Why I missed Zelda...

I have a massive thing for Zelda... the games, not the princess.  Was a bigger fan of Malon anyway.

I've played every style of RPG out there in the world today, and I realized something today: why I missed the Zelda series so badly.  I've played so many games, and some have been good (hey there new Assassin's Creed), some have been great (Skyrim... ) and some have hurt me to play them (go stand in the corner Crysis 2).  The main thing I hate about some games... has started to bleed into other games that I like...

Mainly, the lack of life.

Zelda mastered this in the days when most games required you to tape down the Right arrow button to play them.  The very first Zelda was an open world concept game.  That was it: no glowing trail, no missions, no huge areas of the map locked away like a roller coaster to a gnome.

"Sorry, but you must be this much of a hero before you can look at the water physics."

Zelda handed you the world, and said "Yeah, this is it... there's more, to be sure, but there's only one way to get there... exploration."  If you wanted to find things, you had to explore. There would be clues, and a sort of order to how you needed to do things, but life is like that.  But you could at any point in time just wander off like an adventurous kitten in search of new things, and you were encouraged to do so.  In a time when having an area that served no purpose to the main plot of the game took up valuable space, Zelda games put them there because "you might want to see what's in this tiny corner of the map."

Skyrim is like that, the world is huge, and detailed, to the point where it's almost daunting to step outside your door in the game.  You might want to go to a quest point, move this story mission along... but somewhere along fighting/fleeing a dragon and crashing into a bandit hideout and discovering that they're secretly trying to resurect the dead to use in a march on the city... you've stumbled upon adventure.  That was the whole point of turning on the game: adventure.

Too many games lack adventure, in place of it they put a race to the finish. If I'm told "the game really opens up once you hit this level..." I just keep moving on past it.  Why should I have to wait for adventure?  It's why I'm not a fan of level based games as much.  I like two types of RPGs, ones that hand you the world and say "Go..." and ones that sit you down, and prep your mind for a ride.  There might not be much deviating from their story, but it's a hell of a story. 

JRPGs tend to lose me in this bit, since they're all about a giant sprawling world... and they get side tracked in weird places. 

This is where MMO's have lost it for me, they've become a race to the finish.  I recently popped back onto WoW to see the new stuff, and realized that people were already bitching that "there was NO ENDGAME!!!", you know, besides the massive four sectioned raid or whatever.  A giant temple where you fought gods, and there was no endgame.  Listen, I'm going to say this now, and I hope it echoes hard enough for the world to hear:

Endgame is fucking stupid.

It's a climax, yes, it puts a cap on the personal story you were fighting through... that's it.  It's not "more adventure" because "more adventure" isn't an End at all... it's an adventure.  People in MMOs tend to race to Endgame, and then get bored, because they missed 90% of the game so they could see the end.  We've all played with that one person who doesn't read the story, they just skip cutscenes and dialogue to get to the part where they murder things... and then they complain the game lacked substance.

If you ever find yourself ignoring what the writers painstakingly scripted out in the story that you're playing so that you can get to the end faster... you may want to reevaluate why you even play games and don't just watch the final fight on Youtube.

Point of the Day: playing a game is not about getting to the end quickly, unless it involves race cars.  Sometimes it's best to play a game that has no end, because the end is the part you'll always fear.

I tend to fearfully wonder just how much more there can be to a story when I'm approaching the final battle, and I get nervious to see if I've done enough of the world.  I wanted to be told a story, not an ending.