The Legend of Zelda
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past · The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds · The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time · The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess · The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild · The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom · The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
The OG. Why does it feel like every other game had a dark world in this era? One of my original favorites way back in the day.
Really fun 2D Zelda with some interesting gimmicks to it (the buying items, the entering the walls). It's not my favorite but it's fun and it doesn't take too long, and there's a lot of charm here.
I have beaten and re-beaten this game so many times. I think I still remember how to get Biggoron’s Sword from memory.
This game is…good? I played it back in the day, I have renewed interest due to the Dusk decomp (recomp? I can never remember which or what the difference is).
Probably the best Zelda. The right balance of everything.
This is actually too much game. I didn’t like the addition of the underworld or sky and I don’t like having to build machines! Too much shit here. Just let me play Zelda!
An incredibly clever little game that's very cute. Just kind of petered out on this one but I want to finish it.
Alright, needed something short and sweet to fill the void between now and Fire Emblem.
This game IS very addictive and fun.
Every Zelda apparently needs a water temple. They love those puzzles.
Ravio, you can't credit me the amount I put down to rent for my own? COME ON DOG. This game does do a really good job of making money feel worthwhile though. I feel like in a lot of Zelda games it's whatever.
I really like collecting the Maiamais. I'm not going to find all of them but it's such a nice treat and its a little reward you get every once in a while.
We are three sages down. Man that ice dungeon is annoying.
Another sage freed. One fun thing about this game is that you tackle it from a normal 2d top down Zelda perspective and then sometimes you remember to think with portals and you solve something you were stuck on. Oh yeah, I can cross that gap.
And it feels really good when you remember off the bat and you don't get stuck at all.
Another good design thing about this game is the Maiamais. I was a little disappointed earlier thinking I may actually want to try to grab them all, but it would be so challenging to look up which ones you were missing if you were stuck since you'd grabbed them all out of order. This is a common issue where you have to go back and say well dang, I don't remember which ones I got and you spend a lot of time backtracking to realize you did actually get that one.
But then I remembered the game divides them into zones, so worst case scenario I'm sure something exists that tells you where they are, divided by zone, and it's easy to check that way.
I also thought I got some of the Master Ore in the Lorule Lost Woods dungeon but I didn't. Maybe I got it but died and never re-got it.
Lava turtle khezu dungeon also done. One to go.
I kind of dislike the item system in this game a bit. On one hand, yes, it lets you have a lot of freedom. On the other, I feel like the boomerang is so totally gapped in usefulness by the bow? The bow is just better boomerang 99% of the time.
Final dungeon complete, Master sword upgraded. Yes I have played a lot of this. It's very good.
We beat this! It was very fun. I didn't go back and get all the maiamai or the heart pieces because I just didn't need to and it sounded boring.
I would say the difficulty on this is a touch too low and the game as a while suffers from optionality. The game can't punish you very hard because maybe you're a kid and you're bad at the game and you keep dying and losing your items and you can never afford to buy them outright so the poor stay poorer (perhaps this game is a scathing take on capitalism).
But in the last dungeon, very few items are mandatory, much less their upgrades because they can't know that you definitely have all of them, or that requiring all of them would put the player in this unfun loop where they have to rent it, then they die, then they have to go back and buy it, run back to the dungeon and try again, then die, repeat. A rent to own would have fixed this.
But instead they just make it not that hard.
There is the hero mode but my gut is that it won't actually reward what I want, it'll just ask you to be better at the base skills of the game (dodging, blocking, swording) instead of making it so enemies have weaknesses and you NEED to use the boomerang or something.
The game gestures at this some, there are definitely some enemies where the hook shot is really useful to rip shields away but that kind of cleverness isn't really necessary.