Tag: 2d Zelda

Yesterday we discussed bringing various aspects of the 2D Zeldas into future titles of the third dimension; today it’s time to flip that discussion on its head. As much as the 3D games could learn from the original classics and the handheld titles, could the reverse not be true as well? Couldn’t we take certain aspects of the 3D titles and bring them over…

Early video games started out in a mere two dimensions, The Legend of Zelda being no exception. Whether using the top-down view of many of the games or the sidescrolling perspective of The Adventure of Link, the first four games and several of the subsequent handhelds all managed to exploit those two dimensions to their fullest, providing us with some amazing adventures across lands that we actually couldn’t see all that well. We had to imagine a series of blocks on the screen being a impassible forest or a giant mountain, and some of the items, bosses, and puzzles wouldn’t have worked…

In a recent article, entertainment writer Anthony John Agnello explores the moral dilemmas at the heart of Link’s Awakening. Follow the jump to learn why he considers the classic Game Boy adventure the most human of all the Zelda games.

One of the age-old debates among the Zelda community is the question of “2D or 3D?” I’ve heard people go back-and-forth over whether it’s Ocarina of Time or A Link to the Past that’s the truly classical Zelda title. But what about on the development end? Does Aonuma prefer to make one kind over the other? What development challenges are present in one style but not the other?

In an interview with SPIKE, Aonuma was asked as to what his preference in terms of 2D versus 3D

Zelda development, and after weighing some of the unique challenges present in either category, he responded that he “want[s] to keep making both.”

Head past the jump for Aonuma’s full quotation.