Making Rupees More Useful
Posted on June 23 2012 by Hanyou
Yesterday’s article about resource management prompted a comment from JuiceJ that I thought would help flesh out the idea of resource management a little more. One of the core elements of resource management that I overlooked (at least, outside of the original) is the rupee system–consider this an addendum. Rupees are easy to forget about. They’re not usually scarce, and if you’re good at most of the Zelda games, you can ignore them entirely. As JuiceJ pointed out:
“In addition to what you said in this article, it’s also really nice — and by really nice, I mean “FINALLY!” — that Nintendo has finally made rupees useful. In literally every game previous to Skyward Sword, rupees were either only spent in mass quantities or hardly at all. Spirit Tracks was better at this, but even it didn’t do it properly. Skyward Sword finally had numerous money sinks, each worth using, making the money we found along the way having a purpose. It actually made sense to purchase things. This went hand-in-hand with all the other things involving the items mentioned in this article. Nintendo finally got that tidbit right, and it made a world of a difference, despite the fact that it’s not a major gameplay aspect.”
JuiceJ brings up a good point, and one I think bears repeating: Skyward Sword forced the player to conserve their rupees in ways that many of its predecessors did not. As noted in the article, rupees were scarce in The Legend of Zelda, with the player allotted 255 at any given time. You could gamble or grind for rupees, but for the most part, rupees were very hard to come by. A Link to the Past made rupees slightly easier to come by, but the difficulty of the game necessitated that at least first-time players keep a good stock of rupees to ease some of the challenges.
Ocarina of Time made rupees even easier to come by, and offered less incentive for using them. As with items, this had a lot to do with the lack in difficulty and the lack of enemies–by the end of the game, there were few things you’d want to spend your rupees on. It just wasn’t worth the effort. Majora’s Mask introduced the bank system, which was a fantastic idea, and it offered you incentive to re-buy items because you were constantly losing them every time you restarted the clock. I felt that this was cheap, but at least it made for a more useful, and more involved, economy than Ocarina of Time.
Subsequent games all had different ways of dealing with rupees, with varying success. I’m one of the few who enjoyed The Wind Waker’s Triforce quest, and I felt using the rupees benefitted me significantly. There was constant incentive to collect because there was the looming prospect of having the Triforce charts decoded. I just felt like you were offered more opportunities to make use of them. Twilight Princess tried different things, as well. It was the first game since The Legend of Zelda to bind rupees to an item–in this case, the Magic Armor. Unfortunately, the magic armor simply wasn’t that practical outside of the Cave of Ordeals. As with A Link to the Past, I found The Minish Cap difficult enough that I was constantly collecting potions, especially for the final battle.
Skyward Sword, as stated in the article, made it more practical to collect items. There was incentive to customize Link and upgrade things like the Beetle, so rupees often felt scarce. I agree with JuiceJ that this is one of the best applications of rupees, but I also think The Wind Waker did a good job with them, and Majora’s Mask had some good ideas. Coming up with ways to make rupees useful seems to be difficult for the developers, but Skyward Sword, with its item upgrades, potions, and range of options to increase player customization, actually had a unique solution.
Some combination of the best ideas from the rupee system (increasing the difficulty of the game in general, instituting a bank with rewards like Majora’s Mask, requiring some amount of rupees to finish the main quest like The Wind Waker, and allowing for increased customization like Skyward Sword) could turn rupees into an asset instead of an annoyance or an extra thing to collect. For those who don’t 100% the game, this could offer a much more fulfilling experience.
How would you like to see the developers implement rupees in future Zelda games? Which games do you think have done it best so far?
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