It’s no secret that the Legend of Zelda (NES) was a watershed game. The game still has an open-world feel that titles to this day fall on their face trying to emulate, even in this post-GTA design world. This was the first game I ever played that truly was open in the sense that I could go anywhere in the game and basically approach (or avoid) any obstacle as I saw fit. The game also fits the bill as the prototypical example of an action-adventure video game, and the series (with a few minor exceptions) has continued that tradition since.

What is there to learn from a game that originally released in 1986? Twenty years later, there are still design subtleties in LoZ that are overlooked. The game is a perfect example of simple mechanics played out on a vast and varied playing field. From a complexity perspective, the game represents something achievable by any single individual given today’s technology and tools, yet we have the efforts of huge teams with comparitively bottomless budgets failing to capture the subtle qualities that simply make this game work.

In what I hope to be an insightful series of essays, I’ll be deconstructing the elements that I feel make LoZ a relative Citizen Kane of the genre, and see how those successes can translate to useful lessons in today’s games.

As a bit of a preface, let’s look at the game’s premise and detail the overall mechanics of LoZ. The premise follows the classic Hero’s Journey, with Link (the player-controlled character, who was so-named because Miyamoto saw him as the player’s “link” into the game world) out to save Princess Zelda from the evil clutches of Ganon. To achieve this goal, Link must acquire the objects of mythical power (the tri-force) and the one weapon that can kill the ultimate evil (the master sword). To this end, Link travels to many different locales (deserts, forests, mountains, dungeons), doing battle with many monsters and finding many unique weapons.

The mechanics are straightforward. Link is represented onscreen in an top-down view. The player has direct control over Link: the directions on the gamepad (left, right, up, down) correspond to movement onscreen (west, east, north, south, respectively). The A & B buttons are mapped to various actions, usually one of which is mapped to Link’s sword while the other is mapped to a special weapon or inventory item. There’s no jumping. To pick-up an item, Link simply collides with it.

The gameworld is divided into two sections: the Overworld and the Underworld. The Overworld is composed of mountains, trees, bushes, rivers, lakes, rocks, etc., what you’d expect from a classic outdoor adventure landscape. The Underworld is represented by dungeons whose entrances are hidden throughout the Overworld. Each dungeon (of which there are 9) is self-contained with one entrance/exit, each one containing a boss monster and usually an item of significance near their end. The dungeons don’t have to be visited in any particular order, but some of them have accessibility barriers that require attaining items of significance from other dungeons in order to be successful. The final dungeon is home to Ganon, whose defeat is the final goal of the game.

The gameworld is viewed one screenful-at-a-time. When Link hits the edge of the screen (or a doorway on the edge of the screen when in the dungeons) the game “pauses” momentarily while the view shifts/slides to the new screen, at which point player-control resumes. Each “screen” is usually transient, with enemies regenerating and other elements “resetting” when a player exits then returns to a screen. Enemies cannot pursue Link out of one screen and into another, nor can Link attack from one screen into another. Thus, each screen represents a self-contained segment of gameplay, rarely dependent on what came before it.

Enemies are generally very “stupid” and normally just follow set movement patterns. Outside of bosses, few of the enemies actually pursue the player, and most are killed in one or two hits from the player’s sword. Most enemies attack the player with “contact damage,” though some launch projectiles along whatever direction they are facing. Often, enemies leave behind some kind of reward on their death, usually a coin (or “rupee”), heart (representation of Link’s life or hit points) or other refillable items (arrows, bombs, keys).

Of course, all of this is probably not news to anyone reading this, as I would hope everyone is familiar with this classic. It can be easily located in ROM form to play in your favorite NES emulator, or you can grab the version for the GBA (the re-released NES classics). I have both, in fact!

Our first topic (which will be posted either later tonight or tomorrow night) will be some observations on the movement and attack mechanics of Link.