The Legend of Zelda

Happy 25th birthday, original Legend of Zelda. My, you don't look a day over 22. I mean, really, you seem much more like a late '80s game than a mid-'80s game, and for that, I commend you. Unfortunately, that's one of the nicest compliments I can give you, because, damn, gaming has just gotten so much better over the course of my lifetime. To the magazine editors and gaming community who have dubbed you the greatest game ever in recent years, I ask, what's with the age fetish? (Alright, this second-person gimmick is getting pretty silly.) So, yeah. The Legend of Zelda is the second game on my Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition compilation that I've beaten in as many days. I didn't beat the game in one day, having been playing it alongside Majora's Mask a little bit, but I probably would have been able to. The final boss's defeat clocked in at just over five hours and the video walkthrough I was following religiously didn't even last two hours. On the one hand, I'm sure the game was absolutely groundbreaking and revolutionary for its time. It did, after all, spawn an amazing franchise of critically acclaimed and very popular games on multiple consoles across multiple decades. On the other, modern day gaming is just so very different from 1986 gaming. While this was an extremely impressive NES game and probably the greatest one I've played aside from Super Mario Bros. 3, it's still, well, a 1986 8-bit game, and that comes with its own bevy of shortcomings. So much of the game is based on exploration. And what I really mean by that is the game gives you no indication of where to go next, ever, at all. Secret passages may be opened up if you bomb certain rock walls or burn down specific trees or move certain boulders, but there's absolutely no hint given whatsoever that any specific rock or tree (among the hundreds of rocks and trees in Hyrule) will give way to yield a passageway to an essential upgrade. I can just picture somebody bombing every square inch of the overworld 25 years ago for hours on end, thrilled to high heaven when he finally stumbled upon one heart container and calling it a day. Wow! No offense, Generation X, but that doesn't sound like any fun at all! And that's why I used the aforementioned video walkthrough to get me through the game. Exploration aside, the slow and clunky NES-style controls made the game challenging enough - I died like six or seven times before finding the first item. Frankly, my options were either to play the game for weeks on end like those poor bastards did 25 years ago, or, skip the hassle and just get shit done in several hours flat. I won't apologize to myself or anyone else for taking the easy way out. And while I can practically hear a hypothetical old school gamer calling me out and saying that I deprived myself of the real Legend of Zelda experience, I can also refrain from giving a shit. I've now seen all the dungeons and power-ups and bosses that the classic game had to offer, and I've still got the next two dozen free nights available for other video games (or other activities in general). So, you can keep your old school experience, hypothetical angry thirty-something gamer; my video walkthrough and I will be moving on to other games. Like perhaps even this game's sequel, since the compilation disc is still in my Wii and all. This is like those Mega Man compilations all over again. Wait, no. There were like sixteen of those games and there are only two pre-2000 Zelda games on this compilation disc. And now one of them is already done! Whew. Now - or, eventually, rather - it's on to Zelda II, that infamous side-scrolling RPG black sheep cousin on the Zelda family tree. I'm sure it sucks, but I hope it's quick!