There’s a trick for that, in the first one: Don’t kill all of the monsters; leave one alive. When you come back to that area, there will still be one alive, and the others will never respawn. What’s more, the one that’s left alive will usually be one of the easier ones. So, for instance, if you have an area with four centaurs and four of those flying flower thingies: Go in, kill all of the flowers, and leave. Go back in, and there will still be four monsters left, but now they’ll be two flowers and two centaurs. Kill the flowers again, and so on, and when it gets down to just one monster left, it’ll just be an easily-avoided flower, not a dangerous centaur, even if you never actually killed any centaurs. This is especially useful in the dungeons, where you have some monsters that are almost impossible to kill: Kill the easy monsters in the same room, and sometimes you can get some or all of the hard monsters to despawn (though of course you often don’t have the option to leave one alive, in dungeons).
Majora’s Mask was my favorite. The Masks allowed for a lot of neat abilities, and thus a lot of neat puzzles. Plus the aesthetic was cool.
People really liked Twilight Princess? I played a few hours of it, but all the puzzles were so easy that I gave up out of boredom. Did it get better further on?
Ocarina of Time remains my favorite, with Majora’s Mask probably holding second place (mostly due to the time-loop mechanic, which I found interesting, but the masks were cool, too).
Has anyone else here finished Spirit Tracks? I had put it aside for a while because other things were occupying my time, but I finished it Thanksgiving weekend. I quite enjoyed it, though it took the multi-stage boss battle to a very odd place. I particularly liked the fact that it had a solid point of continuity with the previous game–a character who actually remembered the previous Link and Zelda. I don’t recall any of the other games doing that, though they’re sometimes referenced in background art or legends. I haven’t played most of the gameboy titles, though, so I would have missed it if it happened in one or more of those.
Really? I’ve always thought they have typically had great game play but terrible plots. Each one has essentially the same story told with a slight twist.
Really enjoyed alot of he games though. Got burned out by the time the ds games came out though.
Zelda 1-3 were some of the best video games I’ve ever played, and I can go back to them infinite times and never get sick of them.
Zelda 1 has SO MANY different ways you can play it. It’s really a perfect non-linear game. Want to start with stage 3? Go ahead! Want to beat the game without ever getting a sword? With a bug involving the water of life, it’s possible! Zelda 1 inspired so many games to come, but the original is still tough to beat.
Zelda 2 may be the black sheep of the series (Wand of Ganon aside), but it’s an excellent NES platformer. One of the problems with Zelda 1 is the gameplay never really gets that difficult, but Zelda 2 is still a challenge for me to beat. Excellent soundtrack too.
Zelda 3…man, that game was a masterpiece. Much of what I said for Zelda 1 holds true here too. This was the first game I ever speed-ran. I remember it took about 7 hours, and I did it on a snowday in 7th grade. Now there are people who can beat the game in 90 minutes, and I’ve done it in 2 hours.
However, I’ve never been able to get into any of the newer Zelda games. I’ve been putting off playing Link’s Awakening for about 18 years, and I never understood what was supposed to make Ocarina of Time so great. Twilight Princess I actually gave a chance (I beat two of the temples), but that game was just plain horrible.
But that’s why I felt bad about it, they were sure to come around when the game was finished and say “Hey, where’s Bob? And Joe? Where are they?” It was the one bit they left out of the end sequence that I would have liked to have seen resolved.
I digress though. The newer 3D games are (and I say this having never gotten around to playing Twilight Princess on GC or Wii) all pretty good, but the amount of travel time by boat or train between objectives sometimes feels like a bit of a piss take.
I can’t speak for anybody else but for me, I think being 13 at the time helped a lot. I had the free time, I had friends who were also playing so we could exchange information, and the game was just… magic. How could I quit before I finished it?
As much as I love Link to the Past, as much nostalgia as I have for it, I agree with you on Twilight Princess, I loved it. I also agree that it’s a Gamecube game but I played it on the Wii and I loved it anyway. It’s like a more polished Ocarina of Time, what’s not to love? Maybe it’s not a whole new cutting edge thing but it was a lot of fun nonetheless. I never got the hate for this one.
I loved Zelda one and 2. The one on the Super Nintendo might be the best of them all. With that being said, I didn’t play any other of them until Twilight Princess on the Wii.
The game wasn’t that good, it looked like garbage, and the controls were bad. It took me hours -literally to catch a damned fish. All that for a system that preaches such intuitive controls. It took my girlfriend multiple hours of trying to catch a stupid fish, except she actually caught one. She played some more after that, but then stopped playing it after that.
The game was an unpolished mess, imo, hence why I’m able to so readily able to dislike it. Twilight Princes has one of the worst intros I’ve ever experienced in a game, beginning with a several hour tutorial that teaches almost nothing of value and offered nothing of interest from a narrative perspective. It set a terrible tone for the game and makes replaying it impossible for me.
The over-world was too large and barren. Instead of past games where the smaller worlds were filled to the brim with secrets, Twilight Princess offered a ridiculous amount of room in which to roam, while offering only bugs as a hidden reward.Iinstead of as existing as an extension of the adventure, the overworld simply acted as little more than a means from Point A-B.
I could go on, such as how the dungeon items are little more than a key specific to that temple, or how the village seemed much less interactive than previous Zeldas, or how the Wii controls were god awful, or one of a myriad other things, but I’ll let it rest here. Twilight Princess is, without question, the worst Zelda game I’ve played.
Yea Twilight Princess was not an Ocarina of Time.
In Ocarina of Time enemies were actually dangerous. I remember one level of Twilight Princess where I wandered into the boss’s dungeon with one whole heart left, and still won on the first try.
Another one was the underwater level. The boss was just a big fish. It wasn’t hurting anyone, it didn’t try to attack. It wasn’t a threat. It just swam around in a big circle waiting for me grabshot it and stab it in the eye.
I absolutely loved every Zelda game, not to say there werent some I loved more than others, but I never worried about how hard the game was I just enjoyed the story, levels, characters and art. Zelda as always excelled at these things above any other franchise out there.
Well, except for story, anyway. Story has always been a weak point in Zelda, but I never cared.
By the way, I’d actually say Okami is the greatest Zelda game of all time, even though it is not Zelda game. Underneath it all, it is basically a Zelda game and the best one, actually.
Despite disappointment with the most recent one, I’m mildly interested in one that’s rumored to come out, but I’m beginning to think that it just won’t be for me.