Gossip Stone: Does Zelda Have a Place in Nintendo’s New Mobile Gaming World?

Nintendo is currently working on getting into the mobile gaming market, and it has a lot of people questioning what that means for their favorite series, including Zelda. The scale of the games, the exact nature of the gamplay possibilities, the controls; everything about the upcoming games, really, could be completely different from what we are used to. Does this mean Zelda could take on a totally new core feeling? Does the series even have a place on mobile devices?

Join the discussion after the jump!

Two things that I really worry about is the available size and of games on mobile devices, as well as the processing ability of those devices. I know that there are some phones available with very large sizes of hard drives, but those are quite expensive, and people are obviously not buying phones specifically for Nintendo’s games. The developers must work with what is available. Zelda is a large-scale game that requires a lot of room on its console to accommodate its grand journey, and barring the earliest games in the series, the games will not fit on a phone without some sort of external hard drive. That being said, perhaps they could make something like that; a drive or console type of thing that is small, and acts as a processor and/or extra storage for larger games, sort of like the Ouya console. While they are at it, maybe they could make a compatible controller, too, so that the awkwardness of touch screen controls is not the only option.

Of course, this is all well and good, but there is still the question of whether the games should be on phones at all. Sure, Zelda is all well and fun, but are they what Nintendo needs to have on phones to be successful? Simple games with simple, repeating gameplay elements are the most successful ones, not only because they are often proven to be addictive, but because they technically never really end a lot of the time. Angry Birds, Candy Crush and Flappy Bird are only a few examples of games that seem plain and repetative to some, but many others cannot put them down, since they are proven to be addicted to them. Zelda is not this kind of game. You play, you win, and you move on, maybe coming back and playing it again every once in a rather long while.

Honestly, I don’t think Zelda is what Nintendo needs to focus on for mobile gaming, aside from the widely-wished-for mobile Virtual Console service. They obviously are still working on consoles, since that is their key market, so Zelda should stay there, at least when it comes to the grand adventures we are used to. But what do you guys think? Should the epic journeys of The Legend of Zelda be experienced on Android, iOS and other mobile devices? If so, in what manner? Leave a comment!