Board 8 > Best Zelda game?

(+) Yeah! (+)

#0. Oracles Linked Game
#1. Wind Waker
#2. Oracles of Ages
#3. Oracles of Seasons
#4. A Link Between Worlds
#5. Majora's Mask

tazzyboyishere posted...

AoL has a lives system that sends you back to the starting screen and forces you to go back through parts of the game you've already beaten. That's, like, the purest form of filler.

Well, I'm not one of those people who thinks we should have checkpoints on every screen so you don't need to replay anything. I think failure having a price is a good thing, and if you play the game without getting Game Over there's no filler, which is more important.

That being said I will admit Adventure of Link's enforcement of it is a lot more dumb than other games of the time like say Ninja Gaiden which makes you redo a hard stretch of the game when you fail to beat the boss-- since the strong majority of the stuff you're going through to get back to the final dungeon is just a waste of time. On the other hand it doesn't really take long at all either because there are a lot of shortcuts to use so it kinda acknowledges this. Overall it's only really a problem with the final dungeon since most of the other things have more direct routes, but even then it takes just a few minutes
---

The final dungeon actually doesn't make you backtrack at all. If you die there you're booted back to the start of the dungeon instead of the overworld.
---

Oh whoops. Must've been something near the end of the game that I remember that being the case for

Or I'm mixing it up with Dragon Warrior.

Either way it's not a big deal.
---

Either Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker. If I had to pick one it would be the latter, I remember feeling so good both times I've played through it.
---

Lopen posted...

Well, I'm not one of those people who thinks we should have checkpoints on every screen so you don't need to replay anything. I think failure having a price is a good thing, and if you play the game without getting Game Over there's no filler, which is more important.

Totally feel this point of view. It's why the filler argument is dumb.
---

It's not really the same thing though.

Like bumbling around on the Lon Lon Farm or Kokiri Village or running across vast open plains or with nothing of interest or whatever else are not segments of the game I find interesting in any play through, and they're unavoidable.

Game Over penalty is mostly used as a tool to make you successfully do longer stretches of the game in one go through. And what's more they're completely avoidable with more skill.

Game Overs aren't really filler on the content level as much as artificially increasing the difficulty level. But in some ways that kind of difficulty can be more satisfying. I'd rather play a game like Ninja Gaiden where you have to do a long stretch without a lot of blunders than say I Wanna Be The Guy where you have to do super hard segments in very very bite sized pieces.

I mean by your logic, even ignoring the issue of checkpoints, having a hard boss that takes you like 50 tries would be "filler" because you spend 49 tries on the same content, artificially increasing the length of the game.
---

I don't even care to rank them anymore, Breath of Wild just plays on an entirely different league, and I already loved the other 3D games.
---

249USDollars posted...

#0. Oracles Linked Game
#1. Wind Waker
#2. Oracles of Ages
#3. Oracles of Seasons
#4. A Link Between Worlds
#5. Majora's Mask

Best ranking I've seen that isn't my own
---

KujikawaRising posted...

People like you, you mean? Skyward Snore is just a slog to play through. Its few good parts (Lanaryu Mining Facilities, Ancient Cistern, the entire Sandship quest) are weighed down by its unnecessary filler, obnoxious amount of fetch-quest garbage, and constant use of the Beetle as a scouting plug. Every time I started enjoying myself in that game, it was like "No! Can't have that."

You just described every Zelda, especially TP and BOTW. The only thing SS does especially different is that it uses the same locations multiple times for different quests (as if it's actually a world).

Most people actually hate Zelda as a whole because of this, the only reason they nominally like it is because of nostalgia for OoT or something. That's why BOTW is so popular for removing all Zelda elements from the game.
---

Lopen posted...

It's not really the same thing though.

Like bumbling around on the Lon Lon Farm or Kokiri Village or running across vast open plains or with nothing of interest or whatever else are not segments of the game I find interesting in any play through, and they're unavoidable.

They are though? Both are relatively pointless ways of extending the length of a game, and you just don't like one as much. I'm not arguing that one is better, I'm just saying that it exists.

Lopen posted...

Game Over penalty is mostly used as a tool to make you successfully do longer stretches of the game in one go through. And what's more they're completely avoidable with more skill.

I could maybe buy this if AoL weren't filled with cheap deathtraps and if it weren't a known fact that lives and continues were created to make the game last longer.

Lopen posted...

Game Overs aren't really filler on the content level as much as artificially increasing the difficulty level.

Yes, creating artificial difficulty is an easy way to create filler.

Lopen posted...

But in some ways that kind of difficulty can be more satisfying. I'd rather play a game like Ninja Gaiden where you have to do a long stretch without a lot of blunders than say I Wanna Be The Guy where you have to do super hard segments in very very bite sized pieces.

Again, this has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm saying.

Lopen posted...

I mean by your logic, even ignoring the issue of checkpoints, having a hard boss that takes you like 50 tries would be "filler" because you spend 49 tries on the same content, artificially increasing the length of the game.

That's a pretty big stretch! If the game allocates fair checkpoints and the deaths actually feel deserved, then that isn't filler at all. That's just a fair challenge. A game that sends you back to the starting screen, making you replay multiple segments of gameplay which you've already completed once or more, is padding a game out.
---

Well, the big issue here is I think you're using a different definition of artificial difficulty than one I'd associate with filler-- and that was probably my fault for saying 'artificially increasing the difficulty' when that isn't really an accurate way to say what I was getting at. But either way it has everything to do with what you're saying because you're saying "losing progress after a game over = filler" when I would say it's generally not unless the stuff you're repeating is truly 100% trivial, which I would not say is the case in Adventures of Link. The game generally gives you shortcuts through the trivial stuff and the meat of your penalty is assessed on losing progress in the dungeon you died in, which is completely fine since the game wants you to be able to consistently do everything in the dungeon rather than being able to fluke through each individual room piecemeal.

Being able to withstand attrition of many lesser challenges isn't a lesser type of difficulty than being able to withstand something with a super hard execution level. It's just a different kind.
---

OoT in my bOok
---

Lopen posted...

The game generally gives you shortcuts through the trivial stuff and the meat of your penalty is assessed on losing progress in the dungeon you died in, which is completely fine since the game wants you to be able to consistently do everything in the dungeon rather than being able to fluke through each individual room piecemeal.

This is the biggest reason why lives and game overs are an important thing to me - that is what makes it so that you have to prove you are good enough to do a long challenge while only making minimal mistakes. You have to actually get good enough to the point of being consistent instead of just throwing yourself at the same obstacle 100 times, fluking through it once, and then never having to worry about it again, which is a design element I really hate that's popped up in a lot of modern indie games.

Zelda II is actually a lot fairer than its contemporaries I think because it offers you the ability to level up and you get to pass through a lot of trivial stuff quickly once you've made enough progress. Sometimes having to walk all the way back to a temple (or to death mountain) can be a bit of a slog but such a large appeal of Zelda II, for me, was that feeling of actually making a long journey to somewhere far away, feeling like you're really far away from safety, going into a cave and not being sure if you'll actually make it through. There's a sense of actual danger to the game that comes from the difficulty and the long travel that other games don't really make me feel that I find exciting. It actually feels like an adventure.

LttP > LA > OoT > Z2 > MM > rest
---