from the forest and onward was actually well laid out.

The actual Dodongo cave was a mediocre dungeon.  Entering rooms can be disorienting at times, and I found myself accidentally back-tracking a few times.  The fire-bats which burn your shield are a great idea, but the targeting and strafing system does not work well, so it's very easy to accidentally walk into enemies without realizing they are there.  I don't mind taking occasional damage because of this, but I do find myself taking unnecessary damage.  This particular dungeon was not compelling or interesting enough to make up for these issues.

The Legend of Zelda - Part 2: Zelda Strikes Back

Hey link! You smell.
Yeah.

The Plot:

As a reminder, we left off last time with the Great Deku Tree's untimely death.  His final instructions to you are to take the green super-stone to Hyrule and talk to the royal family.  When you return to town, The Great Mido, another Kakari boy, accuses you of killing Mr. Deku.  Mido is a tool; we do not like Mido.  You manage to convince him that you did not commit arborcide, and he skulks away to pout about something.

At this point you're given no direction whatsoever.  Sure, I know what I'm supposed to do eventually, but I have no idea how to get there.  I decided to wander into The Lost Woods -- it seams reasonable to assume that Hyrule's on the other side of the woods.  This was apparently the wrong decision, so after half an hour of traipsing around the woods, I decided to return to the village and talk to a few people.

It's dangerous to go alone!  Take this.

The other Kakari talk about how they're unsure of why Mr. Deku would send you on this quest, since if you leave the forest you'll die.  Great -- I love it when that happens.  With faith unwavering, I continue out the actual exit of the forest, only to be stopped by your best friend, Saria.  You have an emotionally touching moment; she sure will miss her linkie-winkie.  Before you leave, she gives you an ocarina.  Aha!  I see why this game has that in its title now.  Of course, she doesn't bother to teach you any songs, or explain why it might be useful at all -- so far as I'm concerned, it's a momento at this point.

What do you mean 'start'!?  I just saved the whole forest.

With the cutscene ended, you finally make it to Hyrule Field.  But wait, there's another cutscene.  Please meet Mr. Owl.  We like Mr. Owl; he's a hoot.  From here on, you can count on him for advice.  You see, you may already have a magical advice fairie, but it's the owl who gives you direction.

This encounter with Mr. Owl is focused on teaching Link how to read a map and wander the countryside.  I like to think of this as his hoot-torial.  Also, just in case pressed B and accidentally skipped everything he said because the text appears so slowly, he asks to make sure you caught all that he said.  What a guy.

"Go to the castle," they said, "It's important," they said.  Yeah, time to visit the cows.

Finally.  Fresh air.  Wait.  Aren't I supposed to be dead now?  I mean, I left the forest, and we're not actually supposed to do that.  I'm sure someone will totally explain this to me (spoiler: they don't). Oh well, I'll just walk over here and, what the!? Great.  Hyrule's apparently infested with skeletons which count out at night; night which comes every 3 minutes, roughly.  Zelda's an exploration game, so I take this chance to wander around the small countryside, and go everywhere but the castle.  This involves saying hi to Lon Lon Ranch, and trying to get to the other places which are not yet available.  This takes entirely too long for absolutely no reward, so I won't bother you with the details.

Anyway, with all this dilly-dallying, let's hope that the princess is not yet in another castle.  I head to Hyrule only to find out that there is more to do in Hyrule than the rest of the game I've seen combined.  hundreds of shops and homes, thousands of pots to break, and even some grass to slash.  It's link heaven.  I gamble away my meager living on slingshot contests, and pout as the bomb-bomb-bowling is not yet open.  Eventually I make my way toward the castle, where I'm supposed to save the world.

Me: "I'm here to save the world!" Guard: "Get out of here with your weird outfit, kid."

It turns out that you can't just introduce yourself to the guard as "Hi, my name is Link, and I'm here to save you!"  Apparently there's nothing to save them from.  In fact, they're very busy meeting with someone from the desert.

Being the determined young lad you are, you decide to bypass the guards and sneak your way into an audience with the royal family.  Unfortunately, some perv in town recently tried to spy on Princess Zelda, who may or may not have prophetic visions, so the guards are on much higher security than normal.  Mr. Perv is nice enough to tell you exactly how to get into the castle; what a guy.

So, what ensues is a ridiculously dated stealth portion of the game, where you run past guards as they're not watching.  This is no Metal Gear Solid here; there's no crouching behind a box, or knocking on walls to distract them.  To sneak past the guards you just have to wait for them to walk out of site for a second.  The most difficult part of the whole ordeal is working with the camera angles they give you.

"I'm very trusting -- that's why my father has so many guards."

"We don't have brown people in Hyrule -- he must be evil."

Thankfully, after not too much effort, you manage to sneak up on Zelda.  Did I mention she's prophetic?  After a startle, she immediately decides you must be the savior of the world who she has dreamed about.  She has been terribly bothered by dreams of the destruction of all things good recently, and she just knows you can help here.

Oh my god, you have an ocarina!?  You must learn this song.  It's no big deal or anything, just a long protected secret song of the Hyrule royal family.  It's a good thing Mr. Perv didn't find her, because she's clearly delusional.

"It's 'cause he's black."

Anyway, she's convinced that the recent guest her father has been entertaining is completely evil.  Her reasoning (I kid you not) is because he is brown, and from the desert.  Hello, Racism 101.  I mean, she's not wrong in this particular case, but wow.

Racism aside, that jewel you have is really powerful, and Ganondorf (who's mother clearly hated him to call him that) probably wants to get his hands on it and its two brothers.  If he can do that, then he could control all the power of the gods.  So, obviously you have to collect them for him to stop him.  Word on the street is that the Gorons have one, so you better hurry up and convince them to part with their gift from the gods.

My Thoughts:
The game has aged surprisingly well.  I suspect that many of my issues (such as how terrible it is to aim your slingshot) stem from me playing a GameCube port of the game on my Wii; my good gamecube controllers did not survive Super Smash Brothers: Melee, so I am using a third party controller.  Also, for those wondering, I received this copy of Ocarina of Time, along with Master Quest as a pre-order bonus for Wind Waker.  I may not be a Zelda fan, but I'm not unfamiliar with the series.

Mechanically, I believe OoT was very well polished for its time.  However, some of the areas were clearly given more attention to detail than others.  I don't find the textures uniform at all; some areas are clearly better than others, and it doesn't appear to be correlated with importance.  For example, your beginning hut is absolutely atrocious, and it's not just the style; most of the time the art is nicely done though..

My biggest complaints thus far are all plot related.  I don't mind throwing Ganon[dorf] under the bus early on.  It's okay to know who the primary antagonist is.  However, their reasoning is flimsy at best.  Also, collecting all three stones together is the worst idea.  If you're worried that he's going to use them against you, don't bring them to him.  This can only end badly.

The Legend of Zelda - Part 1: The Great Deku Tree

Before I review, critique, and summarize this particular game, it must preface everything with the following:  I did not like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time when I first played it.  With that in mind, let me discuss why I decided to play through Ocarina of Time (OoT):

Earlier this year, I loudly denounced a good friend's choice of video games, based exclusively off of his love for Zelda.  When he asked me for a better game within the same genre, I was hard pressed to think of one.  It would be deplorable for me to maintain this position without revisiting this series.

My plan for this series of reviews, is to play through the game, briefly summarizing the plot points, and noting the good, the bad, and the ugly.

This is how I imagine many people remember Mr. Deku

The Start:
You are Link: a Kakari boy.  The Kakari are a peculiar people.  What is most odd about them is that they each have a fairy companion; each of them except Link.  Link does not have a fairy companion.  The opening sequence to the game shows this fairiless boy plagued by nightmares.

The Great Deku Tree sends Navi the fairy to fetch Link the Fairiless because only Link has the ability to stop the evil causing these nightmares.  In total, you spend about 2 minutes fairiless in the game, but what little dialog there is in Karkiri Village is used to underline "Whoa, Link has a fairy now!"  It's an effective technique, and I actually don't mind Navi incessant need to talk -- usually.

The first half hour of the game can be summarized by: here's an informal tutorial to hopefully disguise the fact that this is really just a tutorial.  You're sent to the Deku Tree.  Whoops, can't go without a sword and shield, better find those.  Unfortunately, the game does not give you so much as one hint as to where to find these things.  So, you wander around the village, talking to everyone, hoping one of them will just happen to have a spare sword you can have.  When that doesn't happen, you wrestle with the camera (which they do not tell you how to properly align until later) and eventually find your sword.  I don't mind that the game starts with a fetch quest, but the designers could have done a better job at providing some direction here.


The Deku Tree:

Me Deku Tree.  Deku Tree is sad.

And, of course, someone made one in Minecraft.  Arguably, a better looking one.

Once you're properly equipped, you can finally go meet The Deku Tree.  Oh no, it appears that Mr. Deku has had a curse placed upon him!  Being the strapping young lad you are, you're the obvious choice to enter his mouth and fight the curse.  This is where we get our first taste of battle.  This is no D&D adventure, so you can bet we're not going to be fighting any rats.  Oh, no sir -- it'll be much more dangerous than that.  You'll be fighting: 

Nobody cared about me, until I put on the mask.

That's right.  Our mighty hero - the supposed savior of the world - fighting oversized venus flytraps, and spiders.  Everyone's got to start somewhere, I suppose.  I genuinely believe that the designers spent much more time on the Deku Tree than they did with Kokiri Village.  The tree serves very well for a first dungeon.  You start at the bottom, fighting small plants and picking up sticks, but as you explore you obtain new weapons and items, and the game nicely introduces each one without overwhelming you.  While it is still a tutorial, it allows more interesting exploration than the village did, and everyone likes slashing things.  It begs the question, what was the point of wandering through the village for an hour, if they could have just as easily started you here?

Above all else, Ocarina of Time is an exploration game.  When you realize how to get through the spider web at the bottom of the tree, you do get a genuine feeling of accomplishment for figuring it out.  The game didn't hand you hints on a silver platter; you're encouraged to look around and engage with your environment.  Another good example of this are the Golden Skultantulas -- there are three (at least three that I found) hidden in the tree, and it's hinted that collecting these skulls may give you rewards later on in the game.  The reason you start in a village and given little direction is because this is as close to an open-world exploration game that 1998 could come up with.  It does it not terribly.

Gohma:
Once you fight, climb, burn, and wander your way through Mr. Deku, you eventually find the Source of the Curse: Gohma -- our first boss.


As far as boss battles goes, this one plays out the way you would expect a first one to -- it climbs about, looking menacing, and occasionally attacks you.  The game telegraphs each of Gohma's attacks, so the actual danger here is minimal.  This is okay, because this boss provides the players with one final lesson from Mr. Deku -- there is a strategy to beating bosses; don't just run up and slash them, find their weakness first.  It's an important lesson to learn.

The Lifting of the Curse:
And with that, the curse is lifted.  But wait, it turns out that it was too little, too late.  Mr. Deku literally says that the entire venture was doomed before it began -- the curse has done too much damage, and he is dying.  This is my only complaint so far -- what is the point of this plot then?  To obtain the Kokiri's Emerald?  He could have just spit it out to begin with, rather than have my wander through tree-innards to get it.

One plausible explanation would be that if I had not rid Mr. Deku of his curse, it could have spread to the rest of the forest/village, but the game provides no real justification for this -- so I'm making up my own reason, because God knows I do not want to spend 1-2 hours for absolutely nothing to have happened in the plot.  

In Summary:
So far, the game has provided a good adventuring platform, filled with dangers and secrets -- all the things you would want.  Mechanically, the camera is a bit fiddly, and jumping around is annoying at best.  However, it gets slack for those things because, let's face it, it was 1998 -- they didn't really believe in slow-walks then.  The game does earn kudos for implementing a not-terrible lock&aim system to compensate for the otherwise mediocre camera.  So, so far, so good.