Why the original Legend of Zelda is full of strange, early experiments
The Legend of Zelda (1987)
The Legend of Zelda (1987)
It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon and, thanks be to God, you finally have the TV to yourself, not to mention a bit of peace and quiet. You start flicking through the TV guide, looking to be spoon-fed some entertainment. By TV guide, I of course mean your television’s internal EPG - what use is a TV guide magazine in this day and age?
Since tellies have got a lot more than six channels these days, not to mention we all have access to huge amounts of mindrot on Netflix and other services, you never really know what to watch. In this scenario, analysis paralysis will kick in, and you’ll always gravitate towards the old reliables, the stuff you’ve seen a million times before.
But when you do find an episode of a series you like, quickly you notice that the onscreen synopsis seems rather unfamiliar. And when you actually start watching, you’re wondering why Kramer is being called Kessler, why Daphne Moon seems to have psychic powers, or why Smithers is black with blue hair.
Or maybe the intro is off, the actors are different or the set is completely wrong. The entire first season of the Fresh Prince, for example, had a completely different configuration for the Banks residence. Tenured Fresh Prince pros like me also remember that Uncle Phil used to cut about with only a moustache, no grizzly bear beard for him.
There was even an odd period where the Banks family would have high tea, and visit country clubs. Then there were the extra verses in the iconic theme tune, which you’ll only hear in the first few episodes – but if you’re gonna belt the song out in a nightclub, as I’m prone to doing, then you’d better know the whole lot of it by heart.
What you’ve done here is stumbled on a very old episode, perhaps the first ever, and it looks remarkably different to what you’re used to. Everything looks weird, unsure of itself, visibly dated. And it’s quite jarring.
This isn’t the show I fell in love with, you think to yourself, with the occasional mewl of protest at the television to show your disapproval. You pick up on every single detail that looks wrong, and you say to yourself, “yeah, I see, so that’s where Kel’s penchant for orange soda came from. But… I don’t know, it’s a little weird.”
And that’s what it was like for me, going back to the original Legend of Zelda on the NES. I’d been weaned on that beautiful diet of the SNES game, A Link to the Past, plus its two immediate successors on Game Boy and N64. I knew a great Zelda game when I saw one.
This really was the one that started it all though, which means that it must have done something right. Talk about pressure: the first Metroid game was a load of alien bum. The first Metal Gear game, as we’ve seen, was bunkum as well. The Legend of Zelda, retrospectively, has a lot to live up to.
It set a lot of series’ conventions into motion, not the least of which was the music. Thank heavens that beautiful man Koji Kondo played a blinder with the tunes, including the iconic overworld theme. Actually, this game gave us the overworld full stop, plus nine labyrinthine dungeons, a number you can double after taking on the game’s famous Second Quest.
It introduces Link, Princess Zelda and Ganon (or is that Gannon?), staple items like the Boomerang and Bombs, plus a few not-so-lucky ones like a Candle and a Stepladder, which were quickly shuffled out. Then there were all the other goodies that you could pick up, like Rupees, Heart Containers, legs of meat and the like.
You navigate past the cumbersome file select screen, which you can excuse as it’s the very first of its kind, and then you start off in a clearing. You have Link, your ever-so-silent character, onscreen. You have a shield, you’ll have a sword once you walk into a nearby, inviting cave… and that’s it.
The old man who bequeaths you the series’ first ever child’s play sword suddenly disappears. That’s charming, isn’t it? He tells you it’s dangerous to go alone, and then he immediately disappears and leaves you to face the music. With that, you’re left to explore Hyrule all by yourself.
It’s good to be let out into a vast world, and it really was vast, at the time. This was way before the oversaturation of open-world games, of course. But some direction and hints wouldn’t go amiss, right?
Well, that’s not the order of the day – Shigsy Miyamoto himself, the brainchild behind all this 8-bit non-linear madness, told us all later with a wry smile that it was his intention for kids playing the game to frequently become stuck at the cryptic puzzles.
This would prompt them to ask their friends for tips, compare what items they had, find out about the places their schoolyard peers had previously journeyed to, and all of that tomfoolery. That, he says, was the real goal of the game they were trying to make.
Hmm. Was it really? It sounds lazy, and a bit too social for my liking, but it was also a neat idea – millions of gamers had a NES at the time anyway; there was no Nintendo vs Sega console war at the time, and Ataris already looked set for the knacker’s yard.
Still, you can’t tell me that walking through walls four times in a certain direction is in any way intuitive. Nor does an enemy monster screaming “GRUMBLE, GRUMBLE” give any indication that he wants some tasty meat that you probably never bothered buying, and he won’t let you past until you go back out of the dungeon and buy the most expensive pork leg in the world.
If you’re playing The Legend of Zelda for the first time today, having somehow missed out on it for the last 35 years, then I really would suggest to do it with a guide – after all, it would be a bit unwise of you to try hanging around school playgrounds for tips, old boy.
A guide certainly doesn’t ruin the game, and it also saves you the heartbreak of trying to get into Shigeru Miyamoto’s head. Or the head of some other mad Japanese developer, who delighted in exercising his sadistic architectural muscles to make this game as enigmatic as possible.
After all, life’s too short these days for us to burn every single tree on each and every square of the map to find the way through. But don’t worry, whatever you may miss out on is probably optional. An awful lot of things aren’t necessary in this game, in fact, which just adds to the replay value.
You can skip maps and compasses easily, as well as quite a few of the dungeon items. A lot of the dungeon door keys are superfluous - I had 10 spare at one stage during my last playthrough - and the keys carry over between dungeons. You can even get right up to the final fight against Ganon without a sword, which is mind-bogglingly brilliant.
As for the other trimmings, things aren’t so bad – there’s not much music, even if it is great to hear that classic overworld theme. Every dungeon bar the last has the exact same song, which does have enough retro cred in its own right, but God does it grate after a while.
The graphics really aren’t that bad for NES. Certainly not as offensively mutilating as some other games of the time, like, I don’t know, Hydlide. Yes, Link may go a little bit bug-eyed when he picks up an item, the Lynels look a little malnourished, the supposedly fearsome Darknuts almost look cute, the Armos Knights look like they’re carrying around wooden television sets, and some of the dungeons have the same colour scheme as your worst ever pile of vomit. But the game looks fine in motion, trust me.
It’s not that easy, but it’s accessible for a NES game. I can’t say I’ve beaten the Second Quest, because the puzzles involved in undertaking this quest are even more mysterious and unassailable again. But it’s a great little trick for extending the game’s longevity, something that must have been a real selling point ‘back in the day’.
And on the subject of longevity, I’ll give it this – The Legend of Zelda really does warrant replays. You can pop this one in again and again, having thoroughly blown on the cartridge connectors first of course, then checked to see if your precious save files are still there.
Then you can rifle through a good chunk of the game, or even beat it in one sitting. You may look at this game, the first of its kind, and find it to be a little bit quaint, like those early Fresh Prince episodes. Or you might think it’s a little awkward, or a little cumbersome, or even a little bit ‘off’. But it’s most definitely a Zelda.
9 June 2023