365NEWSX
365NEWSX
Subscribe

Welcome

Give Link a break: Celebrating the legends of people other than Zelda - The A.V. Club

Give Link a break: Celebrating the legends of people other than Zelda - The A.V. Club

Give Link a break: Celebrating the legends of people other than Zelda - The A.V. Club
Sep 14, 2020 3 mins, 47 secs

Despite there now being at least 22 games in Nintendo’s long-running Zelda series (depending on your tolerance for allowing your count to include weird CD-only titles, crossbow training simulators, and *shudder* Tingle), it can often be a tricky thing to define what traits actually make a game Zelda-like.

It’s a question that the series itself often makes tricky to answer, with genre-defying entries like platform-based RPG Zelda II, or the free-form exploration of 2017’s critically beloved Breath Of The Wild—to say nothing of Nintendo’s recent announcement of a sequel to Hyrule Warriors, a game that stretches the series’ iconography to its breaking point in the service of letting players mow down whole armies of Moblins at a time.

(That last one might feel academic, but it’s the distinction between a game like, say, Secret Of Mana, where beating enemies levels up your stats, and one where beating a boss drops another precious heart container into your lap.).

Who is this game the legend of?

(Rated from one to four big friendly Zelda hearts.) And—most importantly—what, if anything, is its equivalent to the Hookshot, the prototype for all truly great Zelda tools.

Decidedly non-comprehensive (but hopefully enlightening), we can only hope that this trip through all these other legends helps refine the idea of what makes The Legend Of Zelda one that’s been repeated so insistently across the last 34 years of gaming history?

Whose legend is it.

What’s the legend about.

Butt is, basically, a standard fantasy protagonist who decides to destroy a great evil because he lives in a video game, and that’s his job.

It has a “Magic Rope,” but it’s really just a rope that’s been jazzed up a bit.

Whose legend is it.

What’s the legend about.

Neutopia, like Golden Axe Warrior, is one of those games where the developers (in this case Hudson Soft) clearly saw a Zelda-shaped hole on a particular non-Nintendo console and said, “Yeah, we can make one of those.” Specifically, the game plays out as a more visually pleasing version of the first The Legend Of Zelda game—albeit one “gifted” with what might be the most irritating “Your health is low!” sound in the entire history of the sub-genre.

Whose legend is it?

(Though in Japan and Europe the game was called The Story Of Thor: A Successor Of The Light, so maybe it was Thor’s legend all along?).

What’s the legend about.

Also, this isn’t really what it’s “about,” but the game itself looks really nice, with big pixel characters and detailed animations that make it stand out from the pack.

Whose legend is it.

What’s the legend about.

Whose legend is it.

What’s the legend about.

One thing that’s not particularly Zelda, though, is the enemy designs.

Whose legend is it?

What’s the legend about.

Whose legend is it.

What’s the legend about?

Although it predates the actual Zelda game where Link spends much of his time as a wolf (Twilight Princess) by several months, there’s a healthy streak of the franchise’s DNA running all through Ōkami.

Really, it’s all about that sense of losing yourself in the world that games like Ocarina Of Time (and even the modern Breath Of The Wild) are still celebrated for, encouraging you to run all across the gorgeous cel-shaded countryside while tracking down sidequests, collecting stray treasures, and just marveling at the beauty of its world?

Whose legend is it?

What’s the legend about.

Whose legend is it.

What’s the legend about.

As a very intentional riff on Zelda games, 3D Dot Heroes does everything in its power to generate a 3-dimensional take on the original The Legend Of Zelda

(Not to be confused with the actual 3D Zelda games.) Interestingly, though, Silicon Studio couldn’t resist slotting in a few more modern aspects, most notably an RPG-lite forging system that lets you customize the power of the various weapons your hero acquires over their journey, which moves the game a little bit further from a straight homage

But it’s there—and with it, the true heart of any great Zelda nod

Whose legend is it

What’s the legend about

It’s a little thin, plotwise, but this is a phone game

Unlike most games that look like a Zelda but aren’t a Zelda—which generally pull from the A Link To The Past playbook—Oceanhorn is more of a callback to 2003’s The Wind Waker

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

RECENT NEWS

SUBSCRIBE

Get monthly updates and free resources.

CONNECT WITH US

© Copyright 2024 365NEWSX - All RIGHTS RESERVED