The Legend of Zelda Didn’t Modernize Well

As much as it pains me to place the Zelda series on this list, I am left with little choice after my hands-on experience with the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

Hoping that the new Zelda game would introduce something new and fresh to the series, I was disappointed to see that the game played and felt much too identical to 2006’s Twilight Princess, except now with less responsive Wii Motion Plus controls and outdated graphics. Somehow, the Gamecube game from 4 years ago looked better than the upcoming Wii game!

The Zelda “formula” throughout the years have remained unchanged as well. How many more times must we do a block pushing puzzle in order to stop Ganondorf from doing some kind of evil? Sure, the introduction of Zelda to 3D with Ocarina of Time was revolutionary at the time, but every subsequent entry in the series has been almost same game. Not enough has been added to the Zelda series lately to create a fresh experience for longtime Zelda fans.

That is what Peter Mai, author of this article wants you to believe. Since it’s a slow news day I thought it’d be a good idea to spark some creative discussion in our comments and see what the fans think of the Zelda entry in Peter’s list. I’ll begin with saying that I couldn’t disagree more, simply due to the fact that the article’s main criteria is “games that can’t keep up in the modern gaming industry”.

We all know it – Zelda is a series that really hasn’t changed its core gameplay much over the years. One might argue that the last one to do a major overhaul was no other than Ocarina of Time, but The Legend of Zelda still stands as one of the most polished and perfected examples of action adventure gameplay to date. This list pickled my interest primarily because I tried putting together an article earlier this year to see what games Zelda was influenced by. I’ve tried and tried but all I could find were games that are like Zelda because they borrowed elements from it, rather than the other way around. If you think about it, Zelda is only stagnant within itself, but it’s still as fresh as it gets on the global gaming scene.

Agree? Disagree? Random thoughts? Share it in the comments or on the forums!