Has The Zelda Series Become Stagnant?

Disclaimer: This article ignores all portable Zelda games, as I have never put much time into them.

I have a professor who is hopelessly addicted to superhero movies, anticipating translations of comic book vigilantes to on-screen juggernauts with glee and obsession. He reads previews. He watches trailers. He counts the days on his calendar. He buys tickets for opening night.

“I’ve got my popcorn" he says, "I’ve got the big soda, I’m all ready. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, Daredevil sucked, but man, Green Lantern is gonna be great’…and then it always sucks. But you know what, they always get me the next time. I think, ‘man, this next one will be the one that does it. I just know this one is gonna be awesome.'"

This is how I’ve felt about the Zelda franchise for the past ten years and this is what scares me as I look toward Skyward Sword, the latest installment in Nintendo’s fabled franchise. I can't wait for it, but I can't help but feel like it's going to be disappointing.

Now, before the tomatoes and beer bottles start flying, let me say, I don’t think the Zelda games suck. Far from it. The series has always been fantastically produced and unquestionably one of the best in the history of gaming. But the recent entries, while well-constructed and clearly crafted with a lot of care, seem to lack something. Some intangible magic. After each one, I am left feeling like the game was merely good, not wondrous, not other-worldly, not, if you’ll excuse the extreme arrogance in assuming my own opinion applies ubiquitously to a company enjoyed by millions, what is great about Nintendo.

What is it exactly? What is missing? To be honest, I don’t know, but I do have a few inklings. It’s my hope that in this post I can explore the question, and that maybe some readers (there must be at least a few of you) can chime in with their thoughts as well (Please no flaming, I ♥ Nintendo too!).

Hypothesis 1: It’s Just Me: I’m Old and the Magic is Gone From My Life. I Should Just Don the Suit, Have Kids, Drop the Controller and Die.


My first thought is that perhaps the sensation that I'm looking for in Zelda games is more a symptom of youth than of the games themselves. I can’t help but wonder what experience a twelve-year old gets from playing Twilight Princess or Wind Waker today. These games provide the same type of gameplay as Ocarina did, the same dungeon-crawling, town-wandering, forest-exploring and boss-fighting that made the series so famous. Perhaps nothing has changed and I’m just at a point in my life where the type of belief required to make these game worlds come alive is just not in me. Should I expect it to be? Of course the old woman who spoke one sentence and lived on the outskirts of the town in Zelda II seemed mysterious when I was seven, but what would I think now? But here's the thing: that old woman still seems mysterious. At this juncture, it’s hard to separate nostalgia from the genuine feeling of wonderment. I don’t remember playing the game, so I’m not pining for some specific sense of family or youth, yet hearing the music from an old game or seeing images like the one to the left, the feeling is there. The question seems to be, was there something particularly wondrous in the old NES and Super-NES games or is it just nostalgia?

Hypothesis 2: Zelda Was New, Now It’s Old

What gives me pause on the whole nostalgia explanation is the progression of Zelda games. From the original up until Ocarina of Time, nearly every game was a new experience. The first essentially invented a genre in itself. The sequel was a sidescroller mash-up that, even though it wasn’t the best game in the world, had its own charm and diverged greatly from the original. Link to the Past provided perhaps the most fully-articulated, living game world in a console game up until that point, and Ocarina created the same type of new experience in 3D, showing all games after it How To Get Shit Done.

The entries since then, try as they might to introduce new elements (and you have to respect them for trying), have still felt like variations on the experience established in Ocarina. Masks, cell-shading, realism. It was all cool. It was all enjoyable. But none of it felt new and none of it felt like magic, at least not to me. Frankly, Twilight Princess was boring for long stretches. And like I said before, it could just be me. I’m working with a very intangible concept here and it's hard to make clear lines in the sand. Still, I’ve been able to muster the same type of emotion for other games- Fallout, Okami, Flower. These games, however, are all intended for a slightly older, more mature audience. But they also all include some element that feels new, novel, strange. Maybe it’s just that a game, without feeling new in some way, has a hard time creating the sense of wonder that I’m pining for so much. And for a video game franchise, Zelda is more or less as old as stone on Death Mountain.

I also can’t help but wonder how much of this has to do with Miyamoto’s involvement. I’ve been reading about Miyamoto’s games and philosophy since I was in elementary school, and in all that time, it’s become clear that Nintendo’s innovative, experience-driven philosophy stems from him. He has been the heart and soul of the company for the last twenty-five years. And as the years have passed, he has been required to oversee more projects and has subsequently become less involved in the Zelda series. Maybe the reason that the later Zeldas feel like great games that lack that Miyamoto magic is because, well…they lack that Miyamoto magic. And maybe there's a new type of magic that I'm missing.

Nintendo: Stagnant and Innovative?

The question of Miyamoto’s involvement brings me to the question of Nintendo at large. You certainly can’t accuse them of not trying new things, and I believe, exciting new things. The first introduction of the Wii reinvigorated in me a spirit of newness and novelty that felt lost during the previous console generation. But, Nintendo’s attention and, more importantly, its inspiration, has seemed focused on other areas. The traditional, exploratory, world-creating games have fallen to the wayside in all the hullabaloo (what a fantastic word!) of fitness, fencing and party madness.

Of course, Metroid Prime and Mario Galaxy were great, with the original Prime being probably my favorite game of the last two generations combined, but what we’ve mainly seen from Nintendo the last few years is a privileging of other experiences, ones that shoot for communal fun and only fun. I love Wii Bowling as much as the next guy (literally the next guy- the guy right next to me having a blast playing it too), but it's a different beast from the Nintendo that captured everyone's heart in the 15 years between 1985 and 2000. And yes, I realize that their new console is supposedly more targeted at "hardcore" gamers, but here it seems more like they're going for the Halo market than the Costume Quest one.

So, what does this have to do with Miyamoto? Well, it seems like Nintendo tends to follow the sparks of his inspiration. Even though there are many wonderfully talented and creative people there, he seems to be the head honcho in terms of new thinking. In terms of Mario and Zelda, they were created in the eighties based on experiences he had playing as a child. Now nearly sixty, how can Miyamoto be expected to be inspired by the same types of thoughts and experiences now as he was way back when?

I’ll always respect Nintendo for their insistence on going against the tide, on going it alone with at least some semblance of philosophical conviction. No matter how corporate and annoying many of their practices may be, in comparison to most mega-companies, they ooze originality. As Michael Abbot of Brainy Gamer put it in a post about Wii U, “Nintendo will bet the farm on another big idea. That's what they do, and it's why I always root for them a little more than the others.” However, I can’t help but feel that maybe Nintendo’s consoles are no longer the place for the types of experiences that I’m most excited about: ones that are other-worldy, exploratory, mysterious and, dare I say, magical.

With all that said, I'm still psyched about Skyward Sword. I just know this one is gonna be awesome.