Game:

The Legend of Zelda (1986)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 18:52

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What is The Legend of Zelda?

During the development of a relatively unknown game throughout time called Super Mario Bros. by a small indie company known as Nintendo, they were working on another game in tandem with Super Mario Bros. called The Legend of Zelda. Whereas they had decided to make Super Mario Bros. an athletic sort of Platformer, they decided to take a different approach to The Legend of Zelda, instead making it an Action-Adventure game.

In The Legend of Zelda, the player must see Link through his adventure throughout the land of Hyrule, a land of beautiful forests and majestic mountains as Link must brave eight dungeons to gather the shattered pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom so that he can enter Death Mountain, defeat Ganon, and rescue Princess Zelda.

Gameplay in the Legend of Zelda is incredibly basic, but that's okay, because it's fun, and that's all that really matters, right? The player can move in the four cardinal directions, and they can use many different types of weapons to fight the many different enemies that the player will encounter, including swords, bows, boomerangs, and bombs. However, it isn't just Princess Zelda who needs rescuing. Numerous people live in fear of Ganon and have made their homes in caves. Some will help you, some will sell you items to help you in your quest, and others will charge you money for destroying the door to their home. That's one of the best things about The Legend of Zelda is that it is filled to the brim with secrets, and almost every screen in the game's overworld has a secret, with even some of the dungeons being hid in places a novice player might not ever think to stop and check, but since I played this game all the time as a kid, I know where most of the secrets are, except for some of the "pay me for the door repair charge" dudes. Hey, since when do video games require that their secrets be good? Also, on that same note, how many games actually have bad secrets? Not too many that I can think of, but maybe that's a good thing. You don't want to discourage the player from finding secrets, do you?

Graphics-wise, it's an NES game, but everything just looks so good for an 8-bit system. Enemies do kinda sorta in a way look like the way they do in the game's instruction manual. Things look like what you would expect them to.

Music-wise, the game is great. You have that triumphant overworld music that everyone is now familiar with (funnily enough, Koji Kondo, Nintendo's prime composer, actually wanted to use the theme from Bolero as The Legend of Zelda's main theme or overworld theme, but when he learned that Bolero's theme was still under copyright, he composed The Legend of Zelda theme as we know it today and the rest is, as they say, history.), you have the foreboding dungeon theme that plays in the first 8 dungeons, and the final dungeon's theme is ominous, signifying that the end of your journey is in sight, and this dungeon is your last obstacle before the last stop.

Overall, this game is fantastic, and if you're interested in checking out the Zelda series roots, then this game still holds up, I think, at least in most parts. There are some enemies who can, quite frankly, go find a hole and rot in 'em, such as the Dark Nuts who are oddly enough easier than I remember. But those Wizzrobes? Yeah, no thank you. However, you may want to watch a playthrough like this one and/or look at some maps online to learn where all the secrets are in-game.

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