BS The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets, Chapter 1 (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
534A playthrough of Nintendo and St. Giga's 1997 action-adventure game for the Super Nintendo, BS The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets, Chapter 1.
Chapter 2: https://youtu.be/iZHR0WOkyRY
Chapter 3: https://youtu.be/gLsie5ZtqSM
Chapter 4: https://youtu.be/oY0PuhEwFug
A Link Between Worlds was excellent, but it wasn't the first officially released "sequel" to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. That honor instead goes to this esoteric bit of Zelda history.
Ancient Stone Tablets is the direct follow-up to Nintendo's 1991 smash hit. It is not a standard SNES release, though. The game was played through the Satellaview, an attachment for the Super Famicom that allowed the console to receive satellite transmissions through St. Giga's subscription-based broadcast service.
The service would send programs that could be temporarily stored and run from the Satellaview's four megabits of RAM, or if you had the fancy storage cart, programs could be downloaded into its 8 megabits of memory and retained for later.
However, some programs, like Ancient Stone Tablets, included features that could not be saved locally, and so these games had to be played at the specific times when St. Giga would be broadcasting them. The programs were about an hour long each, and if you were tuned in during that hour, your game would be synced up with a live, high-quality digital audio stream. The end result is what you see in this video - a Super Nintendo game with CD-quality audio.
With this feature, Ancient Stone Tablets became something of a hybrid, merging the concept of episodic games content with that of the 1950s-era serialized radio drama. The game is split across four broadcasts, each featuring two new dungeons, and your progress transfers between them.
Because of the time-sensitive nature of these broadcasts, you were only allowed to play each for an hour, meaning that the open-ended nature of Zelda's gameplay had to be streamlined in order to allow players the opportunity to finish the tasks given for the week. Chapter 1 sharply limits your freedom on the overworld, but the map does open up over the course of the four episodes.
The version of the game that I'm playing has been modified to make use of the MSU-1 mapper (created by Byuu, author of BSNES and Higan). The MSU-1 gives the SNES access to a means of mass storage (somewhat like the Sega CD did for the Genesis), meaning that FMV and streaming digital audio are possible on real hardware. This is all playable on a real console using an SD2SNES flash cart or in an emulator with MSU-1 support (like BSNES or Snes9x).
This version, which can be found at https://bszelda.zeldalegends.net/bszelda.shtml , has painstaking recreated the experience of playing the original broadcast on real hardware.
Since the sprite sequence data at the start of each broadcast has been lost to time, the game begins with an FMV clip made from a VHS recording of the original sequence. It's a bit grainy, but it is a creative and effective workaround to ensure that no content is missing from the experience.
Since no clean copies of the broadcast's original audio stream are known to exist, the team that made this patch recreated the soundtrack from the sources that the original used. They then translated all of the Japanese dialogue, recorded a fan-dub, and overlaid the vocals atop the reconstructed music track, creating a faithful, clean reproduction of the real thing that can be played by English-speakers. Such an incredible amount of work was poured into this project!
And while it might be easy to poke at the voice acting, it is important to remember that this was a fan project produced without any sort of budget, and that the original game itself is from 1997. Remember what dialogue and voice acting were generally like in 1997? What was done here really doesn't sound too far off of a standard 90s anime dub, so just embrace the cheese. You'll enjoy it more that way.
But the actual dialogue... wow. Hahaha. It very much sounds like dialogue written by a 90s game company. The narrator explains the controls to you several times, and everytime someone gives you a hint, somebody else will then directly address you with a, "Hey, did you hear that?" and repeat the entire message. It reminded me a lot of good ol' Weevey Sig's job in Galaxy Quest, actually.
BS The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets is a pretty fascinating experiment in game design. It holds up well as a legit Zelda game, and thanks to the tireless efforts of some really passionate fans, it has been preserved and made playable to a brand new audience. Go try it out!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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