Hello, Grouvee dot com. Two years ago, in the midst of my 2022 Christmas cheer, I had a brilliant idea: let's play every Zelda game! At the time, I only meant the mainline titles. But in my hunger for more Zelda, I eventually decided to play the spinoffs as well. This put me on an inevitable collision course with the Philips CD-i and its three infamous Zelda titles.

Last year I breezed by Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. But the third of these, Zelda's Adventure, is a game that has made me ponder many questions over the course of months. What is a bad video game? Can a bad video game be enjoyable despite its flaws? Why am I doing any of this, even????

This is a code that must be cracked. A mystery to unravel. Queries that need delicate consideration. I shall tackle them one by one.

What is a bad video game?

Nobody intends to make a bad game, right? From what I can tell, the developers of Zelda's Adventure, an obscure Californian studio called Viridis, had every intention of making the best video game possible. Development began in 1992, surely because Philips wanted to cash in on the popularity and acclaim of A Link to the Past, and thus needed to produce their very own top-down Zelda game.

Early previews promised 300 hours of gameplay and a sprawling photorealistic world. Sure, the final product falls very short of those promises. But still, it does contain one of the more expansive worlds of any 2D Zelda, and it's considerably longer than Animation Magic's CD-i Zelda titles. Environments were designed as real dioramas and then transported into the game using photographs. They hired a professional modeler with Hollywood experience to design the enemies, giving the game a stop-motion feel. Despite the low budget, they still committed to adding live action cutscenes and voice acting with the help of their office staff.

Viridis tried.

But for what? Zelda's Adventure sucks. It sucks so much. It makes me question if anyone in their staff even played video games.

Well...Surely they must have. After all, Zelda's Adventure sure feels like a Zelda game, despite not looking like one. Its world is divided into single-screen areas much like in The Legend of Zelda and Link's Awakening. In its best moments, it replicates that same feeling of adventure and discovery as you explore the world of Tolemac.

What went wrong then?

Well, a lot of it can be blamed on the Philips CD-i, much like with the other CD-i Zelda titles. The loading times between screens is unbearable. Frame rates are choppy. Enemy AI and hitboxes are a total mess.

But the issues in Zelda's Adventure go well beyond this. Remnants of the game's original scope clearly drag the game down. The sheer number of items clutters your inventory, and weapons don't do enough to change the feel of combat in a meaningful way. Instead, the title relies on annoying trial-and-error as you figure out what weapon is effective against what particular enemy, and what item can open up what path. Online guides are the only way to untangle the mess without losing your goddamn mind. Believe me, I tried.

Zelda's Adventure boasts 7 dungeons for you to explore, but they all consist of hallways that are simpler than the simplest labyrinths in the first Zelda game. Hints are buried in vague, poorly acted cutscenes with no subtitles and terrible audio quality. At least the performances can be amusing, and there is some enjoyment to be had amidst the mess. Regardless, though it took 11 hours to beat the game, it felt like 11,000.

So, the answer to the question is multi-faceted.

Bad video games over-promise and under-deliver.

Bad video games are the products of developers who set unrealistic goals.

Bad video games are designed to make the player do a lot of work for little-to-no reward.

Bad video games don't play within the technical limitations of the platform that they are being developed for.

But...

Can a bad video game be enjoyable despite its flaws?

I found the first few hours of Zelda's Adventure to be truly miserable. But some time after completing the first dungeon, I entered what I can only describe as a hypnotic zen state. It is the closest that a video game has come to making me feel high, no drugs involved.

Why... Why?! How can I be so entranced by what is objectively such an awful video game?!

Could it be its sense of exploration? Something about having to see what lies beyond the next hill was surely propelling me forward towards the game's conclusion. Zelda's Adventure has a pleasant variety of places to discover. There are forests, badlands, volcanoes, wetlands and beaches to find. I genuinely enjoyed absorbing what each NPC had to say with their often nonsensical dialogue. Zelda's Adventure may be badly designed and technically deficient, but boring it certainly is not!

There is some kind of magic at work. Like an echo of a time long gone. When I play this game, I can feel the creativity that the developers poured into designing it.

In an interview, former Viridis modeler Jason Bakutis called the creation of Zelda's Adventure a "total blast" where he had "total creative free reign." Its relation to the Zelda franchise brings with it a certain prestige. But if you cast that aside, it becomes easier to frame Zelda's Adventure in your mind's eye as an endearing DIY project made by a group of people who were just trying to make the best game they could with a minimal budget on a shitty system. Playing it feels like peering into that joy and creativity through a tiny pixelated window.

Yes, bad video games can be enjoyable sometimes. But why?

I think that in some weird way, the energy a creator is experiencing is transferred into the essence of their work. That energy can be positive or negative, and I'm sure that in most cases, bad games are the products of negative experiences. But if there is some level of positivity, whether that be fun, creativity or passion, it transcends the barriers of time, place... and even quality. If Zelda's Adventure has taught me anything, it's that the the joy of creation in of itself is valuable, even if the result is far from perfect.

I'm happy that Zelda's Adventure exists. I feel privileged to have gotten a peek at the imagination and creativity a small team of people must have felt back in 1993.

But I would be remiss not to mention that it wasn't all positive during the game's creation. After one year of development, most of the development team was laid off, starting a protracted testing phase that would strike the game with continuous delays until it was finally released as a Europe-only title in 1996 (or 1995, depending on what magazines and blogs you believe). Despite that, all I see now is happiness.

This leads me to additional questions about the very nature of media and its consumption.

Why am I doing any of this, even????

Am I putting positivity into my reviews? Is whatever energy I'm putting into them really visible to anyone who may read them? These questions swirl in my head as I sit here writing at 2:00 AM on a random Friday.

When I wrote my very first review in this series in December 2022, I really didn't think that much about it. I was just an excited little fanboy who couldn't wait for Tears of the Kingdom to come out, and I didn't really think to put all that much detail into it. Over time, I came to see writing reviews on Grouvee as valuable writing exercise. I don't necessarily feel that I need the practice, but English isn't my first language, so it can't hurt.

Perhaps it was around my Majora's Mask review that I started to see them as a chance to explore more than just the video game itself... Sometimes that's to explore the history of the particular game's development, and other times it involves exploring my own personal relationship with the game. I don't think I did a great job of it back then, but I try to sprinkle that stuff in as much as possible to this day.

Sometimes I phone it in. Other times, I pour my heart into reviews, like with my write-up of Fire Emblem Engage, or my look at Paper Mario. Then there are moments I wonder: What was the point of my short review of Kirby's Dream Land 2? Or my lazy thoughts on Bayonetta? I still remember the feelings of "What's the point of writing this" and "I don't feel like I have much to say" when I wrote those reviews. Did that come across in those reviews? Is it bad?

It certainly feels stupid and pretentious to compare writing posts on a site to the intense work of a game developer, but playing Zelda's Adventure really made me think... Can people really see what I'm feeling? How could people possibly see what my feelings are if I'm not actively aware of the feelings I'm putting into anything I make?

I guess the answer to the question is that I play video games for entertainment, and reviews are a weird way to turn that consumption into something vaguely creative.

Going forward, I hope that I can channel the same creative positivity I glimpsed in Zelda's Adventure. If I don't do that, what's the point of any of this? If I'm wiped from this Earth, the only things that will be left of me are these little snippets that I put out into the world. I want those snippets to invoke positivity, not negative emotions--even if my comments are about a game I don't like.

And I don't like Zelda's Adventure. It is one of the worst video games I've played in my entire life.

But please know, I truly treasure this site for giving me an outlet to think so deeply about the games I play, and I enjoy reading the discussions and well-thought reviews, even when I don't have much to say or add.