AWKWARD ZOMBIE

And I had one. Got it for Christmas.

I got LBW and it's cool but Why did I get the Hylian Shield in Lorule?. Really though this game is really good and I like that some of the puzzles got me for a bit rather then just needing to throw the dungeon item at the problem until the problem goes away. I've gotten lost like three or four times it's great.

Yes I am loving LBW all the time all over the place

Hyrule is bodaciously the same map from ALttP with a few tweaks.
Lorule is bodaciously the dark world from ALttP but broken up and a few tweaks.
The dungeons are laughably easy, and hilariously aside from a few dungeons that just switched places, they're all in the same locations and all the same themes.
I haven't even beaten it yet and the twist is obvious.
and I can't
fucking
roll

A Link Between Worlds is probably the most consistently disappointing zelda game ever. It's not bad at all, it's just a long string of things I wish they could have done better. Had they made it, say, a remake of A Link to the Past, that would have been good. Would have been all over that.

But it's not. It's an "original" game.

Really glad I got it as a gift, because I would not have spent cheddar on this shit.

The DS Zeldas are way worse then this game, and much more disappointing. But Spirit Tracks was better. Still not great, but better.

Wait, so the DS Zeldas (PH and ST) are way worse than ALBW...but ST was better than ALBW?

So PH&ST<ALBW
And ALBW<ST
Therefore PH&ST<ALBW<ST, so PH&ST<ST
So if ST>ALBW, then ST>ST, but also ST<ST
whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Galaxy Man wrote:A Link Between Worlds is probably the most consistently disappointing zelda game ever. It's not bad at all, it's just a long string of things I wish they could have done better.
Really glad I got it as a gift, because I would not have spent cheddar on this shit.

thank yooou

wordNumber wrote:The DS Zeldas are way worse then this game, and much more disappointing. But Spirit Tracks was better. Still not great, but better.

No listen

Phantom Hourglass had problems, but it was still an original game. It was still a game you could look at and go "oh, yeah, that certainly had time and effort put into it"
Spirit Tracks had problems, but it was still an original game. It was still a game you could look at and go "oh, yeah, that certainly had time and effort put into it"

A Link Between Worlds is not an original game and I don't think any real effort was put into anything but the graphics.

I'd rather have a Zelda game with problems than a Zelda game that's trying to pretend to be a new thing.

Mind you, at no point does it become bad. It is not a bad game. There's nothing about it that you can really like stare down and go "yeah no this is awful design"

it's just lazy bullshit

Galaxy Man wrote:A Link Between Worlds is not an original game and I don't think any real effort was put into anything but the graphics.

I agree with you on almost all of those points, but I wouldn't say that they didn't put any effort into anything but the graphics. I'm sure a lot of effort went into that Hyruleglyphics mechanic or whatever it was called. That was extremely well used and was without a doubt the best part of the game. Also, most of the dungeons, while ridiculously short and pathetically easy, were fairly well-designed, especially the Desert Palace and the Thieves' Town.

But yeah, aside from that, I think "lazy bullshit" sums up this game pretty well.

OH MY GOD HELP ME I'M STARTING TO DEFEND THIS GAME

Sir Real wrote:Wait, so the DS Zeldas (PH and ST) are way worse than ALBW...but ST was better than ALBW?

Spirit Tracks is an overall improvement to Phantom Hourglass, PH is not a 'bad' game but incredibly bland and with a lot of questionable design, LBW feels like a more polished product then either of the DS games. Sorry I flubbed the wording a bit.

Galaxy Man wrote:

I dunno man, I just had way more fun with LBW. I like ST and PH isn't the worst thing, but I just liked LBW better then either. I guess we just value originality and an overall polished experienced to different degrees. I am sorta bugged that LBW is so very a sequel to LttP, but it's an enjoyable sequel and so I don't care that much. Also I would argue that LBW does have enough original concepts going for it to make it stand out from LttP a little, but I won't pretend it isn't trying incredibly hard to be LttP.

What original concepts are we talking about? All I can think of are the painting mechanic and the idea that the world will crumble without a Triforce.

I thought the whole renting system was a neat idea. mixed up the formula a tiny bit, gave some consequence to dying. Not that this game is that hard but I suppose a kid might die here and there.

Sir Real wrote:OH MY GOD HELP ME I'M STARTING TO DEFEND THIS GAME

That's what happens when GM's hyperbole winds up on your side of the argument~

I don't really care that Link Between Worlds reuses the maps; it's not different from the similarities between Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time's overworlds in a terribly important way. It's not like the layout of the world map matters very much in a Zelda game anyway. The gameplay doesn't hinge on knowing that death mountain is up north, or that Kakariko is in the west, or that Link's house and the sanctuary are on opposite sides of the castle. It's a direct sequel anyway; it takes place in the same region. Strikes me as weird to criticize this similarity, especially when the map has been altered on the small scale so that getting around is still different.

As for the dungeons being easy, have you ever played Ocarina of Time? Aside from the Water Temple, that whole game was laughably easy. The Water Temple is the exception that proves the rule - the one dungeon that gave any real challenge was such an outlier from the game that it's all anyone ever talks about. Zelda games after Link to the Past just aren't hard, dude. At least LBW's bosses are mildly challenging, which is more than you can say for OoT.

As someone who had never played Ocarina of Time until very recently, I'm approaching these games from an almost identical viewpoint - if OoT is a well-made game, then you can't really level 'too easy' as a criticism against LBW.

And if you want to compare it to Link to the Past? The difference is controls. Combat and maneuvering is much easier than it ever has been in a 2D Zelda (Except, somewhat ironically, the two DS games that disappointed so many. I found that their controls worked very well.) and that informs almost all of the gameplay. Nintendo didn't make the game easier, they made the controls easier.


I suppose if you're bothered by the map reuse then that's entirely your prerogative, but it seems silly to me, especially given the significant impact the painting mechanic had on gameplay and navigation. Complaining about difficulty, however, is simply inapplicable.

The thing is, TP's Hyrule may have been similar to OoT's Hyrule, but there were clear differences. For example, there's no way you could mistake TP's Kakariko Village for OoT's Kakariko. Hell, there's just about no way you could mistake any of the locations in TP for their OoT counterparts, because even when they reused previously established locations, they mixed things up and gave you something that was familiar but also new and exciting. And even then, they added in interesting new locations like Snowpeak, the Hidden Village, and the Palace of Twilight. ALBW, on the other hand, copies and pastes its locations from ALttP; if it weren't for the graphical difference, it would be difficult to tell one game's location from its counterpart in the other game. I just can't get over how lazy Nintendo was in designing the world of ALBW.

While Ocarina of Time isn't as gonad-pulverizingly difficult as some of its predecessors, it was still at least a decent challenge. Unlike ALBW, it's not a game that I could beat over the course of a single weekend. Hell, I've never been able to beat a Zelda game over the course of a weekend on my first playthrough. And to think that ALBW has twelve dungeons! So yes, ALBW is too easy.

The processes of creating and playing a Legend of Zelda game are both acts that should have a good deal of time and effort put into them.

When did you first play Ocarina of Time, though? I don't like making assumptions, but I'm of the impression that most people played it when they were pretty young.

I breezed through OoT for the first time in the equivalent of a weekend last year, though spread out over a bit longer because I didn't play for very long at a time. There wasn't a single boss that gave me issues, and in fact no dungeon ever managed to kill me except for when backtracking in the Spirit Temple made me fight a certain powerful enemy several times in a row.
I can say the same of LBW, but I can also say that at least there seems to be more skill involved in the fights. Ocarina of Time felt like it was about doing the right thing, while LBW feels like it focuses on doing the right thing while staying alive. I still haven't felt significantly challenged, but I have felt a bit more challenged. I'd say that the harder of the two is definitely LBW, but not by much.

The differences may be more noticeable between OoT and TP, but I think they're just as significant in LBW and LttP; possibly even moreso. Ocarina and Twilight always struck me as kind of empty, because most of the overworld travel is just aiming yourself towards a town and crossing the field. Enemies showed up sometimes, but especially in Ocarina you could just ignore them and leave them behind. In LttP and LBW, there are enemies on almost every screen of the world map. There are also more trees in your way, NPCs to talk to, grass patches to cut, etc. the small details make a much larger difference here than they do in the 3D games. That's why I don't think the similarities of the maps matter too much - it's not the direction you're walking that matters, it's what you see on your way there. The small details are still similar, yeah, but I think they're enough to make the two games feel pretty different.

Comparing OoT and TP's world similarities to ALttP and ALBW's world similarities (wow acronyms) is the straight up most flawed argument I have ever heard.

ALBW's map is not just kind of similar to ALttP it is bodaciously the same map with a few changes. Right down to the grass you can cut.

Twilight Princess had a vastly different map to Ocarina. Things were similar, the lake was by the desert, Kakariko was by Death Mountain, things like that. But the overworld itself was not only significantly larger, it also had entirely new areas. Lake Hylia dosen't look anything like the one from OoT, Gerudo Desert is bodaciously entirely changed and has almost no similarities, Kakariko isn't even pretending to be similar. The map in TP also added entirely new areas, and comparing it to Ocarina only shows that it has similarities, and it's not an outright copy.

Meanwhile, I know where secrets are in ALBW because I found them in the same exact location, using the same exact method, in ALttP.
The actual secrets have changed but so what, I have bodaciously been traversing the map through muscle memory. The Witch's House? Same exact spot. The dungeons? Same exact spots.

The only notable changes to the map, really, is the closed off desert and the way to the blacksmith has been opened up more. That's it.

The idea that "oh it's the same hyrule as in ALttP" is a bullshit excuse too. The Hyrule in ALttP is the same Hyrule as fucking Ocarina, and through that, the same Hyrule in every game not in the Wind Waker timeline.

You can argue that not enough time could have passed to change how it looks, but ALBW is about as far off from ALttP as TP was from OoT in terms of straight years.

Another thing is that a lot of puzzles in Zelda games, especially the 2D ones, are at least hard enough to make you sit and wonder what to do next.
I have bodaciously not encountered anything I could even call a puzzle in ALBW. The dungeons are basically linear, what you need to do is obvious, and you'll only ever get stumped because you flat out did not pay attention.

ALBW is just totally shoddy, especially compared to other Zelda games. It is bodaciously a very long lie, telling you that it is not a poorly done ALttP reimagining, but it is.