By Master of Zelda
The Legend of Zelda, the very first installment in the ever-increasingly popular Zelda franchise, has created the very first benchmark in action/adventure video games. Zelda was unique in so many ways, that it quickly rose to the top of the charts, and won its place among many gamers' hearts.
The Legend of Zelda was the first game to feature the battery-powered memory chip- at long last, a game that didn't need passwords. It was also the first game to be non-linear, meaning you could go to more than one place, without having to be forced there. In this game, you could go in any direction you wanted across the great land of Hyrule, as long as you had the items and equipment to do it, where then you would have to enter the dungeons of the Underworld to obtain them by slaying great beasts.
Nintendo knew they had something special here. In order to show that The Legend of Zelda wasn't going to be your average NES game, it was carried in a special gold cartridge, starting off the grand tradition of releasing future Zelda games in that legendary gold color.
Despite the innovations of Zelda, this first game was quite small compared to the future expeditions of Link in later sequels, but doesn't ever once have an "easy" feel to it. The game is large in retrospect and its difficulty is set extremely high. The graphics and music, thought of highly in the mid-80's, have come now to be known as crude and "blocky."
The story was deep and the first of it's kind. You play as a child named Link, who finds himself in the middle of a vast field. You are on a quest to save the kidnapped princess Zelda, but before you can enter the evil lair of Ganon whom has stolen her, you must find the eight shattered pieces of the Triforce. From here lies Zelda's roots, where you travel across the enormous world of Hyrule, discovering secret passage ways, new lands, and dangerous enemies. The only way you can progress through the game is to enter an accessible dungeon, where you obtain a new items, slay a beast, and collect a shard of the Triforce, from which you can proceed to the next, more difficult level.
The story is very blunt and, especially compared to today's standards, has not the depth of Ocarina of Time or A Link to the Past. No twists have been thrown in, and no surprises have been made. It is just you V.S. the game. Sure, many improvements could have been made and maybe can still be. But thus was the first adventure that we took in Hyrule and thus it remains as it was.
The Legend of Zelda, the very first installment in the ever-increasingly popular Zelda franchise, has created the very first benchmark in action/adventure video games. Zelda was unique in so many ways, that it quickly rose to the top of the charts, and won its place among many gamers' hearts.
The Legend of Zelda was the first game to feature the battery-powered memory chip- at long last, a game that didn't need passwords. It was also the first game to be non-linear, meaning you could go to more than one place, without having to be forced there. In this game, you could go in any direction you wanted across the great land of Hyrule, as long as you had the items and equipment to do it, where then you would have to enter the dungeons of the Underworld to obtain them by slaying great beasts.
Nintendo knew they had something special here. In order to show that The Legend of Zelda wasn't going to be your average NES game, it was carried in a special gold cartridge, starting off the grand tradition of releasing future Zelda games in that legendary gold color.
Despite the innovations of Zelda, this first game was quite small compared to the future expeditions of Link in later sequels, but doesn't ever once have an "easy" feel to it. The game is large in retrospect and its difficulty is set extremely high. The graphics and music, thought of highly in the mid-80's, have come now to be known as crude and "blocky."
The story was deep and the first of it's kind. You play as a child named Link, who finds himself in the middle of a vast field. You are on a quest to save the kidnapped princess Zelda, but before you can enter the evil lair of Ganon whom has stolen her, you must find the eight shattered pieces of the Triforce. From here lies Zelda's roots, where you travel across the enormous world of Hyrule, discovering secret passage ways, new lands, and dangerous enemies. The only way you can progress through the game is to enter an accessible dungeon, where you obtain a new items, slay a beast, and collect a shard of the Triforce, from which you can proceed to the next, more difficult level.
The story is very blunt and, especially compared to today's standards, has not the depth of Ocarina of Time or A Link to the Past. No twists have been thrown in, and no surprises have been made. It is just you V.S. the game. Sure, many improvements could have been made and maybe can still be. But thus was the first adventure that we took in Hyrule and thus it remains as it was.
