From Zelda 1 to OOT the games were revolutionary and set standards with every release.
I would say that WW and TP were more evolutionary then revolutionary. Let me preface this by saying that I do like those games a lot, but let me take you back to the past and lets explore their context in gaming history. Big post ahead.
We had Ico in 2001 which felt like it took the raw essence of Zelda's dungeon exploration and innovated with it. The plot was boiled down to the essentials. It used show not tell storytelling techniques and had a degree of emotional intelligence in its storytelling which is still rare in gaming. Additionally, the art style was distinctive and beautiful. It raised the bar for this kind of game, for sure.
Wind Waker came out in the end of 2002 in Japan and early 2003 elsewhere. It had a cutting edge new graphical style that holds up to this day. It refined the N64 Zelda formula to a great degree. The openness of the Great Sea was innovative and the combat was polished up, and it had a great storyline. It felt great to play. Sailing up and landing on a beach of an island with zero load times felt great. Thematically, the essence of the plot was not clinging to the past and to keep looking forward. Ironic considering the next game in the series.
Late 2005 - Shadow of the Colossus. The sequel to Ico. What can I say? It was a huge game, deservedly so. The gameplay was a massive breath of fresh air. The complexity of the Colossi, both in terms of design and gameplay was super innovative. These towering, beautiful monstrosities each had to be taken down in unique and increasingly complex ways. The soundtrack was fully orchestrated and remains a high point for gaming. It was dynamic too, changing based on what was happening in the battles and as you explored. The storyline was told in a similar minimalist degree to Ico, but with even deeper emotion and style. There was a huge world to explore as well, beautiful and varied. After completing this, I wondered if Zelda had been outdone. How would Nintendo top this?
Late 2006 - Twilight Princess. After being announced with an insanely hype trailer (with an equally tear the roof off crowd reaction), then moving from Gamecube to Wii to further utilize Nintendo's newest technology, I was ready to have my socks blown off. Upon starting the game however, something immediately dawned on me - the lack of originality of the title screen sequence. Like Ocarina, we see Link riding Epona around while quiet, emotional music slowly builds before the Zelda logo appears. But we also see a cascade of bloom, and a cliff heavy landscape that seems not only reminiscent of Shadow of the Colossus, but imitative in an unflattering way. The game mostly follows the framework of Ocarina for most of it's structure. Forest dungeon, Gorons, Fire Dungeon, Zora, Water Dungeon. Some better variety is introduced in the second half of the game, fortunately. Most of the new elements, were, in my opinion, unfortunately mostly unsuccessful.
The Wolf Link segments are dull, repetitive bug hunts. Wolf Link himself isn't fleshed out enough to feel different. His moveset is almost identical to human Link, but where human Link gets to learn several cool (however inessential) moves for combat, Wolf Link remains the same throughout the game. You get these contextual moments where Midna lets you jump much further and higher then you normally could, but there's no freedom to this. How much better would it have been to be able to explore these sections organically, instead of a button prompt telling you what to do? The Wolf sense feature is another example of the bare minimum of a concept being included. You get assigned a scent for your current objective and then you follow it. It's a glorified arrow on a HUD element. Another thing that I find strange is that gaining the ability to transform into Wolf form at will basically renders Epona useless. For her early significance to the story and her connection to Link, she is essentially cast aside for a mechanical upgrade, a faster to utilize form of speedy transport.
There are some cool new elements, don't get me wrong. Horseback combat is cool and you get a decent amount of chances to really try it out. Some of the items, like the Spinner, Dual Clawshot feel great. But then you have things like the Slingshot. Handy at first, but when you get the Bow, why would you ever use it again? It would be one thing if it replaced the slingshot, representing Link's power growing or something, but it remains in your inventory, never to be used again. It feels like there are many things in the game design like this - not fully thought out.
As much as the game was advertised as a dark edgy Zelda, the tone is all over the place. For every cutscene like Zelda surrendering to Zant, her sword slowly dropping to the floor, you have things like having to slap a baboon's giant red asscheeks in a miniboss fight. You have things like the escorting the dying Midna scene, but then youve got things like that chump in Kakariko village with the welders mask doing the the Charlie Chaplin bit when confronted by the Orcs.
The pinnacle of the this to me was a moment after I got Epona for the first time. Picture this. You triumphantly ride back into Hyrule Field, with that great heroic theme playing. You leap over the fence blocking the way out of Kakariko Village, ready to face your next challange... and then you're immediately interrupted by the goofy postman and his equally goofy music stopping you. A small thing, but a definite way to kill that epic feeling.
I do like most of the environmental design a lot. Faron Woods is beautiful. And the second half of the game redeems TP for me. Great dungeons. The atmosphere is frequently really cool. Snowpeak and the journey there are very memorable. I feel that the biggest successful OOT homage is following the Skull Kid through the Lost Woods, while a haunted version of the old theme plays, before returning to the Temple of Time. Awesome.
Where Shadow of the Colossus proved you could have both orchestrated music and have it function dynamically, TP is still utilizing sample based MIDI music. The sample quality had improved over WW, but its still a far cry from SOTCs beautiful, richly textured soundtrack.
The bosses - not to beat a dead horse here, but we're still operating in the "do the same thing three times" mode with little exception. Compare this, once again, to SOTC... or even just the fact that this is 4th 3D Zelda to utilize this largely unmodified approach to boss encounters. This is where Zelda was becoming complacent and not leading the industry in terms of action adventure games. I still like it a lot, don't get me wrong. But it was clear that it wasn't nearly as innovative as it's predecessors.
2009 - Demons Souls. An extremely innovative title that definitely owes some influence from the 3D Zeldas, but had the best 3rd person melee combat in any game yet released. Dank atmospheres, great character customization, a degree of challenge not seen in most gaming for close to a decade by that point. Wow, I hope the next Zelda has combat like this, I thought to myself at the time.
2011 - Skyrim, Dark Souls, and Skyward Sword are all released within 3 months. Oh man, where to begin. Skyrim continued to evolve the Elder Scrolls formula, was a massive popular hit. Dark Souls refined Demons Souls combat to a razor sharp edge and introduced a revolutionary interconnected world, a metroidvania for the modern age of gaming. Both games focus heavily on player freedom, playing the game your way. Super replayable as a result. Skyward Sword, on the other hand, gives a big fat middle finger to the concept of player agency and freedom. After another tediously long introduction, featuring characters with the depth and design of an 80s Saturday morning cartoon, Skyward Sword sends you down a bewilderingly restrictive rabbit hole of linearity. It feels like the game is telling you exactly how to play it and what to do, constantly. The world itself is absolutely prohibitive in terms of freedom. The closest you get to exploration are the meaningless floating islands of Skyloft, totally divorced from the world below. Exploration in a game, beyond mechanical rewards, works best when it tells you more about the world it takes place in. The floating islands definitely don't qualify. Fi represents a ton of these problems in a nutshell, constantly taking control away from the player to tell them exactly what it is they need to do at that moment. Sir, there's a 100% chance that the game would have been massively improved if they removed her completely.
Nintendo's central concept for innovation for this game was full 1 to 1 sword control with the Wii+ control. Awesome! The problem is that, again, your freedom to utilize this is quickly stripped away, as the enemies begin to become equipped with shields and electric rods which can only be defeated by swinging your sword in one particular way. Why bother then? When it reduces each encounter to a puzzle with only one obvious solution, what's the point of? What were they thinking?
The 3 environments of the game are again forest, fire, and water, with variations as you progress. There is a spark of innovation in the sandsea which is awesome, but like Twilight Princess, this idea is dropped and never returned to be fully fleshed out, again. I despise so much of Skyward Sword and it's design philosophy. It's like going to an amusement park and being told, precisely, what rides you'll get to go on, in which order, what food to eat, the pace in which to do so, and exactly how much fun you're allowed to have at any given time. Ugh.
Breath of the Wild, if anything else, realizes that sapping player freedom and agency like a starving vampire is a bad thing, and puts you in CONTROL faster then any other 3D Zelda has in over a decade. It obviously looks to a lot of current open world design trends, but innovates with the intricate physics and chemical systems. And as complex as they surely are under the hood, the game is still super polished and stable, which is much more then you can say about any of it's peers. It's a total breath of fresh air for Zelda and it needed it so badly. I hope they can include more traditional atmospheric dungeons and music in the next one while keeping the player freedom and agency.
Okay, mega post over!
