Gossip Stone: How Should New Zelda Games Have You Get Items?

Link’s wide array of items in every new Zelda game tend to be obtained through dungeons, and the dungeons revolve around the use of those items, but A Link Between Worlds introduced the new method of buying nearly all your items through Ravio’s shop. This was a fresh new idea, and many loved it, as it opened up some great in-game possibilities. Now that a new Zelda is around the corner, should this method be used again, should the old dungeon-item method return, or should something brand new be done? Join the discussion after the jump!

The obvious, and to many, overused, mechanic has been to get items primarily from dungeons. These dungeons are often laid out to have you solve the puzzles within with the new item, and not much else. In the past, Zelda games have been adored dispite this rather simplistic ctyle, but nowadays, standards for adventure games and their puzzles are rising. Not only should new puzzles be challenging, but it should not be obvious what should be used to solve them.

In A Link Between Worlds, the rental shop, run by Ravio, was introduced. I thought that this was a great idea, and so did many others, as it opened up more open-ended exploration and dungeon traversing. You could go through the dungeons in any order, but by the end, you still had to get them all. The fact that having them permanently cost quite a bit was kind of lame, but still. A great idea.

The new question is, what could be done next? Perhaps there could be more items obtained through mandatory side-quests, or at least parts of the plot that are not dungeon-related. The first example I can think of is the Iron Boots in Twilight Princess, obtained not as the main item in/needed for the Goron Mines, but in a side-quest leading up to it. Maybe a better example would be the Majora’s Mask Transformation Masks. They were obtained in the times between dungeons, and used all across the board. They were even utilized together in the final dungeon – a fair step away from the usual “enter dungeon, get item, use item to beat dungeon” mechanic.

What do you think. Is Zelda Wii U going to bring us a new item-obtaining method? The “conventions of Zelda” are being moved away from, so could that mean a cool new style, or should things stay as they are? Leave a comment below!