Zelda-Like Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

What Zelda Was Actually Like

July 19, 2023 by Belghast

Hey Folks! I’ve mentioned a few times that I have been playing around with Yuzu and while I purchased Tears of the Kingdom on my Switch… I didn’t really get into it until I dumped the game and started playing it on PC. Essentially “Breath of the Zelda” series has one fatal flaw as far as I am concerned… weapon durability. I hates it… I hates it so much… and it ultimately destroys my enjoyment of the game. So on the emulator, I can apply a “patch” of sorts to simply remove that problem. I did not make it all the way through Breath of the Wild until I played it on Cemu, so it isn’t shocking that the same seems to be playing out with Tears of the Kingdom. You also have the side effect of playing at a higher frame rate and with slightly improved graphics.

All told I think I like this entry a lot better than I liked Breath of the Wild. Both games started you out in a sort of “starter island” experience, with Breath of the Wild being a plateau that you could not leave without access to the Glider and Tears of the Kingdom being a literal island in the sky. You are set forth with only the vaguest of directions and left to sort of bumblefuck your way around the island and figure out exactly how you should go about traversing it. At first, this felt grossly inefficient, especially given that you only end up with one shrine marked on your map and you sorta have to guess at the location of the other two. Each shrine is effectively unlocked by the power you’ve learned from the previous one, so by the time you leave the first island you get a feel of how to use the new combining powers to their fullest.

A few months ago Kodra set forth to play some Tears of the Kingdom and found the experience disappointing which led to a discussion on the podcast with me relating my feelings about Diablo IV to his feelings about the latest Zelda entry. The end result is that we thought maybe Breath of the Wild was a good game but not necessarily a good Zelda game. I think the challenge is that we are looking at the game through the lens of multiple decades of living with this series. I personally consider A Link to the Past as my favorite Zelda game in the entire series and I think for Kodra it is Majora’s Mask. As I have been playing Tears of the Kingdom I have begun to re-evaluate that conversation in my head. I think maybe I was misinterpreting my modern view of the series with what the series originally was at its core.

Thinking back about the very first game… I similarly was left to bumblefuck my way around it and failed to make much progress until I got my hands on the above image. Nintendo of America released this magical tome called the “Official Nintendo Player’s Guide” and it contained detailed maps and boss strategies to take down almost every game in the arsenal at the time of publication in 1987. In the original Legend of Zelda, that first dungeon is super easy to find and then the second dungeon requires you to just roam around aimlessly around a ton of territory to actually find it. I am pretty sure originally I had fought these dungeons out of order and did three long before I finished two. So when I got ahold of the maps… I was finally able to strategically knock out the dungeons in order. Similar to Breath of the Wild, I only had the vaguest of directions to go on… that I know Dungeons exist and that I should clear them.

The outrageous options that you have with Tears of the Kingdom and building took a bit of getting used to. Last night before I logged I was held up in a shrine that required me to make hot air balloons to do “something” but that objective was not entirely clear. It was fun as hell though to slap a fan to a minecart and watch it zoom along a track out over a chasm. I’ve built several different boats to varying degrees of success and can see the potential to make gliders that are powered by a fan and can let me cross great distances. Last night I helped repair a cart and tame a horse to drive it. The objectives are what you make of them, and there is often a simple solution… and then a way more convoluted one that you could take if you are so inclined.

I also now get why folks were telling me that weapon durability was not as much of a problem in this game as it is in Breath of the Wild. One of your powers amounts to the ability to take shitty weapons and glue strong components to them… to make less shitty weapons. For example, I glued a fire emitter to a shield and now have a fire-breathing shield. Similarly, I have a Boss Boko horn that is curiously sword blade shaped… glued to a random tarnished sword that I picked up and have turned into a rather effective piece of gear. Per the lore… every weapon in Hyrule has decayed as a result of the opening moments of the game and the only way to make them viable… is by crafting something with them. I still greatly prefer not to have durability turned on however so that when I land upon a weapon I like… I can just keep it indefinitely.

I’m in no real rush to get through this game, but I do find it rather relaxing to play. I’m trying not to let it bother me how general or vague the objectives are. If I see a shrine along my path… I go attempt it. If I see something off in the distance that catches my eye… I go explore it. I am however mostly going in the direction of my next objective marked on my map. However, I was given four equal objectives… and I just happened to choose the one that seemed like it was the correct one. All in all, I think Tears of the Kingdom is probably a more compelling game than Breath of the Wild. The world already feels more vibrant and alive. It also feels like less of a retread of the rote Zelda story we have experienced in one form or another before. There are more new elements being woven into this tale.

I am honestly surprised by how much I am enjoying the game. After the conversation on the podcast, I sort of thought that it would not be for me. I am pleasantly surprised that has not been the case. It is also shocking how much more I enjoy playing Nintendo Switch games on a PC than I ever did on the console. That is entirely my problem, and I wish there was a way to pass saved data back and forth between the two. I might look into this… or I might just get Yuzu up and running on my Steam Deck as that might be simpler. Hopefully, you are having a great week. At this point, I have gotten three certifications this week and will be wrapping up the fourth today. Then by Friday I should have my fifth and be done for a while. I am so ready to return to being alone in my office plugging away in lieu of being in person. The experience has been fine, but by yesterday at lunch, I was done with human interaction.

Games of the Decade: 2017

December 26, 2019 by Belghast

Once again I am continuing down the path to 2019 as I talk through the games of this decade that were important to me. Going back this morning and assembling my picks for 2017 made me realize what a freaking phenomenal year for gaming this was. There are so many games that would have been game of the year… were they not up against other competition. Once again a preface of that this is my personal list of the games that were important to me during the year. Your list probably looks a bit different and there are a few games that were left off because I never quite got into them the way that I should.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Lets be honest… this is the game that sold a bunch of switches. This is absolutely the reason why I bought mine and even managed to start out on the WiiU and then rebought it and restarted from scratch when I ultimately purchased my Switch. I have issues with one gameplay mechanic, and that is the breakable weapons. However even taking that into account there is no denying how good of a game this is. I ultimately greatly prefer playing it now on Cemu running the WiiU game on emulator so that I can apply a mod that removes weapon durability. There is just something about this game world and the pacing that make me want to get out and explore. The fact that through climbing and stamina you can both gate your progress but also feel like you can get anywhere if you try hard enough kept me pushing forward and trying to find the next secret. If I could remove the gyroscope nonsense and the weapon durability this would have been the perfect game.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins

I’ve made attempts in the past to break into the Assassin’s Creed series but there have ultimatley been two obstacles. Firstly they are games that were designed for the console in mind and seem to be way more reasonable when played with a controller than a mouse and keyboard. Secondly they were games that felt defined by a bunch of mini games and things like rooftop chases, which some sneaking around that felt forced and limiting. AC:O pushes the Assassin’s Creed game into a full open world experience where you explore large swaths of the Ancient Egyptian countryside and get a real sense of place and setting that make it feel like you are part of something much larger than effectively being trapped in a single city. The combat itself also seems to be way more forgiving of my desire to rush into combat and not stealth at all, which makes for a better experience personally. I love this game and at some point I will get around to playing the follow up Odyssey.

Night in the Woods

While there are significant issues surrounding the co-creator of Night in the Woods, I cannot write the game off because it is extremely powerful. It spoke to me on such a primal level because it effectively could have been my story. I grew up in a tiny town much like the one depicted in the game, and was one of the few of my friends who successfully transitioned into college… but the fact that I lived at home for the first two years commuting back and forth made for a bizarre experience. I was living in two different worlds… the world that remained the same as High School where I saw the same people I did then on a regular basis… and this new fledgling world of experiences as I took my first steps into college. Like Mae I reached a point in my Junior year where I came perilously close to dropping out of School entirely. This game means so much to me, and nothing is probably ever going to change that.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

While this game was universally panned by critics and social media… I loved it and will be forever saddened by the fact we wont see more of this setting. This is the game that YouTube killed because of some pretty bad issues in the early release candidate that were more or less fixed in the first patch. However by that time all of the damage had been done and all of the demo real of horrific facial contortions was shot giving it an endless stream of memetic images. I liked what this game did to Mass Effect by opening it up and bringing us to an entirely new galaxy with its own issues, while at the same time providing hints of the conflicts from the original game that ultimately lead to the splintering of the Andromeda project. I want to see more of this setting and I am hoping at some point EA allows Bioware to revisit it.

Destiny 2

I love Destiny as a franchise, and while I would have greatly preferred that Destiny 2 didn’t exist from the standpoint of that I would have rather seen the first game transition to the PC and get the necessary upgrades it required, I was okay with the reset because it meant I could finally play the game on my platform of choice. Destiny 2 had a rocky road but today we are experiencing a renaissance of some of the best content that has ever existed in a game of this sort. All of that ground work comes back to the transition from the first game to the sequel and the subtle changes that were made to the way the game functioned. It has been an interesting ride but one that began back in 2017, and for that it will always deserve a space on these sort of lists.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn was easily my game of the year for 2017, and would be a heavy contender if I was trying to make a game of the decade. I love the setting and how it takes the post apocalyptic genre into some very new and interesting directions. I love Aloy the protagonist because she represents a new kind of character that we really haven’t seen much of to this point. I am absolutely hungry for more of this series and I fully expect to see a new game in this sequence release as a launch title for the PlayStation 5. I would love to see this release simultaneously on the PlayStation and the PC at the same time, but I somehow doubt that is actually going to ever be a thing. If you have yet to play this… it is worth the purchase of a console just for this game alone.

Adorable Zelda

September 23, 2019 by Belghast

This weekend various things happened, but one of them was that I played the first game that was not World of Warcraft Classic since the launch of aforementioned game. Friday two games of note came out, but the one I spent the most time playing was The Legend of Zelda Link’s Awakening. One thing that is important to know about me is that I love Zelda games, but more importantly I love the pre-n64 style of Zelda games. So while I am a huge fan of Breath of the Wild, I honestly had more fun playing A Link Between Worlds.

I purchased a Gameboy in 1989, and quite honestly it was more novelty than something I actually played on a regular basis. It was something we brought on trips or would occasionally link up with friends, but considering it had no backlight it made it extremely difficult to play at times when playing a game might be super convenient. If it was light enough to see I was way more likely to be doodling in the backseat of the car on a drawing tablet than to actually be playing the Gameboy. I got my Super Nintendo in 1990 and by the time Link’s Awakening came out in 1993 I was a Sophmore in High School and could give a shit about anything on the awkward to play Gameboy at that point. I did not have a renaissance of the Gameboy until 1994 with the release of the Super Gameboy, but for whatever reason mostly fixated on Metroid and never went back to play this game.

As a result I went into this experience knowing next to nothing about the game apart from the fact that it was supposedly wildly different than the traditional Zelda narrative and was still exceptionally well received. This could have meant a few things, because Majora’s Mask is wildly different than the traditional Zelda narrative and I am not at all a big fan of that game. Minish Cap on the other hand is also wildly different than the traditional Zelda narrative… and I instead loved every minute of that game. What I did know however is that the game feels like it borrows from A Link to the Past and managed to make a Gameboy game that looked very much like that.

What I was not expecting however was a game that was a way harder start than pretty much any other Zelda game out there. There is a whole trading quest system that exists and I found myself trying to figure out how to trade this for that, and what the hell to do with the thing that I just received in return. I also spent time playing around with the fishing system which is absolutely adorable… as is pretty much everything else to do with this game. As a whole this very much feels like a game where they just went hog wild with the systems development and also a game where they played with a bunch of interesting concepts… like the fact that apparently Hyrule and the Mushroom kingdom are not part of the same tapestry.

There were a lot of times I spent with the “beep beeps” as I call them, which apparently caused Tam to lose his shit and laugh the other night when I said it… but at the same time immediately knew what I was talking about. It is that moment when you are down to half a heart and the game is playing a constant and annoying health warning sound going “beep beep… beep beep” over and over and over. Thankfully while some of the concepts are mechanically harder than most Zelda games they are seemingly fairly generous with mobs dropping hearts when you actually need one.

I’ve not made it super far into the game, and have pretty much beat the first dungeon boss and started the second area. I do find it super interesting that this is a Zelda game that includes a vertical element with one of the first abilities that you pick up being a feather that lets you jump. It took some getting used to in order to sort out how best to jump across objectives, which lead to me falling in several pits along the way.

Can we just talk for a moment about how adorable the Great Fairy is? I love this art style and honestly would love to see other games in the Zelda series redone in this style. It really fits the feel of this setting, and quite honestly it makes me wish I had a version of the original game remade in this fashion. It also just makes me wish that I had all of the games that came out on the mobile platforms available and playable on the switch. I’m not much of a handheld gamer, but I do like the switch as a platform and its ability to shift back and forth between the two modes of handheld or docked.

This seems well worth picking up, especially if you are like me and somehow skipped this entry in the series. It feels vastly different than any other Zelda game I have played, but also that is perfectly okay. It feels like a game where they experimented with a bunch of big ideas that somehow managed to work perfectly. Additionally it has a really great soundtrack, which makes me want to go back and see how the chiptune versions sounded.

Mythic Invitational

April 2, 2019 by Belghast

My wife spent the weekend sick and I think has passed whatever she had onto me. So the end result was last night both of us came home from work completely dead and ready to go to sleep. We managed to last until around 8 pm before hitting the sack, and then slept the entire night through without interruptions. This is not exactly normal for us and as a result I feel a little weird after getting all of that sleep. As far as gaming went I managed to complete the daily key challenge in Anthem before logging out… thankful that you can bank keys for a later time. Shortly after that I attempted to play some more Breath of the Wild and managed to get the outfit needed to sneak into Gerudo Town… but could not stay conscious long enough to actually do that thing. It was around this time that my wife showed visible signs of succumbing to sleep… when in truth I had been quietly nodding off the entire time we were sitting in the living room. Basically I had a very unproductive night gaming wise, but I hope the sleep helps because she sounds miserable… and I am starting to feel that way.

This weekend I got wrapped up in the Magic the Gathering Mythical Invitational happening at Pax East, which is weird considering I generally bounce off of all e-sports streams. However I watched most of the finals on Sunday strangely compelled and finding myself actually rooting for one of the players. What was interesting about this specific format is that it all happened inside of MTG Arena, meaning there was no need for a judge and limited stalling tactics… the end result being very rapid matches given that most of the mechanical stuff was being taken care of by the game. What was also interesting about the roster specifically is it was a mix of Magic Pro League players, 8 Qualifiers that came up from the ladder play on Arena, and a mixture of notable streamer types. So this could have played out a bunch of ways, but if you were a gambler you probably would have bet on one of the battle hardened MPL players to take hope the trophy. However what happened in truth was something slightly more interesting. The final ranking looked a little bit like this…

Andrea Mengucci – MPL member
Piotr Głogowski – MPL member
Janne “Savjz” Mikkonen – Challenger – Mostly known as a Hearthstone Streamer
Ondřej Stráský – Challenger – Top 8 MTG Arena Qualifier

So yes at the end of the day Magic Pro League players took the first two slots… however they absolutely gave them a run for their money. Savjz especially played some matches that could have gone either way and like so many Magic matches it wound up coming down to card draw and top decking. I think this even more than probably anything was a chance for WotC to show that Arena players could in fact compete in the MPL and I wonder if at some point in the future we will see all MPL matches played out using the Arena client. The difference in speed was noticeable as well as the match being way easier to follow for the viewers at home. When watching a normal Magic match, things are happening so fast that you are largely entirely reliant upon the announcers to tell you what is actually happening. Here you can see both sides and the what the players have in their hands as well… and as a result it leads to way more tension as you know what the other player has as an answer to the play that the active player is about to make.

The other cool thing about the tourney is it gave them an opportunity to show off the cosmetic changes to the client including the introduction of special full art skins that you can get for various cards. The game also launched without card sleeve art that is so popular in games like Hearthstone. Throughout the game play they announced redeemable codes over Twitch that allows the players watching at home to pick up some of the things. Here is what I believe is a full list of the codes that are redeemable.

StarterStyles – The Pack Shown in Screenshot
SparkleDruid – Druid of the Cowl
SuperScry – Opt
ParallaxPotion – Revitalize
FoilFungus – Deathbloom Thalid
ShinyGoblinPirate – Fanatical Firebrand

Additionally they are starting to add the cosmetic rewards to various events. Now the interesting thing about a cosmetic is that if you don’t already have the card… you seem to also get the card when you collect its appearance. During one of the various redeems I did not actually have a copy of whatever card it was granting me and the game made a note that I was getting one of that specific card. I fully expect that there to be more cosmetics surrounding the release of the War of the Spark. That is probably a whole other topic however and I am running out of time this morning so going to wrap this post up. I really think Wizards of the Coast finally understands what it takes to make a viable product for the internet age, and I look forward to seeing what happens surrounding the Arena client and future tournaments. This was probably quite literally the first time I cared about anything e-sports related, so good on them.