Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
US Release Date: 7-14-87
It’s interesting playing The Legend of Zelda again in 2020 and noticing just how many elements of the game are things that get complained about in other games. It’s an obtuse game filled with cryptic clues with little direction. You never really know what to do next, and you have to check just about every square inch of it just to make sure you find everything. It has terribly unbalanced fighting with monsters usually taking either one hit or several, and the monsters just sort of wander aimlessly. It can best be described as “hit them before they randomly hit you.” Any other game like this on NES would have endless snarky YouTube videos devoted to how bad it is. So why is The Legend of Zelda such a classic? It all comes down to execution.
The Legend of Zelda is a game that looks and sounds great right from the start. Its an atmosphere that instantly draws in the player. I still think that when NES games done right are timeless, and I don’t think it’s only because I first played them as a child. Hyrule is a fun place to be even if it is so sparsely populated. Seriously, why does Ganon care so much about a world almost entirely inhabited by old hermits living under trees? It’s one of those games where every screen looks like it is hiding and important secret, and a very high percentage of them are. It’s also too hard to fault the cryptic nature of the game because it came out during a time where mysterious adventure games were much more popular. People liked to be challenged, especially when there were only about thirty games to chose from. You have to imagine being a gamer in the summer of 1987 and seeing the limited NES library and thinking about the horror of actually running out of games to play. You would want something that would keep you busy for a while. I still remember being young and having everyone in my family who played games figuring out little pieces of it until we were able to put the whole puzzle together. I think it was our second game right after Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt.
Of course flaws are still flaws even in a great game, and Zelda does have some. It has many of the problems that plague other mid-80s games that make it a bit harder to play today. It’s similar to Metroid in that whenever you die you always start back with only three hearts of life no matter how many you have collected. That means finding a fairy soon or quickly dying. You also start back on the same screen after dying in the overworld no matter where you are on the map. This leads to some frustration early in the game when the world is wide open but you don’t have many hearts. At least your rupees stay accumulated after death, because grinding for them can be a bit of a pain. For some reason I find the combat in dungeons to be fun but overworld combat to be more annoying than anything. Most of the monsters do sort of just walk into you and there is almost no tactical element to it whatsoever. Even most of the bosses are too simple simple. They also run out half way through and start recycling. Adding two extra dodongos doesn’t really change the stakes very much other than making it more frustrating to run out of bombs. There’s a reason why most games we think of as Zelda clones usually borrow more from Zelda 2 and A Link to the Past. This game is rough around the edges.
Still I had a much better time playing this game than I expected, especially considering how many times I have played through it. It’s also the first game that I wrote about on my old blog to get written about again. This time around I was much more enthusiastic about it. I don’t know if it was my mood or if the other games I have been playing recently made me appreciate it even more. And of course even though I don’t rank games based on importance it’s really hard to overstate how important this game is, especially in the United States. American audiences never really took to the more-advanced-than-Atari consoles, and while there were certainly advanced games coming out on computers at the time that was still a niche market. By the time the NES was getting popular in America it already had the big three: Super Mario Brothers, Metroid, and The Legend of Zelda. These three games were among the first new games that people had played since the Atari era. There aren’t a lot of console proto-Zeldas out there. Imagine going straight from Pac-Man to Zelda. It’s hard to even fathom such a radical change today. Games change their size and scope, but not so much their goals. The Legend of Zelda more than any other game solidified the concept of beating a game as the main goal. Even Mario could be played for a high score, but Zelda with its battery save and mysterious world was played to be won, and the gaming world never really went back.
So The Legend of Zelda is a great game, but one that is flawed enough to only be second on the list. I had a hard time putting it over Galaga, but it’s just more fun for longer periods of time. Galaga would be wearing pretty thin after an hour of play, but The Legend of Zelda would still be fun thanks to the variety. I’m just warning you now, however, that it’s not going to stay the highest rated Zelda game, and the ones that go higher on the list probably aren’t the ones you’re thinking about. So I just want to take this moment to enjoy the brief time where most of my audience is still going to agree with me.
NES quality percentage: 6/11 or 54.54%
The Ironclad List of Correctness:
1. Super Mario Odyssey
2. The Legend of Zelda
3. Galaga
4. Donkey Kong
5. Exodus: Ultima III
6. Pac-Mania
7. Wrecking Crew
8. Super Pac-Man
9. Pac-Man
10. Viva Pinata
11. Dragon View
12. Excitebike
13. Drakkhen
14. Arc the Lad
15. Clu Clu Land
16. Artifact Adventure Gaiden DX
17. Mickey’s Racing Adventure
18. Metro-Cross
19. Ice Climber
20. Gaplus
21. Dragon Spirit
22. Pinball (NES)
23. Ninja Golf
24. Super Soccer
25. Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour (GBC)
26. Red Sea Crossing
27. Baraduke
28. Tennis
29. Hogan’s Alley
30. Gamma-Attack
31. The Legend of “Valkyrie”
32. Galaxian
33. Evoland
34. Cosmic Commuter
35. Hot Pixel
36. PocketBike Racer
37. Wild Gunman
38. Defunct
39. Gyruss (2600)
40. Looney Tunes Racing
41. Squidlit
42. Baseball
43. Birthday Mania
44. Bad Street Brawler
45. Burly Men at Sea
46. X-Men (HyperScan)
47. My Name is Mayo
48. Marvel Heroes
49. Ben 10
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