Why Zelda U Should Have Absurdly Difficult Bonus Content

The Legend of Zelda is one of the most famous, most successful, most influential, and frankly, most awesome franchises in video game history. The latest entries in the series, such as Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, are truly amazing games from beginning to end, but are known notoriously for their “insulting” difficulty level. Really, ever since Aonuma took over, the games have been getting easier, both in terms of intellectual difficulty and actual combat. This isn’t always a bad thing.

While it can get some of the older fans really pissed, Zelda does have to appeal to a broader audience, and the new games have been proof of that. However, as most of us know, there isn’t any fun in an easy game, because if you do everything on the first try, then where’s the sense of accomplishment? Where’s the triumph in uniting the Triforce of Courage and killing Ganondorf if you didn’t lose a single heart in the process? Past harder difficulty levels and a “boss rush mode” for the hardcore fans, which I don’t think really add anything to the experience, I think that the new games in the series would benefit from some truly ridiculously difficult content to keep everybody satisfied.

As far as I can remember, the only games in the series that really had bonus content of the sort were Wind Waker, Spirit Tracks, and Twilight Princess, which featured, respectively, the Savage Labyrinth, the Take ‘Em All On!” game, and the Cave of Ordeals. They all had the same basic premise: numerous rooms of enemies, each one harder than the next, ending with one really hard battle that yields a great reward. The thing about these places is nobody ever goes through them entirely for the reward. It’s just the sense of accomplishment, the ability to be able to brag to your friends that you managed to go through the entire thing and survived. But they all seem to have the same rather bleak idea. As I stand here watching my brother play through the Pit of 100 Trials in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, I find myself wanting something bigger. Something more. Not just a rehash of everything you’ve already fought, but a new boss battle. Something so intimidating, huge, and pants-shittingly terrifying that it will be spoken of in legends.

This is not uncommon in modern video games. The Final Fantasy series has been doing this since the very first entry, in the form of REALLY hard boss battles hidden in each game, known as “superbosses”. They all have virtually no story or relevance to the game, and require precise attacks, items, strategy and preparation to be ultimately defeated. For example, take the Yiazmat from Final Fantasy XII. You don’t need to have played a Final Fantasy game to know that when something has 50,112,254 HP, it’s not to be trifled with. A battle against the Yiazmat takes over 4 hours and will almost invariably end in disaster. Few people have ever beaten it.

And therein lies the problem; The Legend of Zelda is not an RPG. Enemies don’t have an HP gauge. A battle that long in a Zelda game would be tedious, repetitive, and, simply put, ridiculous. Long boss battles are rarely, if ever, part of Zelda games, with some exceptions. Even when present, they are multiple stages of a single enemy, usually at the very end of the game, similar to the four-phased Ganondorf battle in the finale to Twilight Princess. So what would be the best way to extend a battle in Zelda, increasing its difficulty without ruining the experience? While there is no real answer to that question, I think that I’ve come up with why and how the next Zelda game could feature a superboss in a way that would fit perfectly with the classic Zelda formula.

The first issues at hand are the limitations of Link’s character. As I’ve said, The Legend of Zelda is not an RPG, and it shouldn’t be by any means. In a regular RPG, such as a Final Fantasy game, your character gets progressively stronger, and there really is no limit to how powerful you can be. Even if you somehow max out your levels and wield the game’s strongest weapons, you can still spend a fortune on potions or power-ups that could help you draw out a battle indefinitely. A lot of battles in classic RPGs are built around the principle that you must be constantly healing to defeat a powerful enemy.

In Zelda, as Link has no experience gauge, there’s always a limit to how powerful he can be. After filling your bottles with fairies or blue potions, it’s entirely up to you to survive. While this could be seen as the end of the line for the possibility of a superboss, I believe it a godsend and the perfect setup for what could end up as one of the most memorable moments of this generation. You see, Link’s character limitations only stop the boss from being incredibly long. By making the battle shorter, yet still unbelievably difficult, players won’t feel as disappointed when they die. Who hasn’t fought their way to the Champion’s last Pokémon only to have victory pulled out from under them at the last second? When the battle’s short, you won’t feel cheated, you won’t feel the impulse to quit, and so you’ll feel the urge to keep going every time you die. This allows for the battle to be even harder, for the boss to deal obscene amounts of damage and be nearly impossible to hurt without being harmed.

A classic element of bosses in The Legend of Zelda is that you always have to try to figure out how to harm them. While in some cases in might be simply obvious, as with Tentalus in Skyward Sword (my god, that was disappointing), you still need a certain amount of intellectual ability to defeat a boss and to make it seem like something from a Zelda game. Remember, it still needs to feel like Zelda. So how would this boss work? Obviously, it would have to be very difficult to damage, but would it be easy to figure out how to damage it? Most importantly, would there only be one stage to the boss fight or would it stay as a one-tiered blitz?

While I don’t know how this boss would work or how it would look, I can say that I don’t want it to include too much intellectual difficulty. The game will be stock-full of puzzles as it is, which is amazing, but I don’t think this boss battle in particular would benefit from it. There is one simple reason behind this reasoning. This is supposed to be a test of your strength, of your ability and reflexes, and you’d die quickly if you’re trying to figure out how to damage it, trying out a series of items in your brief windows of opportunity. Being beaten to death by a boss in 25 seconds when they don’t know how to damage it would lead players to look it up online, thinking they’d be hopeless without doing so. This really takes away from the experience. As opposed to an RPG, where the preparation is a big part of the battle, and you pretty much already know what you’ll be up against before fighting, I think a Zelda game would benefit from the fight being unexpected, new, and requiring no internet help. Maybe the room leading up to the fight could be a huge puzzle in and of itself, or maybe the boss could only be accessible after a series of side quests, similar to the trading game in a number of The Legend of Zelda titles. Nevertheless, intellectual difficulty should not take part in the battle.

Of course, there is one inevitable question that still needs to be answered. Who could this boss be? Traditionally, a superboss could be a character cameo from another game, as in Kingdom Hearts I and II, where the superboss was Sephiroth, the main antagonist from another Square game you may have heard of, Final Fantasy VII. So who could play the role of the ultimate enemy? Assuming that Zelda U will feature either Ganondorf or somebody entirely new as their main antagonist, this opens up a world of possibilities for this boss battle in particular. Why not an old, beloved villain, such as the Majora’s Mask, or even Vaati? How about somebody that wasn’t even cast as a villain in their original game, somebody respected and feared, like the Hero’s Shade? What about somebody from another Nintendo franchise altogether, like Bowser, or Dialga from Pokémon Diamond? Maybe somebody entirely new? The world is full of possibilities, and we know that Nintendo will use them in the most perfect way imaginable.

Who do you think it could be? Would a superboss really fit in well in The Legend of Zelda? Let us know in the comments!