When did Zelda stop leading?

[Fierce_Deity]

Nintendo has gotten lazy. They’re focused on gimmicks that should be optional rather than forced. They ignore fans, seem to care more about their own personal wishes. Example: attempted to make SS resemble a Monet painting. Maybe it would have worked better if the Wii wasn’t underpowered. Which of course brings up another issue that affects games, Nintendo machines being behind and their stubbornness not to be with the times, means smaller less epic feeling games. That leads to disappointment which is why Skyrim and the like have taken the lead. Nintendo should return to what made OoT and TP such a success and build on it, not regress. BotW isn’t that game though.

The limited Switch probably won’t be able to put out a game that competes with huge games that the other consoles have. Nintendo is having moderate success right but the future doesn’t seem bright especially with below par 3rd party titles and ports of older games that run at lower resolution. The PS5 and a new Xbox soon to come will destroy the Switch. First party titles playing on a stone age machine won’t always be appealing

 

[Lilith2]

It is sad to say, but I believe that Zelda has simply strayed from the appropriate path of creative enlightenment, and lost its metaphysical balance. Without this harmony, very little can ever be achieved in the way of a "good" game, as this tricky but righteous path of balancing the creative chaos and rigid adherence to true quality is instrumental to achieving the essence that the early games were known for.Having lost this, new games can only be a shell of the former glory of the series.

When this happened, is not a perfectly discernible thing, but something that can be grasped at by appreciating the trend of gimmick apotheosis beginning largely with Twilight Princess...

 

[Hyrulian Hero]

Gimmicks have had various effects on the series, but again, SS is a great example. No matter weather you liked it or not, it was a critical success and the other two console manufacturers (who really have a hard time not making completely soulless games) spent years trying to mimic it. I'd say the gimmicks started with TriForce Heroes, three player co-op is gimmicky.

Wind Waker HD? A second screen was unnecessary, pretty gimmicky. Or maybe it's actually Skyward Sword, stupid gimmicky motion controls. Just a worse version of Twilight Princess' gimmicky motion controls. Or Phantom Hourglass? Yeah, stylus controls for movement? Ridiculous. But wait, what about the Oracle series? Releasing two games simultaneously with "link" capability for the full story, are you kidding me? The three day "mechanic" in MM? A thinly-veiled gimmick of the lowest order.

What about that punk game "officially the best game ever made" Ocarina of Time? What did it think it was getting away with being all 3D and having a rumble pack IN THE GAME?! Ridiculous gimmick. And don't get me started on the time travel, totally contrived. But maybe it started with that stupid sidescrolling gimmick in The Adventure of Link. Or the save function in LoZ? Who's going to play a game that requires you to actually save between sessions? I hate gimmicks. Zelda should eschew them entirely.

 

[DarkestLink]

3D Gaming isn't a gimmick. It was a necessary evolution and trying to make a 2D Zelda game on the N64 would have been jarring. It was something that was adopted well before OoT, stayed with the series well after OoT, and has consistently been used by other developers. Time travel? I'd argue that's more of a theme than a gimmick. And with how little it's integrated into the gameplay, I'd say it's a minor gimmick at most.

 

[Darthnut]

It began with Twilight Princess, my best in series. I'll say it again, Twilight Princess is half the game it had every right to be.

Twilight Princess had every right to be Skyrim long before Skyrim was ever a thing. Skyrim turned out to be the inevitable evolution of video games, but Twilight Princess could have been that years prior. What Twilight Princess could have been could have made Skyrim look like another one of its own pathetic wannabes. I guess I didn't realize it at the time but in hindsight, Nintendo was already losing its edge.

It's all been downhill from there. Suckward and Skyrim would go on to be released within days of each other, and Suckwort ends up being utterly impotent and laughably pathetic compared to the majestic self perpetuating hype monger that is Skyrim. Then BotW drops centuries later as yet another in a painfully long line of bland cookie cutter clones of every Ubisoft opin whorldd ever churned out.

This makes me curious. What could have made TP the Skyrim before Skyrim?

 

[Castle]

This makes me curious. What could have made TP the Skyrim before Skyrim?

To invoke the words of Our Lord and Master, The Almighty Todd Blessed Be His Howardness...

*ahem*

"More Bigger."

Or was it one of His apostles who said that?

Seriously though. Skyrim's claim to fame is that it was open world on a large epic scale. Skyrim didn't really do anything new. It just did a everything big with what was at the time next generation presentation. It was the first time people really saw just how impressive video games could be. Yeah, many critics see Skyrim as a regression from Morrowind and especially Daggerfall in terms of roleplaying features and mechanics - and I agree. And many people wonder why Skyrim has to be so big just to impress when really it doesn't actually do much of anything with its scale other than show off - a criticism rightly aimed at many big huge epic open world games (a certain game featuring breathy wilds included).

BUT there is no denying that Skyrim was a seminal moment for video games. The first time a game truly impressed with the size and scope of its presentation. Twilight Princess looks and performs visually pretty much in league with Skyrim for all intents and purposes. Bethesda just put forth the effort to cram Skyrim full of loads of content in a massive world to really showcase what a next generation of video games could do. In that, Bethesda was on the leading edge.

Nintendo lazed their way through four years of financially limitless development and ended up with a game that not only featured a fraction of the content of Skyrim to begin with but also ended up cutting loads of content that should've been included anyway.

When I saw the Twilight Princess reveal trailer for the first time, I immediately envisioned something similar to Skyrim before anyone knew Skyrim would ever be a thing - a vast sprawling landscape filled with towns and villages and ruins and caves and secrets and quests around every corner. What we got instead was a small sample platter compared to that. Skyrim would deliver on that vision years later when TP could've done so then. I don't think hardware constraints would have been much of an issue. I don't expect Twilight Princess could have ever equated Skyrim in its scale and the size of its program. But it could have made the same initial impact then that Skyrim would go on to make.

I suppose you could argue that Ocarina was really the first game to make that impact. Twilight Princess should have just taken that and cranked it to 11.

 

[DarkestLink]

Honestly Skyrim's size never impressed me. Didn't feel that much bigger than previous TES games and if you wanna use a Zelda comparison, tWW was probably bigger. Never really cared about size. The two things that did impress me were:

1) How immersive the world was.

2) That it didn't have the "huge but empty" vibe other large worlds had.

And after so many people took a **** on tWW for it's size...I actually thought TP would be smaller tbh. Even OoT felt a little too big due to how empty the world was.

 

[HeroOfTime]

Well, as many others have stated, Zelda stopped leading back in the Wii era. I believe that is almost completely the fault of the underpowered console, however. SS tried to get away with more than it was capable of graphically, and the world could've been so much bigger and open if it wasn't for the hardware and memory limitations. What everyone liked about the Wii was how casual the games often were. Where other consoles had games with dark souls-level difficulty, the Wii just felt fun to play. Mario Galaxy will always be one of my all-time favorite games, I sank hundreds of hours into that game and enjoyed literally every second of it. The same could be said of nearly every first-party Wii game in existence. The Wii appealed to the casual side of gaming, and Zelda isn't revolutionary for being casual. I'd almost go as far as to say that a Zelda title shouldn't have been made for an underpowered, casual console.

However, just because a series isn't leading anymore doesn't mean that it isn't a good game. Nearly every Zelda has been a masterpiece, certainly in its time at least. There are very few exceptions.

 

[YIGAhim]

It's not the pioneers that live a happy life, it's the settlers