Tag: Empty Elegy

A few months back I had a weekly feature on various Zelda clones. Well, I’ve been away for far too long. Let’s talk about clones some more! The recent release of Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I Don’t Know got me thinking about the previous Adventure Time game, and how even though it was heavily inspired by the black sheep of the Zelda family, The Adventure of Link, it was actually quite good.

We’ve been focused this whole time on games which attempted to emulate the 2D overhead perspective style Zelda games. The time has finally come to talk about one of the few games which tried out the more modern 3D style. One of the final games released in the Mana series, Dawn of Mana attempted something brand new to its franchise. Using Ocarina of Time–and similar subsequent games in the Zelda series–as a blueprint, Dawn of Mana attempted to follow Zelda…

For the past few weeks we’ve been talking about Zelda clones that defy the label and are actually quite good. Well, the time has come to talk about probably the worst Zelda clone ever released. And the fact that it was never supposed to have been. It has a strange and complicated history, but if you ever searched for “Zelda” in the iPhone App Store–hoping against hope that there would somehow be an actual Zelda game in there–you’ve probably come…

This particular game is one which I’ve been planning on covering in this features series for quite some time–really, since the beginning I started writing these. However, I wanted to make sure I’d played most of the game–if not actually finishing it–before writing about it. The reason for this is because there’s a lot of negativity about this particular “Zelda clone”, and it seems like that negativity comes from the same people who then later say “well, I haven’t actually…

What do you get when you cross the hilarious cartoon Adventure Time with a Zelda game? Well… probably the awesome-looking upcoming Adventure Time game. But also the indie game Ittle Dew. I had planned on the next Empty Elegy to cover a notorious Zelda clone that has unfortunately gotten a bit of a bad rep, but when I came across Ittle Dew, I just couldn’t help changing my plans. For those not familiar with this little gem, Ludosity (the developers)…

When talking about Zelda clones, the usual suspects make the list: Neutopia, Okami, 3D Dot Game Heroes. Yet somehow one of the biggest “offenders” is often overlooked. Lagoon was a game released on the Super Nintendo before A Link to the Past, so the notion of a 16-bit Zelda was still just a dream to we Zelda fans of the day. So when the main arrived and in it was a special Nintendo Power-published catalogue of upcoming Super Nintendo games…

Sometimes fantastic action-adventure series don’t make it over to Nintendo consoles, leaving many Zelda fans–those most likely to devour such a game–completely unaware of their existence. This is unfortunate, but likely intentional: worried that Zelda will overshadow their games, sometimes developers will focus their releases elsewhere. One such fantastic action-adventure series, Ys, has seen very few Nintendo releases. But with its battle system, puzzles, and cutely serious tone, I think many Zelda fans would be overjoyed with what these games…

Since we’re already out of chronology, I may as well leap past some of the older 8-bit Zelda clones for now and focus on a much more recent retro-styled 16-bit game created as freeware to be played on your PC. And if the picture to the left didn’t make it obvious enough, this game is clearly based not just on the Zelda series in general, but A Link to the Past specifically. This week we’ll be talking about the Zelda…

My intentions were to sort of follow the basic chronology of the Zelda clones, doing all the early 8 and 16-bit ones first and working my way up to the newer ones. But then Evoland happened. And while in many ways it is in an entirely different genre of video games (meta? Is that a genre?) it is absolutely a Zelda clone to point that it basically tells the technical history of Zelda (and by extension all action-adventure games) up…

Welcome back to Empty Elegy, where we take a look at various Zelda clones from the ages and see just how close they come to “borrowing” from our favorite franchise, and what ways they either tried to improve upon it or simply tried out some new ideas and used Zelda as a starting point and then forged their own path. This week is a bit more of the later. While definitely very inspired by Zelda, this particular title was also…