Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 66: Zelda on NES

Episode Date: May 23, 2016

Chris Kohler and Sam Claiborn join Jeremy and Bob to dive deep into a part of the Zelda series Retronauts has rarely touched on: The NES duo of The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II. Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more podcasts or whatever. And if you'd like to support the show, that can be arranged through our Patreon page.

This week in Retronauts, Octorox, Tectites, and Levers, too. Hi, everyone, and welcome to... Oh, man, which episode of Retronauts is this? We've been doing this for like 10 years. It's the 10th Zelda episode. So we've got to have at least 20 episodes under our belts. So welcome to episode 21 of Retronauts. I'm just assigning that number arbitrarily.

21, I think we're in the 60s by now. We're in the 60s. We have to be. It's all imaginary numbers. We're counting down. Welcome to the square root of negative 1 of retronauts. That's exactly right. Quantity is a construct of the human mind.

And so are video games. So we're going to talk about those this week. We're going to talk specifically about the legendary of Zelda and Zelda too. How have you not talked about Zelda before? We've talked about Zelda in general, but we've never really... I've listened to the Zelda episodes. We've never really drilled deeply into the NES games.

Because people tend to kind of brush over those. As the Retronaut's a historian, I guess, I think the last time this show did an episode on Classic Zelda was maybe 2007, so we're about due. I was a listener, good God. Long-time listening. And that was the 25th anniversary. Everything about that game has changed since then. The way we think hasn't changed.

But maybe you didn't dig into Zelda, too? Definitely not. Guys, I beat Shadow Link two days ago for the first time ever. Oh, nice. Wow. So it's fresh. Sweet. Okay.

Well, that's excellent. Wait. Who are you? I never played Zelda, too. Oh, my name is... No. This is actually asking for an identification. Sure.

My name is Sam Claiborne. I'm an editor at IGN, and I operate games at Free Gold Watch and Hatt Stanyan in the Mission, or the Hate Asper District. You keep talking that place up. I need to go sometime. It's a great arcade. San Francisco's most pinball. I stayed in a super crazy Airbnb like two doors down from that one time.

Really? Yeah. Was it above a yoga place? That's a trick question because they're all yoga places. Also, I'm Jeremy Parrish. I'm here as usual. And diagonally from me. I'm Chris Kohler from Wired and I'm so hungry I could eat an Octarock.

Wow. There's some scones right there. Oh, cool. We could do the thing where we eat on the podcast because I know people really like that. I am one of those people who really, really loves that so much that I would. Oh, no, no, no, don't even imitate it. I literally want to punch. the best thing. We just got...

I'll edit that out. I think we just got three one-star reviews for that. And also, I'm Bob Mackey, noted Zelda 2 Hater. I'm sipping on that Zelda 2 Hater Aid, and it's delicious. This is the... That's an unusual and iconoclastic opinion. We're on the anti-Zelda-2 side of the table, I guess. Oh, cool.

I never said I was pro-Zalda-2. Well, you just beat it. I just beat. I need to deconstruct it and decompress it, I guess, in this very episode. This could be therapy, folks. You heard it here first. We'll see. Anyway, so yes, in case you haven't figured it out, we're going, because I mentioned it.

Okay, yeah, we're going to talk about Zelda and Zelda 2, the Adventure of Link. More or less on the occasion of their 30th anniversary, or of Zelda's 30th anniversary, which was February 21st. And then Zelda 2 came out in Japan, I want to say February, 1987, so it wasn't too far behind. So, yeah, both of those games are pretty old now. And I remember seeing commercials for them when they were brand new. and that makes me feel very old. I remember waiting for many, many years for Zolda 2 to come to America.

Well, I guess it was like a year, but it seemed like so long. Yeah. Well, that was the first example of, well, I don't know. I'll get myself in trouble and say it was the first example of. The first example. Of a game being announced

and like sort of having a release window and then like getting a very conspicuous delay. This is for Zelda 2. For Zelda 2. Yeah, because Nintendo had to say, yeah, the quote unquote chip shortage, yeah. Yeah, we can talk more about that later, but I wonder how much of that was true.

Well, I mean, it's not so much a chip shortage as, like, it probably took them a certain amount of time to manufacture these games, you know, internal components and external components, and they probably realized, like, oh, we actually need a lot of these. Like, the NES has kind of exploded so much in popularity that, like, we can't release this game without, like, exponentially more copies of Zelda 2 than we were originally going to have. That could be the origin of Nintendo's, you know, just having too few of one thing,

that everybody's excited about just has to be repeated every time they put out a console every time they put out an amoe well actually actually the NIES itself was like to build a two at that time

Nintendo had like their chip manufacturing process and that was how right I mean like Nintendo's games all third party games like Nintendo manufactured everything third parties had come to Nintendo and said we'd like to do our own

you know chips and here's factories that we have and Nintendo was like no this is an unacceptable level of quality so like they're they really had really high standard for the quality of the electrical, you know, electronic components inside. I wonder if that was the full story there. I think, I think no.

But anyway, we'll talk more about that. Again, Nintendo might, people are like, oh, Nintendo, you know, they screw third parties because they didn't give them enough of their allotted orders. But Nintendo's not going to screw themselves with a fake chip shortage to, like, delaying a game doesn't help anybody. Like, I imagine there really was an issue getting enough manufacturers. I'm sure that's true.

It's for hype. Zelda 2 used a cartridge very similar to, the first Zelda, except it had an additional subcomponent to it. It had like an extra 16K of some kind of memory soldered onto it. So it was almost the same, but not quite. Yeah, isn't it weird?

But I really think, you know, as I think about it, it occurs to me that Zelda launched in America right around the time that the NES really started to pick up steam. And I kind of wonder if they just wanted to delay Zelda too so that the first game had more time to breathe. Could be? lots and lots of kids were still buying NESs all the way up. I think the peak of the NES market in terms of console uptake was 1989.

So, like, there were more and more people buying the games. And, you know, NES games were, just in general, games at that point had a different life cycle than they do now. Now they come out and three weeks later, they go on Steam sale or whatever and the value drops out. But during the Nintendo era, a popular game would stay in circulation for years and years. I mean, the Black Box games were, we're continuing to show up on store shelves into the 90s.

Imagine a game like Zelda in which nobody could solve it. Right. It was unsolved. It was a never-ending adventure. Do you think that explains the Mario 3 18-month gap between America and Japan just to get Mario saturation at its highest level? Yeah, I really think one of the parts of the 18-month gap is that Mario 3 came out in Japan, I believe, one month after Mario 2 came out in America.

Oh, wow. So that needed some time on the shelves. Oh, for sure. But, I mean, that is, yeah, that's part of it. Like, they wanted to give the previous game time to breathe. Sure. So I think it's a combination of factors. Yeah, and anyway, I mean, the delay of Zelda 2 was a boom to hurt the game.

I mean, yeah, it gave other people a chance to, you know, release games. But also, like, it built up this anticipation for Zelda 2. By the time it came out, we were all like, when there's Zelda 2 coming? Right. I would call, like, the local stores that had electronic sections. Like, on a weekly basis, I would call all of them and say, do you have Zelda 2 yet? This was in the summer, like, months before them?

No, there's some speculation that they released a very limited quantity of Zelda 2 in the U.S. Because it was actually announced, I think, at the same time as Zelda. Like, there are promotional materials that are like new coming soon, Zelda and Zelda 2. And then Zelda 2 didn't show up for, you know, like two or three years later. And Nintendo Power, they actually used issues to address the shortage, too. Yeah, I mean, it was their propaganda mouthpiece. But yeah, I don't, I personally think it's very unlikely that they, would have released just a few games and then said, oh, no, let's not do that.

I really think they had plans to release it initially and then, for whatever reason, whether it was manufacturing quantities or just the desire to let the first Zelda take some time and breathe, because they put a lot of marketing behind Zelda, the first one. And it was a really, it was a standout game, not just because it was a good game, but also because of the packaging and the presentation and the marketing and everything. So, yeah, why don't we talk about the first game and whatever great? Yeah, this has been Chip Chet, in case you weren't paying attention. Our new segment.

So, The Legend of Zelda, what was it? Let's not read the notes since. Sure. Tell me, guys, what was it? Well, it was a game that was developed alongside Super Mario Brothers that couldn't have been more different than Super Mario Brothers. Like, they were made at the exact same time, and they feel like just completely different ideas.

That's like developing Star Wars and Indiana Jones at the same time, too. Like, that's really strange. They came out. I mean, they said originally the character walking around on the screen was Mario. I mean, because that's just what Ventendo did. Yeah, and just sort of like Plot Mario down. Mr. Video. Yeah, Mr. Video, exactly.

I just have him walking around. But the idea, you know, just starting to developing that top-down gameplay first and then trying to figure out later. Definitely, I mean, when the first Legend of Zelda was released in Japan, it was called an RPG. Like, it says that on there, right? So this was clearly, like,

Miyamoto looking at the emerging genre of the role-playing game and saying, I can do this better. by taking out all of the parts of the role-playing game. I wonder if Zelda came like six, maybe like eight, nine months later, if it would have been a different game because it came out right before Dragon Quest arrived. And Dragon Quest really, I know it took a while for that to get pick up, but that really sort of set the design of RPGs.

And you see a lot of Dragon Quest in Zelda, too, actually. I kind of feel like the game came out at just the right time to be what it was and to be sort of unshaped by other trends in the Japanese games industry. Right. They were both shaped by the growing, like, realization that RPG is a thing and then took it in two wildly different directions. Like, because looking at, because Dragon Quest also looked at, you know, games like wizardry and games like Black Onics,

and we're like, you know, let's make this really for the console audience, to make this for kids, let's make this for, you know, casual gamers, if you will. It was also shaped by the hardware, too, right? Because it was a Famicom disc system. Sure, yeah. It was made for that. It was like, what can we do with the system? Well, we can put saves on it.

What does that game that needs saves look like? Yep. Doesn't look like Super Firefighters. Yeah, because Dragon Quest on cartridge in Japan used passwords. Everything used passwords. And so their idea, being a third party, was, well, we have to use passwords or something else we can do. But the disc system was their, you know, one of the major, like, benefits of the Famicom Disc system was, this will let you save games and have adventures that go on and on and on.

You don't have to write down passwords anymore. And then the first games that we saw, you know, on Famicom Disc System were, like, Castlevania, Kid Icarus, Metroid, and these were games that, and Zelda, and these were games that allowed YouTube, they all had saves. Can you imagine Castlevania having saves? That makes it so possible. It makes it, it makes sense why the U.S. version was so, like, completely ridiculously difficult. Yeah, it, yeah, the game is, the game's still difficult, but so difficult. Right, right, but you can try the same levels over and over again.

For me, growing up and just kind of figuring out video games, Zelda was kind of like the dad game. Like, everyone's dad was playing Zelda. Like, if you were a dad in the 80s, Zelda was your game. And it was this thing I would watch people's dads play and be like, that looks so complicated. But eventually I got the confidence to play it myself. But for some reason, it was just like I just viewed it as the dad game. Like, your mustache dad in the 80s, you're playing Zelda. Yeah.

Having a good time with your 80s. You know. So clearly, I can totally agree with you. Yeah. I just remember I felt a little young for Zelda when it came out. Like, I can just say that. Well, Zelt, I mean, you know, because. because it was this, the lengthy adventure that kept drawing you back in,

you know, all dads, you know, they would sit down and play some Super Mario Bros. Maybe Dad even beat Super Mario Bros. I remember Mom's liking Zelda, too. Yeah, but, like, making maps and stuff. Your parents might try things and then sort of walk away from it. So, okay, I played that game. That was fun. That was interesting, but I don't really play games. But Zelda was, like, one of the first games in the NES where it would just keep bringing you back for more, because you can't just sit down and play it a little bit.

It's kind of, like, info-competition adventures. Like, parents always, like, were attracted to those to just come back, and they're a little bit more surreal. And they're slow-paced and they reward, you know, they reward the things that parents have the patience and the, um, the, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, kids don't, like, you know, your parents are, they are doing problem solving and they're going, okay, let me take a step back here. What if I bomb this wall? Whereas kids are just like, ah, killing enemies. I can't play this game. How do I get past this dungeon? Yeah. It's funny how we're talking about everybody as, as parents, because we were kids then, but actually we're just

talking about adults. Yeah, wow. Makes you think. Perspective. It's matter of perspective. Adults own NES if they didn't have kids. That's the thing, right? That's the question.

The chicken and egg. You know, it would be like the distribution, you know, some of them would. Some of them would. The weirdos would. Adults had Atari's. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Somewhere along the line, you know, it was the introduction of computers.

But that probably also burned them on, like, I'll just get an adult computer instead of a kid's toy. No, I mean, that's essentially what was happening. Yeah. The, I mean, remember, when the NES came. out, we've, I mean, here's something we've done to death on retronauts, you know, people thought... Don't even say the words. People thought that video game systems were over.

And so, if anything, they were trying to sell them as, like, yeah, as a children's toy, right? But parents, adults had moved on to computers. And, of course, they'd sit on their computers for hours and hours playing games, but they weren't playing video games. These were computer games for grown-ups. Yeah. So I want to go back to the idea of Zelda being an RPG

because, man, are people insufferable about arguing that it's not an RPG? Action RPG or adventure or... It's okay. Role-playing game is a very open and broad term. Just because you don't have numbers that go up. What about the numbers? It doesn't mean it's not an...

Oh, you did it. But I feel so uncomfortable. It blew it up. Yeah, but I mean, it really was drawn from... You can't make a character. It was kind of trying to distill RPG concepts into sort of an action milieu, if you want to say. You know, you had games like Adventure for Atari 2,600.

was in the late 70s, Venture by Exidy. And then on the Japanese side, which probably was more influential to Nintendo, you had Namco's Tower of Juraga, which Zelda looks very, very much like Tower of Duraga. So does Gauntlet.

Suspiciously like Tower of Duraga. Not I'm saying it's a ripoff. It's got a guy with a very short sword. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, they are very, the three quarters per seclectic. Yeah, exactly. Like the characters and everything are not top.

Well, you have like those wizards that are just like the whizrobes. They warp around and shoot at you. I mean, it's very definitely coming from the same cloth. But you also had, on the PC side, you also had, you also had Falcom experimenting with series like Sorcerian, and those may not have been quite as directly molded and influential for Nintendo.

But that was like 19... I've never heard of that one. What's that? Sorcerian is, no, it's a PC game. I think they worked on PC88 mostly. The problem, I think one of the issues with, like, if we, one of my problems is if we call Zelda, a role-playing game,

it almost defines down role-playing game to the point that role-playing game starts to lose a lot of its meaning. And we don't really have a word to describe a Final Fantasy anymore. If that's an RPG...

It's an action RPG. That's what it is. I mean, again, I think that's debatable. Like, I'm not really passionate about it. I don't really want to have this argument. I'm just saying that it is attempting to distill RPG concepts into an action experience.

So action RPG is a really good description for RPG or for what the game is. And, you know, I just went to the GDC Diablo panel yesterday and listened to David Breivik talk. And, you know, afterwards I asked him, like, you said that Diablo was the birth of the ARPG, but, you know, I was playing action RPGs on consoles a long time before that. So how does that differentiate? And he said, you know, at the time that Diablo came out, there were a lot of PC Grognards who were like, God, know, this is. not an RPG? Like, where's the character creation system? What the hell? This is no RPG. So there's always people trying

to draw boundaries. I'm more interested in looking at the idea, the inspiration behind Zelda. And it really is to take the RPG experience and make it a stabby fast action game. And Miyamoto is not into RPGs. I mean, he will say

I mean, I think when I was talking to him about, I don't know, mother or something like that Earthbound, it was just like, I I dislike RPGs. I have a fundamental dislike of RPGs because you don't need to like perform well or get better. I mean, you just have to put in the time

like just pressing the A button over and over again to build up your character before you move on. So Zelda is the RPG for people who don't like RPG. It's by the people who don't like RPGs. Right. That is precisely what it is. It's trying to take that concept and move it forward. Now, Zelda 2,

which we'll talk about later, I mean, that I think you can see, that is a reaction to the popularity of Dragon Quest because Dragon Quest was explosive in its popularity and Final Fantasy. And so now RPG's being a huge thing in Japan, Nintendo was like, okay, now let's do a game with numbers. Now let's do a game with grinding.

However, those games basically play themselves compared to Zelda too. Right, right, right, no, no, that was an attempt to total, not total line, it was attempt to walk the line between. Yeah, I think to push back toward the RPG, like the RPG concepts. still maintain the action-oriented nature of the gameplay

where you do have to perform the game well, you know, when you do have to have skills in order to do that, but to add in grinding and to add in experience and to add in more RPG elements. And then they pulled back from that immediately, and then they never did that again. It's funny you mentioned all the Japanese influences,

because I don't know a lot of those except for Black Onyx, but like so many of the games that you see mentioned are American games that even came out for the Famicom. Well, it's very surprising to see such a Japanese, you know, movement come out of America? Yeah, a lot of the earliest Japanese RPGs, really before Zelda, Dragon Quest, you know, 1986,

they weren't coming out on consoles because consoles couldn't support them. Like we said, you really need to be able to save your data. So those were coming out on Japanese PCs and that is a mystery area that is very inaccessible for Americans. I mean, that's something that really just deserves someone to devote a whole lot of time,

maybe a career, to unearthing. But, you know, we get little bits and pieces, like new information is always coming out, like someone stumbles across some PC-88 game or some game for the Sharp X-1 and is like, whoa, this is mind-blowing, can you believe this? It's just so hard to find information on that. Even if you read Japanese, there's not necessarily a lot of information online. It's just like, you know, in America there were all these PC games coming out, and we know about the big ones, but what about all the little ones that were distributed in, you know, Ziploc bags and, you know, 20 copies were made and stuck

on a store shell somewhere. Like, it's just such a mysterious area, such an undocumented area. So I think Falcom, you know, Sorcerian and Zanadu and some of those other games that they did like 1984, 85 before Zelda, those are well known just because Falcom continued to thrive and continued to grow and continued to build on those series. Like Sorcerian had sequels, Zanadu continued to have sequels. There was a Fizanadu for Nintendo Entertainment System. related? Yeah, they are. It's Famicam Zanadu. There you go.

I think it's really funny to look at the Dungeons of Zelda and see Tower of Draga in them and know that that's where they started with Zelda. Like the dungeons were where they started, and there was even a dungeon creation tool that was considered, and the overworld came second, but when I just picture Zelda, it's all overworld to me. I mean, the dungeons are big, but it started as a dungeon crawler. I remember... But the overworld is what's significant about Zelda for me.

I remember being excited to play Tower of Drag finally, like in the late 90s when it came out for the Namco collection. And I sat down to play and I'm like what the hell is this? Like what do I do? Where do I go? And I think you really needed to be part of that arcade culture in Japan in the 80s where there was a conversation being had. It's kind of like Dark Souls today without the internet. I'm sorry for the Dark Souls. I don't even

I'm sorry. I mean you had to input button codes that you had just no idea what they were until somebody figured it out by accident. It was even more arcane than Dark Souls. Yeah my understanding is that Tarah Drogha did pretty well in the arcades but it was a hundred you're in a play, so that's not cheap. And it really exploded in popularity once it came out on Famicom, which was like 1984, 85, I think early 85.

Yeah, I mean, you know, it was going to save you money. But, you know, it was one of the early, one of the early first party or third party releases. And there weren't a lot of Famicom games at that point. It was kind of early on in the life cycle. So a lot of people bought that game, a lot of kids, you know, and then they started doing the sharing and the information. buying strategy guides because there was a strategy guide explosion in 1985, in 1986.

So it did become kind of this, you know, this sort of trendy thing. And I really feel like that was, that was, that helped shape the legend of Zelda because, you know, Tower of Dragha did have such a huge presence among Famicom owners at the time. Strategy guides, to your point, would chart on Japanese bestseller lists. Like they were some of the most popular books. And we saw a little bit that, like, how to win at Pac-Man, but it was so isolated. Right.

Whereas there, it was just, you know, when Japan does something, it goes all in. It's not like here in America where we're just kind of like, eh, nah. Like, they do it, and then they drop it. Tower of Duraga is built on Pac-Man hardware. Like, by 1984, they're still using a Pac-Man board with different ROM sets. That's your basis for an RPG. So Pac-Man is where it all begins.

Everything goes back to Pac-Man. But yeah, the Legend of... of Zelda kind of stepped away from the RPG by making, you know, it took out experience points, and in doing so, it divorced character advancement from the idea of killing and of defeating enemies. Like, enemies were there, but they were kind of a means to an end. Like, you would kill them to get rupees or, you know, to restore some health or just, you know, in the dungeon to clear out all the enemies in a room so that you could find its secrets. But it wasn't really the point to go out and, like, say, I'm going to become stronger by killing bad guys.

You just had to kill the bosses, basically. Like, you can make it through Zelda with killing very few enemies. Instead, the idea was that character advancement became sort of a corollary to the things you discovered throughout the game, the tools you found. And that kind of became really sort of an ongoing theme in a lot of Nintendo's more adventurous games. Metroid is the same way. you advance through the world and learn to or gain the ability to uncover new areas and advance to new places by discovering tools. And those become sort of an integral part of your tool set. So they weren't really big on the idea of, you know, abstract numbers making you stronger.

It was much more concrete, like your health is going to go up because you found this gym that, you know, gives you an extra heart for your life meter. That is how you get stronger. You find these things. is you discover, you explore, you poke in every corner of the world. And you're right, the, like, maybe Zelda started as a dungeon crawler, but the dungeons to me were always

really the easiest part of the game. I mean, you might have to take a few attempts at them, but it was the overworld. It was really the overworld that was so complicated because it was just, you know, like this, what, 16 by 8 grid, so what is that, 128 different screens, and I think 90-something of them have a hidden secret on them. So you don't know what those secrets are going to be.

They could be pushing an object. They could be burning something, blowing a flute at the right time. There's no way to know until you just... No, it's only those three things. It is those three things, but that's still three different things to do, and a whole lot of bushes to burn. Right. I think it was more manageable than Dragha, though, because there were far fewer variables to work with.

Like, you could always, you can always kind of brute force it with Duraga, like you guys were saying, like sometimes it was secret codes or if to step on the right square or whatever. Just is really arcane stuff. Yeah, I mean, Duraga was inscrutable by design. And that was really how games of that era tended to extend playtime. They just made things impenetrable. And Zelda does a little bit of that. Oh, for sure.

I think it's hard for people to go into that game for the first time these days because it does require you to burn every bush and bomb every wall and push every wall and push every statue or whatever. Yeah, the beauty, though, is that you can go out and just, the overworld is so open that you can go out and see everything. And whether you know what to do with or not, that means that later, when you

figure out what to do it, that you can go back to all those things that you spotted before and put connections together. That's just the most exciting part of exploration for me. And something the Zelda series just hasn't had since that game. I mean, it has a little bit in link to the past. It's just the ability to probe

the farthest corner of the map and come back, that's what Skyrim does now, not Zelda. And it's risky to go to the corner of the map. There's centaurs there and they'll kill you. But that's not an invisible wall that's stopping you. It's not a corridor that's preventing you from going through a game. It's a sword beam that takes off

two-thirds of your life. Yeah. And, you know, you can quickly walk around them. If you're very good. So we mentioned the Famicom Disc System earlier, but why don't we go into a little more depth about that? Like you said, Sam, Super Mario Brothers and the Legend of Zelda were pretty much developed in parallel, and Nintendo knew the Famicom Disc system was coming out. it. For those who don't know at home, why are you listening to the show, or how did you find this show, I guess? But yeah, the Famicom Disc system was a peripheral released only in Japan for

the Japanese version of the NES, and it was a 3-inch diskette drive, and it did exactly what it sounds. Like, games came on discs, and you popped them in, and they'd word a life and load, and you could save on them, and the hardware did add a little bit of extra capabilities to the system. At the time, the diskettes had more storage capacity than cartridges. And secondly, thanks to the kind of the way the Famicom hardware was designed, there was an expansion port inside the cartridge slot. And the Famicom connected through the cartridge slot and enabled an extra sound channel. So the hardware sound channel went from four to five. Right. And the demise of the Famicom disk system was hastened by the fact that cartridges quickly

overtook the amount of storage that was on a disc, which was fixed. You could not have a bigger disk. And then also they could then add in those sort of enhancement chips to the cartridges as well, which, again, you could not enhance the Famicom discs. And so it burned so bright in Japan for like a year or two and then was gone forever. The rewriteability of those discs is so integral. I mean, imagine a place where you can't rent games, you could take a disc to a place and get for 500 yen a new game put on the disc.

You didn't have to buy the $30 to $50 game. Yeah, it wasn't like today where you download a copy of Zelda and it cost the exact same amount as retail or possibly more because they don't put it on sale. And there are some games for the FemicomDisc system today that are super rare because you have to find it on someone's disc. Yeah, they were only writable copies. You had to go to a store and have a disc rewritten

or buy a new disc and have it written with this game. You couldn't just go to a retail store and buy it. the game it had to be written with the disc writer onto a disc. Like final square games were all like that. I finally got my last square Famicom Disc System. The pinball game? The pinball game. Moonball Magic. Finally got one. How is it? Yeah. I haven't played it yet, but I can, because I have a working... Is it a dog game?

It is? They're all dogs. Okay. Now, people figured out at the time how to copy disks illegally, and that's so why didn't come to America. Piracy also hasten the demise. Yeah. It didn't need to come to America. By the time they would have brought it to America, it was. was already on the decline in Japan. I kind of realized, like, oh, yeah.

And they realized, like, oh, this is just not, it's not worth it. So how do you bring? So, but of course, in 1986, 1986, 1987, some of the biggest, biggest games that we remember as the classic NES games were actually Famicom Disc System games. So how do you bring a disc game over to America? Well, for Castlevania, you just take out the same states. Yeah, exactly.

Just compromise it and make them play in one place. Sometimes we get the harder version of games. Everybody always thinks, oh, they make games easier for U.S. audience. to make them way harder. Yes, the Castlevania used what is known in the trades is the fuck you method, which is we're just taking out the safe feature. Deal with it. Still a great game, though. We didn't know any better.

Right. Metroid and Kid Icarus, which of course, not a coincidence that they were both released with that cool silver box, you know, password series games. They reprogram them to use passwords. Now, they also, I will say, nicely took advantage of the fact you can do different things with passwords versus saves, because when you have a password, you can then put in secret passwords, which they did with both, yeah, with both Metroid and Kate Icarus, there were secret passwords.

Danger Terror Horror. That would, Danger Terror Horror. Icarus fights Medusa Angels, and of course, Justin Bailey. Right. But were those, were those, like, put in there for players, or were they more, like, debug codes? Kind of like, you know, the Konami code was originally put in because the guy who was testing Gradius and programmed, the NES version, was like, I can't beat this game. Justin Bailey is not helpful for any sort of debugging whatsoever.

I think that's just a, that's pretty much been figured out to be just a random string that, yes, it turns out that it seems like it means something. You're kidding me. No, get out. What does it mean? There is no real Justin Bailey. There's all these theories. Like Bailey's a swimming suit, like Justin Bailey and. Yeah, or somebody's name or whatever.

But like, why would Samis be running around without her power suit on? And with green hair. Yeah. What about the green hair? So we need the green hair. I mean she's got the varia. Yeah, but she doesn't run around without the suit on in the game normally. That's unusual.

It's unusual not to have the Varya suit, but not have your helmet. Yeah, I've done it once. Oh, you can do it. Yeah, you can beat the game without the Varia, and Samus is naturally a brunette. I think Justin Bailey... That means green, right? Yes, that's Spanish for green. I think Justin Bailey, Chris Hulahan, and Andy Kaufman are all living together in the same trailer park somewhere.

And we can't find them. Didn't Andy Kaufman program Pilevious? What? Yeah. Anyway, so, yeah. And resulting in deaths. Debug menus. Like, if you go to a debug menu and it allows you to select your stage and change variables, like, that's a debug menu.

Like, something that just jumps you to the end of the game, you know, fully powered up. It's like, it's not really, it's not particularly helpful. Well, we know in Kid Icarus, there's definitely codes that were made for fun. Yeah. I don't know for Metroid necessarily. Well, definitely. There is a random string didn't get Icarus fights. It's like jumping to Mike Tyson, you know, the code to jump to Mike Tyson with a bad record, basically, you know, right?

Because that, that one was for fun. It was to circulated out there. there so people can, you know, do it. Yeah, but there is the Narpa Sword password for Metroid, which people are pretty sure is, you know, for debugging purposes or testing purposes. Yeah. Because it could either mean like NAR, like someone said,

it's North American release, password. Or I think the programmer or tester was named Nara Hito or something. Okay. So it could be like Nara's Hito's password. Right, right, right. Who knows? NARA's password. Yeah.

But no one really knows. but it's all kind of, you know, just speculation. So the disk system had immediate advantages, but it also had a big disadvantage, and that was load times. We never got load times on any S cartridges, but the Famicom, like Zelda itself has big black screens when you go into the dungeons. I will say that having just played through a bit of Zelda

on Famicom Disc System and also Metroid and a few other games, a well-programmed game is not super terrible about load times. It's not like, you know, reading, for example, from a personal remembrance here, you know, playing Adam games, Calico Adam games off a cassette tape, where it would take like two minutes to load a stage. Well, Famicom cassette system would have been a little slower. There was a cassette system, but it wasn't used for games. Right, right. What was it used for? It was used for making your own games and then saving that data.

Yeah. Oh, just rewritable. If you need a lot of data. Or also saving your excite bike stages or working crew. Right, right, yeah. We got robbed. Yep. We did.

IROB. Yeah, so what the heck was I said? Well, Zelda was the third method because they decided that they didn't want to just, A, make people play from the beginning of Zelda all the time, but also that B, it was maybe just too complicated to rely on a password system. This is going to take, this is a game

is going to take you a long time to play. You didn't want to be constantly re-entering passwords. So, they had to come up with a technological innovation that had not actually been used anywhere at that time. I think it's used in pinball machines. Oh, yeah? Okay. Yeah, that's how high scores are saved. I put them in before. It's an S-Ram chip and then a battery. Okay.

And that just goes to one pin a bit. And I've never cracked open a Zelda cartridge, but I've fixed a lot of pinball machines that have that exact thing in them. Okay. So they moved it over from pinball machines. Yeah, like a very low amount of voltage is just constantly being fed into the S-Ram. And those things

last forever. Like, there's still Zolda cartridges that still work. They were supposed to last for five years. Is that what it was? 30 years later. Nope, still going. Same with ends. That might be different. That might actually have... It might be a more advanced model.

There's also a chip to store memory later that doesn't need voltage. Super Nintendo was all batteries. It is batteries, too? I want to crack one of those open, but it's worth too much. You have ones that don't use battery, but Super Nintendo I think was all still battery.

You can retroactively go back to your cartridges now and put in non-volatile storage, which is basically not. If you want. I have to wonder, though, was Kittakeris? Were Kittakeris and Metroid released one year before Zelda in the States? Were they both one year before? I think so.

They were actually released around the same time. Yeah. I think so. Yeah, no, I know for a fact that they were. The packaging is from that earlier. Metroid and Zelda were released weeks apart. Okay. I was wondering if the password system was so bad.

They were just getting a lot of feedback from, like, their customer support. They won't take my password because there's zeros and O's and ones. They got that feedback about batteries, because the battery is wiped all the time. Oh, yeah. And there's iterations of Zelda in the United States where some of them warn you to hold reset and some of them don't. Oh, right.

Yeah, no, they did. I never even realized that. I really think, you know, Zelda was meant to be this sort of standout game. They gave it the golden cartridge and a golden box that just had a crest on the front. It broke from the black box style, even the silver password games, still used the sort of standard NES box art, first-party box art format. It was just with silver instead of black. but Zelda was different

and I really think that you know putting the battery in there was a big part of that it was definitely it made the experience a lot more pleasant for people

oh yeah like you yeah the Metroid passwords were a big enough pain in the ass but Zelda you really needed to just be able to jump in and get back to where you're going

and you know it lent itself to that I remember going to a friend's house and playing around on his Zelda cartridge and I saw that there was a safe file that had three hearts and 256 deaths. Like there's a death counter

on the title screen it shows how many times you've died and restarted. And I was like, who is this? He was like, oh, that's my sister's safe file. The punchline is that a sister is in high school, not just some like little kid. She just didn't know how to play the game,

but she kept playing and kept trying. And, you know, I'm sure she would not have gotten that far into the game that many attempts and deaths if she had to input a password every time she wanted to start up a new session of the game. Yep. So it really did lend itself to just people kind of casually jumping in, mucking around a little bit, seeing what they could find, dying, saving, calling it a day.

I do really like the Japanese cover art, but you are right, that the American cover art is so much more iconic. It really stands out. And as a kid, like, putting in the gold cartridge or, like, just looking at it and marveling at, it wasn't experienced. Like, oh, my gosh, it's like a special game, you know. It really was, like, a design to be, like, this is very unique and important. And when you don't grow up in Japan, you don't realize that all the cartridges there were beautiful colors. Oh, yeah. They're all amazing.

Now I know it's like a rainbow of plastics. Yeah. And here there was a patent on that gray cart. So it was a risk to make a gold one. I mean, they didn't make any other colors because of the gray cart look was like this level of protection, legal protection for their games. That's why Tengen had to make those crappy-looking black cartridges for color dreams, mid-blue ones. Yeah, a lot of, you know, in Japan, third parties could manufacture their own cartridges, at least initially. And they made some crazy looking cartridges.

is like Konami was pretty normal looking except there's always a hole in the cartridge. Like in the upper left hand corner there's like this hole. I guess you could put your cartridge on a keychain or something. I don't know. I hear there's ones with LED be gates on the top of them.

Is it Sunsoft or IREM? Jaliko? No, I don't think it's Jalco. It might be I rem. I think so. Maybe it's Metal Storm. But yeah, they would put LEDs in. For the amount that Metal Storm sells for in Japan,

I would not just want LEDs. I would want like a small light show that just like illuminates my house maybe it's just shaped like the mecca I don't know I've never seen inside

but yeah yeah so Zelda was unique because it was the first NES cartridge to come in something other than a gray pretend this is a VHS tape case

and the same size and the last licensed one there are any others there's just link all right yeah I was thinking of super NES cartridges there were a few colored

super NES cards but yeah yeah yeah that was what a Okay, never mind. I was going to say, why I wasn't linked to the past gold? Maximum Carnage was red. If they could pull out the stops with that game, when I opened that game box and was like, wait a minute.

What about a lenticular? Which one had lenticular? It was a major mask. Majora, I think. Well, Ocarina Fime too did, didn't it? I don't think so. I think it was just Majora. And they were all gold for Majora.

Some people are like, I got the gold Majora. It's like, no, I'm sorry, they're all that. You lose. I think they all have lenticular. I'm not sure if there was a second printing. No rarity. Oh, on the cart. On the cart.

Okay, yeah. Well, there's a demo great card. Right, exactly, yeah. So send us those cheap ones. Yeah, great cards. We'll send you gold ones. Send you gold for gray, yep. So, yeah, Zelda took about a year longer to come out in the U.S. than its initial Japanese release,

partly because, you know, it came out in Japan before the NES had actually entered the national broad market here. But also, I think they needed time to get a cartridge that big and to figure out how to do the save RAM and everything. Yeah, they had to make new hardware for it. They certainly didn't spend that time in localization. No. I mean, there's serious localization problems with both that and Zelda, too. For being the flagship titles, there's bad clues in those games. Zelda, yeah, there's localization problems.

This is one of the first games to get localized. This was one of the first games to get localized. I mean, every arcade game was localized. And they have problems too. If you read Legends of Localization and everyone should, the Zelda localization book, you will realize, like, how do we even know what we were doing? Like, everything is wrong. Since you're bringing it up, this is a great time to plug the book, Legends of a Localization, by Clyde Mandolin, who translated Mother 3 and is actually a professional translator.

And he had the website, right? I mean, where a lot of this information appeared, but man, in book form, which is beautiful, it's by fan gamer, it's gorgeous. I loved reading through it in the book because not only do you find out about, like, every different way the games were changed between Japan and the U.S., but, like, you learn about every different aspect of the Legend of Zelda. because like in showing how it's changed she has to explain what it was originally and yeah if you are at all interested in going deep on Legend of Zelda like this book is phenomenal

it's full color really there is there is some stuff in there like the enemy like like where that name came from I could not even believe it when I read it because I'm like I cannot believe that I have gone my whole life without knowing this because that is deep

it's a really obscure bug and error it's a it's a pun it's something about, um, like, it's something about water bugs and what they like. Yeah. But, but the thing is, it's like, uh, the, the pun is, um, on, I forget what it is, but it's like, um, Tate is shield. It's okay.

Yeah, you don't have to get it to it. It's all about, it's all about how it eats shields versus eating bugs and, yeah, right, right. We really should be getting a commission on all the times we've pimped that. Oh, really? Oh, okay. I'm sorry. That's fine. I haven't, I haven't been here. Check the book. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, check out the Retronaut's Pocket that I interviewed Clyde on and Heidi Mandolin. There we go.

Zelda is really interesting in terms of game design because I think, as you mentioned, Sam, it's really open. Like, you can go to almost any screen on the overworld from the very outside of the game. If you know the way through the Lost Woods in the southwest corner of the map, you can pretty much go to any place that you don't need a raft or a ladder to get to, which is like three screens. You can go anywhere. you'll probably die once you get up into Death Mountain or the graveyard. But you could go there. But you could go there in theory and there are game runs that are kind of built around the idea of

seeing how far you can get without picking up the sword and you have to like go find a place to get free money and then go buy some bombs and yeah it's really like the game lends itself to that kind of like crazy like how can I play this? How can

I play this game in ways that the designers never intended? And there is an appeal to this if you can pull it off in your video game. Like, for example, like, you, hey, Mike Tyson's punchout comes out. Nintendo immediately distributes the code that warps you right to Mike Tyson. Well, doesn't that ruin the game? No, because if you've never played the game before, you can't possibly beat him if you're going to warp directly to Mike Tyson,

he's going to completely destroy you. And not only that, now it's really set up this whole game as like, oh my God, how will I ever beat Mike Tyson? He's too powerful. But then if you go through the entire game, by the end of it, you actually have the skills to beat him. it feels like a real accomplishment. So setting it up at the beginning

by having them destroy you, that was a really clever way of doing some out-of-order kind of narrative, you know, player story stuff with that game. Zelda very similar. Yeah, go to Death Mountain. Go to Death Mountain and get wrecked.

In that case, it's about collecting the hard containers. It just ties exactly into what you two were talking about earlier about gameplay being the RPG element in this and how it being so important because in Final Fantasy you would handle that by having a boss character cream your team right in the beginning.

But you're still playing. And then you're like, well, how am I ever going to beat that guy? Well, it's just a series of button presses and grinding to get to there. But in this game, you actually have to do the same thing. You have to grind for a while and get better. But also, you're actually going to be physically better at the game by that point. And not just choosing healing spells in a better way. Yeah, you'll figure out, oh, I can get the right kind of shield

and I can deflect those Lionel's sword beams. And, you know, I can shoot them from across the screen and not have to get up close and so on and so forth. Or you still run around the centaurs, though. They'll go for those guys. Just avoid them. Fun to kill them. Anyway, so, yeah, if you sit down and really look at what gating exists in the game,

you need eight triforce pieces. In other words, you need to beat all of the first eight dungeons to enter Death Mountain, the final dungeon. To beat Gannon, the final boss, you need the silver arrow, which is inside the final dungeon. You need a few items to uncover certain dungeons. Like, there's one dungeon you can only find by burning a bush. So you need the candle for that. there's one dungeon you can only reach by taking a raft, so you need the raft to get there.

And there's one dungeon that you can only reveal by blowing a flute on a certain screen to reveal a secret. So that's... Is there a clue for that one? There are secrets where fairies don't live. Good luck for hearing that one out on your help. Most screens, in other words.

I lost the second game, I lost my mirror. Yeah. Zelda was clearly like... I mean, it was, you know, we don't know who translated it, but it was clearly translated by people with a sort of a bare grasp of English and English language

stationary. I'm sure it was localized in Japan. Oh, yeah. Maybe even by Mr. Miyamoto, who knows English pretty well. The problem with that is that what would probably happening was that these cartridges were literally being mailed back and forth between Nintendo of America and and CL. I'm sure they were just faxed the code.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. You know, but they were just like, okay, Nintendo of America probably had to pick its battles as far as what it asked NCL to rewrite and how it asked them to rewrite it. They may not really have put that much thought into it. Like, this is, you know, good enough.

And it's pretty clear that the manual was localized in the U.S. Like, it was written by the American team. You know, Nintendo had a good, small but very good marketing team. You know, Gail Tilden and Howard Phillips and so forth. And it's, I think it's pretty clear that they, you know,

took the Japanese materials and really wrote that themselves. But localizing inside the game is a more complicated process and you need someone to program that stuff into the game. Right. Which they did not have. Pre-Treehouse. Yeah, I'm sure they offered some... Exactly. Yeah, they probably offered some input, but for the most part, I think it was

handled in Japan. That opening Star Wars, like, text role is so just awful and great. I love it. Just like, quotes are around things for no reasons. Right. Well, they use quotes in Japanese to set off important terms, so they just carried that over. Evidence of it not being localized. Right. Precisely. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Right. Anyway. Oh, I bet the house that it was localized in Japan. It's really interesting. I never thought about it that way, actually, which makes so much sense. Yeah, so that really is kind of like an unusual sort of game for Nintendo. It's much more of a sort of playground. Like, you know, if you want to say sandbox, sure.

It's kind of a sandbox game for you to mess around in. So it really kind of established a new, I think a new level of depth and substance for NES games and really for console games because they're, you know, consoles just didn't have the power, the capability to present that kind of experience before that. So it was something new and interesting. Well, having read I Am Air recently, semi-recently,

I recommend everyone else read that. We're also promoting other people's books, too. It's just like that game could not have happened without the programming wizardry that put it all together. And the fact that, like, all the dungeons fit together on one big map. They're just like all parts of one big map. So when you're playing a dungeon, you're just entering that map with all the dungeons,

but it's choosing where you are in that matrix of dungeons. It's just such a marble. It's the same size as the overall. Yep. Yeah. There's 2506 screens overall. And as lots of people know, that was actually the only half the space was used for one set of dungeons by accident. I believe it was a lot of ass.

Oh, right. It's like, oh, let's put another game in here while we're at it. There's a mistake. They fit all the dungeons into half the memory by accident. And then all of a sudden it was like, hey, why don't you use the second half of that memory to double the size of the, make, say, eight more dungeons. And that's what the second quest is. And man, that second quest is a great idea. I still, like, that is such a great thing to explore for future Zelda-like games

because there's so much to do it. And now they're re-releasing Twilight Princess and Edwin Waker and stuff like that with a kind of second-questy elements. But they have that great. They're always like, lose all your hearts. Or it's like it's a mirror of the world, really. That's as far as they go sometimes. So we've talked quite a bit about the legend of Zelda. Pretty much covered most of the things that I had of my notes.

So just to kind of wrap up the first game, I'm curious to know kind of what you're owning. experiences and memories of the game are. You know, for me, it was the first Nintendo game I remember seeing advertised. Like, I knew about the NES, and I wanted the NES because obviously I was, you know, a kid, and I'd seen demos, and my friends had one.

But I'd never really seen anything about it on television, at least not that I can remember. But then those commercials came out, and they made it look so amazing. It was a never-ending adventure new friend. Like, how could I play a game that never-end? Like, how amazing would that be? What if that was the last game I ever needed to play?

Like, how cool was that? It was gold, it was special, there was a guy rapping, like, amazing. I had to have that. I don't remember how we got it. We got our NES in 1988, so Zelda was already out. It was, you know, one of many games. We might have gotten it used at a flea market or something like that. But I can certainly tell you this.

I was really into it. But at the time, I did not play the video games. My brother actually played all of the Nintendo. I mean, like, I played the games, but I was bad at them. He was very good at them. And I was very happy to simply watch him play the games. So he played Zelda. We beat Zelda.

I got a strategy guide. And I think he beat Zelda, but we were both very much sort of like cooperatively. I had the guide. I told him where to go. So that was how we played. Zelda 1. I don't think I have... No, no, no. I have never beaten Zelda 1. I've played a lot of Zelda 1, but I've never finished Zelda 1.

I love finding complete copies of Zelda 1 and seeing somebody's handwriting or maps whatever they're making there, and sometimes it's clearly their parents that help them. Sure. Just like a really nicely done one with kids writing all around it. And that's just one of my favorite things. And Zelda was the game where I always saw that happening. So I always knew it was probably like this big family game, as Bob was talking about it. Yeah, it shipped

with this big fold-out map that showed most of, but but not all of the overworld, the kind of the corners of the map where things were most difficult and most obscure were left just blank white squares. And they didn't show where any of the hidden secrets

and any of the screens were. So it was there for you to know, like say, well, this is where I can bomb and find a heart container or up over here, there's, you know, the money-making game

or a hidden, you know, hidden rupees or something like that. So it was kind of left, like that map begged to be marked on. It was not meant to be pristine. If you have a pristine copy of the Legend of Zelda map and it was used, that means someone who owned it before you was horrible and had no soul.

Like they didn't understand the passion about this game. Like, they just didn't get it. I probed Zelda a bit when I was a kid. I never rented it, but friends had it. But I never got into it, and I forced myself to play all the way through it. Very much enjoyed it when I already knew you guys. So I did this. I think Brian Altano every day at IGN would say,

now today you should go for this heart because it's really easy to get he just helped me through the game he was my personal deal with help it was really fun and for some reason when I was a kid I was very anti-Zelda I love Super Mario Brothers

I love Castlevania I love Mega Man but my friends that all like Zelda I was like that's just not for me I can't explain it I was eight I was seven I just don't know what happened the presentation and the marketing around Zelda

made it feel like it was a game that was too good for me like I wasn't worthy of this game Like, it was something that other people could own, but, like, I couldn't have a game like that. That was just too good. And that attitude about, like, RPG-style games stuck with me for a long time. I always looked at those sort of RPG adventure-type games, you know, everything from Zelda to Final Fantasy as being, like, games for other people. Like, other people own those, and I borrow them.

Felt the same way, Jeremy. I think that's really interesting. But, like, I, you know, like, I don't deserve this game. It's too good. I got over it. Or maybe it was a big kid game or something. Yeah. I'll tell you what, Final Fantasy broke me.

I was so into Final Fantasy. I'm older than, I think, all of you. So, yeah, you know, I was a teenager at that point. Young teen, but still, I don't know what it was. It was just like, I don't know, sense of lack of self-worth. Were you anti-fantasy at all? I'm not a big fan of fantasy genres. Because I loved Lord of the Rings, but I always felt like Zelda and things that

weren't Lord of the Rings were a knockoff. I still kind of feel that way. I think other fantasy that's not Lord of the Rings that still has, as giants and dwarves and stuff. And I think it's just like, why? Like, fantasy is so wide. Why use those Tolkien classes? Oh, we'll have fun talking about Final Fantasy.

Don't you worry. I never actually owned Zelda because it was one of those games where, like, everyone had it so I didn't feel the need to buy it, like Mario 3. And again, it was the dad game, and I inherited it from my stepdad when he married my mom. And I got to a certain point, but I never finished it, but it was just fun to play in the world and just, you know, how many, how many rupees can I get? where can I explore, even if I wasn't finishing the game.

It wasn't until I actually finished a link to the past a few years later that I think I was ready for what Zelda was asking of me. And I didn't actually finish it until after I beat Link to the past. So it's been a while, but I have finished the game before. Yeah, I never owned Zelda until many, many years later, but I borrowed it from friends and played all the way through it over the course of a couple of weeks and got hints and everything like that. But really kind of figured it out of my own. And I remember the sense of elation I had when I defeated Gannon for the first time and then discovered, oh, there's a second quest. I should try this out.

Then I ended up beating the second quest in like a weekend because I knew pretty much all the tricks. Like the only thing the second quest adds is much greater difficulty and the new element where you have to push against walls to walk through them. And I think I forgot about that. I think there was a tip in Nintendo Power. Like there are certain walls you have to push through. So I knew to do that.

But don't you also have to like burn a different random bush a lot? Oh, yeah. Everything has changed around. You just go through the perimeter of every level and everything. Yeah, to find, right? Like, the entrance to the dungeons is like... But you know the trick,

which is to test every single tile. Right. Yep. That's not exactly fun. No, but... But it went much faster the second quest through. Yeah. Anyway, so final thoughts about the first legend of Zelda.

It truly is a legend. Zelda needs to go back to that. They need to go back to... I love a big exploration-based game. That's risky. I just love that idea. What they seem to be promising, at least. We'll see if they follow through.

It's been a while. They say a lot of things every time. Yep. I might be the only person. And then you find yourself, you know, collecting five music notes. Musical notes to get the freaking boomerang again. Yeah, I might be the only person in the world who found a link to the past somewhat disappointing because it did go back toward, you know, the original Zelda style from Zelda, too, which I thought was cool.

but it just didn't have that sense of like everything is open. It felt much more structured and rigid. And I really liked, that's what addicted me to both Zelda and Metroid. Those were two of the first games that I really got into. And just their openness in the sense of like, hey, I have to figure this out of my own. I need to just like poke my nose into all these corners and figure out how things work. I really liked that kind of sense of, you know, you're just out there on your own, figuring it out. You have to, it's you against this entire horrible video game world.

And I'll link to the past, you know, really push the series more toward puzzle-like dungeons, which are cool. I like the puzzle-like dungeons, but the world itself, the overworld became more puzzle-like. It's fences and gates, instead of just being a big open field to explore. And there is satisfaction in, you know, making all those things work. And I think that's more, you know, like better game design and more deliberate game design and more appealing game design for most people. people, but I do miss the sense of just like, here's Zelda, go figure it out. You know what, Jeremy, and everybody at home, it's time to drink. I think Dark Souls has replaced Zelda for me, and I'm not just saying this to be Bob Mackie.

I'm saying this because there is that spirit of, go anywhere. You might get killed, but you also might find something cool. You might run into a boss you haven't seen before. It's just such an open game, and they're not, they have that confidence that the original legend of Zelda has. Like, we will just set you free, and you can go to wherever you want. There is sort of a kind of a right order, but if you want to go outside of that order, you can also have fun there, too. I will try it based on that.

Based on that, nobody's ever sold it to me that way before. Yeah, I mean, I just feel like from software... I have tried it, I just haven't liked it. So I want to go back and try it. It is a very different game than Zelda, of course, but I find that confidence and that exploration is something that has been missing from the series and I go to Dark Souls for that rewarding feeling. And again, you can drink. It's okay. My liver thanks you for this case of cirrhosis of it.

I apologize. There is one other Zelda game that does kind of recapture the openness of the original Zelda. One waker. Yeah, to a degree, but that's much more sparse. One of Gamelon.

Yeah, no. I was going to say Oracle of Seasons. Oh, yeah? Oracle of Seasons actually started out as a remake of the first Zelda, and it retains not the same degree of openness, but it's much less linear than other Zelda games,

and you can very easily take dungeons out of sequence. It's not nearly so gated. And I remember, yeah, I beat a couple of the dungeons out of order the first time I played through it. It was like, huh, I can't usually do that in Zelda. That's neat. Cool. And then, like, to me, the Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons

feel like kind of a duology. Oracle of Ages is very much like, you know, the modern day legend of Zelda. It's very, like, quest-based. You're talking to a lot of people and going on little sub-quests for them and doing fetch quests. and that sort of thing, whereas Oracle of Seasons

is just like, you and the seasons and monsters. And it's kind of, they're kind of nice bookends. Like, they really show where Zelda had been and where it was going. And, you know, if you haven't played those, they're on virtual console for 3DS, so please do. They're really good.

They weren't... Yeah, that's the big shame gap in my... Oh, really? Ages and Seasons. I like seasons more just because it does have that kind of retro feel to it. But they're both really good. Okay.

And it looks really good. You change the seasons where the snow and snow piles over everything. It's beautiful. Yeah, yeah. It was really kind of meant to take advantage of Game Boy color. They were like, oh, it's going to be false. Everything's orange or red now. Yeah, I think each tile of the world has four potential states based on the season.

So so much can change based on what season is. It's really fun. It's really fun to play that world. Yeah, I need to revisit that. I actually haven't played it since it came out for the first time. So that's, God, that's 15 years, isn't it? Yeah, I was going to say I replayed it recently, but the thinking back, I replayed it nine years ago, so that's not very recent.

Oh, time slipping away. We're going to die. Oh, Speaking of going to die, Zelda 2, the adventure of link. The game that kills everyone because it hates you. I will say, I like all the ideas in this game. The way it punishes you is a very old-school way of punishing the player by basically wasting their time. That is my only problem with the game for the most part.

Oh, skipped straight to the meat. I just want to, I mean, in case anyone was wondering why I don't like the game. And my other problem with the game is that, I'm filibustering right now, but my only problem with the game is that other problem is, I found that the pacing of how they introduce enemies is very strange, where it's like, first dungeon, here's the hardest thing you'll ever fight in the game, and you'll fight a lot of these. The Morseheads?

No, the knights. No, not dark nuts. They have a different name in this. Yeah. Rebenax. Anyhow, I feel like this guy did this little jump slash. Little jump slash, a little jump a little bit, you jump a little bit and hit him in the face. and they're hard otherwise.

Otherwise, you just have to go up and guess which way you're going to stab them up or down. It is such a... Man, I'm very familiar with this. It's such a bizarre difficulty spike to me that did not feel right. And I've made so many attempts to get back into this, and I can't do it.

And I want someone to patch this game and make it a little nicer. You know who did that? Nintendo, because they just updated the ambassador version of it with SaveStates. And SaveStates makes that game much better. Yeah. Oh, wow.

And I didn't realize that because I'd been playing it without Save Stets. They don't ever announce the Ambassador stuff. Like stuff gets changed. and you have to go into your 3DS download list, which is for me hundreds of games. And, oh, there's one that needs an update. I played half the game. Oh, by safe states, you mean like...

You just get to make a safe state and reset from there. So you can go screen by screen and not listen to way. Didn't they do that with all the Ambassador games in one big batch? I think they did. God, this is all used to me. And I did never update it. So I was playing it classic. And then I got three-down-down-down.

They didn't just do it. They did it like five years ago. You can also do that on WiiU Virtual Console. Anyway, why don't we talk about Zelda, too? But I agree. But I agree that save states, you know, in general, like, you know, save states can actually make a lot of games a lot more fun to play. Zolda 2 is definitely one of those.

I used, I don't want to say abused, but I definitely used save states playing through earthbound beginnings on Wii virtual console. It's like, you know what? I'm just going to save state. Yeah. Okay, so Zelda 2. Surprisingly launched like 10 months after the first game in Japan. That's so funny.

Like, it's less than a year later. It's crazy. that they came out with a sequel that quickly. Nintendo hadn't really done sequels before that. They had Super Mario Brothers, too, which was kind of just like, you know, the ROM hack of Super Mario Brothers. But this was a radically different game.

Right. And I think it's important to note... I wonder if it was already, like, kind of in development as something. I don't know. Probably with Mario. And then they were like... Mario Adventure 2.

Yeah. Here's the interesting thing. You know, the main design team for The Legend of Zelda was Shigura Miyamoto and Takashi Tezaga. the Mario team. Quite. The main designer,

what's that? Quite. Okay. The main designers for Zelda 2, Miyamoto produced, but what does that mean? He probably looked down beatifically and said numbers, stats,

I don't know, but go ahead. I'll hold off on the tea table for you. You know, he did not yet. He said, at that point, I don't think he had the tea table power. Like, I don't think he really had the ability to go in and be like,

Yamauuchi was still alive. Can we explain what this tea table references to people? I think it might be lost on some people. Oh, it's fine. It's just an oblique reference. Gotcha. The main team behind Zelda 2 was Tadashi Sugiyama,

Yoichi Yamada, and Kazunobu Shimizu. And the game that all of these people have in common, the one game they all have in common, besides Zelda 2, is DokeyDokiDoki Panic, aka Super Mario Brothers 2. Ah. So it was really the next project from the doki-Doki Panic team.

Yeah, so doki-Doki Panic didn't start out as a Mario game, but when it came to the U.S., of course, it became Super Mario Bros. Two. Right. And it was radically different from the first Super Mario Brothers. Was that after Zelda 2?

Or before. Doki Doki Panic came out. It was 87. It was 87. They both came out around the same time. Yeah. I wouldn't, yeah, they're not, yeah.

I just think Doki Doki Duky Panic is beautiful compared to Zelda, which is kind of rudimentary. Zelda 2. Yeah. No, Zelda 2 came out first, actually. Doki Dokey Dany panic was mid-87, I want to say.

They both have characters that lift step above their heads. Zelda 2 is February 187. They made games real fast in the 1980s. Yeah. Real fast. Yeah, but I don't know, like, there's probably nothing to it, but I think it's interesting that, you know, Nintendo games develop this weird reputation for the second game never being like the first. Yeah. Largely on account of Zelda 2 and Super Mario Bros. 2, even though Super Mario Brothers 2 wasn't a Super Mario game originally, Zelda 2 was.

And so there is, I don't know, like... It was a Zelda game. Yeah. Yeah. But it does really change the game. You know, Zelda, the Legend of Zelda is a top view. inspired by Tower of Draga, like three-quarters perspective,

action game, where you move freely in all directions around the screen. Zelda 2 was very much a 2D platformer. Yeah. And you ran, you jumped. It had RPG elements, but it was also much more of like

an action game that you would have expected to see on NES at the time. And it was kind of arriving around the same time as a lot of other games that were attempting to do that. Like a month or two

before Zelda 2 came out, there was a game called Wing of Modola that came out from Sunsoft which was like if you think Zelda 2 is hard and kind of opaque and oblique and difficult to play you should try Wingamadola because that game is just like

there's no mercy. Sounds like you shouldn't try it. I think it's educational you start out like completely defenseless almost like unable to destroy anything and right away you find a better sword like halfway through the first level. The levels are all very

small. And all of a sudden you can like attack stuff. I don't know. Like it has kind of a magic spell system and everything like that. Shortly after, it's very similar. Shortly after Zelda 2 came out in Japan, Rygar came out, which attempted to take that arcade game, which was just, you know, like a Raston saga sort of linear hack and slash and turned it into, you know, this nonlinear game with tools and equipment. And there is an experience system and like a hub world, like an overhead hub world. It kind of combined Zelda and Zelda 2, but it came out so close after Zelda 2 it, it obviously wasn't influenced

by it. So there was this kind of, I would say, like, just sort of this synergy happening. Like a lot of people were sort of arriving at the same ideas at the same time. Dragon Quest had come out and been pretty popular the year before and of course Super Mario Brothers came out

in 1985 and that was a massive hit. So people started to think, what if we put all these things together? People were starting to think, what is a console game? Like what is a home game because they, I mean, you know, everything on the Famicom for the first couple of years was ports of arcade games. And so then you had people just starting to consider in a lot of different ways. Like, well, what does it mean when it's not just a hundred, you know, a hundred yen to play? Like, what if it, you know, shouldn't everything be a lengthy adventure?

I mean, those are the games that are selling the best in Japan. So let's, you know, let's make RIGAR into one. Even, yeah. Even Double Dragon had experience points on the ENS version. Yeah, so weird. Yeah. So it's really interesting because, you know, you had a lot of people kind of of taking these arcade experiences and trying to make them deeper for the home console, whereas Zelda 2, they kind of pulled it back. Like they took it back from the top-down overhead view to something that much more resembled Super Mario Brothers or, you know, an arcade hack and slash.

Link is... And they gave you the shortest sword possible. It's a dinky little sword, but you... It's so bad. Link can attack and defend at two different levels at two heights. He can stand and he can crouch. And, you know, as you do that, not only does that determine the... the level at which you're attacking,

but also at which you're defending. And that becomes an important part of the game. But really interestingly, interestingly, Link loses, ooh, that was tough, all of his tools in Zelda 2. All the things that you associate with Zelda, like, you know, the boomerang and the,

well, the hook shot, shook hookshot wasn't around yet. Man, I cannot talk. Hell. Bombs are taken out. Instead, you get magic spells, and you get the experience system, you get sword techniques. So, you know, if you...

And tools, but they're passive. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you get keys. Well, you get the candle. There's like a glove that lets you... Yeah, but yeah, everything is automatic. You get a raft, but you can only use it for one strip of water. Yeah, like all of these things become kind of just keys,

basically background elements. And you no longer have active tools. I guess that's a better way to say. But the spells are the active tools, and they solve puzzles later in the game, but the early ones just give you more defense. Right. Let you throw fireballs.

Jump is an important one. But man, you're always managing how much magic you have. It's always a battle between, oh man, should I die just to refill my magic because I have another life? Because you have lives in that game, which is really strange. The whole game is juggling, like, your time. It's like, do I want to start over from here or here? It's so frustrating to figure that out.

The American version, at least, is friendlier than the Japanese version. It penalized you with experience. Yeah, well, when you, okay, so there's this weird kind of, of leveling or the experience system where you can allocate your experience points into three different stats. You have your defense, your life meter, which is kind of the same thing, and your attack power. And attack power is so important. Actually, it's magic and life and attack. Oh, magic. Okay, that's right. Yeah, magic life attack. Okay. And you want to go for attack, but attack is worth so much more so you either can spend a dinky amount on your life bar or hold off

and don't die. Right. And you can only, you can only upgrade. when you hit like a target for a certain level of experience. But it's always like 2000, 3,000, 9,000. Yeah, you have to save up a lot of experience and you lose it all if you die. If you continue, if you die, it's okay.

But if you continue, you lose it all. So anyway, you have to kind of balance this out and decide, like, do I want to upgrade now or do I want to go for it? But in Japan, the Japanese version, there was this weird kind of quirk where if you'd leveled one element up ahead of everything else, if you ended the game and restarted,

you would lose, like, the attribute you had leveled up the most would be knocked back down to be on the same scale as everything else. Ouch. Yeah, it's, I think I'm remembering that right. I don't know if it's a bug, but it's something they changed in the U.S. version, and it makes the U.S. version a lot friendlier. Because basically in the Japanese version,

you have to level up all three traits at the same time. and you don't really have to do that in the U.S. Like if you really just want to go all in on magic spells for some reason don't do that. Go for it. So the thing to do is to go for attack power? Yeah, absolutely. And again, beat it two days ago for the first time ever and man, yeah, life becomes important, but it's just it's so much more expensive to get swords. And there's three grinding areas throughout the game that are

kind of well known. And you just kind of have to sit for a while and do that. It makes the game possible. And that game can easily be impossible, not because of anything but just sheer enemy meanness it's so hard to kill anything until you get in your downward thrust which makes better which is a great move those sort attacks are great the upthrust is not that

great but the down thrust like I feel like that is what inspired duck tails totally because you it's the pogo yeah it totally is you stab downward and you if something you don't kill it right away you just bounce off its head and you keep stabbing it and there are certain bosses where

you're designed you have to do that You dismount one of the bosses from his horse with that attack. Nintendo took that move back with Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze because Cranky Kong's move is bouncing on his cane. He has a cane move. So yeah, Zelda 2. Hardest part in Zelda 2, besides the final dungeon, which is called the Great Palace, is a series, it's a maze of caves.

That leads to the final dungeon? No, that one just sucks because it's like so many enemies. And before that, there's those lizards that there are rocks at your head. I hate that part. But there's, no, this is just right between, there's the first town, the first dungeon, and then second town, and then there's Death Mountain, which is cave entrance, cave entrance,

and each cave has a long fighting area in it, and there's no way to really build up too much before that, except if you grind and lame temple enemies. But it's a maze. And if you get lost, you basically die because you just are going to run out of life eventually. And the way to get through this

is back then, trial, and error. It's like, go in a cave, choose right or left. Go in a cave, choose right or left. It's actually a combination of overworld map and platforming areas. It's so crazy hard. It is. But once you get through it,

do you realize, wait a minute, this little area down here is the entire over-world map of the original Legend of Zelda. Which is a great little reference. Like, I think I played Simon's Quest before this. So, yeah, because that came out

in the U.S. before Zelda 2. Here's a thing, so it was just like this great little, oh, like these games are starting to reference back to the previous ones. I like this. You mentioning this reminds?

I never did it again. Yeah, you referencing this reminded me of, like, we never talked about the story of Zelda and how just crazy the story for Zelda 2 is. It is like the most confusing and needlessly convoluted Zelda story where it's like there's a Zelda born

every so many years and the Zelda that's sleeping is not the Zelda from, I don't understand it. Okay, so the Zelda you rescued the Zelda you rescued is like the current princess. But she was named in honor of a princess who was cursed millennia before, centuries before, I don't know

exactly, but basically like her brother or something made a deal with an evil wizard and reneged on it and so the wizard put Zelda under a sleeping spell and she's been asleep for however long and every daughter born into the royal family since then has been named Zelda and so you are rescuing the or waking the original princess Zelda and you already killed Gannon so you don't have to deal with him at all well you don't have to except if you die then you do well too bad because all the bad guys want to kill Link and use his blood as a

sacrifice to resurrecting Gannon. Which was the bald bull sample, right? Yeah, I was going to say, he sounds like Mike Tyson or something. I think it's bald bull. I think it's the same thing, yeah. But yeah, it's really grim for a Nintendo game, like super dark. When you die, the game over screen is the silhouette of Gannon with glowing eyes in black against a red background and it says game over, the return of Gannon.

Yeah. And he does that laugh. Yeah, it's kind of dark. Kind of awesome. Zelda never really went that dark again. It's tried. There were some parts in Twilight Princess. Yeah.

I mean, it's the Black Sheep of the series in so many, many ways. It is an entire Zelda made up of ideas that they would never use again. But that's not entirely true. We'll talk about that later. Not entirely true. So there's something. There's a lot of Zelda 2 in Ocarina of Time. Oh, indeed.

I don't think as a coincidence because the director of Zelda 2 was the... No, no, no. Like game concepts. Oh, interesting. Game concepts. Well, I'll let you talk about that later then. We can talk about that later. I was going to say, so when you die in Zelda,

two, the most frustrating thing is that you get sent back to where's the princess is sleeping. Yes. Right? Like, you lose two lives and you go back there. You have two lives again to play with after that. Yeah, that's... Doon-da-da-da-do-dun. Like, that's the trigger. When you get sent back, it's terrible. So imagine coming out the other side of that Death Mountain maze.

It's all overworld. You've been playing for a long time, probably like over a half an hour, 45 minutes at that point. And you finally figure out, you get the other side, and there's still random monsters on the map. Remember, random monsters are in this game. They maraud. And if you don't get the hammer at that point, which you will restart with, which is really nice, you will not have a shortcut back to that area.

So potentially, if you don't even figure out how to get the hammer, which is also possible, because it's pretty obscure, then you are playing the game linearly to get everywhere, and you're playing through this huge bound of gameplay. But the hammer gives you a shortcut right in the middle of the whole world that allows you to go in four different directions, and it's really helpful. Yeah. That's brutal game design. I think it's important to talk about

the big change they made to the overworld in this game, which is that it is not the overworld from the Legend of Zelda instead of being like the screen-by-screen situation that is basically functionally identical to the dungeon view. It is much more of a dragon quest abstracted overworld where you walk around

and you can't fight anything. Like enemies will appear and they'll bump into you, but then that takes you into a separate combat screen which is, you know, side-scrolling. So it's much more of a traditional RPG in that sense. And they do some kind of clever things, like if you're walking on a road and enemies attack you, then you go to the sort of combat screen,

but there's nothing there because you're like in a safe space. But otherwise, you know, the backgrounds kind of reflect where you are in the world map, like on a beach or in a rocky, craggy place full of weird bubbles that rise out of the water. So it kind of reflects. you know, the sort of experience that you're having, the situation you're in.

You're definitely, you're definitely in a corridor. You're never, you can explore little areas between mountains and villages and stuff, but you can't get to the further areas. So it's the beginning of the downhill slide for like not being an exploration-based Zelda. You can probe the edges of each area and there's some cool stuff.

You find these like Stonehenge ruins and there'll be a heart in there. It's really, those are like the parts of Zelda too where I'm like, oh, this is graphically interesting. And the rest of it looks like kind of a janky PC game from the time. It's very strange. It looks like a typical... Like the villages?

Like the villages? Japanese action game for Famicom, honestly. It's very much a product of its time. You know, I think... It's not pretty. No, it's not. But, I mean, keep in mind that it's early 1987, and games started to look a lot better toward the end of 1987.

So it was really pretty out of date by the time it made it to the U.S. I think doki-dokey-dokey looks really nice. It does, but that was later. And actually, the Japanese version of Dokey-Doki Panic. You know, that's not... It's a little more... but it's in Mario 2? Yeah, it is.

Like, they polished it up a lot when they brought it to the U.S. a year later as Mario 2. So both of those games kind of benefited from the delays. And, you know, they both are, like Zelda 2, I think, still looks like more of a product

at its time, but because it is so large and complex and has the save feature and everything, it still felt pretty remarkable when it came out, but it definitely, you know, did kind of leave a little bit of a disappointed taste

in my mouth when it came out. I think if you can solve a lot of the problems that a lot of people have, Zelda would save states, as I mentioned earlier, it just makes it a lot less frustrating combat-wise and exploration-wise. But what it doesn't solve is there are adventure games, 90s adventure games style puzzles in that game that you have to solve. That make no sense. And of course, I Am Error is one of those.

There's two characters, Bagu, Bug, and Error. At one point, one of them says to go find error. But the first time you go to error, he just says, I'm error over and ever again. No idea what that means. It tells you to find Bagu, doesn't he? Yeah, he just says, I'm here. The Riverman? Yeah, the Riverman, I think, says talk to Bagu. Then he says, go back to error. But then there's also the, I lost my mirror.

This is a way to get a spell in a town. The solution to that I lost my mirror puzzle is to walk into one of the, you know, 10-house. You don't know if you're going to find that mirror in the end of a cave, which you usually find stuff, right? You find a lost child in the end of a cave. You find something, you know, something else, a trophy at the end of a cave. but this, you just go into a house and this is, you would never figure this out, I know how, you go to a table and you duck down at the table.

Every house is a table. Oh, yeah. And when you duck down the table, it says, I found a mirror. I think I can envision the counselor's corner Nintendo Power section for this. Like, how do I find the mirror? And there's a picture of a guy with a windbreaker on. The worst thing is the entire... Does he have a mullet? He has a mullet. He has to have a mullet, yeah. The worst thing in the game is the entire

hidden town in a forest. And to find it, you can, have to go to that kind of obscure area of the world map. There's nothing else of interest over there. And you have to hit the exact space where the town is hidden with the hammer. Now, at no point

does the game mention that the hammer is able to clear-cut forest. It is. Like, if you try it, oh, you can clear-cut forest. But who would think, yes, I'm going to knock these trees down with a hammer? Yeah. And you know what's a clue to find the villages at all? Is that there's a village that just kicks your ass?

because it's filled with invisible enemies and everybody's moved because of that. So there's no like, hey, we moved a sign, that's your clue. It's like the Croatowan, you know, a sign in the early American civilization. Oh, okay, so the clue is that you find a village, there's no people in it.

It's full of invisible enemies. Yes. Right. And so you're supposed to think they must have gone somewhere. Right. I'll go hit trees until I find them. And you know, since they're invisible,

you just think, hey, is there a gas in this air that's taking my life? There's no real way. You have to find the cross. So then you go to that village. Then you have to go back to the other village and make the enemies visible. It's just mind-boggably convoluted. And you had to use guides to do this.

And, of course, at that time, you could rely on Nintendo Power to give you that. I think we could assume that Zelda II's strategy guide was one of those chart-topping books in Japan. Yeah. But they didn't have an official strategy guide for Zelda's here. No, in Japan. Yeah, isn't that surprising, though? I mean, Nintendo Power had a lot of stuff in it. I mean, Nintendo Power, yeah, it was like a full game.

There was no. Yeah, I think they tried to maybe move over to Nintendo Power at that point for all your strategy needs because they stopped publishing strategy guys for a while. They had the Mario and the Zelda ones, and then that was pretty much it. I picked up an off-brand Zelda Guide as a joke that was from the Zelda 2 era had both games in it. Oh, yeah.

And I've been using that. Oh, I have that. With Link, he just looks like a sissy, like very scared on the stairs. Yeah, we don't really use that word anymore. But, you know. It's very funny. But that book was very helpful. It's a computer drawn maps on it and stuff like that.

It's great. I remember Zelda, I mean, Zelda 2 is one of those games where you would see tips in Nintendo Power years and years after the game was released. Like, you'd see things like Kid Icarus and Metroid in like a 90 issue of Nintendo Power. Like, there was always a need for these hints, you know, for kids. Yeah, that was a game that really demanded you get help.

Like, even more so than the first Zelda, which had some obscure parts. Like, what does it mean, you know, how do I find level 5? Or what does this tip mean, like, northwest, southwest? What's that about? But for the most part. You have to upgrade to come back and get this or something. Oh, yeah. Master using this and you can have it.

And that just means come back with more hearts. Yeah. Like there was some stuff that you needed to kind of figure out or talk about. But Zelda II was just opaque. It was inscrutable. And that's probably the most frustrating part. When I played through it, I got stuck in it for probably like three weeks because I could get to the last dungeon.

I'd beaten all the temples. I could get to the final palace. But I couldn't enter because I didn't have, maxed out hearts. And you have to max out your life by finding all the heart containers before, I'm pretty sure this is right, before you can enter the final dungeon.

Through God. And I didn't know where it was. It turns out it was on this island maze that's kind of like hidden. And I had been to the island maze before, but I guess I hadn't walked into the right random block of the maze where you step and all of a sudden

it puts you in a side view and oh, there's a heart container. Or maybe it's a magic container. There's one out in the water that's really hard to find. Yeah, yeah. Man, you guys are making a phenomenal case for me to never, ever play this video. But again, save states and a game guide make it possible to kind of just explore this game that has things that Nintendo made that we will never see otherwise.

Right. There is a really cool game here that with, you know, the hindsight of modern game design thinking and the idea that maybe you don't have to be a complete asshole to players would be a really great game. I would love to see sort of a modern day remake of this. that just kind of takes out the horrible parts and just smooths over the bumpy bits. I think people have been talking about that for a long time. And I wouldn't be too surprised to ever hear that Nintendo had considered that at some point

or worked up some prototypes of Zelda, too. But in general, they've pretty much just abandoned it. Yeah. But Kiddikris got a nice 3DS remake. I was liked with a little bit of a floaty jump. Yeah, they changed the jump on that and all of a sudden becomes this playable, pretty fun game. Isn't that great?

I love that version. Yeah. Areca just made like a little change to the way Link jumps. They didn't even take out the fact that when you duck, you fall through a platform. Yeah. No, they didn't. They kept all the elements of the game, but they just changed the way you jump, and it changes everything about the game.

It's much more playable. I think, you know, Zolda 2 would need a little more refinement than that, but it's still, there's still the heart of a good game here. So it made better clues, and then maybe those invisible pits. Take out those invisible pits. Those things are so mean. You can't see them. There's no way to ever show them visible.

You just have to fall in them once. And then you have to jump over them the next time. And you don't know which brek it was. And, oh, my God. Final boss. So cool in that game. First you fight a very difficult large boss. And then you go to get the Triforce.

There's a little man holding the Trifor. I don't know who that little man is. He's up on a pillar. Yoda, I think. And you think, I'm finally at the end. There's the Triforce. And then all of a sudden, your shadow jumps out of you and just kicks your ass. Oh, yeah.

That's definitely an idea they've explored plenty of time since this game, for sure. Shadow Link is an Occurine of Time. And in that game, I remember people saying like that, he was so hard in that game, but there's tricks to him in that. But in this game, there's no trick. You just have to back him into a corner or just swatter-and-fight him. But, I mean, you use the exact same tactics that you did with the knights and everything. And, you know, to get to that point, you have to fight through the Great Palace

where you don't just fight those night guys, but the flying bird, the fokers, or whatever they're called. With hammers? They're basically hammer brothers. They're so bad. They're like birds and knights and. They're just terrible. They're horrible. The final boss is nothing compared to that.

But one of the interesting things is that to be able to damage, to be able to hurt the final boss, the next to last boss, the firebird, the Phoenix or whatever it's called. You have to use a spell. You have to use half your magic meter if you've maxed it out. Plus you have to use shield and jump. Yeah, you have to use shield and you have to use jump and shield. So you can't really rely on like the life spell.

Until you get to drains your magic. And then if you have in life, you die. And then you have your full life again. and that's the thing about that Great Palace you can get extra lives in Zelda 2 but they're on the map screen and they're in other places they're even in dungeons but you can only get them once

so if you wait your whole game and spend two lives and everything and then just do a run to get all the extra lives that's the way to beat the Great Palaz otherwise it's too hard then you save your game no you'll lose them you have one chance you have to do that run

it takes on one one save wow The one nicety is that if you make it to the Great Palace and die and continue, you continue from the beginning of the Great Palace. You don't have a five to beat it at that point, so it's... I've done it. That is the one safe point in the game outside of Zelda's castle, right? Yeah, that's the only other one. So I've just played it, and I do recommend playing it on 3DS with save states on your commute.

You can do it in bite-sized chunks, and you just look up game help when you need it, and it's totally worth it in that sense. I had a great time playing it, actually. Like, I really like it. So, I mean, yeah, would this be a game in which you would say, just start playing it and then if you need help, you know, go to the fact. Because there's some games where I would say, like... Skip the parts you've played.

Because you've played those so many times. You've gone to that great palace probably and gone to the caves. But, like, just get through that and then explore a little bit. But always know what your next goal is. Okay. Like, you know, just an outline is good enough. Otherwise, it's not a fun exploration. game. It's a combat game.

Gotcha. You, and it's good to know. And then we'll upgrade that sword. Yeah, Chris said if you get stuck, I can't imagine a scenario, someone playing this fresh wouldn't get stuck. Yeah, that's the thing you have to know where to go. When you get stuck. Yeah, but there's some games in which I would recommend that people like

start the game and just use a fact because that game is going to tell you, don't do this. Like, here's things to not do. Here's go things to go do that are going to make your gameplay experience better. There's actually a website for that. I think it's called, like, before I play or whatever, Google that. Oh, yeah? And it'll be, like, here's what you should do.

There's, like, no spoilers. Like, don't do this. Make sure you do this. Just to, like, have a better time. I like that a lot. We make those guys for Dark Souls games and stuff like that a lot. Earthbound is a really good game to play with the original strategy guide. Because the strategy guide is not a strategy guide.

It's like, it's like an index of all the stuff it doesn't tell you. And it's like a, yeah, if you have $300, grab that guide. It's also like, great, like, a PDF version. The PDF is available officially. It's also designed to be like an artifact of the world with like newspaper articles and you know just like fun information about that universe.

Isn't that cool? I think that's such a clever thing to release your book guide as like hey this is what we couldn't fit in the game and it just makes it better. And of course as we know the fan gamer guys and bring them up again did the Mother 3 handbook which is exactly that but for Mother 3. I was reading that

thing and I was like oh man how they get all these cool like clay versions of the characters just like the Earthbound guide. I They must have got, they must have scanned these out of a Japanese guy. Nope, they freaking made clay versions of all the characters that look amazing and then photograph them. That's so cute.

Yeah. We love them. They make her t-shirts. So please buy one of those, too. Right, right, right. So anyway, we really need to wrap it up. And I don't know that we really have too much more to say about Zelda 2, but I did want to mention the fact that...

Beautiful opening. Beautiful opening for Zelda 2. Yeah, especially if you play the Family Comic System version. Oh, right, right. The American version, you know, didn't have the sound channel, so it loses something and it's very kind of shrill. Like there's a warbly nature to it that I don't like. Yeah, it's much nicer in the Japanese version.

And I hate saying that because it sounds so pretentious. Oh, you wanted to talk about... You want to talk about Zelda 2's influence on Ocarina of Time? Yeah, so... The names of the towns in Zelda 2 were the names of the Seven Sages in Ocarina of Time. And, of course, that's... Ocarina of Time takes place before Zelda 2,

so what happened was the names of the Seven Sages. We all named our towns after the Sages of Old. Right. So it's a nice callback, but, yeah, the director of... Call forward. Both... Oh, sure. The director of both games was Yoichi Yamada.

And I think that was the last Zelda game he directed at. After that, it was, you know, Aounuma. So I don't know, I guess he went on to executive heaven or whatever. But, yeah, like, I always felt like Ocarina of Time took a lot of cues from Zelda 2 because combat in Zelda and Zelda Link to the past and Link's Awakening was very just kind of like stab spin. You know what? Whereas Zelda 2 is really heavily focused on sword skills and on, like, standing toe to toe with enemies. and they really...

Nose to nose. You got to walk right up to them. You are. You are absolutely correct. I mean, in the main, what happened with the Zelda series is like, oh, why didn't they make another Zelda too? Well, the answer is, after Link to the Past, the top-down Zelda's and the side-scrolling Zelda's all became one game, which is the 3D Zeldas

taking elements from both and moving on as a series with all of that thought about. The Gameblay games, for some reason, stuck with the top-down. A side-scrow... Right, exactly, yeah. So a side-scrolling Zelda at this point would be a deliberate throwback type game design which maybe they will

But yeah, you're right, I mean, when Zelda moved into me When I first played Ok, I was like Okay, this is Zelda 2 But they took the camera from the side And put it behind the link But it really does feel like in terms of kind of the mechanics in play like they really reached back to Zelda 2 and said

This is how we make you know kind of like Strong engrossing combat You know they added the Z targeting Which made a huge difference but just the element of the one-to-one combat that there's so much of an Ocarina of Time was very much a Zelda II thing.

I mean, you spend so much time fighting the knights and the bosses and everything. Right, you and here's an enemy and you have to dance with that enemy exclusively rather than you're in a room and there's three enemies and they're sort of wandering around. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is why you hate Ocarina of Time. I can't stand that game, no. Well, you never beat it, though, right? Isn't that one that you never got through? Have I beaten it? I can't remember. I've played most of it, if not beaten it. But, yeah, it just doesn't.

I don't hate it. It just isn't one of my favorites. Like, I never felt this kind of immense, like, oh, I love this game. Whereas I did beat Zelda, too. So there you go. But no, I really feel like, you know, Zelda II's legacy was kind of showing the way forward for a very heavy combat-driven game. And that's something that Zelda games, outside of Zelda 2 had not excelled at.

So, you know, if that's the lasting legacy of Zelda 2, it's a pretty good one because the way Nintendo handled combat in Zelda 2 really kind of revolutionized 3D action games, it became kind of the standard, really. The one good part of it was what they carried on and everything else went into the dumpster of time. You guys remember the little neat fact that there was a downward stab that was attempted to be put into Occurine of Time?

Oh, really? Yeah, I just couldn't figure that out. They tried, but they just couldn't do it. Yeah, that makes sense. But it got the jump slash. Yeah, yeah, yep, yep. Based on Chris's comment, I want to play Legend of Zelda, the dumpster of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sifting through these thrown-away ideas. I think that was on CDI. Oh, wow. Burn. Anyway, so any final thoughts on Zelda or Zelda, too, as we wrap this up? I never thought I'd endorse playing it, but it's because it's a first party, such a mega hit Nintendo game that most people I know haven't beat or played, that's why I went back to play it.

And that's why I'm here talking about it. When you brought it up, I said, I want to talk about Zelda, too. And then that made me get through the rest of the Great Palace this week. So it's just, it was one of the better archaeology, you know, experiments I've had with a game recently. Yeah, not everything Nintendo creates is gold, even if they put it in a gold cartridge. Nice. Yeah, thanks. Well done.

But there are a lot of really interesting ideas in Zelda, and it really was this, I'd say, a pretty influential game in its own regard. There were other games that kind of did the Zelda 2 thing in the following years, like Fizanadoo, a few others, you know, they did sort of the action platformer RPG adventure thing and did it better than Zelda 2. And, you know, Symphony in the Night probably is sort of the ultimate synthesis of that and Metroid, like Zelda, Zelda 2, Super Metroid, all in one. Oh, and also some Castlevania.

Just a touch. Yeah, just a bit. But, you know, that's really, I think, what they were trying for with Zelda 2, but the technology wasn't there. The game design philosophy and, you know, sort of mindfulness of the actual player experience wasn't quite there. So it's an interesting experiment and a remarkable attempt that isn't always that much fun. But I definitely think it's wrong for people to just dismiss it out of hand because there's a lot happening in that game. And, you know, parts of it did survive throughout. Zelda and have influenced both that series and other series as well.

Yeah, and we have, you know, since those Shade and Freud, we want other people to suffer through this game. Yeah, sure. I want to see them suffer through it. As for me, Zelda has kind of lost me in recent years, but I will always love games the most that borrow from the earlier Zelda games, games that encourage exploration and games that are confident enough for you to get lost. Here, here.

Yeah. And Link Between Worlds, probably my favorite Zelda game of the past 15 years, probably. Yeah. It's a secret to everybody. Well said. All right, folks, that wraps it up for episode 21 of Retronauts or whatever episode this was. And thanks to Chris and Sam for coming in to talk about Zelda. Good to be with you. Thanks for Bob for talking about Zelda also.

Oh, yeah. Thanks to you, the player, for listening. And thanks to me for, I don't know, whatever the hell I did. So we'll be back in a week with some kind of micro episode. And two weeks from now with a big episode hosted by Bob, it's going to be awesome. In the meantime, you can check out our podcast at retronauts.com at usgamer.net. And, of course, on the iTunes store, this podcast is made possible by Patreon. So please check out patreon.com slash retronauts and make a small pledge to us so that we can keep doing this and renting this space with no ventilation.

It's really important. Of course, it's a safe space. That's right. Because we're actually inside a safe. Yeah. That's true. Yeah, it's true. Wow.

So a nuke could drop and we'd all be safe. That's right. Totally. You know, anytime I come out of an episode recording session, I'm like, is civilization still here? Okay. The electricity is still on. We're good. So, yeah, also finally, we're on Twitter, Facebook, et cetera.

So check us out on social media. As for myself, you can find. me at usgamer.net where I work and you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite and also check out Gameboy dot world, which is where I write about Game Boy games

because why the hell not? I love that site. Sam. Hey, you can find me at Samuel underscore IGN. I do a lot of retro game coverage for IGN and you can come play my pinball machines at Free Gold Watch at Hayton Stanley when you come to San Francisco. It's a great arcade.

I am on a podcast called Good Job Brain, which you should listen to it. There's nothing to do with video games whatsoever, but I really enjoy doing it. Goodshopbrain.com. I'm the games editor at Wired, where I do write about the video games. So Wired.com for me. And you can find my rating at usgamer.net

and something awful.com. And I do another podcast called Talking Simpsons. It's a chronological exploration of The Simpsons. We should be in the middle of season three by the time you hear this. So check it out. It's a lot of fun. And I have a lot of fun doing it. All right. Thanks everyone for being here. Thanks everyone for listening.

Thanks Nintendo for making Zelda games. All right, that's it for us. Take care. Bye. Thank you.