After beating 1st quest for the first time...
Honestly I'm surprised how much I appreciated this game. The first few times I tried to get into it, I would get lost and confused, look at these pixels vaguely organized to look like NPCs, enemies, levels and just tune out. This time I finally settled in and it just worked. The game is infamous for being obtuse and hard to understand but between tips from the manual and in-game I think it's surprisingly straightforward, but requiring of patience. This isn't a large game but by forcing a player to really look at every tile of it's world, it makes a limited pallette of pretty much every aesthetic sense, music, visuals, colors, space, etc feel like an intimate world you come to understand only through experimentation. Every room becomes a mystery because anything that can hide a secret, needs to be investigated, and many of the limitations of the game reinforce this. Maybe you were actually slightly off with that fire when you tried to check if it was a burnable tree? You gotta check it again, thems the breaks, and that willingness to allow frustration leaves so much room for the player to interact with a tiny microcosm of 1's and 0's.
Something this game I think does directly better than a lot of future installments, reward. Tho basic, the insentive to find new shit is important to the functioning of this game. If a player simply doesn't take their time, the game's difficulty curve becomes fucked, with enemies become terrifying behemoths and even the act of exploration becomes elongated and more tedious. Future Zeldas, especially the first 4 3D ones, heart containers often felt frivilous because of how easy the combat was, new items would not to uncommonly lose a lot of use past their specific level, or be mostly used to get around barriers to exploration. Barriers exist in this, but far less, with a very large ability to do things completely out of order, The final level isn't even particularly hard to find, accessible by bombs which is a very early item that can be bought in stores, which is often as close as this game comes to "handing" you anything.
I also miss how older games such as this combined the physical with the digital in expecting the player to rely on a physical book that came with it. It gives off this sense of you beginning the adventure before even booting up the game, you are the hero being given the mission, and Link is the body through which you are actualized in order to complete that mission.
I will almost certainly revisit this to do 2nd Quest, but for now I'm excited to start Zelda II. On to the next adventure!!
Honestly I'm surprised how much I appreciated this game. The first few times I tried to get into it, I would get lost and confused, look at these pixels vaguely organized to look like NPCs, enemies, levels and just tune out. This time I finally settled in and it just worked. The game is infamous for being obtuse and hard to understand but between tips from the manual and in-game I think it's surprisingly straightforward, but requiring of patience. This isn't a large game but by forcing a player to really look at every tile of it's world, it makes a limited pallette of pretty much every aesthetic sense, music, visuals, colors, space, etc feel like an intimate world you come to understand only through experimentation. Every room becomes a mystery because anything that can hide a secret, needs to be investigated, and many of the limitations of the game reinforce this. Maybe you were actually slightly off with that fire when you tried to check if it was a burnable tree? You gotta check it again, thems the breaks, and that willingness to allow frustration leaves so much room for the player to interact with a tiny microcosm of 1's and 0's.
Something this game I think does directly better than a lot of future installments, reward. Tho basic, the insentive to find new shit is important to the functioning of this game. If a player simply doesn't take their time, the game's difficulty curve becomes fucked, with enemies become terrifying behemoths and even the act of exploration becomes elongated and more tedious. Future Zeldas, especially the first 4 3D ones, heart containers often felt frivilous because of how easy the combat was, new items would not to uncommonly lose a lot of use past their specific level, or be mostly used to get around barriers to exploration. Barriers exist in this, but far less, with a very large ability to do things completely out of order, The final level isn't even particularly hard to find, accessible by bombs which is a very early item that can be bought in stores, which is often as close as this game comes to "handing" you anything.
I also miss how older games such as this combined the physical with the digital in expecting the player to rely on a physical book that came with it. It gives off this sense of you beginning the adventure before even booting up the game, you are the hero being given the mission, and Link is the body through which you are actualized in order to complete that mission.
I will almost certainly revisit this to do 2nd Quest, but for now I'm excited to start Zelda II. On to the next adventure!!