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Thursday 21 February, 2008
Gamelog Entry #2
GAMEPLAY
My second session of this game went on for two and a half hours. For the first hour, it was all in good fun, but immidiately after I was starting to get really frustrated. All I wanted to do was get to what was called "Level 2," the dungeon that was the next easiest. Although it's possible to play this game doing the dungeons in any order, I see myself as a competent gamer who has been playing RPGs all of his life and can find the 2nd level.
But I really, couldn't find it. And it was extremely frustrating and I didn't want to play anymore. At this point I also had no idea what the backstory of this game was, and I had went everywhere on the map that I could go. The game was becoming much less interesting to play because I had already seen everything there was to see and killed every monster that I could kill.
Eventually though, I did something I normally never do: I looked for a map online and looked for where level 2 might be. Even seeing it on a map, I couldn't get there easily. I finally did, beat the dungeon, and felt a lot better about the game. That is also the time when I let the title menu of the game idle so that I could see the small prologue, and the index of items. I didn't have the manual, so I had wanted to figure this stuff out on my own, but this really changed my mood, and now I actually am going to keep playing. In the process of finding level 2, I had found levels 3, 5, and 6, and found 6 separate secrets within the game. I was still dissapointed that I had to look up on a guide somewhere, but I did try my best.
DESIGN
Oh, where to start. Innovative elements of this game included the fact that you could do the dungeons in any order. This really made the game have more freedom to it, you had the outer gameworld, and you could come and go into the dungeons as you pleased. Also, being able to have a primary and secondary weapon and being able to choose which ones you currently had and whether you used the A or B button was definitely a cool feature. Most common was the sword and the boomerang, but things like bombs or bows or candles were often necessary.
Let me list some good and bad things about the design with this game.
Good: The shield is not just for aesthetics, if you face an enemy who throws a projectile at you, it will bounce off of your shield! very cool. This makes combat more complex than just hitting enemies with a sword at the right time or right angle.
Bad: Enemies can be right on top of each other with no collision. This is sometimes really lame when there are four monsters bunched up in a narrow corridor and they just keep throwing arrows at you and theres not really a way for you to approach them other than to wait until they unbunch.
Good: The boomerang in Zelda is one of the classic weapons in the history of gaming. The boomerang not only can stun enemies temporarily, but you can use it to retrieve rupys or hearts that are out of your reach. The boomerang is also the only weapon that you can throw at an angle, you can curve it and throw it diaganolly, making for some really skillfull action that really transcends the 2-dimensional combat.
Bad: Every enemy is different. But there are a few enemies who are just downright irritating. There are ones that burrow underground, and pop up, which is fine... But when they come out of the ground at random places on the screen, you often don't get to them in time to hit them with your sword, and to clear a screen of them is just torture. Even more torturous are enemies that fly around and are invulnerable most of the time. They do stop though temporarily, and it's random. I had to wait for one of them to become vulnerable for like thirty seconds, and I was just over it by then.
Good: The world is made up of something like 100 rooms, and almost every one has enemies to fight. The game regulates the number of enemies really well. Instead of having the monsters respawn every time you go in the room, if you've already slain them all, they remain slain. (Until you enter a dungeon.) If you've slain 2 monsters, the rest of the monsters remain.
Bad: The minimap is just a giant black square, with your green dot somewhere on it. There is no map, no grid. The logical thing is to get a piece of paper and pen and start going to work, but I wanted to play it as a novice gamer would... and it was really frustrating. See the above to see how impossible it was for me to find level 2.
I realized early on that this game is pretty hard, and I imagine inexperienced gamers would be turned off by it almost immidiately. It's pretty easy to die quickly, and you only have to die once to GAME OVER. The nice thing about it is that you don't really lose much by dying, you still get your items and your progress back.
I loved the game's reward structure. Getting new items was just really cool, even if I wasn't sure what they did. I knew a larger shield must've been better, but I didn't realize for a while what the difference was. The reward structure was very clear: get RUPYs, get items/gear. With this, the player gets that idea of progression that really makes them want to play the game for long periods of time.
Firstly, if I was to change anything about the game I would definitely make the map and world more understandable and accessible. I would add cooridinates, squares, anything to make it so the player would be able to know where a certain room was. The game did this better in the dungeons, but the outside world just kind of left you for dead, which I know was intentional, but frustrating nonetheless. Another thing I think I would change is the use of the select button. Select pauses the game, and so does Start, but start lets you access your different gear. I think if Select was used to cycle through your different gear, it would really improve the gameplay, so you wouldn't have to pause the game and switch weapons every time you wanted to use something. I also think that Nintendo games got really lazy with explaining things in game, but I suppose that was what the manual was for.
Anyways, what The Legend of Zelda is a really well made game, despite my beef with finding level 2 on the map. The gameplay and its form of progression make it a game you want to keep playing, even if it's over twenty years old.
(I'm actually going to continue playing it, too.)
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