Tag: enemy

It has been over 16 years since The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time came out for the Nintendo 64. Though not always viewed as the thematically darkest addition to the Zelda franchise, Ocarina of Time has its moments of terror. Traversing the Shadow Temple and Bottom of the Well both haunt players with their airs of death, darkness, and plain eeriness, giving a taste of what Nintendo had to offer in terms of the horror gaming genre. Other Zelda…

Welcome to the third installment of Piece of Heart, where we look at The Legend of Zelda series through the eyes of a literary professor and examine how its literary elements enhance the gaming experience. This weeks lesson is titled “Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires”, and believe it or not many of the enemies in Zelda are actually life-sucking creatures of the night. Though they may not show up in mirrors, literary vampires are very easy monsters to…

I’ve made absolutely no secret in the past of my love of monsters. I mean, hey, I wrote an entire article about my favorite ones in the Zelda series! Sometimes my favorite monsters are anthropomorphic or humanoid, but in general I prefer my monsters to be pretty bestial. Why am I getting into this? Well Zelda’s always had its fair share of humanoid foes. Ever since the original game, Darknuts have been a big part of the series… and they’re…

It’s interesting to talk about the size of the bosses in the Zelda series, and I wrote about this before in another article, where I talked how the bosses in Zelda had stagnated in terms of concept and design. All the bosses at the time seemed to be titanically huge, follow a tired, predictable formula, and were ironically extremely easy to beat despite their intimidating size. Skyward Sword seems to have begun to reverse that trend a bit, but I’ll…

Very recently, deviantART user Le-Puppet created a piece of Zelda fanart called “As The Dead Awakes” that certainly isn’t typical. In fact, it’s far from the norm. Never has Ocarina of Time been so eerie and unnerving, as Le-Puppet and his wife breathe death into the most ghoulish of all Zelda enemies: the ReDead. Remember those times when ReDeads would jump on Link and drain his life force rapidly after freezing him right in his tracks? Well, the in-game version…

This is a question that’s been raised a lot recently in many discussions about Skyward Sword: Which is better, having a lot of enemies or having complex enemies? Skyward Sword obviously took the latter approach, offering very few enemies (I got 29 in a casual count, excluding all alternate versions of the same basic foe, though it would be significantly larger if I were to include them all). Is it best to have a huge variety of foes that do…

Skyward Sword has been stated to be a prequel to the entire Zelda series, meaning thus far it is the original story, the first adventure. Until another prequel is made, this is where it all began, and as I’ve discussed numerous times, it will even mark the beginning of the Kingdom of Hyrule itself. But there’s another event within the series that Skyward Sword may mark as well. The original event. “The Goddess”, the deity of the Skyloftians and seemingly…

The Dark Tribe. In my experience, it seems that most of the time Zelda fans don’t know what the Dark Tribe is. It’s a name that’s been repeated several times in Zelda history since A Link to the Past where it is believed to have been first mentioned. Throughout the series, references to ancient tribes, tribes of evil, or tribes that have dealt with shadows and darkness have happened frequently. Some fans have speculated on the nature and role of…

You’ve just journeyed through a difficult dungeon, exploring every nook and cranny and fighting evil monsters along the way. You’ve spent your time battling fierce opponents and solving puzzles, and you’ve finally gotten the Big Key. You open the final door. Then something big appears. Something really big. Real FRICKEN’ big! You prepare for an intense fight against the big boss and whip out the weapon you found in the dungeon. Three blows into the battle… He’s dead. Wow, really?…