Category: Retro Gaming

So things slowed down in March. I only got through one Zelda game (Majora’s Mask), but also I played it twice, so… Do I get extra credit? The Wind Waker is chugging along at a nice clip, and as long as I make it to the end before April is over, I’m still on schedule. But the games are getting longer, and we’re in Monster Hunter Rise season now, which is probably going to be the focus of most of my video game hours.

Next on the list is Four Swords Adventures, and I’m thinking about cutting it out. It’s just not very fun to play alone. And getting a group together that is actually going to commit to completing the game seems like an impossible task. Plus… it wouldn’t be recorded anyway. So I could just write a story about how I got a bunch of people together to play it off-camera, and you’d never know if it were true or not anyway.

Also, skipping FSA will get me to The Minish Cap faster, which I actually do want to play.

I scratched The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Oracle of Ages, and Oracle of Seasons off the list last month, which is pretty good, I think. That puts me about a month ahead of my timeline, and that’s important. The more Zeldas I can carve my way through before the release of Monster Hunter Rise, the better.

I’ve still been recording my playthroughs, though they’re getting to be quite a bit longer now. OoT actually should have been fairly quick, except I played the randomizer, which led to lots and lots of wandering and backtracking. All part of the fun, though! And at the current rate, we’ll be seeing A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening running in parallel throughout March, so the OoT videos won’t even start going live until April comes around. I’m probably going to have to start publishing three Zelda videos a week to get these all out by the end of the year.

An interesting little oopsie that I made was placing the Oracle games before Majora’s Mask. I cold have sworn that Wikipedia told me it was that way when I was checking the timeline, but that is not the case. Majora came first. Oh well. It’s not like anything important was actually hinging on me playing these in perfect release order.

Now that the rambling’s done, I think I’m through enough games now to start ranking them. I don’t really expect my top four to move all that much, but it’ll be interesting to see how the the less-beloved entries stack up after playing them all back-to-back-to-back-etc. I’ll probably add narrative at the end of the year, but for now, it’s just going to be a list. Watch the darn videos if you want context!

1. Link’s Awakening
2. A Link to the Past
3. Ocarina of Time
4. The Legend of Zelda
5. Oracle of Seasons
6. Oracle of Ages
7. The Adventure of Link

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, or if you know me in person, you’re probably well aware that I tend to get really excited when I start up a project, only to fizzle out and drop it completely before long. It’s a fault in me, I know and accept this, and I don’t think it’s ever going to change.

That said, how goes my plan of playing through all of the Legend of Zelda video games? If we reference the original document, it actually turns out that I’m ahead of schedule. I finished up through Link’s Awakening in January, and probably a lot of that has to do with the fact that the four original Zelda games are relatively short. There’s even video evidence to back up this claim! Though most of it won’t go live for months…

You know how there are those games that you remember as being impossibly hard when you were a kid, only for you to revisit them as an adult to discover that they really aren’t so hard after all?

Yeah, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is not one of those.

Zelda II is great departure from its big brother, changing the overhead view to a (mostly) side-scrolling perspective, trading in Link’s array of tools and weapons for a list of spells, and laser-focusing on action over exploration. There’s still exploration, but this version of Hyrule is significantly more linear than the last. Also, Link has experience levels and lives now, for some reason?

The most jarring change, however, is that Nintendo ratcheted up the difficulty level to 11 in this sequel. Maybe even to 12. While The Legend of Zelda isn’t an especially easy game to begin with, Zelda II makes it look like an absolute cakewalk. Zelda 1 doesn’t really bear its teeth until Level 6, but there’s a good chance you’ll be killed -possibly multiple times- on the short hike to Zelda II’s first palace.

Having recently completed a full, not-Game-Genie-enhanced playthrough for the first time, I’ve had a lot of time to ponder exactly what it is that makes Zelda II so darned unforgiving. I’ve compiled a list below of a few changes that I would make if I were given the opportunity. No massive shifts, just little tweaks that I think would go a long way in making the game feel a little bit more fair.