Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 123: Breath of the Wild's Zelda heritage

Episode Date: October 30, 2017

It's not an old game, but it has an old soul. Jeremy and Bob chat with Henry Gilbert and (former) IGN editor Jose Otero about the latest Legend of Zelda (Breath of the Wild) and how it connects the series' present to its past.

This week in Retronauts, the Blood Moon rises again. I am Jeremy Parrish, and this week we're doing something a little different. But first, we're going to go around the table. And I do mean around the table because we're actually being filmed. So when I talk about like clockwise and stuff, it might actually matter. So let's do, I said clockwise, Bob. I said hello to TV. Oh, okay, okay.

Let's go counterclockwise. Who are you? Oh, me, I'm Bob Mackie. And I want to say we're going to lose some listeners because when I did a Wii episode, people said, we is not retro unsubscribe one star yep yeah so those people get ready they're not here anymore oh true but i bet a few would hung on they're like bob bob and jeremy get one more chance we're squandering it yes i'm i'm proud too though uh the lionel hunted henry gilbert hello and finally hey hosea otero here how's it going it's going great hosey thanks for asking

Yeah. This week's topic, The Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, is a game that lasts forever. Well, not forever, forever, but nabbing all 900 coroc seeds and finishing every shrine can take close to a lifetime. Unfortunately, most games aren't like this. You spend $60 on a new release, sink 20 to 40 hours into finishing it, and then what? Just try to take it back to where you bought it, and don't be surprised if you're escorted out by security. Thankfully, Gamefly exists as a much better solution to this problem. Gamefly is the best way to buy and rent video games. All of your favorites are there, and you can have them mailed directly to your door. That's right,

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This premium trial allows you to check out two games and or movies at a time. You can only get this offer by visiting Gamefly.com slash Retronauts. Now go and sign up and start playing all of your favorite games absolutely free for 30 days. That's Gamefly.com slash Retronauts. So, yeah, this week we're going to do something a little different for retronauts. I think this is something more like what we kind of used to do in the olden days. But we're kind of bringing retronauts back. around to a current topic, and we're specifically talking about the legend of Zelda

Breath of the Wild, which came out as of this recording time less than three months ago. By the time you hear this, it might have been five months ago. But in any case, it is a current game. But I think that it is worth discussing and worth bringing into sort of the Retronaut's umbrella, because when Nintendo promoted this game leading up to the launch, They really, really pushed the, like, the nostalgia retro angle to the point where they were producing a lot of sort of images, like promotional images, that's specifically tied back to key art from the original Zelda for NES. Right. And the idea was, like, this is a return to Zelda's roots.

This is a return to, like, the open world, go anywhere, do anything, feel lost, feel overwhelmed, die a lot, style of the NES games. And so I took that to heart. And as I played Breath and Full the Wild, which I still have not finished, but as I've been playing it, I have been mindful. Like, is this really bringing the series back to the olden days? And in some respects, I think it's pretty successful. But that's what we're going to sort of break down today. So I'm going to say this is a spoiler warning zone. I know you finish the game.

I haven't finished the game yet. I put in 50 hours and percent of five came out. Okay. But I played the crap out of it. Right. But I basically consider any part of Breath of the Wild fair game for spoilers. So, Jose, feel free to spoil it for me. I could just go about it.

I'm not really precious about game spoilers in any case. Whoa, a princess. Is her name's Zelda? Yes. Oh, my God. All right. Is Gannon the final boss? I don't want to know this.

Yeah, I don't know if I should spoil that for you. It's actually Zantz. I looked it up. They did a switcherio on this one. Thanks, Zant. Zant. So, yeah, this is a spoiler zone. Actually, why don't we start out by explaining how much of Breath of the Wild we have individually played?

Start with the guy who clearly has played it the most. Are you sure you want to start with me? Yes, please, do. Kind of make the rest of us look bad. Yes, I'm sorry. So I'm on my third playthrough of this game. Which means I have sunk in way too. much time into it. But it is because I have a very strong feelings about this game. I feel

like it's one of those games that when I finished it, I, you know, you get that, you get that nagging feeling of, oh, I should play this again. But how many times you really follow up on it, right? And the first time, to be fair, was for review. The second time was the first time you just flew through the game. For review. Yeah, that's right. And that is not how one is meant to play. 60 hours. Yeah. Yep. 64 hours. Oh, you finished it in 60 hours? I think so. Something like that. It's just crazy time. So are you using special conditions for your replays? So for

play number two, yes, I went about it a completely different manner on purpose. And for play-through number three now, I have two conditions actually. The first is the same guideline. Try it differently. Try and test the boundaries of how this open world works. But then the second is

a bit selfish, but they released a VO patch that you can listen to any VO from any country in the game. Latin America Zelda. Let me tell you. Oh, my God. Better?

Infinitely better. Like, we're talking, like, which one? Latin America, Zelda. Okay. Like, you heard it here. Best Zelda in the game. Like, better than Japanese Zelda. Better than American Zelda.

Well, the American one, she's just doing, like, it reminds me of, like, Princess Leia, the original Princess Leia, like, when she would dip into an English-ish accent. It's not the greatest. It does dip. I think she starts out really strong, but there are a few key scenes that when you hear them and you hear sort of that regal sort of naggy tone when they collide together you do kind of walk away going uh but yeah i shouldn't dominate any further but third play through like this is this is going to be the one try it again do it differently i have to learn spanish now yeah it's still

september yeah um yeah i've put in i i put in a little over 50 hours and i have i completed two of the guardians but the rest of it was just dicking around like when it eventually came time to go to the second garden. I was like, I don't even want to do this? Like, there's more shrines. Like, I could see five more shrines over there. But I was like, no, I should probably get a second guardian at this point. It's been this long. But the guardians are kind of just secondary to just the exploring. I love so much. And again, I swear I would have beaten it. We're enough for percent of five coming out and putting 100 hours into that. But I'm going back to Zelda now. Yeah, I'm sort of on, in Henry's court, I guess. It feels weird to say,

you only played 50 hours of a game, but with Breath of the Wild, I assume, presumably, it's like a 400-hour game if you want it to be. I think Jose probably spent 400 hours. I think so at this point. Does the switch have a clock on it that tells you? It kind of will say, like, generally about how long you've played. It'll say, like, played for at least 30 hours. I miss the data.

I don't like that. I miss the data dump that the Wii U or 3DS gave you of just like, here's everything you did every day. Yeah, like I beat Laster Master Zero. and if you look at my system, it says, played for a few minutes. I'm like, you know, I played through it pretty quickly, but not that bad. But yeah, I played it for like 50 hours. And like, Henry, I don't go in with an agenda. I sort of play it like I play Minecraft.

Like, I'm going to go in this direction and do whatever I find in that direction. To the point where I kind of screwed myself because I was like, I'm not doing any story stuff. I don't want to rush it. So I didn't upgrade my Shika Slate for like 40 hours. I had no idea I was missing out on so much functionality. I was like, you should just. Wait, what are the upgrades? You can take photos of things and then find them anywhere in the world.

Jeremy didn't do this either, it seems. No. Whoa, you didn't do that. I haven't, I have not used guides or any kind of pointers. Do not underestimate what you can't find in the rest of the while. I mean, I finished this game never meeting Hestu. Have you met Hesstu? Yeah, I found him twice.

Oh, is it the guy you give the golden poop to? Yeah, okay, yeah. So I finished with the default inventory, and that was it. Wow. Oh, my God. Someone on our team found him or found the manner in which you can. do that. And I, my thing with reviews, especially with a Zelda, is don't tell me anything. Like, I want to find out on my own. I didn't do a guide, but they do, you know, if you want to find the red text in a conversation,

they'll say, well, you can go over there. And so I did that till I met, you know, I met a few people. But also, Bob, I know you're playing it like some sick freak on not a switch. Yeah, I'm the one Wii U player of Zelda Breath of the Wild. I'm looked down on with you a little bit. You're playing with a real chic asleep. Yes, the one that's actually in the game. But yeah, I'll talk more about this later when we get into the discussion of the design. But I feel like the way I play with Zelda, it feels like the most toy-like thing Nintendo has made outside of their, like, R&D-1 stuff, where it's just like, it's just the thing I play with. There's no agenda. There's no goal.

It's just like a thing I tinker with and interact with, and I just have fun with it. I'm at least 50 hours into the game, and I was playing last night, and I was trying to ascend the final tower so I could finally finish out my map. And on the way up, it was the one, like, near the Lost Woods. So there's, like, moblins and bocoblins or whatever, kind of, like, around station on towers and stuff. And, like, the whole interaction I had there, I don't, I'm not strong enough to fight moblins, really. I have, like, decent weapons, but I only have five hearts because I've been upgrading stamina. So, yeah, like, there was a moblin station, and then there was a boclin station. And then there was a Boko Blin on the lookout above him.

And somehow, I don't remember exactly what I did, but I got the Boko Blin to, like, spot me, but the moblin didn't. So the Boko Blin, like, tossed this exploding barrel at me. And it fell way short because I was a long way away. And it hit the moblin instead and exploded. And, like, he got really mad. And so he turned around and faced the other way. And so, like, I ended up causing, there were more. exploding barrels. I caused the Boko Blin to accidentally detonate the other exploding barrels and

knocked the moblin off the scaffolding, so I didn't have to mess with him. So then it was just me versus the Boko Blin, and he was too far away to hit me, but he started throwing rocks at me, and I was shooting with arrows. And as I was shooting him, my arrow hit one of the rocks that he threw and caused it to fly out of the air. I missed my shot. I was like, whoa. How am I having all these interactions in this game. This is bonkers. That's why I like it. Very little, I don't know anything really feels scripted

in the game. It all feels very organic, very natural. Like everything, there's a way that everything interacts with each other in a very natural way. No, and I agree with that sentiment, because it's not just a toy like it. There's so many ways that it's a toy. You play with enemies. You play with villagers. You have sassy responses to people. And it's also the game

where I feel like, the constant thing that I kept saying out loud is, I didn't know I can do that. Like, that happens a lot where you discover. Well, I think I got so used to thinking Zelda was a lot of invisible walls and a very clear path of which way you're supposed to go. And so I wasn't used to a Zelda game not punishing me for solving a puzzle the wrong way. It pretty much just says like, if you got that ball over there, then you did it. Like, you don't care.

If you got to the top of this mountain, then you got to the top. Who cares how you did it? And it's something too, I think. I was at their, I was at their GDC show. for it. I think Jose were you there? Yes, yes, I was. And a big thing for them was just licensing the havoc physics engine. Like they treated it as this major thing that every game developer, most game developers have been using for over a decade. But just the idea of like, yeah, we use this physics engine and we said, well, these things, this can light on fire or this

conducts electricity. And they all talk to each other in this world. And they let the physics just do what they're going to do. Yeah, they very much laid it all out on the table and said, these are elements and these are, you know, just objects. And how do we have an interplay where if an element introduces meets another element, what happens? It meets an object, what happens, et cetera, which was really, really thoughtful. I had a very formative, I didn't know I could do that moment in the very early part of the game where in the beginning, you're locked into this one area. You have to find, I think, five shrines, right? And I had one left or four, whatever, how many other were, but, okay, Jose should know.

Jose should know by this point. I trust him. But there was one left, and I had Skyward Sword on the brain. And I was still thinking of, you know, old punishing Zelda in terms of linearity. And I was like, I haven't been up that mountain, but they wouldn't let me climb all the way up there. And I just start climbing. I'm like, oh, I guess they are. And I keep climbing.

I keep climbing. And it's up there. I'm like, okay, now I understand what this game is capable of. And I think they put that up there just to let you know, like, there are no invisible walls. You climb whatever you want. And there are boundaries of a sort. Like when you get up to a certain altitude, it becomes cold. Yeah.

So you have to find ways to circumvent that. And there are a couple of ways in that initial area where you can do that. you can talk to the old guy and you know if you meet the right conditions he'll give you some stuff like equipment that will help you absorb the cold but if you don't then you can find other ways to mitigate the cold like yeah there's like a bush of chili peppers right outside the cold area or what i did was just like i'm going to stockpile health items and just as i start losing hearts i'm going to eat the next thing and that works too no go ahead please and that well i love the the the old man in the beginning he he exemplifies how much nintendo had stepped back from tutorials because he's just hanging around. If you want to talk to him, you'll give you a tutorial, all the tutorials you want, but you don't have to talk to him. He's mostly just there to kind of like, say, to like incentivize you to be like, oh, you should, you should confine me. If you cut down this tree, it'll make a bridge over there. Maybe you want to.

Yeah, but there is one barrier in the game that we're actually not talking about, which is the Great Plateau as a structure, you're not allowed to leave until you get. Yeah, we'll talk about that later because I feel like that is something that kind of tie. into where Breath of the Wild looks back to kind of classic Zelda games. And, well, the way it really reminds me of classic Zelda as somebody who played Zelda, the old Zelda's when they were new, is just talking about it is like an old Zelda of saying, like, oh, you did this? Like, I haven't seen this thing because even with how much you could guide it, it's just there's too much to even really catalog or to check a guide for online.

And it was always much more rewarding to talk to a friend. who was also playing, like, hey, do you do this? You've seen this? Like, did you know you could freeze this thing in time and then hit it five times and then fly on that rock across the water instead of drowning?

Like, did you know you could do that? Yep. So with that said, why don't we kind of roll into the discussion of where is Breath of the Wild kind of fits in the overall scheme of Zelda, like how it matches up with its own history? because I think that in most respects, the game is very successful. So I feel like to begin with, we should go back to the original Legend of Zelda because I, kind of as you were saying, like it really does feel like they manage to capture that elusive sense of like, oh, this is new and different that those of us who played Zelda on NES back when it was new experienced.

Like there had never been a console game that big, that complex, that involving before. I mean, we were coming off of, you know, just look at what else was available on NES in 1987. Like, Zelda just briefly predates Metroid, which was probably about as close as you get. But, you know, the other stuff that was out there was like, you know, the games I've been covering for NES works, my video projects, you know, the Black Box NES games, all of which are like simple, mostly one screen type games, very limited arcade style play design. You had some Early third-party games, most of which were not very good. I mean, even Capcom wasn't making their own games at that point.

And Ghost and Goblins, 1942, like, those were pretty rough ports of those games. Data East was on there. Tag Team Wrestling is not good. No. Carnov. Carnov was ambitious. There's a lot that I like about Carnov, and I did finish it back in the day, but it's also pretty janky. You had a lot of Tose developed games published by Bondi, which were generally not that good.

And then you have the legend of Zelda, like out of nowhere. This huge game comes in a gold box with a golden cartridge and a battery save on the cartridge. And these commercials promising a never-ending adventure new for your Nintendo entertainment system. A kid in the leotards, man. Leotards. Zelda! I get him confused with the Encyclopedia Britannica kid. They're both of that dork.

Nerds wearing black. I think of the rap. I think the wrapping. Yeah, yeah. But it was a product of its time, right? Where, you know, this was before the advent of tutorializing in video games. So if you went with something that was very open and very different, you kind of left it on the players' devices to discover what was possible. And so when a kid decided to use the red candle and he burned a bush and it released a bunch of stairs, the playground the next day was the best place to be because you heard that story for the first time.

Did the guide, did the instruction manual offer a brief tutorial or like a mini guide for the, the early parts of the game. I thought it did. There was a really thick manual. I think it does kind of give you like a general walkthrough. But Zelda on NES also came with a foldout map.

That's right. Of the overworld and then it had a lot of the dungeon layouts in the back. But it didn't show you the whole overworld. If you go back and look at the foldout map with Zelda,

it's like kind of this triangle. So it shows you like the whole bottom of the map, but then the top half of the map, the corners are blank. So you have to go in and draw out the rest. And those are where kind of like the greatest hazards exist. It's where you have the Lost Hills.

It's where you fight the Lionels up near Spectacle Rock. So it's like kind of not showing you the end game. But at the same time, you know, it's not necessarily the end game in the sense of like in sort of the Zelda's that we're more familiar with in more recent years where there's like the end of the game and you can't actually. get to those places physically until you've, you know, beaten so many bosses and so on and so forth. The only thing you can't really do from the beginning of the game, if you know your way around, is get past the entry screen to Spectacle Rock, because you have to have all

eight pieces of the Triforce. But you can sequence break anything up to that point. You can, you can go anywhere to do anything. Like the biggest kind of choke point is that most of the north part of the map, like the Death Mountain area, is you have to Ford Rivers, so you have to get the ladder to do that. But you can go through the southern route, and if you can make it through the Lost Woods, then you can get up there and get through the cemetery, the graveyard. Yeah, there were very few gates. In fact, outside of the ones you talked about, I think the only one I can think of is the white sword had a specific heart requirement. And the master sword. That's right. Yeah, and that, well, the magical sword

at the time, right? Remember? Is that canon now, by the way? Yeah, I don't know if that's actually supposed to be the master sword. Maybe it is just the magical sword. Maybe that's why Gannon came back the next game. Tyrol his story has three paragraphs about why it became the master's sword. I'm guessing. Yeah, but the manual did do its best to sort of lay it out. Nintendo Power did the other part of the heavy lifting, right? It was providing maps or trying to give you tips.

Was it Nintendo Power or was it the Fun Club Newsletter? So I remember, well, maybe it was the Fun Club Newsletter. It was more likely that. Because Zelda predates Nintendo Power. Okay. And they did go back later, like years later. And I think when Zelda was reissued on a great cartridge, they were like, check it out.

This is, you know, a classic game. you probably don't own that issue of Nintendo Power or Fun Club Newsletter, so here it is again. Yeah, the only way you got your tips was you called the tip line. Anyone at this table ever called the Nintendo? We couldn't afford that. I did, but only in the Super NES era, and it was useless. I called for some help on Chrono Trigger because I thought there was like some side quest that I was missing because at the end, someone says, like, each of you knows someone who's in trouble or something like that. Go and help them.

And I was like, well, I've done, you know, quests for all these people, but it feels like there's something else. And the guy, basically, I spent like $5 for someone to say, like, no, that's it. Yeah. That wasn't money well spent. I called the Nintendo Power Hotline or the 1-800 number because I was a lonely kid and they would humor you. Actually, there's truth to that, though. Like, sorry, I met an employee once who worked the hotline and he said that he used to get a phone call. I think he said every Saturday from some kid who wanted Mega Man tips.

and he didn't need Mega Man says he just wanted to talk about Mega Man with him and the kid's grandma would take the phone and say like look please I know you got to go just talk to me he's like lady you're paying for this call I don't think this is okay well mine was full free yeah I never my parents

wouldn't let me pay for any phone call like that either it wasn't it wasn't for lack of money it was just like that's a waste of money it was a feeling when I played Zelda it did it was too complicated for me when I first played the original legend of Zelda I was like seven, six or seven

when I played it. And to me, video games were just Super Mario or Pac-Man. The most simple ones are just like, as Super Mario was as much as my brain could take, which was go from one side of the screen to the other side of the screen. So when that didn't solve things in Zelda,

it really was hard for me to comprehend it first. Yeah, I mean, I refer to this game as the dad game on our Zelda one episode because everyone's dad was playing it. So it was kind of intimidating like, oh, this is a game for adults. And I would play it sort of like how I play Breath of the Wild now. I mean, I know how to finish video games now

and I know what I'm supposed to do, but when I was playing Zelda, I would just like explore aimlessly and have fun. There was no goal in mine. Like, oh, what's up here? What's down there? What's in this dungeon? I didn't really realize like, get the 8 Triforce pieces and then rescue Zelda even though it says it in the beginning of the game. But I was like, I'm going to explore. It's fun. I think this, I think the original

legend of Zelda is the one. Nintendo's been the most obvious about like this was our inspiration or we were going back to that. In the official art especially, been doing that. Like, I mean, the big one was, when they showed it at E3, geez, was it just last year? The true reveal of Breath of the Wild?

That's right. It was. When they showed him, when they showed Link looking off at the mountains, I was watching with Super Zelda Phantom, a friend of mine, Brett Elston, and he said, that's that official art from Zelda. And then, like, five minutes later, on screen, how Newman was like, yeah, that's the official art from Zelda. We wanted to recreate it.

It was like, oh, wow. they mean this for real here. And same with one of my favorite official arts they did when it got reviewed by Fimitsu. On the cover was original link handing the master sword to Breath of the Wildling. I think you mean magical sword. Oh, yes. Magical sword. Okay, but it's all well and good to say we looked back to the original Zelda.

Okay, that's great. But what I think they really want to say, we looked back to the original Zelda. Okay, that's great. But what I think they really wanted to capture about the original Zelda was not like, here is that game, but here is that sensation. But how do you do that? In 1987, when Zelda came out, yeah, it was easy to blow people's minds because the only way to have really proper context for an adventure that big, that open, that challenging, that free was to have been, you know, like a PC player having played Ultima or something like that. Like, that's really the only precedent that existed for that game. And most kids playing Zelda for the first time

had not played Ultima 4 on PC because that was you know that was also a dad game but in the year of our Lord 2017 like that is old hat every game now is open world like even if they shouldn't

be they're still open world for some damn reason yeah that's true and you know if you want a challenging game that says figured out on your own you've got Dark Souls which is an open world game and also really challenging But I think for Nintendo, there was confidence in seeing things like Dark Souls, seeing things like Minecraft that were successful and popular,

despite having, you can say, an inscrutable to an extent knowledge before those games really blew up. Like, there isn't really a guide built into Minecraft that tells you how to make some of the most, you know, rare items in that game. It was up to you either figuring it out or turning to other people. I think that gave them confidence. I don't doubt it. Especially because of Jose is here.

I want to talk about this. It's to look at how Breath of the Wild so successfully pays tribute to the original Zelda, I think you can look at how much Skyward Sword betrays that philosophy. And I'm not saying this to be a salty dick. I feel that that game especially was the most linear, the most play it safe, the most like misunderstanding of what a Zolv game should be. And Jose reviewed it, and I was there in the background while he was suffering. Jose, can you talk about how you feel, how you view Skyward Sword now after playing Breath of the Wild for 500 hours?

still feel, yes, there's definitely those criticisms to be lobbied against Skyward sword, right? In terms of that it was very controlled, very much telling you and pointing you towards every single thing, not really letting mysteries be mysteries. But I would put as a point of argument that I do think this is Nintendo trying to make a Zelda game essentially for a platform that had a predominantly casual base. Yeah, that's true. This had to be like them internalizing and saying this is the approach we need to take because some of these people have never played Zelda.

I think they had to step back and try. try to figure out where to integrate the complexity into these games. Because there is complexity to Zelda. It's Nintendo's most complex series. They're most challenging and involved and intricate. But if you look at Skyward Sword, most of the intricacy had to do with the combat interface, the idea of like the motion controls and all of that. Whereas Breath of the Wild is more of a systems-based, we're probably going to use that word a lot.

Yeah, I mean, like everything, it's all about creating like these interlocking elements that all kind of fit together and interact with each other and affect each other. And that's, that's a, like, that requires more of a holistic approach as opposed to Skyward Sword, which is like kind of, you know, guiding people through a path. And, well, yeah, like I, go ahead. If I was Nintendo in the Wii generation too, yeah, I would see, I would feel like my consumers were. telling me, I want a simpler thing. I want simpler stuff, make this easier for me. Like, for them, they made Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, which were really great,

but it sold a fraction of what the new Super Mario Brothers, we and New Super Mario Brothers did. And that was also the timeline when they introduced the Super Guide or Super Mario Galaxy 2. It might have just been in Japan, but it came with a DVD of like, here's how you play it, if this

is confusing for you. So, I could see them taking it easier. And for all of Galaxy's successes, it's important to point out too that it's probably at least in terms of world design and it's like it's masterful but it is very straight and to the point you are traveling along set routes there are key junctions where you can break off and discover other parts of a level but it is way more linear than say Mario Sunshine or Mario 64 before I get any angry tweets I do like the dungeons a lot in Skyward Sword I wish I could just play the dungeons but you guys are right

I understand where it comes from but I feel like unfortunately the game was developed as things like Minecraft, the beta, the alpha was out in 2011 when Skyward Sword came out. Dark Souls came out in 2011. All of these things that would go on to shape the face of games and change the face of gaming were released just as Skyward Sword was finishing development.

So they could not reflect as much on what people wanted. I know A.G. A. A.A. Onuma, the producer of Zelda games since, like, Majora's Mask, said that, you know, he was kind of struck by the fact that Skyward Sword came out the same time as Skyrim. Yeah. He checked out Skyrim.

him out of curiosity because he was like, here's this other game that people really like and is really successful that has kind of like, you know, a similar name to ours. What's that all about? And I think that was kind of an important moment for him. Yeah. I don't know that he necessarily played Skyrim and said, this is great because I feel like Breath of the Wild does a lot of things much, much better than any Elder Scrolls games. Oh, for sure.

Yeah. New Elder Scrolls. None of the bugs. None of the bugs in fairness. Well, that's just a Nintendo thing. Yes. Like the promising thing before we ever played Breath of the Wild when they said this is going to be, you know, like big, free, open world.

Like, okay, everyone does that. But Nintendo never does anything unless they can refine it. They can polish it and make it a satisfying, smooth experience. Like, sometimes they sand off too many of the edges and you're like, but like we could at least be confident in the fact that this was not going to be, you know, Bethesda Jake. Well, I think if we're looking at all the things that allowed Nintendo to feel free again to go back to the roots of the feel of the original Zelda, you know, definitely Dark Souls and Skyrim had a piece in it. I also think, like, I feel a lot of Assassin's Creed when I'm playing that game, too, like, especially... I mean the Ubi Towers?

Yeah, Ubi Towers. I think of Assassin's Creed specifically that. But, yeah, but also, I think the success, both sales and critically, of a link between worlds really told them we can be free again like let's really like that one now just seems like baby steps to how much they threw out everything

for breath of the wild I'm glad you mentioned that because I feel like that is the critical link between all these you know like sort of more recent Zelda games and Breath of the Wild because that was the first game where they said let's look to the past

and let's try to do things differently. And so you have, you know, a game that really consciously reaches back to a link to the past for Super NES. But at the same time, the structure is completely different and basically throws out all the rules of kind of like how you progress the result of game. I will say, though, I do find some of the marketing. And by the way, it was cute. And maybe this is the cynical side of me, which doesn't show itself very often. But I do feel like some of it was very convenient marketing. Like, I do think that they set out to have this free, this open experience, and it was

based on extraneous factors of feedback from Skyward, baby steps with a link between worlds, and wanting to change up that formula, because realistically, and we're going to get into this, I'm sure, the formula has not changed since a link to the past, and it has been set in stone practically, right? Three temples. Then you get the real quest. Then you go out for, what, four to seven more. Right.

Well, I think that's why a link between worlds is important, because they did go back to the game that sort of set the rules for Zelda, like how every Zelda since then has worked and said, what if we changed up the rules? What if instead of getting a special weapon in a dungeon and using it against that boss? What if you could have access to any of the special weapons anytime you want, depending on whether or not you could afford them? Yeah, and this is not to be super critical, but Aunguma has pretty much made it clear he never finished the first Zelda.

And Miyamoto was not very involved on this game. I mean, clearly, like, very much like the Mario team, the Zelda. the team is sort of trained in the Miyamoto approach, has the approval, and once they get it, they go running, right? And that's it. So I did see, when I saw a lot of the marketing and the mentions on, like, Nintendo's Japanese website for

comparisons to Zelda one, I was just like, all right, this is a bit convenient. But then again, they did bring back Linos. They did bring back, like, some of the other stuff. Like they've said, you know, they looked to that for inspiration. And like I said before, it wasn't about, you know, like, repeating the story beats or whatever of Zelda

one. It was about giving you that like, whoa, this, this, like, there's so much to do. Where do I go? What do I do? Actually, I think that's what they were reaching for. The sensation. And that's what they, and that's what they really captured. I see what you were saying, Jose, and I don't want this whole podcast being beating up on Skyward Sword, but I feel like Skyward Sword's marketing

was more cynical than Breath of the Wild because it's like, no, no, this is actually the first game in the series. And we made a book about it. It's that important. And I feel like that was a little more cynical than Breath of the Wild. They couldn't help the timing of it, that it wasn't an anniversary year. So of course they were going to push harder

on like, it's a 25th anniversary of Zelda. So this is the first Zelda game with Skyward Sword. Like they didn't, the anniversary part of the marketing, at least in America, wasn't as heavy, even though this is... It was the 30th, well, it's 31st, whatever. Yeah, I mean, it's hard

doesn't matter. It's hard to say. It's hard to say. The American release. Yeah, yeah. They didn't play that up at all, did they? I don't recall. No, with Twilight, even with Twilight Princess H. H.D.'s re-released last year, there was no mention of Zelda's 30th. coinciding with that. It was like we'd rather save any of that mention for a breath of the wild. No compilation or anything.

Switch's marketing in general seems to kind of shy away from like, hey, kid, you love Nintendo. It's more like, hey, here's something fresh and new. Well, they don't want to, yeah, it definitely it feels like they made a decision like we don't want this to feel old. We don't want to remind people that we had other

systems. This is the Switch. And it's a cool hip thing that millennials do. And hey, Mario's on it. Isn't that a cool guy? And get Mario out of Wario where. these stock actors. But, you know, to drive back to where this was going at first, right, comparing the two games. They did hit on some essential beats, right? They had the old man that you see is the first and only human you see on the Great Plateau.

And he doesn't give you a sword per se, but there's a torch nearby and an apple. And he offers to at least give you some vague advice, but says nothing really. It gives you a stick if you want. Yeah. Well, the sticks near him. I don't think he had anything to do with that, but there's an axe behind him. The old man in the cave in Zelda, one, didn't actually, like, hold the sword. It was next to him.

Yeah. No, and they didn't overuse the opportunity, too, to be like, oh, what's the classic line? It's dangerous to go alone. Yeah, it's dangerous to go along. They could have completely sidestep that nonsense. They could have easily done that, too, if they wanted to. Crops to NOA, like, thank you. Thank you for skipping that one.

All the elbow nudges, yeah. Like, that would have been one too many, too early. Like, let this game stand on its own. Yeah, and the return of the line of, like the line of, like you said, Yeah, and the return of, like the Lionel, like you said, which I, I so underestimated when the first time I ran to them on the Zora path, they're like, well, you go here and also you take a picture of them, too, if you want it for this other side quest. So I was like, yeah, I'll take a picture of them right before I kill him. And then, like, 18 deaths later, I was like, okay, I'm just going to carefully speak over.

Why is lightning raining from the sky and killing me in a single? I mean, I love just how much you die because I feel like Twilight Princess, Windwaker, Skyward Sword, I never die. Even in the ultra-challenging bonus dungeons, it was just like, I'm protected. But in this game, like, whoa, the enemy hit me once. I'm not ready for this. Or I have to throw all my weapons at this one enemy. Like, they're not afraid to kill you. Sorry, you died in Skyward because you couldn't, like, aim the side.

Yeah, but you started that game with more hearts than Nizelda ever. Yeah, yeah. Like eight hearts or something. And like I said, I'm 50 plus hours into the game and have five hearts. I've only, I've focused on stamina. Me too, me too. So, yeah, I tried doing, I was like, I finally need to. get a second guardian, like legendary guardian guy down because I've only done the Zora path.

So I went to the Yiga hideout and I was like, hey, I'm not ready for this yet. I'm 50 hours into this game and this is too hard. I guess it lets you decide. That's such a goofy part of the game. I'm sorry. Like I love that they're calling cards. What the hell? Yeah, the calling card.

It's almost like their descendants of the Kong or elect the Kong. There's like a stash of just a ton of bananas. I was like, did you leave one out in front of him? He just, oh, oh, oh, oh. And he has this hilarious, like, walk as he tries to go pick it up. I tried distracting them. They kept seeing me as I was throwing them. Well, but stuff like that, that is what I love.

It's stuff like that that reminds me of more Majors mask and the weird side of Zelda, that they need that. They need that to lighten the mood sometimes because otherwise you're just going into a ninja cave of ninjas like, well, what'll happen if he's ninja see it? They'll slash your throat. Oh. And that's just kind of, that's just a bummer. That's just grim. It has no extra, like, humor or fun to it. Yeah, but the first time I came across the Yiga was, like, it was kind of a serious moment.

Yes, I know. It's like you're out on a plateau or something, and all of a sudden, like, this person comes up to you, and they're in disguise, and they try to kill you. You're like, oh, what's going on? You get a cool scimitar when you beat them, but it seems pretty serious. And then you get to their hideout, and it's like, this is really hard, but also they're monkeys. What's going on? Yeah, I love how they set those up. It reminds me a lot of a red devreda.

I think that was the first open world game that I played where there were ambushes waiting for you like that, that it was people disguised, and you'd help the damsel and then find out, oh, crap, on the other side of that stagecoach, they're all there waiting with guns, which I thought was interesting. Yeah, I actually think, like, the amount you die in it, I guess you, you'd probably say the original legend of Zelda is the most difficult classic Zelda game. So the difficult, I'd say Zelda 2, Zelda 2, yeah. Yeah, actually, right. But the difficulty level, I guess, feels old school in a way, except you can save whenever you want. So even, like, death is just like, it's a frustration and you feel like a loser, but then you can just go straight back to it. Like, the game does not punish you all that much for death other than... Except in, like, the Yiga Cave where you get sent back to the beginning.

Like, I fought my way through the first group of enemies and it was like, okay, I think I can do this. And then the next group is like two ninja and five samurai. I'm like, there's no way I'm going to get all these guys. And it's another Zelda stealth segment, right? But, you know, and they kind of get by, but they're never like great. Yeah, like this is a bad reference. Oh, this is the part of Zelda you hate with the stealth, like in Wind Waker at the beginning. At least this isn't at the beginning and isn't necessarily compulsory.

I mean, it is, but not the same way that Wind Waker's early Fortress. You can chug a stealth potion, though. Does that help much? No, it's if they see you. Okay. I mean, like, I've got the, I've got upgraded, um, uh, shika armor on. So I'm pretty much silent. Mm-hmm.

But they, they see you, and they're all stationed, yeah. But I love that section, too, because it challenges you to like, if you're greedy, you're like, there's, there's stuff right over there. I want that. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm not saying that's a bad part of the game. Just, like, I gave up on it yesterday because I was jet lagged and, like, I've only got five hearts and not nearly enough sleep.

I can't do this right. Yeah, but then with Zelda 2, right, what are those some of the comparisons, I wonder? Well, I feel like we haven't really delved enough into Zelda 1. Got it, got it. Because there are a lot of things that this game does. I mean, we've talked about the open world. We've talked about, like, the old man. We've talked about the Lionel's up on Death Mountain.

And the Lionel's here definitely give you that same sense of, I am so screwed. They get with the original Zelda. Although in the original Zelda, you can always just, like, duck back a screen. and they're gone. Here, it's like... It will hunt you to the end of the earth. It's really hard to get away from the Linos. You really have to hope that they don't see you.

I died like three times thinking like I am definitely far away now. I'm safe. Oh, an arrow just hit me in. Once I thought I really had it down and I can fight any Lionel, I ran into the silver linels, which have you had the pleasure yet? I haven't met any silver enemies yet. Thank God. Yeah, those things will, like one hit.

And he especially has this attack that he can fire a blast at you. That's really hard to avoid. And so it's pretty brutal. Overall, they use the silver enemies as a way to really gut-check you once you've gotten a lot of hearts. Like the silver chorizo or whatever in the Super Metroid? Or no, the gold chorizo. Torizo. Whatever.

Is it a sausage? That's it, yes. Chorizo. Hey, what? Where are we? Chozo, Torizo. Yeah, there you go. I get all mixed up.

Chorizo. All right. No, but the, like, I really feel like those situations are sort of, of the logical evolution of saying like, well, we remember what it was like when you were suddenly in over your head and super overwhelmed. Like, you're fighting

through a dungeon in Zelda one and all of a sudden there's like this eyeball thing surrounded by bees and it's not a boss. It's just there and you have to fight it. What the hell? Like, this really like coming across something like a Lionel where it will

go after you and stalk you forever and has powerful attacks and is pretty intelligent and as a capable fighter, like, that is very much that that sort of it really recaptures the kind of sense of, oh God, this game is so hard

and I feel so lost right now. Yeah, absolutely. It's a standoff. The series has not had in a long, long time. The gates are skill base rather than artificial ones put up, like, oh, you need this item, which is a key that will get you to this area. It's like, you can kind of go anywhere outside of stamina. You need more stamina to climb certain things, but it's not the artificial

barriers we saw in like almost every Zelda a game. And everything seems to have a workaround. Like, you don't have to fight that linel up on the Zora path. You just have to collect enough of the arrows that it's what I did. Yeah. You just get stealthy and careful.

Yes. And then run away. And I'm like, stealth, I can do that. I mean, I'm sure that's what I can do in the Yiga hideout also. I just need to be awake. It was so smart of them to not have bombs be a finite item, just have infinite bombs. This is a tool you can use and there's infinite ones of these and just experiment with blowing things up. So smart.

Well, the whole idea of the four items you get, the four or the four or five tools you get on the opening plateau, like to me, that is maybe the most important way that this game walks it back to the beginning of the series because, you know, ever since a link to the past, which had like two dungeons where you get a tool and use that tool to clear the dungeon and then kill the boss with that tool. You always use the tools to clear the dungeons in a link to the past, but then they had like two bosses where you had to, you know, use the hookshot to pull the eyeballs away from the giant slime thing and kill them individually. Like that became the way Zelda works, beginning with Ocarina of Time. And it turned into a real cliche. Like it stopped being interesting.

When you knew, I'm going to get this tool, I'm going to use this tool to reach the boss, then I am going to use this tool to knock the bass down and hit its weak spot. And that's going to happen three times. And I'll never use that tool again outside of like three prescribed areas. Yep. Yeah.

Whereas with this game, there was that reinvention of, okay, we're going to give you four tools up front. And that's all you're going to need for the rest of the game. And, you know, if you're a classic Zelda fan, you do feel a tinge of disappointment for maybe a second because you're like, oh, no hook shot. Oh, no item X, item Y, whatever. But when you see how the shrines work and when you go into each one and each one is a surprising, for the most part, a surprising and new experience. Combat Shrines, notwithstanding. I hate those.

I hate whenever I find one of those. Oh, I love combat shrines. The ones with the Guardians? Yeah, I like those. They're fine, but I prefer the puzzle ones. No, the worst ones are the physics puzzle. Oh, yeah. I hate those.

I don't remember, like, which one, like, the ones where you, like, I gotta balance the thing. Do I roll it over here? Did you not? I don't remember if I got stuck on those. I'm trying to think. Those drove me crazy. I could not buy the, the, the, oh, oh, oh,

Oh, the motion control. Yeah, the motion control. Those were, those were back. When I got to the second one of those, I was like, I can't do this again. And I swear I tried to do it the right way for 15 minutes straight. And I said, you know what? I'm just, screw this. I like move my controller, the joycon, and it spins the thing.

I was like, wait a minute. And then I just eventually used the movement of it to, if you can spin it completely 360, it then slapped to the ball to the other side of the screen. And after about 20 tries, like, oh, in light of that. In their defense, though, I did find it interesting that there was no right way to solve anything. Yeah, specifically with the motion stuff, it occurred to me just with that first elaborate one. Yeah. If you look at the path they lay out in front of you and where the ball falls, all you have to do is rotate it by 90 degrees.

It falls on the lane that you need it to, then turn it back, let it fall, and flip it over. Like, when I realized that, I was just like, why is anyone stuck on this? But that said, they leave it to your devices. It doesn't feel great because the motion control calibration is very bizarre. Yeah, it's not one-to-one like I want. It's like you move it and then it moves a little. It just, it's weird. To reset, you have to, like, disengage from it and then go back to it.

Magically, it's back the way you found it. Yeah. Reeking havoc. What I love about the initial shrines where you get the items is once you exit the shrine, there is something immediately outside you can use your new power on. So it's showing you, it's like you use this in the shrine. Here's how you use it in the world. You can pick up the treasure chest out of the water.

You can build ice cube, like, bridges to the treasure chest. Although there was one where, like, there's something in a lake, and you're supposed to use the item that you just, get from that shrine. Yeah, I think, I think, but maybe it's the one up in the mountain with the ice and you're supposed to use the colors, but I like fussed around with magnesis until I got it before I went in the shrine. And then I got out of the shrine.

I was like, oh, that would have been a lot easier if I'd done it the right way. But you can always do things the wrong way. There's so much potential for like, you know, kind of brute forcing an unintuitive way. Like if that's how your brain is wired, this game doesn't force you to do things the right way every time. So at E3, during our demo for that, because they let us play on the Great Plateau, right? And the four shrines were available, but I think that the way they had to build work

is that you could only unlock three of them. They made absolutely sure you were not going to see that power glider before you were meant to. Oh, I see. But outside of the shrine with, I think it's stasis, you can see that there's treasure underneath something there. And so I just kept laying bombs down, laying bombs on.

And there's a demonstrator standing nearby, recording all this. And I'm just like, do I need to waste my time here? He's like, I don't really want to tell you yet. It's like I kept bombing it and bombing him. I'm like, it doesn't work. And he's like, just go inside the shrine. I felt like an idiot.

But I learned the hard way. And, you know, I think the giving you those tools up front works in this game because there are so many systems. There's so much to do. You're not constantly using these things. And it's easy to forget, like, oh, yeah, I have the ability to like freeze time and hit stuff. Like, because you're not constantly doing it.

So it becomes kind of a puzzle in and of itself. It's not so much like, what is the right tool to use here? It's more like, do I have the, oh, right, that's what I do. It's jogging your memory and forcing you to change up the way you play, like to call back on things. They weren't afraid of overloading you with tools early on. Like, you definitely get the feel the pacing in other Zelda games. Like, I think they give out those items piecemeal also, so they make sure, like, you've used this one item for 12 hours, you definitely know how to use it.

Now is the time for the next item. Yeah, and they would sort of tease you, right? Because there was always that sort of a Metroid or Castlevania-like element where you'd see like these targets on the wall and be like, how do I, what do I even do with that? And then you find out later, oh, there's a hook shot. Okay. I'm going to use that to then traverse to this area. They didn't bind traversal in any way. During my adult life, I've lived in some apartments with tiny kitchens, and worse, for a long time, I didn't have the first clue about how to even prepare good food.

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equipment not return, and other charges and restrictions of clock. I don't know. So I don't want to be labor the Breath of the Wild Zelda 1 stuck in the past idea connection but there is one other thing

that I think really harkens back to the original Zelda in Breath of the Wild and that is the dungeon design I mean the dungeons in Breath of the Wild are not like a one-to-one translation of how dungeons

worked in Zelda 1 but I do feel the general spirit of them is much more in line with kind of how they worked at the beginning of the franchise. They're not these massive, you know, like a dungeon in Skyward Sword or Twilight Princess you go in and you're in there for an hour, two hours, sometimes three if you get stuck. And it kind of brings the game to a whole. Like when Nintendo switched to the more puzzle-oriented dungeon design and a link to the past,

it was really innovative and fresh and was like, wow, I've never seen anything like this. This is like a puzzle game and an RPG and an action game all in one. That's crazy. But, you know, after however many iterations, it became kind of cliche. And that was actually the hardest part of Skyward Sword for me. That's why I kind of faded out and never really continued because the dungeons were so big and so time-consuming that they just felt like a chore. Like you really have to sit down and commit yourself for a long time. Yeah, the density of the dungeons.

from, well, Twilight Princess, I think, was the first time I noticed it where the density was changing the way I played a game or the way I pasted it. Just like once I finished all the things to get to a dungeon, then when I get to the answers of dungeon, I'd say, like, I would normally keep playing, but I know I'll still want to be playing this in three hours. So do I have the next three hours for you? You really had to commit because it always felt like, you know, if you quit and save partway through a classic Zelda dungeon. engine. It's like, it's going to take me forever to come back here and remember exactly everything I was doing if I don't get to play for a few days. So, yeah, like I said, it really, that design, while definitely, you know, like kind of a trademark, it really, I feel, kind of grinds those games to a halt or can. And you don't have that problem in Breath of the Wild.

And I know some people are upset because Breath of the Wild doesn't have that many dungeons in the traditional sense. But it feels like they've taken all the puzzles from a dungeon and then spread them out across many places. So you can take them in these bite-sized. I love that so much. It is, they took probably what would have been like the equivalent of 20 regular dungeons and just cut them up and sprinkle them across the entire world. And it made it so much more beautiful in that way. I loved it.

What I think of in terms of designing in terms of how good I feel when I finish one is Portal. I feel like, I think Portal was a major influence on dungeon design. It's like these isolated challenges that are literally one room. You just have to know the context of this one room and that's it. Then you move on. And that's how Portal and Portal 2 are designed. I think you're right. Yeah.

Yeah, the spirit of the longer dungeons definitely feels carried on through like the divine beast, right? Yeah, much more so. Yeah, the one in Garudo Valley took me like two and a half hours. It was an amazing two and a five hours the first time. Are you talking about just inside the dust? Inside the Divine Beast? Or are you talking about like all the lead-up, all the steps you take in the quest leading to that point? No, this was just inside that, that Divine Beast specifically at the Garudo Valley.

Just because there were many pieces involved with solving the puzzle, it's a cylinder where you're like twisting each piece and the effect that it has and you're studying the room trying to figure it out. Yeah, that camel is really hard. I love that dungeon. Don't you dare. I know. It's too good for my smooth brain. All the different things go turn. I don't know. Maybe it's just my fondness for that aspect of Zelda. I do like when I'm trapped inside of a dungeon. But I do feel like because they are so long, you are effectively kind of, you're anchored there. I kind of set the Otero rule as you walk in a dungeon. You don't go to bed until it's done. So you really like kind of gauge. Even on Skyward I did that. We'd be like, okay, I know there are safe statutes here, but I'm scared I will forget a piece of this. I'd rather just get through it in one sitting.

Yeah, and I do feel like something is lost a bit with the sort of deconstructed approach, the scattered approach to dungeons, which is that there is, in the best of Zelda dungeons, this sense of progression, and like everything is a big, you know, a puzzle. It all fits together. And, you know, they started really doing that with a link to the past where you would kind of have to trace your steps back in a dungeon. and there would be something you'd see early on and you're like, what do I do there? And it wasn't until you had solved more puzzles, gotten more keys, and acquired a special item,

that you were like, okay, now I go back and now like, you know, I bombed through this one place and fall to the area that I can see below and I now have the tools to unlock everything I need there. You kind of lose that with,

with Breath of the Wild, sorry. And I realize, you know, that is something that Zelda has kind of made its trademark. But on the other hand, like, how many times have we done that? I'm okay of doing something different. And I think the world is just too big to keep those footnotes

in your brain, you know, come back here. The world's in Zelda 1 and 2 and Link to the Past and stuff. They are manageable to just know, like, oh, go back to this area. I know where that is. But it's like just a lot of random mountains and very few landmarks for the most part. Yeah. No, I agree. And I think, though, that the one other benefit that came from

sort of coming up with a bunch of Dungeons, uh, excuse me, shrine designs that, you know, make up the larger and comprise the larger divine beast in that area to an extent is that it does sort of form as a mini elegant tutorial without really trying to tutorialize it, right? Because if you found that trine, you know what that green ball does. When you put it on the plate, you know, it generates electricity, right? If you didn't find that, you won't learn that until you get to the, the proper puzzle itself. But they don't, they don't, they don't, it works either way if you knew or don't know.

Like, it's very clear how it works. I also do wonder, you know, comparing it to the first one, you know, in the first game, if they had had the technical capabilities to over-explain things to you, I wonder if they would have. Well, meanwhile, in Breath of the While, it's a conscious choice to not tell you stuff or to tell you fewer things and give you. What I mean is, like, if they could have had five screens of text on the screen in the original Zelda to say, well, the next place you want to go is here or the secret is here instead of just saying like having eight words max to explain

something, I wonder if they would have. No, I don't think so. I agree with Jeremy. They had text in the game. They could have used that to explain things, but instead they gave you cryptic riddles. Well, they put that text in the instruction book. All the stuff Henry's talking about is in the book.

You don't have to read it, though. It's not forced upon you. Right. But within the game, everything is cryptic. Like, they could have made that very clear explanatory text, but they chose not to. Yeah. And so I feel like the riddle of the game was part of the experience.

Yeah. Well, and at the time, like, who was doing that, right? Like, were any game developers really, like, overburdening you with too much information to try and tell you what's the next thing? No, because games were still kind of finding their way around. Well, games were so small back then that, you know, like, just kind of tossing players in and letting them figure things out and, you know, figure out how to beat some. certain enemies and that sort of thing, like that was part of the play experience. That was how you turn a, you know, a game like the original Zolda, you can beat in an hour and a half, two hours. But you turn that into a, you know, a two-month experience by not explaining things.

That was just kind of the nature of games. More value, yeah. So it will sit with this and figure it out. Yeah. So in this case, you know, it is a more conscious effort, I think, to kind of dial things back and not go to town over explaining stuff. Although, you know, if you talk to everyone and take every opportunity, you'll have a lot of things explained. But it's such a big game that there's no guarantee you'll get those explanations in the proper sequence or that someone will give you a hint before you actually need to use that hint.

I also feel like there was not the degree of like focus groups in market research at the time where it's like the Wii was like, okay, our core demographic is seven-year-olds who love we sports makers all the game for them it was just like they were just dudes making a game and there were there were like QA testers but there wasn't like all of the like stats and you know people trying to figure out what game will sell best they're just like this is a cool idea if there had been focus groups in the NES days then Zelda 2 would not have had a town hidden yes exactly tile of forest that you have to clear away with a hammer players can't find this well read the 10th hour was reading the manual exactly and we talked about

this was the other one, the understanding or sort of the knowledge was gained through other pieces of media. It wasn't game itself. Or the other people. Nintendo Power, just like, they would have tips for five-year-old games in their Q&A section or whatever just because people needed them. I mean, back then, their focus group

in Nintendo of America was just Howard Phillips. Like, he was he just said, oh, I played every game, this is what you do. And he was a guy who was 25 years old wearing a bow tie. So, I want to believe him. How much is he like the average man? I want to believe him when he says, he's finished every NES game, but I find that

I claim slightly dubious. I'm like, really? There's a few where I'm like, really. You beat taboo. Can anyone be taboo? Are you the reason Devil World didn't make it over? I appreciate that. Yeah, thank you. I figured it was Jesus. Howard Phillips died for our sins, or hasn't,

but possibly one day will. His soul died, playing all those bad NES games. You know, having all those conversations with people, that's in the breath of the wild, that's what reminded me a lot of Zelda, too, in the game. Just all the, the pocket of towns that are in there

as you find the remnants of civilization in Hyrule. Yeah, that's something that really went away starting with a link to the past where you had Hyrule, or you had a Kakariko village. And in subsequent Zaldi games, it's pretty much you have a village and the castle and then a few other NPCs scattered throughout the world. But this is really the first Zelda game I can think of

where there are lots of towns all over the world. And so, you know, kind of like in Zelda, too, you're traveling to new places and getting new knowledge from people. It's not all dumped on you at the same time. And it doesn't create a hub effect where you're constantly going back to the same place and trying to, you know, kind of progress through that town. They don't turn into bats and try to kill you, for example. I haven't found that yet. The Zelda 2 joke that it was like, wait, what is going on in this town? I just think of I AMER.

That's my first thought of talking to somebody in Zelda. But I like, too, the breath of the wild begins by making you think, like, well, everybody's dead. There's nobody alive in Hyrol anymore. And so then when you start meeting people, you're like, oh, hey, there are still people. Cool. Yeah, until it starts to turn into Westworld and you're like, well, wait a minute. Who are you? Is your name, Dolores?

How many times are going to save you on this bridge? Yeah, I was surprised. Again, like was Jeremy saying, I thought there was going to be Kakarika Village and maybe Hyrook Castle or whatever. But when I started something across more settlements, I'm like, oh, wow, this is much. bigger than I anticipated. It's a populated world. Yeah. And the fact that there is no hub makes the game, it's like, Link has no home. He's always wandering. There's no place you always return to to

fill out something or to give someone something. It's just like everybody has their own home and you're just a wanderer. And they could make that cave the place. Like, they could be like, yeah, keep coming back to that cave or whatever, but they don't. Like, yeah. Well, I think the shrine design too makes it about wandering because

it's what makes every shrine important to you. Like, oh, this is another fast travel point. Awesome. I can just go everywhere now. Yeah. Yeah. And even with the update, they're kind of giving you a way to set your own fast travel points.

Or if there is something in between those spaces that you want to get back to, they're trying to give you that, you know, if you're buying the DLC or not. I like some of the little connections that I found to Zelda 2. Like you begin the game in a shrine with someone sleeping. This time it's not Zelda sleeping. It's Link. But still, like, the way. kind of opens and, you know, there is this sort of sleeping person that does kind of

throw back to the original Zelda 2. And, you know, the shrines work more in the way of like the XP grindingness of Zelda 2 instead of just the complete this dungeon and that's when you'll get your next heart, you know? So the pacing of leveling up feels a little more like Zelda 2 as well. Yeah, there's only like four compulsory hearts in the game are right with the Divine Beasts. Yeah, that's correct. And you don't have to pick them up. And if you leave them there, you come back to where that beast is and it's just sitting there.

Oh, cool, cool. Yeah, they thought of everything, I think. Why would you leave it there? Speed runners, man. Don't underestimate. Oh, God. What's the record now? Like 20 minutes or something?

Something crazy like that, yeah. Like someone, like physics themselves across the map. But like Zelda, too, also, I think you mentioned this earlier, there were, you know, like things hidden in the forest sprites. And you would never know they were there unless you wandered. But if you wandered off the beaten path, you'd run into the, these enemies and sometimes they could be a little tough so it came down to, you know, how

dedicated were you to find this thing, but sometimes you needed that house per se to move forward. Well, the first time I came across an island with a labyrinth on it in Breath of the Wild I was like, that is Zelda 2 right there. Because there is, you know, on the second

continent in Zelda 2, there is an island kind of off to the northeast. Oh yeah, that place. With a labyrinth on it and you're like there's basically, there's I think a magic container or a heart container in there, but you have to find it. It's on like a specific patch of ground. And as you go through the labyrinth, like, you'll get into combat encounters and stuff. So it's really kind of disorienting because you're constantly being taken out of the labyrinth. And that was actually where I got

stuck when I played Zelda two the first time. Because I thought I'd explored the whole thing, but I was still short, like, one item that you need to get into the final dungeon. I was like, where in the world is it? And eventually, I think Nintendo Power or something told me, like, go to this square. And so I found that one square that I had somehow missed in the labyrinth. But the labyrinth here are different because they're not just like random combat encounters. There are like the drones patrolling and stuff and you can avoid those, but you don't have to like find your way through the labyrinth. You can actually climb over if you have enough stamina and just kind of like, you know, stumble your way around the top level of the maze. Oh, and stumble, I did.

No, because it was inscrutable, right? You didn't know what or what the direction was. and they do a lot of just basic trickery. Like, if you follow the map design on your chicaslate, it leads you nowhere because it's a hidden turn somewhere that you'll never see. Yeah, so, like, I feel like that kind of nebulous mystery really, you know, calls back to the NES era and creates a lot of the same appeal that the later games had. So, I don't know, I kind of want to wrap up now.

I think we've talked about a lot of the sort of big spiritual connection. But there are other little things that I like. You know, like Zelda 2 is very much more so than any other Zelda game. It was a game about combat and about, you know, like standing toe to toe with enemies. And this, you know, Aquarine of Time gave you the lock on and that sort of thing. Wind Waker gave you the evasions. But this really feels like it's not just, you know, like some set piece battles. It's like you're always fighting.

You're always kind of coming to terms with enemies and trying to come up with ways to outsmart them. the first time you come across wolves in the wild you're like oh my god they're so hard to hit because they always stay just out of your range and they're doing the like the Jurassic Park Raptor thing while one's distracting you another one's attacking you from behind but then I figured out like you can use that against them you can like toss a bomb onto the ground

and then kind of kite one toward you and detonate the bomb and it'll kill the wolf and the other wolves freak out and they run off so like you get free meat and you don't have to fight with wolves I really like how simple combat is, but the possibilities seem almost endless, where it's like every game from O'Koreen Onward's was building more on the combat up to Skyward's Sword, where it was that one-to-one Wii Pro Plus, whatever the hell that dongle was called. And this game, it's like, no, you can swing a thing or throw it.

But you also have nine million different things you can swing or throw. So have fun with that. I like that. It wasn't just like, okay, I'll wait for this animation, then hit A, and I'll sorker around the enemy, hit them from behind. It's just like, no, you can just swing a thing and just do that. Yeah, even the paraglider worked into combat, right? Yeah, that's true.

forget a pre-release video where he's sort of flying through the sky and then he sees a little group on the ground. He just lets go and just downward staff straight into them, knocks them all out in one hit. And I was just there like, yep, that's awesome. But archery was never really, like it's always been a part of the Zelda series, but it's never been this involved or this easy to use. Yeah. And previously it's like you get the slingshot first and then you wait for the bow and arrow.

You have to earn that. And how satisfying they make headshots in this one. Oh, yeah. Just that sound of it. a headshot. It's just like, boom. Yeah. The way enemies collapse.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It's them showing off. You know, the thing that it didn't remind me a ton of Link to the past other than the opening area totally did. Like, it had the same, it did give me the same kind of feeling I had when I first played Link to the past when, as a foolish 10-year-old, I thought, well, now they got these

three dungeons, and I'm the end of the game. I thought that too, Henry. Yeah. And so. The plateau, not exactly the same. I definitely knew the world was bigger than the plateau, but when it really shows you, like, you know, this is how big this thing is. You don't appreciate how much bigger it is because you can see Hyrule Castle from the beginning.

So you're like, oh, so it's like, here I am, and there's Death Mountain and Hyrule Castle. That's it. But, yeah, the actual scale of it all is just, yeah, it's staggering. And they really got to, it's something you don't even think about because HD has been a reality for us for so long, but it's the first original HD Zelda and they could do a lot of stuff with HD detail that they didn't do in any previous Zelda game.

And that's really special too. Whenever I say people complain about like the lack of grass textures or something in this game, I'm like, really? I mean, did you notice like how stylish and painterly this game is? Yeah, it's missing the point a lot. And I think they're sacrificing

a lot of graphical fidelity for just the amount of interactions. At the same time, though, I'm playing near automata, and in the back of my mind, I'm like, I love breath of the wild, but God, I wish it could look like this. I wish the landscape could look like this. Some people are doing that, right? Like, they're using, you know, WiiU emulation and they're bumping it up. Oh, yeah, dolphin, yeah. I've seen like 4K breadth of the wild. Yeah, they're pushing it as harder than they can. Though they wanted that painterly style like that was also the GDC thing where they talked about how they were working on Wind Waker HD and then the art director just came up to Al Newman. I think it should look like this. Like, yeah.

Yeah, that was the shortest meeting on our direction, like in the history of video games. Just like, make it look like that. Fine. Yes. Okay, we're done. And, I mean, they added more to it. They added more detail. But they definitely, it was, you can, a lot of stuff clicked from me when they revealed that they were really starting to work on Breath of the Wild as they were putting out Wind Waker HD.

And you're like, okay, this Wind Waker HD making it again or overseeing the remake of it taught them a lot of lessons or reminded them of stuff they wanted to do. do in in breath of the wild All right, so I'd like to jump over to the mailback now because we've got some good letters from readers. So we'll make this quick and then wrap up, but I definitely want to read some of these thoughts. From Nicholas Lehman. Breath of the Wild is the new standard for open world gaming going further.

The key is building a game with mechanics and systems that lend themselves to emerge in storytelling. Breath of the Wild's open-air system combined with its chemistry and physics system, form a breeding ground for players to craft their own stories. In the same way that the original legend of Zelda paved the way for action-adventure games with its emphasis on exploration, an ocarina of time helped bring gaming into the third dimension, so too did Breath of the Wild single-handedly redefined open-world exploration.

And it also helps that the game trusts the player to figure out the solutions to their problems themselves. He hit it right on the head. And I think the one thing we didn't talk about too is this was the inverse version of everything that open world usually does. Take, for example, Assassin's Creed, you get on top of the high highest point. And now they litter that section with, oh, look at all these little things you can do now and look at all these activities. I was like, no, now you can just see what the topography

looks like. You actually need to go in there and find what you're trying to do. There's no checklists that you're opening up. It's just like, I will find things on my own. I don't know how many corox seeds there are unless I go online and look it up. 900. Don't get them all. It's a lot of poop. It's a lot of poop. For Michael Klappik, I think

the Breath of the Wild does harken back to a lot of what made the original Zaldi grade. It also expands a lot on those ideas and ultimately or ultimately results in a game that is way more open-ended. Zelda 1 wasn't really as open as we might remember it. It was more like a linear game that was guideless. There's still an order to things as opposed to Breath of the Wild, which is explicitly designed to have no order to progression.

Yeah, you could potentially stumble across almost any dungeon in Zelda 1, but try getting to Dungeon 4 without the raft, or completing any dungeon with water in it without the bridge ladder item. Let's see. That said, it's more like an evolution. There's lots of elements of Breath of the Wild that feel like they took Zelda 1 elements and fleshed them out. Breath of the Wild also handles enemies

in a similar way to Zelda one that I think is quite clever. The variety of enemies in Breath of the Wild isn't as vast as previous 3D Zelda instead there's a core set of foes that are color coded to signify difficulty. And as a side note, I for one am delighted to see Lionel's represented in a 3D Zelda for the first time ever.

3D Zelda fans deserve to know the terror we all felt stumbling across them on the NES. They also brought back the Burt people which I felt were sorely missing from all the games following Wind Waker. Yeah, the Rito. So the parrot with the accordion is my friend. Is that your husbando?

It's not on that level, Henry. We have a platonic mutual understanding. Yeah, also a great musical homage in their village. It was fantastic. Well, I haven't gone there yet. Yeah, yeah, cool. Wait until you see that. All right, this is from a guy from Norway, and I'm going to mispronounce your name,

and I apologize, Comacor Gordarsan. Breath of the Wild made me realize what I missed from every Zelda since burning every bush and roaming through the forest maze in the original, a genuine openness, a feeling of an actual world and not just a rapper around dungeons. Instead of funneling me down a path of puzzle rooms with one solution, Breath of the Wild, entrusted players to experiment and explore.

As a result, it captivated me like no other Zelda game has in over 25 years. From JJ, Breath of the Wild is simply magical. Zelda on the NES was my first big adventure game. I remember seeing that gold box with a gold cartridge at the mall when I was 12. I had to have it. I would take the map to school and talk about the game

with my friends. We filled out each other's maps with secrets we'd found and gave dungeon and boss tips. It was a community experience. The same thing happened with Breath of the Wild. My friends and I couldn't wait to talk about our adventures. Our experiences were so wildly different. Our maps were full of the things we had found, not cluttered with useless points of interest like other open world games. Our adventures were our own and we couldn't stop talking about it. I missed a gold cartridge. I wish they'd done it, but maybe there was no like-bittering agent you can put on it. Maybe that didn't work. It was nice to see the final. I think

I think that Wii U copy of Zelda could be the last disc Nintendo ever prints. I think it could be. From David Scholes. I was hesitant at Breath of the Wild at first. I've always been one to attempt to 100% Zelda games. Formula of the last decade or so has worked well for me. I'd never played any modern open world game more than attempting to survive as long as I could on a friend's GTA. But Breath of the Wild caught me in the initial minutes.

What felt strongest was the loneliness. While no longer having a companion character was a great change, not waking up in a as a departure, I didn't realize would affect me so. When I finally left the first area and saw a familiar face in Beatle, I was enlivened. What the game lacks in story, it more than makes up for an atmosphere and emotion. I love that, beetle.

Thank you. It's weird that he has a human body, but still a Muppet head. It's like a... I don't know that his backpack is also shaped like a huge beetle. Oh, you're right, yeah. Eric Spratling says, everyone and their mother has weighed in on just about how well the newest Zelda has briefed.

breathed fresh life into both the series' own formula and that of the modern open world premium RPG. But one aspect I seem to hear little about is its story, with some reviewers dismissing it as perfunctory, and one level at their right. With its beat the four sub-boss's structure, Breath of the Wild's overall plot couldn't be more basic and predictable. Yet even a cynical old gamer like myself couldn't help but fall in love with many of the story and character beats anyway. I grinned at the joyful teamwork as I flitted about madly with my NPC partner to attack every dungeon's outer shell. And the row of the rousing cutscene after each divine beast was restored, got my blood pumping each time,

both building up my confidence to face the vital challenge and giving me the satisfaction that comes with having righted a horrible wrong. I liked those cutscenes, but it's still, they dealt with it way better, and they didn't say Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword, but they still like Link doesn't talk, and so they kind of just have to cut around times when Link would have said something, you know? It's still noticeable to me in it, but in the better, less noticeable than it wasn't Skyward or Twilight. I think the thing I appreciate most about it

is just that it is pieces of a story. They don't tell you the whole thing. I'm kind of glad they don't. And you might not see the whole thing, right? Yeah, that's the other part of it too. Yeah, they don't waste time on it. Okay, just a couple more. Ryan Bloom says,

more than just a return to Zelda's roots, I find Breath of the Wild to be a return to the roots of the entire open world sandbox mechanic. I always remember the hubbub people made over Grand Theft Auto 3 and the freedom to choose how you wanted to complete an objective. The game would tell you to, off somebody, but left the grisly details up to you to define. As open world games progressed, they eventually locked you into heavily scripted

encounters, where if you deviated from the narrative, you failed the objective. The open world is merely a very expensive and mostly a necessary backdrop. You could likely stitch all of GTA's five, GTA five's cutscenes and missions together, and cut out its open world and exploration, nobody would miss it. Breath of the Wild gets back to the original reason anyone cared about open world games to begin with. And let's see. You got some good mailback, man. I mean, I do feel like it breaks.

the MMO structure that almost every open world game follows, at least Western ones. Yeah, yeah. Though, I mean, things like fighting those memories and those specific places, they don't make you, like, go into Eagle Vision to find it, but they follow similar things. Like, I've done quests like that dozens of times in Assassin's Creed of find this thing and will give you an ounce of a memory that will add up to a cool story. Yeah, but on the other hand, Assassin's Creed, like, you go up to a tower, you look around, everything's on your map.

I like the fact that this doesn't do that. No way. Like you go up on a tower and your map, you know, the outlines fill in, but that's it. Or if you're in a mission and you go the wrong way, oh, you're out of sync, start over, you know, things like that. And the design wise of just making it, making the shrines visible from the top of that thing. Like, not every shrine, but it made me want to walk around and circle every time. Like, okay, let's see how many shrines I can see. Oh, there's one.

There's one. There's one. Like to make you visually look for it instead of just hoping. for, you know, a new legend to appear on your map. Yeah, sorry, just the one that makes me make me chuckle is there's one that's just a shot of the forest.

I'm like, what the hell? There's like, 20, like hundreds of those. Are you kidding me? These trees are special. From Tim Shrimpum, Shrimpton, a parent's perspective on the Zelda spirit question. Breath of the Wild seems to have brought

the same spirit of the original Zelda to the playground. Our kids, eight and four, talk about Zelda almost every moment of every day. I hear Master Sword and Hinox and Lionel drifting through the air whenever I'm able to be here for recess. Almost every day our oldest comes home with a tip or secret from one of his friends that he's just dying to try out. They're talking about locations of hidden treasures and difficult enemies.

It has captured their imaginations in a way that I never expected, even bleeding into playing Zelda with sticks and toy swords for not playing the game. As a parent, it's been a lot of fun not only to explore the game myself, but to explore it with them and through their eyes. That really goes back to the Minecraft connection. I feel like it broke the conventional wisdom of giving small children instruction and the fact that they had complete freedom

is what to empower them and what made them obsessed with the game and what made them want to watch videos of the game and everything like that. I feel like that's the direct connection. Yeah, that letter may be a little misty eye. That's fantastic. That must be such a great feeling for a parent.

Here's another one. We'll end on this one, which has a similar sort of message from Philip Summers. I've been playing Breath of the Wild with my twin daughters that are six years old. We have previously played through most of the mainline Zelda games where I would read them the stories and they would mostly watch me play. They love the games and the stories, but 3D Zelda's are too hard for them to actually play on their own.

Breath of the Wild, on the other hand, is way more approachable. It's the first Zelda where they can play it and feel like they contribute to the adventure. My daughter loves cooking in it and is always happy when I would need to rely on her meals during a boss battle. My other daughter, however, has been completely taken by it and has played it nearly every day since launch. We talk about it all the time, and because it's so large, we have discovered new things separately from one another and are always trading secrets. I can see that this Zelda will be as meaningful to her as the original was to me when I was a child. I think in that regard, Breath of the Wild has certainly lived up to its ambition of returning the franchise to its roots.

The kids are right. They're not wrong. That's really important. Yeah, it's like not just for old farts like us. It appeals to kids, too. Video games don't have to be like comic books. They don't have to be like increasingly focusing on a shrinking, aging population. They can bring in fresh blood.

and it's great that a franchise like this that's been around for 30 years is able to do that that kids don't necessarily have to go to five nights at Freddy's or Minecraft or something to find something that speaks to them like whatever Zelda has or Nintendo has done with a Zelda game

you know it's great to hear that it is it's got that same allure for new players as it does for veterans that it can be universal like that while also still appealing to old farts more than their more than their last couple of console Zelda's

dude, you know? Strangely enough, I have not heard that that's not real Zelda, like I heard with Resident Evil 4, like, that's not real Resident Evil. Like, I'm sure that exists, but I haven't heard it, and I'm sure I would have heard it if it was, like, a significant voice. I haven't, I haven't heard that.

I've heard people, you know, be critical of granular elements of it, like the dungeon or whatever, but I haven't heard anyone say, like, no, that's not Zelda. It's not real. It is Zelda. It is so Zelda. Yeah, exactly. It is so Zelda, and I hang my head every time, because it's like, look, if it had been what you've done,

Hundreds of times before, like, I love that the mission statement of this game was do it differently, even if it has the spiritual connections to the other games. It doesn't matter. We haven't seen some of this stuff in forever. I think it was worthwhile, whereas when I see folks, again, arguing and belaboring the point over, like, oh, well, there were not eight dungeons and I expect eight dungeons in every Zelda. It's like, look, you got to let that go. And maybe the next one will return some of that. Yeah, if you want, you know, standard 3D Zelda, they just did an HD port of Dark Siders 1 and 2. So they're eager.

Yeah, have fun. Hey, that's fine. Have you never played Dark Siders the first? Go right. It's like it's a new Zelda game for you. Except it's drawn. Yeah, it's drawn for 17-year-olds in 1999. Right.

But I think there is a population that wants that from Zelda. They can't have that, but they can have Dark Siders. Maybe we'll see more Zelda clones now, like traditional Zelda clones will come back into fashion. I do wonder if they weren't exactly back to back, but having Okami and Dark Siders prove that other people could make a Zelda game? I wonder if that made Nintendo question what they do with Zelda games. That's true, yeah. It's less special.

Makes you wonder, too, what, you know, Rockstar is thinking of Red Dead Red Dead Redemption. Not that they would ape Zelda wholesale, but, hey, here's an open world game that just set the standard, right? And you're an open world developer about to release a really big title. Makes you wonder. I mean, in the years to come, we're going to definitely see its influence on a lot of games. Will we? I think so. Do you think people will take the right lessons from this game?

I think they'll get a few of the right lessons from it anyway. I think they'll probably learn some bad ones. But I think, like, say in the case of Ubisoft with the trademarked Ubisoft's open world that they make eight of every year, I think they'll see the ways that Nintendo learned from them and improved to refine things. And they could take some of that back. And I hope they do. I really do too. I want to like more of their games. I'm picturing a businessman just sending an email saying,

Did you see the attach rate? Oh, my God. There's more copies. How do we do that? Like more copies than actual systems, right? Jesus. That hasn't happened since Pac-Man for Atari 2,600. I really want to know the Wii U attach rate

because I'm one of the proud Wii U Breath of the Wild owners. And I'm not ashamed of who I am. They put a number out there, but I don't think they've updated it. Oh, yeah. Well, I think that wraps it up for this episode. So thanks, guys.

Thanks everyone who wrote in. Great letters this time. Great conversation this time. Hopefully everyone was okay that this episode, much like Breath of the Wild, broke from the formula. I hope you still feel like this was Retro-Nus. I wrote a one-star review during the podcast, and I said Bob Mackey would not stop with his political ranting, and Jeremy was boring. More like Nintendo Nuts. Okay.

So anyway, worth it, absolutely worth it. For Retronauts, this has been Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. You can find Retronauts at Retronauts.com on iTunes and on the podcast One Network or app. You can also help support the show at Patreon.com slash Retronauts. There's so many ways to hear us and support us. It's amazing. We're all over the Internet.

It's really good. Jose? All right. First of all, thank you so much for having me, by the way. Thank you for joining. Yeah, no. Always a pleasure to come on the best retro podcast. What I will say, that's right.

You guys, IG has a retro podcast. No, no. So it's safe to say that. Yeah, it's safe to say that. No, absolutely. But, yeah, I'm on Twitter at Jose underscore Otero, O-T-R-O, and you can find me on IGN. I run our Nintendo podcast there, and you'll find my name on a bunch of articles, I'm sure, that are related to that. Awesome. I'm H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G on Twitter.

You can follow me there. I do a lot of podcasting, and, well, gee, I guess this is so far off in the future, Bob. We could say that I co-host the show with Bob Talking Simpsons, where we go through every episode of the Simpsons chronologically from the beginning. We're probably at the end of season five about now, or maybe the start of season six. And that is supported on patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Ooh. We're jumping the gun here, but it's going to happen by the time this episode comes out.

Totally. So follow me there. And yeah, I also love doing Retrodots, as always. So thank you very much for having me back. And I, of course, I'm Bob Mack. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. I also want to say, and I will say this on every podcast now, that if you give to our Patreon at $3 a month, you will not hear ads.

So you'll get the podcast a week ahead of time at a higher bit rate with no ads. I hear a lot of pushback on ads. And that's the one way to not hear ads outside of pushing a button once. So please go to patreon.com slash Retronauts for that bonus. Thank you. And I guess that wraps it up. So that's Retronauts. Thanks again for listening.

We'll be back next week with another episode. That's what we do. Thank you. Did you see that game, oh, oh, oh, and you see that game, did you see that game last night? Instant Classic. I can't believe how much burden was sweating in the night. You could see each bead dripping off his brow. I didn't see him sweating.

My girlfriend was blown away by his clear skin. She kept going on and on about what his daily regime is. It was pretty impressive. I'm sure you noticed that. Yeah, I didn't notice his smooth skin. Either you don't have a girlfriend or you don't have direct TV. I don't have either, actually. Wow.

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Equipment lease, activation, installation, early termination, equipment not returning and other charges and restrictions of the product. The Mueller Report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News. minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a

President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican Senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do.

The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.