Collection essentials #75: The Legend of Zelda (NES)
Zelda is an action-adventure game controlled from a top-down perspective. It wasn’t the first game of its kind, but it’s one that raised the bar so high that it still deserves “pioneer” status. The game features a very non-linear structure. You are thrown into a world with no obvious way to go from the start, with just a sword offered to you (which you don’t even have to take!). Your objective as Link is to clear the eight dungeons and defeat the evil Ganon, and the dungeons may be numbered but the player has a great deal of freedom in how they explore the world and in which order they tackle its challenges. Along the way you’ll find upgrades and new tools for your journey, such as bombs, a boomerang, heart pieces that increase your health meter allowing you to take more hits, and much more. There are all kinds of secrets scattered all over the game’s world, some of which are required to reach the end with others being completely optional. Dungeons are like small mazes that have locked doors you unlock with keys found throughout your journey and plenty of enemies you must defeat along with hazards you must avoid to proceed. And if that weren’t enough, the game has a secret “second quest” you can access when starting a new game with entirely new dungeons and locations of everything in the game jumbled around!
Not only was this level of adventure gameplay unheard of at the time, but it was complemented with an engrossing fantasy world, quality visuals and memorable music. Gamers were totally enraptured and Zelda became the talk of the hobby all over. People from that era speak about the original Legend of Zelda with great reverence, a type that is probably impossible to fully understand if you weren’t around at that time. I remember as a teenager getting what was then the newest Zelda game and in a social setting talking about how great it was, and someone there replied, “It can’t be as great as the first one, not when it first came out.”
Which brings me to my own history with the original Legend of Zelda. Unfortunately, I am just a smidge too young to have partaken in the true Zelda fever that exploded in the 1980s. One of my first ever games was a Zelda game, which I loved, but it wasn’t this one. Obviously I heard a lot about the legendary original and occasionally got a chance to see it or sample it, but not having an NES, I wasn’t able to dive into it myself for a long time. It wasn’t until I finally got my own NES at roughly age 13 when I finally got my own copy and was hyped to fall in love with it. And then something funny happened: I didn’t really fall in love. I tried it out at various times, always progressing a ways and then feeling like I’ve run into a brick wall, followed by me putting the game down in favor of something else. Where was the magic?
Age has not been the kindest to the original Zelda, I’m afraid. The game’s secrets are sometimes cryptic, and the average person just picking up the game with no help or context simply isn’t going to be able to figure some of them out. Nowadays, it just feels like bad game design. But the truth is, I believe, this wasn’t as frustrating in the context of when the game was released. At that time, before the internet, TONS of people were playing this hot new game, and kids going to school for example would be thrilled to share secrets they had learned about the game with each other that they could excitedly go home and try to find for themselves. In modern times people play games and expect a certain pace of consistent progression in a way that gamers back then didn’t, as they enjoyed simply spending a lot of time with a game they liked whether they were progressing or not. Nowadays, with the game being old news, it’s not so exciting to just look up a walkthrough or YouTube video that just tells you where everything is so you can get through the game quickly. It’s just really hard to replicate the excitement of those who were there for the early days of Zelda in modern times, even if you know and appreciate the context.
Playing one of the 2D sequels or other games in the genre can also make combat in this game feel lackluster by comparison, too, as Link can only thrust his sword directly in front of him in four directions and fighting enemies this way can feel awkward. Sometimes there are other ways to defeat enemies; for example, when your health is at full, thrusting your sword causes a beam attack to shoot across the entire screen, which is great, but the second you take damage it’s gone, so you can’t rely on having it. Sometimes the player will have enough resources to use weapons other than the sword to take out enemies, but this also won’t always be the case.
That’s not to say the original Zelda is completely unenjoyable or without any merit other than historical curiosity. I did end up playing the game eventually as a young adult consulting a walkthrough to find the most notorious secrets, and while I wasn’t totally blown away, I enjoyed finally finishing the game. It does have an advantage over its sequels for how wide open it is. Future Zelda games opted for a more involved and linear story that unfolded throughout the whole game, and in doing so they sacrificed some of the freedom the player had in the first game to explore the world and tackle its challenges largely in the order they wanted to.
Zelda would go on to be one of my favorite video game series out there, and you’ll be seeing a lot more of it in future posts. The first game may have been before my time and may be one of my least-preferred games in the series in terms of what I actually desire to play, but it’s still an absolute slam-dunk essential that deserves the huge recognition it receives.
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