The NES is a system that becomes more interesting to really mull over the more time I spend thinking about games as something that are a holistic experience that can’t be neatly segregated into arbitrary boxes that you can each neatly explain entirely on its own terms. The idea of atmosphere being something that can fall into a separate category to gameplay or narrative for example, is one such example of the inherently flawed way at looking like games like this, rather than seeing them more as a selection of aspects of a title that all inform one another to become something greater than the sum of its parts. All this is to say, that for as janky and unintuitive as it could be in a lot of areas, the NES truly felt like the first home console which designers realised they had the capability to make something that was more than simply “fun”. While there are obviously games before the NES that were able to provide a more nuanced and complex take on games than what you’d typically find at the arcades on early PCs, especially with a lot of those early text adventure games, the NES realising this feels so significant due to it being from the first generation of home consoles to lean a bit heavier into this idea, the first system marketed towards such a wide audience that had a sizeable amount of developers transcending the boundaries they’d set beforehand rather than keeping it to a comparatively more niche crowd at the time. While there were still a lot of holdovers from the arcade era, with a lot of games still focusing intensely on polishing the more pure gameplay experiences, and not just the amount of early turn based JRPGs, but also ones like The Legend of Zelda.
The Legend of Zelda also presents the audience with one of the clearest pictures of the teething problems with transitioning into this different ideology too however, seeing this attempt at creating an expansive world to embody the spirit of freewheeling adventure while still finding one’s footing with an interactive adventure that focuses hard on the interactivity rather than feeling more like the player having to understand exactly what the game is wanting at all times with you simply guiding things along. It’s a tough balance and one that clearly has its elements that work and don’t in the context of this game specifically. There are so many abstract ideas floating around here that are not entirely utilised to their fullest potential, and yet there’s an undeniable creative focus that runs through the entire experience. The world might not be particularly lively, both with the repetitive enemy waves and the almost total lack of characters besides Link himself, but it’s still undeniable that not only does the world feel rather expansive, but there’s a very strong sense of freedom that it provides. The almost total lack of objectives other than the overarching goal of “collect the trifoce pieces and slay Ganon” is an especially worthwhile point of interest for crafting this feeling of freedom with how you approach the game, with very little being actively gated off by needing to accomplish other goals and more accomplishing these goals to get a more concrete sense of knowledge for how to approach certain secrets and puzzles.
The bits and pieces of direction that the game does provide tend to be quite nice as well in striking this balance between nudging you in the right direction without outright tearing you away from feeling as if the player is the one doing all the exploring and uncovering this mysterious world on their own. My favourite way this is done is as simple as numbering each of the dungeons as a way to ensure that the player doesn’t hit a late part of the game, struggle to it a lot, and then begin questioning whether they should be here, rather just straight up informing the player if they’ve gone a bit too far. While a more nuanced, organic approach is likely something that could work in a more modern title with a more conventional sense of how to approach game progression (in this case something that could be utilised in some interesting and effective ways), the fact that so many NES games were as blatantly unforgiving as they were means that this was a worthy compromise to make in order to make the experience as a whole less frustrating while still feeling like a very open experience. In regards to frustration, I’d say that people are often a tad too harsh about how obtuse this game really is, as while yeah, there are a ton of hidden areas that are completely unmarked that lead to secret areas and the like, none of them are actually required to progress and feel closer to additional bonuses towards those who are willing to spend the time to go insane with trying to uncover everything it has to offer. They’re definitely the kind of thing that could be conveyed better for sure, but it never feels intrusive towards the core gameplay, especially when you keep in mind that providing a player this huge area that felt like there could be cool secrets underneath every rock or bush was part of the point.
Outside of this, there are definitely a couple of hints that entirely fly past in ways that feel too out there, especially the infamous one where you need to feed the hungry monster a piece of meat to progress with basically no concrete hints anywhere of this being a thing to do, but a lot of it feels surprisingly intuitive as long as you operate under the logic of the game as opposed to how things would logically work in a more realistic setting. While it can all feel a bit abstract at points, it also feels very cohesive in how it’s presented, with each piece of information being something very tangible to work off of, with a lot only really making sense once you’ve already looked around and found the place to begin with. It feeds into this core design philosophy where the player is meant to explore and discover things for themselves, if you don’t know what something means, check places you haven’t before, try out weird ideas that vaguely resemble the hints given, don’t be stopped by fear of the idea not working, just give it a shot anyway. It’s a bit messy, but it’s undoubtedly both ambitious and something that’s executed way more cleanly than you might expect as long as you go in with the mindset of experimentation being key.
With all that said, while games clearly achieving their goals in certain respects is entirely admirable, it’s not the be all end all of the experience either, as there are a few frustrating points that rear their heads that make exploration feel far less enjoyable than it could be. The biggest issue is with the way combat is handled, Link simply doesn’t have the mobility required to make a lot of the encounters you’ll be facing feel particularly reasonable, and while the game gradually gives you more tools that can lead to slightly more offbeat thinking in how to deal with situations, it’s not enough to fix the fact that there almost feels like a fundamental disconnect between the abilities of the player and the obstacles placed in their way at times, especially on screens that can be flooded by projectiles or enemies that can’t easily be knocked back. This makes the exploration lose some of its lustre when basically every screen is full of the enemies too, sometimes being fun little challenges to take on as you’re progressing, but other times feeling closer to a frustrating hindrance that are there to get a few cheap shots in and not much else, with the attempts at populating the world with these dangerous creatures not entirely working effectively when you’ll be facing the same small group of enemies throughout, with a lot of the visual deviation ultimately being functionally identical, which ends up hindering some of that sense of discovery once you start predicting what’s coming up ahead without much of note beyond the journey to discover the secret to get to that point. Obviously the destination isn’t everything in these games, but when the destination is yet another dungeon that ends up throwing a few too many enemies at you without much to speak of in terms of unique design ideas, it does end up wearing out its welcome a bit. Also very much not a fan of only respawning with 3 hearts whenever you revive, basically makes the iconic sword beam less useful as the game progresses unless you’re willing to grind at basic enemies for a while or go back to a fairy fountain every time you die.
On the whole my thoughts on the first Legend of Zelda are a bit warmer than they originally were, but despite loving a lot of what’s done with the overworld and really encouraging the player to freely explore the world, the combat and dungeon crawling is absolutely infuriating a lot of the time, and there’s an unfortunate amount of time spent with that stuff, so it ends up making for a game I love conceptually, enjoy about half the time, and feel angry at the other half. Incredibly ambitious for an NES game, and one that gets a ton of things right, but it just becomes annoying by the end and it makes the last couple hours feel especially painful. Ton of respect, but that doesn’t always translate cleanly into how much I enjoyed or appreciated the experience of actually playing through it again.
The Legend of Zelda also presents the audience with one of the clearest pictures of the teething problems with transitioning into this different ideology too however, seeing this attempt at creating an expansive world to embody the spirit of freewheeling adventure while still finding one’s footing with an interactive adventure that focuses hard on the interactivity rather than feeling more like the player having to understand exactly what the game is wanting at all times with you simply guiding things along. It’s a tough balance and one that clearly has its elements that work and don’t in the context of this game specifically. There are so many abstract ideas floating around here that are not entirely utilised to their fullest potential, and yet there’s an undeniable creative focus that runs through the entire experience. The world might not be particularly lively, both with the repetitive enemy waves and the almost total lack of characters besides Link himself, but it’s still undeniable that not only does the world feel rather expansive, but there’s a very strong sense of freedom that it provides. The almost total lack of objectives other than the overarching goal of “collect the trifoce pieces and slay Ganon” is an especially worthwhile point of interest for crafting this feeling of freedom with how you approach the game, with very little being actively gated off by needing to accomplish other goals and more accomplishing these goals to get a more concrete sense of knowledge for how to approach certain secrets and puzzles.
The bits and pieces of direction that the game does provide tend to be quite nice as well in striking this balance between nudging you in the right direction without outright tearing you away from feeling as if the player is the one doing all the exploring and uncovering this mysterious world on their own. My favourite way this is done is as simple as numbering each of the dungeons as a way to ensure that the player doesn’t hit a late part of the game, struggle to it a lot, and then begin questioning whether they should be here, rather just straight up informing the player if they’ve gone a bit too far. While a more nuanced, organic approach is likely something that could work in a more modern title with a more conventional sense of how to approach game progression (in this case something that could be utilised in some interesting and effective ways), the fact that so many NES games were as blatantly unforgiving as they were means that this was a worthy compromise to make in order to make the experience as a whole less frustrating while still feeling like a very open experience. In regards to frustration, I’d say that people are often a tad too harsh about how obtuse this game really is, as while yeah, there are a ton of hidden areas that are completely unmarked that lead to secret areas and the like, none of them are actually required to progress and feel closer to additional bonuses towards those who are willing to spend the time to go insane with trying to uncover everything it has to offer. They’re definitely the kind of thing that could be conveyed better for sure, but it never feels intrusive towards the core gameplay, especially when you keep in mind that providing a player this huge area that felt like there could be cool secrets underneath every rock or bush was part of the point.
Outside of this, there are definitely a couple of hints that entirely fly past in ways that feel too out there, especially the infamous one where you need to feed the hungry monster a piece of meat to progress with basically no concrete hints anywhere of this being a thing to do, but a lot of it feels surprisingly intuitive as long as you operate under the logic of the game as opposed to how things would logically work in a more realistic setting. While it can all feel a bit abstract at points, it also feels very cohesive in how it’s presented, with each piece of information being something very tangible to work off of, with a lot only really making sense once you’ve already looked around and found the place to begin with. It feeds into this core design philosophy where the player is meant to explore and discover things for themselves, if you don’t know what something means, check places you haven’t before, try out weird ideas that vaguely resemble the hints given, don’t be stopped by fear of the idea not working, just give it a shot anyway. It’s a bit messy, but it’s undoubtedly both ambitious and something that’s executed way more cleanly than you might expect as long as you go in with the mindset of experimentation being key.
With all that said, while games clearly achieving their goals in certain respects is entirely admirable, it’s not the be all end all of the experience either, as there are a few frustrating points that rear their heads that make exploration feel far less enjoyable than it could be. The biggest issue is with the way combat is handled, Link simply doesn’t have the mobility required to make a lot of the encounters you’ll be facing feel particularly reasonable, and while the game gradually gives you more tools that can lead to slightly more offbeat thinking in how to deal with situations, it’s not enough to fix the fact that there almost feels like a fundamental disconnect between the abilities of the player and the obstacles placed in their way at times, especially on screens that can be flooded by projectiles or enemies that can’t easily be knocked back. This makes the exploration lose some of its lustre when basically every screen is full of the enemies too, sometimes being fun little challenges to take on as you’re progressing, but other times feeling closer to a frustrating hindrance that are there to get a few cheap shots in and not much else, with the attempts at populating the world with these dangerous creatures not entirely working effectively when you’ll be facing the same small group of enemies throughout, with a lot of the visual deviation ultimately being functionally identical, which ends up hindering some of that sense of discovery once you start predicting what’s coming up ahead without much of note beyond the journey to discover the secret to get to that point. Obviously the destination isn’t everything in these games, but when the destination is yet another dungeon that ends up throwing a few too many enemies at you without much to speak of in terms of unique design ideas, it does end up wearing out its welcome a bit. Also very much not a fan of only respawning with 3 hearts whenever you revive, basically makes the iconic sword beam less useful as the game progresses unless you’re willing to grind at basic enemies for a while or go back to a fairy fountain every time you die.
On the whole my thoughts on the first Legend of Zelda are a bit warmer than they originally were, but despite loving a lot of what’s done with the overworld and really encouraging the player to freely explore the world, the combat and dungeon crawling is absolutely infuriating a lot of the time, and there’s an unfortunate amount of time spent with that stuff, so it ends up making for a game I love conceptually, enjoy about half the time, and feel angry at the other half. Incredibly ambitious for an NES game, and one that gets a ton of things right, but it just becomes annoying by the end and it makes the last couple hours feel especially painful. Ton of respect, but that doesn’t always translate cleanly into how much I enjoyed or appreciated the experience of actually playing through it again.