The Legend of Zelda (1986)

This is one of the first video games I ever played as a kid. I had this, Duck Hunt (which my grandpa amusingly got really into), Super Mario Bros and TMNT. I didn't manage to beat any of these games at the time, except for TMNT. To be fair, these games were legit hard and obtuse since there weren't really any hard rules or conventions with video game design. This allowed for more experimentation, also helped by how small teams were. Which further encouraged experimentation. It wasn't that long ago when a studio would release a new game in a series each year. Of course, video games were relatively simple back then, due to hardware limitations and also how novel video games were. Firmly a niche and it was unclear if it would ever be anything more than a gimmick.

This OG nascence of a genre and game design pioneer honestly still shines through even with it's baggage and frustrations. An open world with non-linear exploration and only vague hints of where to go. A true adventure that you are plopped right in. The first screen of the game alone is actually pretty brilliant and a great form of natural tutorializing. You have 4 choices. A path to the East/West/North and a cave. The cave stands out as the only unique path and it turns out it's the path you want to go to first. All communicated in a very subtle way. Then, when you enter you get a sword, teaching you that going into caves will reward you. Within the first few minutes of gameplay you are taught to explore and once you move to an adjacent map tile, you will likely encounter your first enemy and learn another core gameplay mechanic (hopefully after you found your sword).

While this is a simple, economical and effective tutorial, from here the game gets far less directed and obtuse. Which is a good and bad thing. What's kind of fun, is the game shipped with a fairly comprehensive guide that will lead you through the first 2 dungeons and includes an overworld map. I did find a version of this on the interweb and would recommend checking it out. The instruction manual is a lost art form now in video games. Without a guide, you will likely get pretty lost after the first 4 dungeons. After the first four, dungeons become hidden. While there are hints about how to discover these hidden dungeons, by weird old men that live in caves, unless you obsessively try to destroy every wall and bush, it will be hard to find these hidden entrances organically. Later Zelda games got around this by including cracks in walls, or in the case of OOT, some walls will make different sounds when hit, hinting at a secret. In this first generation, you just have to have an irrational hate of all walls and trees and try to destroy them all. Not elegant, but you have to start somewhere?

This is certainly the type of game that will likely be more frustrating to a modern gamer if you play it without a guide. I don't think there's a shame in using a guide. Especially since Nintendo often included intentionally obtuse secrets to sell Nintendo Power or Strategy guides. That all said, the instruction manual does a good job of preparing you. It lists all the secret items you can find on the game world, which you could use a check box, and the overworld map does feel necessary. it is a shame you don't get an overworld map in game, but given this was made in 1986 and was one of the first of its kind, it's easy to overlook this. And it did compensate for this by including said map in the instruction manual, which in a way did create an immersive experience.

This first entry certainly had all the trappings of all future Zelda games (for the most part). You have exploration, puzzles, combat, dungeons and some Macguffin you need to collect to beat the bad dude (in this case, pieces of the Tri-Force which would be re-used in Windwaker). These early dungeons have their fair share of secrets, and unlike the overworld, each dungeon has a map and compass (which of course ended up being mainstays in future titles). The only thing I found a bit frustrating was how keys worked in this game. Some dungeons don't contain enough keys to open all doors, but keys can be bought from random merchants on the overworld. The issue here is how expensive everything is, and how slow it is to get money. There are some great upgrades you need to buy. Such as a candle to see in dark places, or a ring that reduces the damage you take. The economy is certainly pretty fucked in this game, but if you use a guide, you can also b-line to secret caves to get large chunks of rupees. Not great, but hey you take what you can get in this economy.

Another nice thing about the game design is how the dungeons feel focused. Something that would have clashed with the exploratory adventure on the overworld. So dungeons end up being a far more focused form of exploration and does a good job of shaking up the game play. Not all dungeons are great, and something I will criticize the game over is the focus on combat in these dungeons and repeated bosses. Combat isn't great. Link moves reasonably fast, but you are limited to four directional attacks and it is certainly clunky. This isn't really a problem for the first 5 dungeons. After that, they really ramp up the combat difficulty and I did find myself more frustrated with later dungeons than engaged. FUCK THE WIZARDS AND KNIGHTS. Those fuckers are so frustrating to fight. The wizards teleport around and move erratically, a lot of the times right on top of you to instantly knock out a heart, and spam projectiles... then the Knights can't be hit from the front, which is fine, but they also constantly move erratically making fighting them pretty frustrating. This is fine, the real issue is how in later dungeons they will throw like 6-8 of these fuckers at you at the same time in confined space while also having statues that constantly spit fireballs at you. It's so brutal and not in a fun way... so this could have used better balancing.

You are mostly free to tackle dungeons in almost any order you like. Though the dungeon order kind of indicates difficulty. So later dungeons will be harder. There are exceptions, such as needing a raft and ladder to get to and navigate through two dungeons, but aside from that you can kind of do them in any order you see fit. All dungeons do contain one treasure, though these treasures are honestly not really necessary to beat the main boss (most of the time. Last dungeon does have a required treasure to beat the last boss). But that's another trapping you would see refined in later Zelda games. One issue I ended up having was how in one dungeon you get a magical key, that removes the need to collect keys since it is reusable, and I didn't find it! This resulted in a problem in the final dungeon, where there are an absurd amount of locked doors. This design was likely due to them expecting you finding the magic key I never found. I actually got stuck in a room and needed to look online how to save and quick... and man is it convoluted. You need a second controller plugged in. Then on the second controller, you need to hold down A and the up arrow while the game is on the subscreen... workable but certainly perplexing considering most everything else in the game has a logical design. I guess Nintendo really wanted to sell more controllers.

Another thing you kind of need are upgrades to your health, defense and sword. These are all hidden, which does play into the focus and reward of exploration, but without a guide you are unlikely to find these early. And a decent amount of these upgrades are hidden behind secret walls you need to destroy.. so yeah, I hope you hate walls and trees or just give up and use a guide to see where they are. These upgrades can fill very necessary, especially with the absurd difficulty spike in later dungeons combat encounters.

That all said, I had fun with this and think its worth playing, but it's certainly not a casual experience. I think there's no shame in using a guide, but respect to those who painstakingly make their own graph map and go tile by tile trying to destroy every wall and tree to uncover every secret. It's possible without a guide, but certainly tedious.

Using the map that came with the manual of the game made it much more enjoyable. It shows the location of the first four dungeons. The combat took some getting used to, it revolves around movement and predicting enemy patterns. The dungeons were relatively simple but I did have to look up a few things. Overall I enjoyed the game, although I don't think there is a chance that I would be patient enough to finish it on original hardware. It was cool to see where the series started, and pretty satisfying to see how much of the formula they nailed down from the beginning. It was gratifying to cross things off the map as they were completed. I can definitely feel the similarities with Breath of the Wild in terms of exploring a big world with no idea where to go. I don't think I'll play it again, but it was definitely worth a playthrough.

• Level 1 - Pretty easy dungeon, the boss gave me some mild trouble until I realized I could use bombs. You get the bow in this dungeon, but you have to buy arrows before you can use it.
• Level 2 - Another pretty easy one. The boomerang is the item, which I didn't use all that much in my playthrough. I understood the cryptic hint in this dungeon "Dodongo dislkes smoke," and used bombs to beat him.
• Level 3 - There is a room of dark nuts before getting the raft that is difficult here. This boss was not super easy like the last two but a decent challenge.
• Level 4 - "Walk into the waterfall" another cryptic hint that I understood. The two headed dragon boss was hard. The heads both shot at you and moved around making hitting them hard, and bombs did not work.
• Level 5 - "Digdogger hates certain kinds of sound" another hint I understood. In this dungeon you find the recorder/flute, and you have to use it to shrink the boss and allow sword attacks to connect. First appearance of dark nuts as well. First tough dungeon overall.
• Level 6 - This dungeon was HARD. Introduced wizzrobe enemies that are very tough. Some of the rooms in this dungeon are harder than most bosses in the game. "Aim at the eyes of Gohma." This hint was easy to understand, use the bow on the boss. I did not think that Gohma would go down in one hit though, super easy boss in contrast with the rest of the dungeon. Also, I totally missed the magical rod in this dungeon and had to come back and grab it, finally using a guide. There was a hint I didn't understand in this dungeon, "There are secrets where fairies don't live." Apparently you had to use the recorder/flute at the pool of water without any fairies to drain the water and reveal a secret staircase. I had no idea though, and while reading the guide I looked ahead and figured out what to do
• Level 7 - This one was actually not that bad in comparison to the previous two dungeons. Three previous bosses reappear in this dungeon. I did have to look at a guide yet again because I could not progress in a room. There was an enemy with the text "Grumble, grumble." It was supposed to mean that he was hungry, and I needed to buy bait from a merchant. Red candle is the item in this dungeon.
• Level 8 - Once again the location was not clear to me, so I used a guide to find it. A hard dungeon. Book of magic and magical key are items here.
• Level 9 - I tried to get as far as I could without a guide. Eventually I found the red ring and Ganon, but not the arrows so I looked it up in a guide. There was a bombable wall that I missed. While I was reading the guide, I looked at how to beat Ganon with the arrows. The final fight was not too tough since Link was fully upgraded.

Beat using a guide and save states - the only way I wanted to so as to still witness and enjoy the game. Not my kind of fun, too tough, but felt nice to play the start of my favourite franchise - felt like a cathartic moment to defeat Ganon in his first form.

I’m very glad this is the time I’m living - if I was a kid in 1986 I would’ve screamed SO many times.

Played on emulator, using a guide + savestates.

The first half of the game is pretty good. I loved exploring Hyrule and completing the dungeons.

After that, the game got repetitive and annoying, mainly because : -The wizards (Wizzrobe) -The items you need to survive later on are really expensive, requiring some serious farming or (in my case) abusing luck via savestates. -To find most of the late game stuff you need to bomb/burn very specific locations, which wasn't fun to say the least.

I ended up using a guide for the final 2 dungeons.

Sadly, I can't really say this is one of my favorite NES titles... I mean, of course this is a very influential game, but I had a better time playing other classics like MM2, SMB3 and even games like Little Samson or Ducktales 1&2.

In the end, Zelda 1 is fun but very frustrating sometimes. It made me appreciate just how much evolved the later iterations of the series are.

I've noticed a lot of opinionated fanboys who love to whine about Zelda if it doesn't follow the "formula." What exactly is the Zelda formula anyways? Does that mean you have to play as Link? Does it mean you have to rescue Zelda? Does it mean you have to fight Ganon? Does it mean you have to collect pieces of the triforce? What does it mean?

The original NES Zelda was a monumental release when it came out in 1986 (1987 in the US). There truly was no game like it. It was not a JRPG, nor was it King's Quest, and it wasn't Tower of Druaga either. It was something different. A truly open world adventure that gave the player freedom to do what they wanted to do, to a point. You still had to collect pieces of the triforce, beat Ganon and rescue Zelda. But how you got there was up to you in many ways. Sure, you could beat the levels in order, or you could skip around. You could spend hours on the overworld map, discovering all sorts of secrets, powering up your sword, shield and armor, before you even go into level 1. Sometimes you need a specific item to proceed, so you might need to go into a certain level, but the freedom given to the player in this game was unlike anything seen before.

So what happened? That freedom gradually started to disappear. Love Link to the Past on SNES, but it's much more linear than this game. And with each subsequent release, there was more hand holding and less "freedom" to the player. And maybe that's why I'm not as high on later Zelda releases like some people. Ocarina of Time I find didn't age well. It just got more and more bogged down with things that made that fun, free feeling disappear.

Until Breath of the Wild. With that game, it felt like Zelda I again. The return of the freedom and exploration that I truly enjoyed about that original game and that started disappearing from later editions of the game.

So yes, when people say the "Zelda formula," I think Breath of the Wild is easily the closest to the original concept of Zelda I. And I think that's why I love it and this game (though this one has aged a bit, why I took off a star) stand out from the others.

I (without a doubt) had the Most Fun playing this game than any of the other 2D Installments.

The simplicity of the NES entry is just simple and fun being that the player is on an Adventure and have to find the Quest, Dungeons, Items, etc...

I just had fun. The Difficulty is a bit Rough especially for new players, but I took that Difficulty curve as a Survival mix into the game and to be smart about my moves.

I'm not gonna Bash the other Installments because I had more fun with original but also because I didn't play all of them "lol".

But seriously, This is Easily on my Top 3 NES games.

Similar to its platformer counterpart Super Mario Bros. The Legend of Zelda was a landmark in the adventure genre of games. However, unlike Mario, this game does not hold up nearly as well.

This game is near impossible to play without a guide, and due to poor translation at the time many of the clues to help you progress are just cryptic nothingness. Trying to beat this game without a guide is akin to bashing your head against a wall hoping something different will happen.

It's a shame that the poor age of the game brings it down by so much too. The gameplay is very solid throughout although the spike in difficulty about a third of the way in is intense you grow to use to it after a while. The dungeons are a wonderful mix of combat and exploration. The bosses are quite gimmicky with many having just one weak spot and an overall linear fight.

This game practically invented the open-world genre and helped inspire many other developers to create other amazing experiences. It is also the foundation of one of the most long-lasting series in gaming. However, due to just a frustrating level of secrecy along with really repetitive at times gameplay, I simply cannot recommend this game unless you want to simply take a look back at video game history.

63/100

I played TLoZ a few times as a young-un on the original NES back in the 80s and early 90s, but I never quite "got it" and certainly didn't have the patience to properly beat it. I remember my older cousin had his own NES and a copy of the game that he kept in his room, and I remember every time I visited he'd let me try it out and give helpful hints but it didn't do much good. It was well above me.

As I got a little but older other friends had copies of the game, and I could check out bundles of Nintendo Power at the library for tons of hints. But still, it was a beast of a game I didn't have the patience for, even when I scored my own cart. A cart I've had in my collection for a couple of decades now.

So was it finally time to bust out the old NES and LoZ cartridge and blow off layers of dust from the metal contacts? Well with "Zelda: Breath of the Wild" on the way, I decided... I'd play it on the WiiU virtual console with savestates because I'm probably less patient now and I remember some of those "puzzles" are more obtuse than the like we get today.

Oh, and because I'm a horrible human being I also used an onlinewalk through.

Just sharing all that because except for attempting to play the game in my youth, I would not consider my recent experience "pure".

However, the experience was still fun. There is still that sense of adventure and exploration, and you can certainly appreciate how this grand daddy of gaming led to so many features we take for granted today. It's easy to play this and think "Wow! This game starts off really hard and gets easier as you play. Should it... be like that?" I think if this game were made today, there'd be heart re-fills and fairies galore, especially in the starting areas. It just feels weird that when you're low on life there's hardly any safe way to recover. Even when trying to "farm" powerups from the easy enemies there's still a good chance you'll die. And when you're at full health it seems like all the good stuff starts showing up when you have no need for it. Makes you really respect all those nets and bottles that got added in the later games.

Yeah, the puzzles are still kind of dumb. I remember that at one point in my life I had the original manual which contained maps and secret hints, but it long ago disappeared. That was the old style of game design, put all the text in the manuals because that sure as hell won't fit on the cart. And if someone bought the game used or rented it, too bad, shame on them. Maybe they can redeem themselves by subscribing to Nintendo Power.

Point is I don't know how I would have ever figured out some of the stuff on my own, even today. Trial and error, sure, but that would have taken a suuuuuuper long time.

Save states on the WiiU were great. It allowed you to stay at full health pretty much all the time, with lots of annoying pausing and reloading, just as the original game designers never intended.

Still, there is something missing today with being able to have an entire guide in front of us to solve a game. Part of the fun back then was talking to your friends and sharing different secrets back and forth. Games can't really be built like that any more, except in instances where the games are so huge that it's impossible for everyone to know everything at all times. Pretty much just MMOs, really.

In conclusion, this game is best played on an original NES hardware, on a CRT, back in the 1980s, but you should be in maybe 5th or 6th grade. I had fun re-experiencing it today, with a little bit of the nostalgia glasses effect, but I can't help but wish I was just a wee bit older to properly appreciate this one at its prime.

Thank you Zelda, Link, and Miyamoto for laying the groundwork for all the awesome games we have today.