Project One

The Heart of Adventure: The Magic of The Legend of Zelda

Background

Let me start out by saying that video games are art. Not every artist will recognize this because it is such a new platform, but just like music, film, literature, and the many forms art takes on video games have just as much passion and creativity put into them as any famous painting, award-wining film, best-selling book, or chart-topping song does. Just as other art forms have cheap, quickly-made works to make a quick buck, video games do too. Most importantly are the games that try to do something special. All though Nintendo has created several video game franchises one sticks out more than the rest, The Legend of Zelda.

Zelda games have been around since Nintendo’s first console, the Family Computer (Famicom) or, as it was called outside of Japan, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The Legend of Zelda for the NES paved the way for the Adventure game genre and Open-World game genres as well, but over time it would evolve into something truly special. And that time would be The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for the Super Famicom and the Super NES (SNES). For the first time in the series, the game had a real story besides a couple text boxes telling the player to defeat the villain of the franchise Ganon and save Princess Zelda, whom the franchise is named after. For A Link to the Past, there was a real world this time. There were many characters to interact with, areas to explore, and side-quests to partake in. It was with this entry that the franchise really began to flourish.

            With each new entry, the franchise grew more and more, and each game had its own feel and its own spin on the classic tale of defeating Ganon and rescuing Zelda. The franchise had gone on strong for 25 years and each Zelda game had received very positive reviews; that was until Nintendo release a new entry just in time for the 25^th Anniversary of the series in 2011. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword for the Nintendo Wii fell victim to bad reviews simply because it was released at a bad time. The game was well made, but it came out during a transitional period in the gaming industry. Players were getting tired of story-driven experiences and wanted more freedom. They wanted bigger, open-world games that would let them play how they want, at the cost of an engaging story. Skyward Sword was heavily criticized for guiding the player along a set path rather than letting the player explore on their own. People regarded Skyward Sword as the worst game in the franchise when in reality it was the peak of the series’ cinematic prowess. The game’s story and presentation were absolutely phenomenal, but few players cared. In response Nintendo made an open-world Zelda game.

6 years later on March 3, 2017, the world was given The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the Nintendo Wii U and the Nintendo Switch. Gaming culture ate the game up. It was given perfect scores from nearly every reviewer and many people called it the best Zelda game ever made. But for many veterans of the franchise, myself included, something felt off with the game. It was a good game, but something felt missing. It wasn’t until the 2017 Video Game Awards that it really hit me. Breath of the Wild would go on to win Game of the Year for 2017, beating Super Mario Odyssey, Persona 5, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Player Unknown’s Battleground. It was in the aftermath of the event that I realized why Breath of the Wild should not have won. It was not a Zelda game. In order to please the general gaming market with an open-world game, Nintendo had used the Zelda brand to sell the game. It was missing almost every element that defines a Zelda game.

But what makes a Zelda game, a Zelda game? What exactly was it that made me fall in love with the franchise in the first place? What truly is the magic that is the Zelda franchise? That’s what I want to know. And so, I started my own quest, to find out what the Magic of the Legend of Zelda truly is. In preparation I went and played through A Link to the Past and the original Legend of Zelda on the NES as they were the only games in the franchise I wasn’t familiar with. And it was in doing so I was able to determine what really made the Zelda franchise what it is. Exploration, dungeons, and the world itself all come together to in order to give the player a sense of adventure that no other game franchise can. However, for this project I’m only going to be looking at the original Legend of Zelda (Zelda 1) on NES, since it has the closest design philosophy to Breath of the Wild (BotW); and A Link to the Past (LttP), because it was the game where the mechanics of the franchise were truly defined. However, I will be taking bits and pieces of the other games if they are relevant.

Part 1 - Exploration

The Zelda games are not very different from one entry to the next when it comes to gameplay. You play as Link, or whatever you choose to name him, and travel across whatever location each game takes place in so that you can save the land from whatever evil that is threatening it this week. It’s a simple setup that serves as a means to have the player explore dungeons, collect items and upgrades, and go on an adventure. It’s a tried-and-true formula that has been around since the beginning and it always worked.

A lot of the time the player is exploring the overworld the game takes place in. Most of the time it is the fictional Kingdom of Hyrule, but there are instances of the player being put into a completely different location entirely. For example, the Ocean in The Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass. In those games, Link goes from island to island on a boat rather than walking around a big open plain when exploring Hyrule. Or take the sequel to Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks where the player does explore Hyrule, but this time Hyrule is so massive that the player has to navigate the landscape on a train. Or look at Skyward Sword where the main hub, Skyloft, is above the clouds and the player has to ride special birds in order to travel to the surface and explore the world above the clouds. Each game has a different spin on where the player is and how they get around.

The three games I’m looking at all take place in the Kingdom of Hyrule, with the primary mode of transportation being walking. Each game’s world is huge and promotes exploration. Both Breath of the Wild and A Link to the Past require the player to complete a tutorial segment where the game explains the basics and then lets him or her explore. Zelda 1 does not have this, instead a text prompt scrolls on screen explaining the story and the puts the player in the world without anything to protect themselves, and just lets the player run. As Mark Brown, an independent game design analyst, said in his Game Maker’s Toolkit video on Zelda 1’s game design, “Zelda 1 just felt indifferent to the player’s existence. It had whatever the opposite of hand-holding is. You know, you’re just dropped into a world and told to explore it. It was, to sum it up in a single word, an adventure (“Magic of the First Zelda”).” All three games give this sense of adventure to different degrees.

Zelda 1 and BotW both allow the player to go wherever he or she wants (after the tutorial in BotW’s case), but LttP and Zelda 1 both do something different than BotW when it comes to exploration. In LttP and Zelda 1 certain parts of the map are inaccessible unless the player has certain knowledge of a puzzle or a specific key item from a dungeon. BotW only does this with the paraglider which is the reward for completing the tutorial, allowing the player to glide down safely to the rest of the world. This brings me to my first critique of BotW: there is a warped sense of progression. In both Zelda 1 and LttP, the more items and health upgrades you collect the more you can explore and survive, but in BotW you can explore the entire map from the get-go. Some areas might require you to have proper gear for the weather of said area, but the game makes sure the player knows what gear he or she needs and how to get it very easily. That is, except for the desert.

In my original playthrough of BotW, I had stumbled into the desert on my own and learned about the intense heat very quickly. I had no idea how to deal with the heat, I knew there were heat resistance elixirs that I could drink to help me withstand the heat, but I had no idea how to make them. After getting bored of being lost I looked up how to survive in the desert online and learned that some of the characters around the entrance to the desert would explain that the desert got cold at night and sell the ingredients to the both heat and cold resistant elixirs. Although talking with other players in order to find solutions is generally a fun and intuitive aspect of game design this instance didn’t feel very rewarding to me. BotW is a very obtuse when it comes to solutions to puzzles in the overworld areas. Since the world is so big it is very possible that players will never come across the traveling characters who can help you with puzzles that the players can end up just getting frustrating.

I will admit that creating a barrier preventing the player from even entering the desert without the complete knowledge of how temperature resistance works would be bad for a game that was advertised as a game that would let the player freely explore. At the same time, the designers should have found a way to help the players who were like me and decided to go off the beaten path. In contrast, Zelda 1 and LttP do not have this problem whatsoever. Both games only restrict a few areas based on how far the players have progressed in the main story. By having certain locations blocked off until the player has the tools and is ready for a certain area makes the player feel more accomplished with how far they have come on their adventure. It feels awesome when I get the hookshot in Swamp Palace and can explore the rest of the Dark World in LttP or when I get the Stepladder in Level 4 of Zelda 1 and can finally go to Level 6 and 7 and acquire the magical sword. BotW does not have that same sense of progress. There is only one item in the game that really helps Link explore the world more efficiently but even then, it just makes exploring easier.

The world of Breath of the Wild is massive, and it is all available to the player after the initial section of the game. It is very reminiscent of the original Legend of Zelda on NES. In Zelda 1, nothing was really explained to the player, he or she just had to get out and explore. The same goes for BotW, the player is given the basic info he or she needs to survive and what the end goal should be, and then the player is just let loose. I respect BotW for that; it does a fantastic job at giving the player a massive world to explore and go on their own adventures. However, I will also defend the design behind A Link to the Past; the adventure feels more epic when the player can explore the world more and more as her or she gets stronger and better equipped. However, as Mark Brown brings up in his Game Maker’s Toolkit video on BotW’s open-world aspect, “…Breath of the Wild shows that letting players get pummeled by killer enemies is no bad thing.” He goes on later to say, “But the thing about adversity, is how good it feels when you overcome it (“Breath of the Wild Open World”).” And this has honestly changed my view on BotW, sure there is no item that tells me I can now go to this area, instead its replaced with experience.

To sum it all up, Breath of the Wild does an amazing job of recapturing the essence of adventure from early Zelda games. Although it can a bit too obtuse at times, the pieces are all there for players to find; even if it requires the player to go beyond the game for help. Despite the absence of physical road blocks, skill and experience are just as necessary to truly survive the vast world as any item in a previous game would be. This aspect is the most Zelda-like in the whole game and is executed the best.

Part 2 - Dungeons

            Then comes the most iconic aspect of the Legend of Zelda franchise: the dungeons. Each game has Link exploring many dungeons in order to obtain key items and progress the plot forward in order to become stronger and defeat whatever is trying to destroy Hyrule. The best part of each dungeon is how stylized they are. Each dungeon has its own look and feel and, after the jump to 3D with Ocarina of Time, their own personalized song. Also, at the end of every dungeon is a unique boss fight where the player uses what they learned in the dungeon to defeat the monster that is blocking their path.

Breath of the Wild itself has six major dungeons: four main story dungeons, Hyrule Castle, and one optional dungeon that is unlocked by purchasing the Season Pass for the game. BotW also features 120 shrines which are just small dungeons that focus on one mechanic and have you solve a puzzle or two in order to collect a Spirit Orb. Those orbs can then be taken to a temple and the player can spend 4 of them at a time to expand their life with a heart container or expand their stamina meter with a stamina vessel. This system is a drastic change from earlier games where heart containers were split into four pieces and were rewards for completing side quests and exploring, and the stamina upgrade has just been a reward for completing an optional dungeon in a previous entry. The shrines take away from what the game already did in past entries and ruined the side quest mechanic.

            The four main dungeons named, the Divine Beasts, are a serious departure from previous entries. In previous games, each dungeon would have a special item designed around it, and the challenge would be solving the puzzles while using the special item. In Breath of the Wild the player gets special runes that let him or her make bombs, freeze and object in place for a short amount of time, use magnetic powers to life metal objects, and make pillars of ice out of water. All of the runes are given to the player at the start of the game during the tutorial. Each dungeon knows the player has each rune, so the dungeons have several puzzles incorporating each rune. Which sounds like an interesting idea at first, but the façade quickly falls apart as soon as the player enters the dungeon. Each dungeon is also designed to be really easy because the player can do them in any order he or she likes. In order to make it so no one dungeon is harder than the other, the developers made them all the same difficulty level. On top of that they all are centered around the same mechanic of tilting some part of the dungeon in order to accesses puzzles. Then, the icing on the cake of this pathetic design choice is that all four bosses are all unoriginal and are just variants of each other.

Previous games would feature complex, maze-like dungeons. Take for instance the dungeons in Zelda 1; each dungeon or Level as they are called in that game has the player go from room to room fighting enemies and collecting items, specifically the map and the compass, along with that dungeon’s key item. The player would also have to collect keys in order to open doors around the dungeon. Keys could be obtained from defeating enemies or solving puzzles, but Zelda 1 wasn’t the best game in terms of dungeon design. Due to the limitations of the NES Zelda 1 had very cryptic solutions to puzzles and looking back on it in the year 2018 it is very frustrating. But luckily the third entry in the series, A Link to the Past, completely improved on the dungeon design for the franchise. Dungeons became self-contained and didn’t require items from outside the dungeon to complete. It also made it, so the key item was mandatory for completing the dungeon, so the player couldn’t get stuck if they didn’t pick up the Raft from Level 3. LttP had fantastic dungeons; in fact, it contains one of my personal favorites, Turtle Rock: the penultimate dungeon that took everything the player knew from the previous dungeons and put his or her knowledge of the game’s mechanics to the test combined with an intense atmosphere.

 However, BotW did away with this concept. All four Divine Beasts are self-contained, but they have no keys in them whatsoever. They each have a map which allows the player to control the moving parts of the dungeon and see where their next objective is. As Mark Brown would talk about in his Boss Keys video series, a series where he looked at each Zelda game’s dungeon design, “The Divine Beasts are completely open, with no individual rooms, no delineated floors, and not even any doors unless they are a part of a puzzle. There are also no key items to find (“Breath of the Wild dungeons”).” As Mark talks about throughout his Boss Keys videos there are three types of Zelda Dungeons: Lock and Key Dungeons, which require the player to get keys in order to open doors in a maze-like structure; Puzzle Box Dungeons, which present the player with a large puzzle that spans the entire dungeon and the only way to complete it is to solve the puzzle; and Gauntlet Dungeons, which have the player go through a horde of combat challenges to reach the end goal. All of Zelda 1’s dungeons are Lock and Key, but with LttP and onward each game would have a mix of all three dungeons. This gave each game a diverse feel to it. BotW however, doesn’t. All four Divine Beasts are Puzzle Box dungeons; each one has you get the map and move parts of the dungeon to get to five terminals which open up the main terminal, which allows you to fight the boss. The bosses themselves aren’t that original. They are all different forms of Ganon, called Blights, and what makes the Divine Beasts even worse is that they all look the same. All four Divine Beasts and 120 Shrines use the same brown and blue color scheme, including the optional dungeon as well. Even Zelda 1 changed the colors up for its dungeons. Altogether the Divine Beasts left a bad taste in my mouth and I could only hope that the game would have some redeeming dungeon.

Luckily it delivered. Hyrule Castle, or Ganon’s Tower, is usually the final dungeon of the game and leads to the final fight with the villain of the story himself. Usually they are Gauntlet Dungeons, but there are a few times where they are Lock and Key, like LttP’s Ganon’s Keep. Some players find these final dungeons a bit too simple but as Mark Brown talked about in his Boss Keys video on A Link to the Past, it is very fitting. “This is the time for a gauntlet of enemies as you chase after Zelda. Not pensive puzzle solving and getting lost (“A Link to the Past dungeons”).” BotW’s Hyrule Castle is a gauntlet of enemies with the occasional puzzle, and it even has a pseudo key item in the form of the Hylian Shield, which can only be found deep within the castle by defeating a mid-boss type enemy. I had a lot of fun exploring the ruined castle and defeating enemies as I worked my way up to Ganon. The problem was that this was not the only way up. BotW’s Hyrule Castle has several ways to get to the top and on my first playthrough I completely skipped the castle itself. I found a safe climbing spot and made my way up. It was not until I went back and went through the dungeon to obtain some season pass items that I really fell in love with it.

In the end the dungeons in Breath of the Wild are a letdown. For a series that is known for amazing dungeon design the latest in the series really dropped the ball when it came to dungeons. They all look, feel, and sound the same. And the presence of the Shrines does nothing but take away from the Divine Beasts and the game as a whole. Sure, Hyrule Castle is pretty good, but the rest of the dungeons bring the whole game down. It is by far the least Zelda-like and worst aspect of the game as a whole.

Part 3 – Hyrule and Its People

            It wasn’t until after the 2D era of Zelda games where the story of the games themselves would become a major aspect of the games. Although the stories themselves were nothing to write home about, the characters within them would be much more compelling. Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64 (N64) would be the first game to truly expand on the world of Hyrule. The game featured unique characters and side quests where the player would help solve their problems and learn more about those characters as a whole. The sequel to Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask for the N64, would take this idea and run with it. The game centered around the Moon falling from the sky on the land of Termina. It was Link’s job to try and stop the moon from falling within three days, and he fails miserably. Luckily, he figures out how to go back in time to when he first made it to Termina and it allows him to keep going back until he figures out how to save Termina. This game did an amazing job with the story and characters; because of the unique setup, the characters get to shine in a unique light and display real human emotion in the face of adversity. As the games would go on, the story and characters would be better and better, culminating in the most cinematic game of the franchise, Skyward Sword. Skyward Sword had such an amazing cast of characters that I fell in love with. I was emotionally invested in each character and what happened to them. I was compelled to save Zelda not because the game told me to but because I wanted to.

            Where does this put Breath of the Wild? It came out several years after Skyward Sword, so surely it did an excellent job with its characters; sadly, this was not the case. It feels ironic saying that because BotW is the first Zelda game to feature voice acting. But honestly, I could care less for the people of Hyrule in BotW. The story itself is a neat idea; it takes place 100 years after Ganon’s return to Hyrule where he transformed into Calamity Ganon and proceeded to utterly destroy Hyrule. Link was injured in the fight and forced to retreat to the Shrine of Resurrection where he would sleep until he was ready to take Calamity Ganon on again. And so, as he wakes up it is revealed that he lost all his memory during his 100-year nap and is given a brief synopsis of what happened by the ghost of the former king of Hyrule, Zelda’s dad. There is one side-quest that has Link go all over Hyrule, and upon seeing certain landmarks he remembers what happened 100 years ago which is a cool way of showing the player what happened. However, it is simply optional.

This setup has one glaring problem that persists throughout the game. The characters are awful. Unlike previous games the characters themselves are not interesting. All of them do the same song and dance of, “Hey Link remember me? We used to be BEST FRIENDS! Ha ha good to see you buddy!” The story itself accommodates the player in learning what happened, but when it comes to the characters the player does not learn who the characters are in an organic way; rather, the player is told who they are instead. In Skyward Sword, the player learns how caring Zelda is during the opening hours of the game when she helps Link with standing up to some local bullies. In Twilight Princess the player learns about Midna’s goals and sets out to help her. But in Breath of the Wild the player is told that Zelda was struggling to live up to her true potential and destiny. The player is shown this information in the memories, but when the player sees the Link in those cutscenes, it isn’t them. The whole setup makes it interesting to learn about the story, but it makes the player feel disconnected from the characters. Within the context of BotW’s story, everyone knows who Link is and what happened to him, but there is no genuine emotional connection to any of the characters like in previous games.

Despite Breath of the Wild being the most advanced in terms of presentation it does not do much with that prowess. The story is neat and nothing more, and the characters are nowhere near as interesting and meaningful as characters in the previous games. Although the story is an interesting and well executed take on the classic tale, the characters are not handled well, they still lack that Zelda-feel to them.

Conclusion

            I’ll be honest, I hated Breath of the Wild at the start of this project. Part of it was because I was angry that it beat Super Mario Odyssey for game of the year. But, as I learned more and more about how Zelda games are designed, and went back and appreciated the older games, I learned to appreciate Breath of the Wild more. It is not perfect by any means. In fact, I still think that it did drop the ball in the Dungeon and Character departments, but I can still enjoy the Story and Exploration for what they are worth. I find it funny that, in Mark Brown’s Zelda 1 video he said he could defend the Hyrule of that game until the end of his days but would not do the same for the dungeons; after this quest of my own I can say the same thing for Breath of the Wild. And yes, Breath of the Wild is a Zelda game. It’s not the best, but it is not the worst. And maybe, as I take my second quest through Hyrule after writing this, I might just see the magic that was in Breath of the Wild all along as I journey to find the heart of adventure.

Works Cited

Mark Brown. “Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – An Open World Adventure” Game

Maker’s Toolkit, 20 Mar. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmIgjAM0uh0.

---. “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's dungeon design” Boss Keys, 19 Jan. 2018,

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GudeeRVNo5U

---. “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past’s dungeon design” Boss Keys, 11 Jun.

2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouO1R6vFDBo.

---. “The Magic of the First Legend of Zelda” Game Maker’s Toolkit, 20 Feb. 2017,

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbQ6ti5BQ0