Hello there, and welcome to The Back Page A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we’re going to make an episode all about Zelda games. So, Zelda is something that comes up a lot on this podcast in our Best Games of the Year episodes, and also just elsewhere, like Breath of the Wild featured… Well, did we both have Breath of the Wild as number one in our Best Games of the Generation? I don’t remember, but… I believe we did. Yeah, so, yes, very high, a game that we both love, and the series in general. Obviously, Matthew, with his Nintendo heritage and mags, has a lot of passionate thoughts on the Zelda series. So, with The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword releasing in HD this week on Nintendo Switch, as you’re listening to this… Well, I suppose if you’re listening to it later, it’s not. This seemed like a good time to go through the top 10 Zelda games. So, at the start here, we’re going to talk a bit about Skyward Sword HD and what Matthew thinks of that, who’s been playing it. I’ve asked for a recopy from Nintendo, which I think they’re going to send me. But unfortunately, after this episode is live, maybe I’ll talk about it in a future episode. The listeners didn’t need to know that. And so, what people will get is a really good, sort of like broad view of Matthew’s sort of takes on the Zelda series and hopefully some good recommendations generally and some quite unusual sort of opinions on the series. Matthew, you’ve been kind of threatening me with this being a controversial episode of sorts. How have you kind of approached this list? Well, I mean, it’s a total heartless, obviously, you know, for those playing Back Page: Bingo. The strange thing about Zelda is that if you asked me a week ago, my list probably would have been quite different and the week before that, quite different. I am quite mercurial when it comes to this series and I have a natural fondness for a lot of them. I think they’re quite hard to put into a list, I will say, because for me it’s just a general soup of quality where I’m kind of glad all of them exist for different reasons. So I wouldn’t say there are major gulfs between my picks and it’s a strange old thing. Just reading and thinking about Zelda, any particular Zelda game, instantly makes me want to go back and play it. They just all have that kind of effect on me. So I’ve been rereading Iwata Asks for this episode and that was massively changing my list because I was like, oh yeah, good point, this was great. And then I was looking over some of my old reviews and replaying some of them and so it was just constantly shifting. It was really nightmarish. My affections lie with a particular kind of Zelda game, which means another kind of Zelda game gets slightly hard done by on the list, which is where the controversy lies. I feel fans of older retro Zelda will probably be quite disappointed in my list, but it reflects what I’m into. Yep, and that’s ultimately the point of the list, you know, and you know, it’s personal preference. It’s not like you’re saying the ones that don’t rank are necessarily bad, unless you are, in which case, yeah, you’re getting more of a pitchforks. No, I don’t think so. Okay, good stuff. So Matthew, let’s start with Skyward Sword HD then. So you’ve been playing this. You are, you know, infamous on this podcast for giving this the Edge 10 and therefore dragging the entire scoring system down. I’m only joking there. But I was curious, what do you make of it going back to it in this new Switch version? And do you think that it’s worth picking up for people who maybe bounced off the game the first time? So yeah, I reviewed this for The Guardian where I’ve just given it four stars, which is obviously quite different to an Edge 10. Does this mean I take back that Edge 10? I don’t think so. I think when I reviewed it at the time, I was reviewing it in the context of Wii. I was reviewing it really as the game is a love letter to motion controls. And I think motion controls had a lot more to prove at the time. And for me, this game is the game that kind of that did it all and was a bit of a full stop on the end of the Wii. And so I rewarded it as such. Now we’re in a slightly different space, we’re in a world where Breath of the Wild exists, which has a huge impact on how you perceive Zelda, you know, the level at which you know Nintendo can reach has changed. And so coming back to this game after Breath of the Wild is weird, and that had the biggest impact because I think, you know, to be honest, this is so different from Breath of the Wild. It is completely the other end of the scale, where that game is open, this game is linear as hell, and if you didn’t like that before, you will still hate that and it will feel much worse and much more claustrophobic because you have experienced Breath of the Wild since then. And that was sort of my read on it. I still really admire what it does in this more linear adventure, but it feels stranger than ever before and it also just loses the power of surprise because I’m coming back to it. And that’s an interesting thing I think we’ll get into as we talk about some other Zeldas, is that returning to Zelda, returning to older 3D Zeldas particularly, you can have a very different read on them for various reasons. So did you play Skyward Sword when it came out originally? God, I played probably the first hour where you’re walking around that floating continent and I don’t want to sound like a graphic stop here, but it looks super rough on my HDTV and that was just the nature of the Wii, obviously. So yeah, I must admit it felt slightly antiquated to me in some ways, but I didn’t truly get to grips with the Wii Motion Plus stuff and I always appreciate the fact that your journey with this game was tied into your journey with motion control on the Wii generally, which was you saw what good and bad motion control was and you saw the different ways it evolved. Yes, and that is for me like Skyward Sword, so you have to kind of divorce it a bit from Zelda to kind of understand where I was coming from. You know, I was reviewing it more as a motion plus, the kind of final word, but also, you know, I did like it as a Zelda and I do really like it. Something you will see in my list is something I really value in the Zelda games is the puzzles and the dungeons, and this game is just, it is puzzles from start to finish. I mean, the floor of it is that it doesn’t really have an overworld, it doesn’t really kind of pretend to be a living organic world anywhere, it is a completely artificial puzzle filled space. Like it’s a game where the overworld plays like a dungeon, which to me is kind of heaven. I love that stuff. You know, I love getting to grips and getting my head around Nintendo puzzles. The problem with returning to this now is that I have already done that and I remember most of the solutions and so my relationship with the HD version is kind of going, oh yeah, I remember this. Oh yeah, that was cool. Oh, it’s the cool bit where I do X. There have been a couple of bits where I’m like, oh yes, very clever, like it stumped me afresh. But it’s very hard to replay as Zelda and get that kind of impact if you are into that particular thing. So if you loved Skyward Sword before, that is something to take into consideration that returning to it is maybe some of the shine comes off those puzzles the second time around. If you played all the way through it and hated it, this won’t change your mind. It hasn’t changed, you know, you know what the game is, I mean the control element is I’ll talk about that in a sec. But this also isn’t for you. Really, I think this should be aimed at people who just haven’t played Skyward Sword and those people, you know, I think they’re very lucky in that they get to play this quite interesting thing. They get to play a much more stable version of it, like the Joy-Con motion control for the swordplay is much better. And if you don’t connect with it, you do have the stick controls, which work really well. I kind of played it half and half, the HD version, and it basically replaces swipes of the Joy-Con with the right analogue stick becomes your sword arm. It’s much, much easier with stick controls. Like you can swing a lot faster, so you can kind of sort of cheese your way through some of the fights. I feel like you don’t actually have to connect with it, you know, as mechanically, on the same kind of mechanical level as you did with motion controls, because you can just literally like swing, swing, swing, swing, swing, and things just get churned up against your blade. But it does lack a little bit of the… I still like the motion, the drama of the motion controls, and I think something is lost, but it’s very comfortable to play with button controls. I’ve sort of like… I was flicking through some reviews this afternoon and I think Polygon was like, finally, it’s got a control scheme that works, those ghastly motion controls, and these button controls are better. And I think that’s overselling it a bit, I mean, if you were that against motion controls, I don’t think there’s any game on the world… Anyone could make a game that was going to convert you, if you’re that stuck in your ways. But yeah, it’s a very polished, smart, smoother version of that game, but I don’t think it’s transformed at all. That’s why I think people know where they stand on this game already, and so the review is really for people who haven’t played it. And of those people who haven’t played it, I guess Nintendo is probably hoping that some of the people who like Breath of the Wild will play this, but obviously Breath of the Wild is experiential, as an open world game in a way that this definitely isn’t, from the way you make it sound, so do you think newbies will truly get it? If you played Breath of the Wild and you came away feeling, oh man, this game didn’t feel like a Zelda game, it had no dungeons, you might get on better with this, because this is only that, really. If you played previous Zelda games, skipped Skyward Sword and then played Breath of the Wild, and you liked Breath of the Wild but you liked those previous ones, you’re enough of a Zelda fan that you should be probably playing all the mainline entries. It’s kind of hard to imagine that person, like I can’t really imagine as a self-proclaimed Zelda fan who hasn’t played Skyward Sword. But if your first game was Breath of the Wild and what you loved was the freedom and spontaneity of that world, there is none of that in this. I’m pretty sure we’ve mentioned it on this podcast before, I’ve definitely joked about it on social media, this attempt of Nintendo to frame Skyward Sword as this prototype for Breath of the Wild is ludicrous. They try and draw the thread in that Skyward Sword introduces a stamina meter for climbing and a sail cloth for gliding, but it’s not. It’s sail cloth for parachuting straight down. It’s basically an emergency landing when you fall from a great height. There’s no like gliding across epic environments and the stamina meter is for like dashing and climbing up very fixed walls like vines and medium sized cliff faces. It’s a puzzle mechanic. It’s not an organic system to exploit. You know, it is, I have got X amount of stamina and I have to get from A to B and there is a fixed solution to do it. It is not, I have this sort of general idea of stamina I have to manage to get around. It’s far colder and clockwork than Breath of the Wild and so really, they’re so different. I mean, this is very story heavy compared to Breath of the Wild. This is really explicit in what you’re meant to be doing. You know, if you went to Breath of the Wild and found it, you were flummoxed just by the sheer openness and the lack of direction, the freedom that everyone celebrates for some people is a curse. This is, you will know what you’re meant to be doing, you will have a rollicking 30-40 hours and you will get to the end of it. You will be playing a more streamlined version of it that fixes, speeds up some of the tutorialising. You can skip the text. I definitely got through this game a lot quicker than I did when I reviewed it on Wii. Like, it’s a lot of subtle differences that kind of add up to, I would say, a reasonable time saving, particularly in those early hours where there is a lot of, like, story before you get into the fun of it. Interesting. I feel like I’ve now seen Nintendo do this a couple of times with their games, just like finding ways to cut some corners out. Being quite honest about pacing things that don’t work, I’m thinking specifically of Wind Waker HD cutting down the end game quest, the close, when you’ve got to collect the eight different things. Yeah, the Triforce quest, yeah. I think that people are a bit snooty about Nintendo’s remakes, remasters, whatever we want to call them, but I think they do make subtle changes. Particularly starting with the Ocarina of Time on 3DS, they made some smart, fundamental choices which altered people’s perception of certain things. We’ll get to this later, but that 3DS remake, I think it reveals the water temple for the brilliant bit of puzzle engineering it actually is, because there’s just less faff. A very small interface tweak makes it much more pleasurable. Yeah, Wind Waker sped up the boring bit here, it speeds up the tutorials. Yeah, it’s smart stuff. Good stuff. Well, I think then, Matthew, that pretty much covers it for the HD remake. So what we’ve got plenty to get through here. Maybe it’ll be in my top 10. Yeah, exactly. So it’s bound to come up again a little bit later. Well, maybe. We don’t know. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, we want to maintain the mystery. Yeah, it may or may not come up. Who knows? Will it beat Link’s crossbow training? So Matthew, let’s take a short break there. We’ll come back and we’re going to talk a bit about what makes a great Zelda game and our own personal histories for the series, because I think that’ll be some setting the groundwork for what’s to come in the list. So, Matthew, what was your first encounter with Zelda? So I think it was either Link’s Awakening on the Game Boy, or playing a Zelda game and watch, of all things, which sounds like a bit of a made up hipstery story, like my first Zelda was the game and watch, but I’m pretty sure my friend Mark in junior school had it, and I played it on a school trip, and I didn’t really know what Zelda was, and I, you know, so, but it lodged in my head because it said sort of Zelda on it. It was one of the hinged game and watches, and that to me, you know, anything vaguely video game shaped was the most exciting thing I could possibly imagine as a seven year old or whatever. But yeah, Link’s Awakening is definitely like the first Zelda I played and completed all the way through, and then we’re into like Link to the Past. I absolutely totally skip the NES generation of Zeldas until much later, literally playing them when I was on Endgamer. Look, I just hadn’t played them. I didn’t have any nostalgic relationship. I’ll say right up front, neither of those are in my list. Yeah, I thought that. I think that one of the things I sent you on Discord earlier was knowing what I know about you, I’m 99% sure that The Legend of Zelda on the NES will not make it into this list. I know that some people think there’s some real purity to that game. I don’t know. I’ll go and talk for you, let’s say. We’ll get to it later. Yeah, it’s old as hell. I think they were so generous to this game when they were talking about how it inspired Breath of the Wild. I wonder if everyone has to be super polite about Legend of Zelda, because it is like Miyamoto’s Zelda. And actually, so much of the revolutions that have happened in Zelda are nothing to do with Miyamoto, but everyone feels like they’ve got to say it because he’s the boss. That’s probably not true. I imagine these dudes did grow up on it and they’re being honest, but I feel like they almost embarrassed him with Breath of the Wild. Like they made one of Nintendo’s greatest other games. And so they have to say, but it wouldn’t have happened without Miyamoto’s design, you know, 35 years ago or whatever. And I’m like, okay, sure. Now we’re getting into the spicy stuff. I must admit, having read a bunch of the Iwata asks on this, Miyamoto does come up quite a fair bit, but in instances in Ocarina of Time, for example, where he’ll come in and say, I want it. So when you jump over the chasm on Epona, the horse, the camera cuts so it’s facing upwards and you can see the sun. And that’s like the note he gives, the phrase like months of work, you know. Yeah, I think they undersell his involvement in Ocarina in that interview a bit, in that the only two anecdotes they tell about him is the thing with the horse and wanting bits of the chopped up sign to float on the water. And you’d think that that’s all he contributed, which I don’t think is true. No, no, I mean, there’s that story. I think it’s a fairly famous story as well about how he’s badgered by a shopkeeper at one point for the fact that the game had been delayed. Like, heaven forbid, Ocarina of Time took three years to make. I mean, oh, wow. I mean, you know, if only they knew, if only they knew. What was your first Zelda? OK, so my first encounter with Zelda was with Link’s Awakening 2. And I wonder if this is a fairly common experience for people in Europe where, obviously, the SNES was successful here, but, you know, not as successful as the Mega Drive, particularly in the UK. And so I wonder if a lot of people, Game Boy was mega successful globally. If people just had a Game Boy, this is one of the games that they just had for it. Because when I’ve been looking at lists of the best Game Boy games, thinking about, oh, what stuff I kind of missed or whatever, Link’s Awakening is like, what I want out of games is head and shoulders above pretty much everything else in the system in terms of like, it’s got a story and overworld and, you know, a lot going on. A lot of Game Boy games are just very simple, kind of like toys, basically, and an extension of Game & Watch, like you say. And so Link’s Awakening, I played this in 1998, I think it was, because my friend of mine had Ocarina of Time, I didn’t have an N64, but I did have a Game Boy. I thought, what is a Zelda I can play? There is this Zelda, it was before I had a Game Boy Color, so I bought the original version and I played loads and loads of Link’s Awakening, so that’s a very foundational game for me. And yeah, so that was my first encounter, Matthew. I was curious if, for you, obviously working on Nintendo magazines, what was the kind of journey you went on with Zelda, while kind of like working on covering Nintendo professionally? And do you think there’s any sort of connection between the types of games that Nintendo makes and the hardware they make, just because traditionally there’s so much synergy between them in terms of the intent, in a way that you don’t get with Sony and Microsoft? I’ve asked you a lot there, but you know what I’m talking about. So Zelda’s a weird one, because obviously I joined the mag just as Twilight Princess is coming out, and I feel like the exciting kind of journalistic journey with that game was already done. Like I don’t think I wrote about Twilight Princess in Endgamer ever. And then, just because there is such a massive gap between them, it vanishes, and it’s just a series we can’t really write about from a here’s new things. So you know, Mario was much more present on Endgamer as a figure, you know, we were writing a lot more about Mario, we never really went deep into Zelda. One of the exciting bits of the job, and it came at the right time, was, you know, when things were beginning to wane a bit later on, you know, in 2010, we suddenly have Skyward Sword to talk about, and you know, it was fun to kind of try and apply our sort of Endgamer-y, you know, everything but the kitchen sink approach to kind of hyping something to a Zelda finally. That was exciting. The actual Zeldas we got, I know the handheld ones as well, obviously, which are kind of key to it, but I think the thing that kind of defines Zelda in this period is that they become like massive hardware showcases, particularly for like unique hardware control schemes. It’s also a period when Nintendo is trying to call a new audience of casual gamers, a new audience of not just casual gamers, but new gamers. So, there’s this sense of like, these are games in a series which we have a long relationship with, but they are also introductory entries, and that changes the nature of them entirely. Like Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, for all their various strengths, are like absolute kind of pushovers. You cannot fail at those games. They are designed for you to see through start to finish, and I would argue that a quality of Zelda and a quality of the adventuring spirit that Zelda is trying to tap into is a sense of mystery and discovery which I don’t think plays well with what Nintendo are trying to achieve with those games. I think the problem that people have with Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks and Skyward Sword is that they over explain, that they hold your hand, and this sense of kind of picking away at a world and the mysteries of the world never surfaces in them. So the entire character of those games absolutely changes because of where Nintendo are at. So while it was fun to review them and play them, it was also… I felt like they weren’t necessarily the Zeldas that the core end-gamer reader would get excited about, if that makes sense. I think that makes sense, yeah. We can talk about this when we get to the games because I learned a lot from those awaterists about how they perceived the different people playing the games at the time, and how they informed the games they made, so that can come up a bit later. So I wanted to ask a bit about Eiji Aonuma, Matthew, so obviously the series overseer doesn’t get involved until the N64 games, but is now steering the whole thing, and has been for a long time. Sounds like a man who’s been very tired for a long time, just reading his recollections and awaterists, but what do you make of him, and how do you measure his influence on the series? I really, really rate him as a person, I’ve never met him, so I only know him through interviews, and mainly those awaterists interviews. I love him as a personality, I think he’s sort of a fascinating figure at Nintendo, because he has been with the Zelda team so long, and you know, something that does come up in those awaterists is like how much movement between games and series there are. Like often at the start of those interviews, awaterist is like, oh, you know, you’re the programmer on Skyward Sword, what else have you done? And he’s like, oh, I did a bit of Pitman 2, and I did a bit of New Super Mario Brothers Wii, and I did a bit of brain training or whatever. And you know, so you get this idea that they’ve got like a workforce that’s shifting around. The idea of a Zelda team is a bit of a sort of misnomer, I think. It doesn’t really exist in that form. But Anuma is like this quite incredible kind of through line, keeping up the kind of enthusiasm and championing the series without ever becoming like too much of just like a cold management figure. Because he is super senior in that team, you know, the actual kind of what his day to day involvement is, like in the kind of creative, you know, idea generation is a bit of a mystery, I would say. Even those interviews, it’s sometimes hard to kind of pick out. He’s shepherding people who are coming up with a lot of ideas. But as someone who’s kind of like constantly thinking about like the values of Zelda and is kind of a champion of it, a kind of protector of a series of values which are very, very hard to pin down, I think that’s kind of fascinating. And I think he served that role with like great humour and skill. Like I think he’s, you know, his track record speaks for him. He’s produced a shit ton of absolutely amazing games, like even the ones that aren’t good, you know, aren’t as good as the others, they’re still better than what most people would make. And like, within the series, there’s so much variation and change that it’s not just someone phoning it in, he’s not just the owner of the Zelda template, because there is a one. You know, they’re all so radically different. He’s probably, if I could interview anyone at Nintendo for like a proper, like you could sit down and just ask them anything kind of interview, which don’t really exist, it would probably be him. What I’d really kind of want to know is, because obviously, you know, when Iwata passes, like the, there isn’t any kind of replacement for the type of insight he was doing on how Nintendo games were made. I understand they’ve just started doing something similar, though, for The Garage, what’s it called? The Nintendo Switch kind of game maker thing they just… Yeah, it suggests that that’s going to be a thing going forwards as well, which is good. Yeah, so I mean, I really hope they take the fact that Breath of the Wild 2 is coming out as a chance to dive into the making of one, because obviously the scale of it changes so much. You’ve got Monolithsoft contributing parts of the world and basically how you build an open world game and all that stuff. So the scale of it is so different. A story I really liked that I thought summed them up a little bit was basically he comes off of Twilight Princess as that project wraps up, and he checks in with the Phantom Hourglass team to see how that’s going. He then suggests a raft of improvements and then delays the game by three months to help the team implement the improvements and everyone on the team agrees it was the right thing to do. And then he completes the game ten times, I think he says. And that kind of speaks to his instinct of, I understand that these are the things this game needs to be as good as it can be, and maybe that’s his kind of magic. Yeah. While it’s sort of hard to say, to maybe tie specific features to him, a lot of the anecdotes are of someone who’s like very hands on and has definitely proven himself in the art of making Zelda games. I mean, Ocarina of Time, he basically is sort of responsible for the first six dungeons and the kind of designing them that is. He designs the water temple, he kind of creates the structure for a 3D Zelda dungeon which then defines the entire series moving forwards. That’s pretty major, but you also get these little glimpses on like, you know, when they’re talking about Link Between Worlds, he himself creates a prototype of building a section of the Link to the Past map in stereoscopic 3D to see what it would look like to prove that it would translate. You know, he spends like three days or whatever doing this in his own time, you know, which is it doesn’t sound like you’re a traditional producer or what you know of producers from like Western studios. You know, you’ve got someone who’s like, oh, I’ve got a bit of an idea and sort of goes off and tries to do it to kind of prove that it’s doable. Yeah, I think he’s great. He’s just such a, he’s got such a sort of chilled vibe. And he’s in the interviews, he’s got like big magazine editor energy. And he’s just been around for ages and he can only like, it’s been on his podcast, he can only like half remember a lot of stuff. And he’s just sort of bemused at the kind of half remembered anecdotes that he can tell. I got a lot of time for that. You know, if it was very genuine and honest. I think long running series have been the downfall of like many studios and many publishers. The ability to shepherd something to understand what makes it tick without letting the weight of its reputation like crush you and throw you off. I mean, kind of compare, you know, the bumpy ride that like Final Fantasy had, you know, in its latter half of its life, which is kind of comparable as a kind of how long it’s been going on. And he must be doing something really right for it to have the regularity and the quality that it does have. Absolutely. Okay, so Matthew, something I was going to ask you, but I think we better answered by your list was, what do you think makes a great Zelda game in its core? And I think that we’ll probably tap into this as we go. Yeah, but I was really curious about when are you less impressed by Zelda? And do you think Nintendo has ever truly got it wrong in the time you’ve been playing games? I think the thing they’ve never, they’ve never lost the kind of polish or quality bar of like Zelda is precious to them and it’s clear, and they’ve never like completely shit the bed on that front. Like I say, with the Wii and DS generation, I think it becomes what it values is slightly different. And I still love those games. You know, the DS games particularly and Skyward Sword. But they are, they are very different and they’re the ones which I understand the most. If people who, you know, long term Zelda fans are cooler on them or bounce off them, I can sort of fully understand. For me personally, I’d say their multiplayer experiments are of less interest to me. Just, but I don’t know if that’s just because of like how much faff they were, you know, with regards to like, you had to own 12 billion gameboy advances and like all that cable and everything to make it work on the GameCube, which amazing if you can do it, but like really, really rotten for everyone else. Weirdly, the best time I ever had with Four Swords was when they re-released the little Four Swords freebie on, I think it was DSi for like the 25th anniversary. Do you remember this? Yeah, was it on 3DS? I think I own it on 3DS. Was it on 3DS? Maybe I’m getting my wires crossed. My dates are a little muddled. But yeah, that was basically the mode that came with Link to the Past for the Game Boy Advance. When they remade Link to the Past for the Game Boy Advance, it had like a smaller version of Four Swords, which is what they ported. It isn’t Four Swords Adventure, which was the GameCube version. But actually, like the only way that game was ever going to work was if you gave it to everyone for free on a console which can link up much more easily. So a DSL or 3DS or whatever it was, like that’s the only time I’ve played Four Swords Adventure with four people. Four Swords with four people was because we all had it for free. And it was great. But I was like, man, this is just, it’s kind of bogus. And so much of Zelda is a solitary experience. I just don’t know if it translates. I mean, the Zelda I’ve only played 20 minutes of was that Triforce Heroes, was it the 3DS one? That’s not on my, I have, I had like, I played a little bit of it was like, nah, not for me bounced completely off it. That’s about as wide of a mark as it’s ever been. Just, it’s not, I don’t know, for a world which has so much like iconic stuff in it. And, you know, it’s, it is a world, you know, people love Hyrule and they love that world. It’s surprising how, like, a few spin offs there have been, and B, like, you know, they just haven’t really worked. You know, Link’s Crossbow Training, spoiler alert, is not in my top ten. Yeah, are there any spin offs you do like, Matthew, that still didn’t make your top ten? No, not really. I mean, I contemplated the Warriors games, because they’re quite good fan service, but they’re also a little monotonous. I tell you what, if the Age of Calamity, or the one they did recently for Switch that’s kind of based on Breath of the Wild, if that ran smoothly, that may have been at the number ten slot, because it’s a brilliant bit of fan service for Breath of the Wild, and it really plays on a lot of fun characters. It’s absolutely spectacular as well, but it just runs like an absolute pig. So, that’s a shame. That might be re-evaluated if they ever release a Switch Pro and get it running properly. Those games are surprisingly good. I’m not so sure about the screeching guitar versions of Zelda tunes, but that’s me. Yeah. Well, that’s the unfortunate lineage of Dynasty Warriors. Well, it depends on your feelings on Dynasty Warriors, I suppose. It’s a formula that’s easy to click with when it’s wrapped in fun Zelda characters, I think. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, okay, good stuff, Matthew. There’s only one thing I kind of wanted to touch on then before we get into your list, which is I feel like we should mention Breath of the Wild’s sequel a little bit. It doesn’t have a title, but obviously has been revealed now in some form, some kind of floating continent above the old world from Breath of the Wild. Is there anything else you want from that sequel based on what we know now? When I saw the skydiving stuff, that gets me really excited. That feels to me like they’re actually, they haven’t done that properly in Skyward Sword. That is an idea that was too good to only try once and not quite get right. Skydiving and sailing through the air and throwing yourself off and soaring through the clouds, it’s great in Skyward Sword, but it’s sort of fake. It never really comes alive. I’m really glad they’re going back to that idea. I mean, I’m a little worried maybe about that it does seem to be Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule again, and so much of what made Breath of the Wild good was exploring that for the first time and discovering it. I know it’s a big and complex place, but most of us have spent hundreds of hours charting it in its entirety. I would be worried about them just going, you know, oh it’s that place again, and you’re going to spend the meat of the game there, and you know, that would be a little bit kind of what have you been doing for five years. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but there would be an element of that, I think. Unless they’ve really radically changed how it, I don’t know how you deal with that space, but I can’t, you know, maybe they’re geniuses and they have thought of a way of completely refreshing it, or maybe they’re playing their cards close to the chest and like that sky stuff is like way more substantial than it maybe looks, or there’s more changes on the map or whatever, but that kind of… that gives me a little bit of fear. Straight sequel works quite rare in Zelda, you know, and in the past if anything where they have done it, it’s been an opportunity to do some like weird stuff and you know like the you know I’m sure we’ll talk about this when we talk about Majora’s Mask, you have an opportunity to kind of go wild and play with the conventions, but you know a lot of what they’ve shown of that in that trailer, you know, it could have been Breath of the World 1 in places. Yeah I think so too and I think like you I share the optimism that they’ve got something there keeping up their sleeve that yeah we’ve yeah so first look at the game. It’s too big and special, that cloud stuff just looks amazing, I mean you know I’d pay sixty quid for that right now. Yeah you know and replaying Skyward Sword recently has made me think oh yeah that you know there is so much potential in that kind of that kind of clambering around. Just to dive into Hyrule from that height you know would be amazing like that would be exciting in itself but you know I don’t know if I can like how many more kind of bokoblins I can roll bombs down the same hill at you know and still be thrilled but we’ll wait and see. The weary experiences of a very um of a Zelda veteran there but um yeah I uh yeah let’s see how that pans out. So Matthew let’s take a short break and then we’ll get into your top 10 Zelda games. So, let’s get down to it. Matthew, the top 10 Zelda games. Why don’t you hit me with your number 10, and then we’ll count down to number one. So, I wanted to ask you a question first. There’s something quite big that isn’t on my list, and I don’t know whether I should talk about it upfront, or we should talk about it at the end. So, can I guess what the game is? I mean, you can’t, it just depends how we want to do it. Because if we keep it till the end, it feels like we’ll be ending on a bit of a downer note, but then there’s also the excitement of like, what could it be? Yeah, that’s true. But I feel almost certain that it’s a link between worlds on the 3DS, just from what I know about you. Am I right? It isn’t. Oh, is it a link to the past? It is. Yes, I thought it’d be one of those, but yeah, okay. So I think let’s go with that first, because I think it will offer quite a good, well, an idea of your perspective on Zelda and what you think is important, because obviously this is a foundational Zelda game. So yeah, why don’t you explain why this didn’t make your list? Yeah, so a link to the past is a game which you’ve asked me ten years ago what the top three Zelda games are. A link to the past would have been in it. I had amazing memories of this game. Playing it with my friends across the river, the mysterious boys across the river, which sounds like something from a Zelda game. We used to go over to their house, play their SNES. One of my clearest early gaming memories is getting to the fake ending, I guess, of link to the past, where you then go into the dark world. We didn’t know about any of that stuff. We thought we’d finish the game when we got to… What is his name? Aghanim, I think it is. You know, batting the lasers bat. We did the three opening dungeons, which in themselves were substantial and difficult enough that we were like, we’ve done it. We’ve finally finished A Link to the Past. And then it was like, bup bup bup, this is whole other world. There’s like seven other dungeons. You know, you’re a rabbit. Good luck. So that was like wild. And that will always be locked in my head as like one of the best Zelda moments ever. Like that is a piece of pure Nintendo genius magic that I’ll be forever thankful for. But I replayed this just before A Link Between Worlds came out because I wanted to refresh myself because that game, if you don’t know, is the sort of semi-sequel to this, set in a very similar layout high rule, it was going to have all these connective ties, so I thought I should probably replay this and refresh my mind. And it’s a marvellous game, like it’s not a bad game at all, but the thing I really bounced off in this, and this is something I value greatly in my list of games, is I think the actual like, dungeoning and puzzle solving and puzzle construction kind of changes later than Link to the Past, and I’d forgotten that, it’s much more of a kind of pure action experiences in the dungeons, there are a lot kind of colder, naughtier and mechanical sort of labyrinths to explore, and it kind of really bummed me out. I actually had quite a bad time replaying this, because of those dungeons. It feels like a very sexy version of like, the kind of Legend of Zelda dungeons, you go into a room, there’s probably a combat challenge or a slightly awkward bit of platforming, and then you go to the dungeon, there’s often a malarkey with a lot of keys, and I can’t really be doing with that. Yeah, and it just, I was kind of amazed that I’d remembered these places as being a lot better than they are, and to see this game so regularly topping the best of lists, and I know so many people who I respect who hold this as their favourite Zelda, I do wonder like, who has played this again since New Zelda, and would they still hold that opinion? I don’t know. What’s your relationship with this game? So I played up to exactly the moment where you become a rabbit, and I thought, like you, that I had completed the game, and I thought, bonanza! It was Christmas 2007, and I was playing it on my DS, and I was like, oh, thank God, I completed it. I can’t believe I completed it. That was a piece of piss compared to Link’s Awakening. And then obviously I hadn’t completed the game. And then I never went back to it after that, and I think I just looked at that map and I just felt dejected by the amount of work in front of me. So yeah, I’m kind of guilty of not finishing this one. But yeah, let me just share something I found kind of interesting from reading about the background of the Zelda games in the Auto-Rs, which is that… So this game and Link’s Awakening are both directed by Takashi Tezuka. And I understand that Link’s Awakening was born from the developers of this game wanting to kind of make a kind of slightly unusual, remixed, kind of weird version of Zelda for the Game Boy. It started out as, let’s make a Link to the Past work on a Game Boy. That’s obviously a preposterous goal. And it turned into this more experimental Zelda game. And something that was observed in that interview was that it takes Link’s Awakening for the series to become a bit more story oriented. And I think that that’s quite important to me. And so I didn’t feel like I had that same connection to a Link to the Past world that I did with Link’s Awakening, which is just stuff with character. But I don’t know. Maybe that’s very subjective. The opening to this game is like one of the great game openings from a story perspective. The kind of you’re woken up on a dark and stormy night and you go into the castle, you feel like you’re some scummy little peasant boy who’s had this very one-off, rare opportunity to go somewhere where you would never be. It’s got the bones of great adventure in it. And I should say, the twist that there is this dark world, that’s a big story twist. For its time. And that’s a huge bit of misdirection of what the game is going to be about. But you are definitely right. I think what changes with Link’s Awakening is that there is generally a weirder story vibe to it. It becomes like the characters are much bigger. And I would argue that Zelda’s strength is in character rather than story throughout the series. I remember individual people, like individual sound clips of individual people better than the stories. I’ve got very little interest in Zelda chronology. It used to bore me to tears all the arguments about that when I was on Nintendo magazines. We never really engaged with it because Nintendo themselves are like, story literally comes last. It’s purely functional as long as it works with the game design. It doesn’t really matter, which is why the Zelda timeline is this big fractured mess. Occasionally they lean into it and they tease you, like Skyward Sword is the first ever Zelda, or this one is the sequel to it. They are definitely pitching the story as a bit of a hook with it, in a way that they don’t with some of the others. The way it was described in Link’s Awakening was I think it was put as suspicious characters is what they added to the series with that. It’s like this weird knock-off Mario and the fact that all of the townspeople are quite strange because obviously the spoiler alert are within a big dream and that’s acknowledged fairly openly by the game. There are a lot of oddballs in that world, like you say, and that becomes maybe codified there. Whereas I don’t really remember any of the characters I’ve met in a Link to the Past, it has been 14 years, that’s part of it I’m sure. It’s definitely not as sophisticated on that front. I mean, what it does have going for it is like a sound and a look and a tone, which is forever burned into my mind, as like, that is kind of what a 2D Zelda looks like. Like the look of the bushes, those weird rocks you pick up. Just the individual sound effects, the sort of plinks of arrows on shields, the feel of that combat. I mean, I haven’t really got problems with that overarching adventure, like the overworld stuff I still really like, and the interplay between the light world and the dark world is, you know, kind of creates this dual world trope, which a lot of Zeldas then choose to use, but rarely is as in as complicated and sophisticated way as this, you know, it that that is like a major trump card to it. I just, for me, there is this sort of pillar of puzzle sort of dungeon storytelling, like atmospheric dungeons that kind of have a better sense of place where they feel like quite generic action gauntlets and that’s quite hard to take that step back, I find. And the weird thing is, arguably, like, you know, Link’s Awakening, which follows so close behind makes huge leaps in this regard, and definitely with like some of the puzzle design and item usage, and we’ll get to that when we talk about Link’s Awakening. So yeah, it’s, they’re on the cusp of something, and it’s just, this will be a general theme, I think, throughout this list. I think a lot of Zelda’s, it’s just quite hard to go back. You know, they kind of dazzle you, but then they kind of build on it, and going back is not always wise. Hmm, interesting. Well, there we go. I think we get a good sort of example of our sensibilities there. You still weirdly did sell me on playing a Link to the Past. It’s like, every Zelda game is essential. That’s the dumbest thing about this list. Is this pointless, Matthew? Are they all just very good? No, it’s not pointless, because hopefully it will reflect my taste. It’s quite hard to surprise with a Zelda list, because you’re like, surprise, it’s ten great Zelda games. The nitty gritty of the order is maybe where it gets a bit spicy. I was worried with this one because it is part of most people’s standard top ten, their top five even. A lot of people it’s their number one. It may sound incredibly dismissive, but what I value isn’t represented by this game anymore in Zelda, what I want from Zelda. And there’s very few Zelda games which I can say that about, and this is one of them. So apologies, Link to the Past. But you too old. Well, there you go. The people at home can go play this on Nintendo Switch online if they want to form their own opinions if they haven’t played it somehow. Obviously there’s a Game Boy Advance version available as well. So, Matthew then, let’s get an idea of what it is you value about Zelda more than anything else. So what’s your number 10? So my number 10, as apologies to Link to the Past, is A Link Between Worlds. Oh wow, okay. So this obviously has like an item borrowing mechanic, but I recall you being slightly down on this compared to other people who loved the Zelda series, is that right? When we did our top 10 3DS games, Joe Scribs was quite into this. I was cool on it. I’m not going to say I’m going to eat my words, but I have replayed a chunk of this since doing that episode and refreshed myself a little bit, so it came with kind of new eyes, kind of pondered it. It’s weird, it’s probably a game I still have like more cons than pros in terms of… I actually really hate the look of this game. Like, the art style really doesn’t do it for me. Like, it feels kind of like, of all the Zelda games, kind of like weirdly budget. And it sounds like they did make it quite fast in Nihwataras. This is the one where they famously kind of come up with the concept as a core team, and then they all basically get taken onto other projects, so the whole thing kind of stalls for a year, and then they kind of get folded back into it later. But it sounds like they’re only really going at it properly for like a year on this. It’s a very slick 3DS game. Like, the 60 frames per second up until Skyward Sword HD. This was the only 3D Zelda with a 60 frame frame rate. And the 3D is not only brilliant, I would say it is one of the major like redeeming features of this in that it takes the top-down Zelda dungeon design, which I am generally cooler on, and puts things like… that height perspective actually is super valuable. Like, I love the dungeons where you’re kind of like smashing through the floor and hitting springs that kind of throw you up. It actually plays with up-down a lot because of the 3D in more interesting ways than any of the other 2D top-down Zeldas ever could or did or could. I think it does have a big problem with the difficulty curve because it’s a game where you can play any dungeons in any order. They’re all basically at this quite simple introductory level. They’re all designed around one item because it can only guarantee that you come into the dungeons with one item. For those that don’t know, the gimmick in this game is that you hire items rather than finding them in dungeons. So you basically hire a hammer to hit some pegs and that’s the key to the dungeon which you only need the hammer in. Where, you know, previous Zelda games, it knows that by the sixth dungeon you’ve got six items from the other dungeons so it can do a lot more complicated things. That said, and the thing which kind of brought me around on it was just playing a couple of the dungeons and seeing like how creative the item use was. This is important to me. I love Zeldas that get new ideas out of old favourites. You know, I really like that they’ve got this returning bag of gadgets but they’re finding new uses for them like 20 years later. That’s kind of mad to me. The wall mechanic where you turn into a painting and sort of scoot along the wall is just a really magical idea. That was the idea that they originally pitched the game with. That’s what got this game commissioned by Miyamoto. There’s some quite funny stories in that that Oata asks about how down Miyamoto is on their original pitches. Did you see that? Actually, that’s one of the ones I didn’t read actually. Oh, it’s great. They’re like, we spent six months coming up with ideas and then we showed them to Miyamoto in like a presentation and he’s like, he had like a face like death and he hated the whole thing. And we were like, and he was like, this seems like a game from 20 years ago, which must be rotten to hear from him. And they’re all like shitting it because most of the stories in those interviews, while there is some like tough love, it’s very rare, like everything we did Miyamoto hated, but actually paints him as like quite a scary figure. And then they basically go away and come back with this link can turn into a portrait idea. Interestingly, they the prototype they make is with the kind of Phantom Hourglass spirit tracks kind of perspective. So more of that kind of angled view rather than top down. And it’s that it’s it’s the kind of combination of, you know, I think it’s like a new mode basically talks them into going properly top down. And then that triggers the we should do something with the link to the past world. And it all comes together. I think it’s an easy game. I think it’s quite simple game, but it’s a smart game. Good 3D, decent Zelda. I think I agree with you about the art style. Like, it doesn’t dazzle you when you turn it on. Admittedly. Admittedly, I’m playing on 2DS these days as well. And I do, I think I did sample the 3D when I first got it. And I do remember thinking the effect was good. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s got it’s got really good 3D. They do this occasionally, which is like, oh, we’re going to try and make it look a bit more like the very simple illustrations we used to do. And that’s fine. But, you know, they did Wind Waker, which just had so much like character in its art style. It was so alive. These just look like quite nondescript models. Just the textures are quite, quite ugly. It’s quite like, I remember when we were writing about this in the magazine, the screenshots of this game are rotten. And you basically every caption is like, trust me in 3D, this looks great. It’s kind of true, but it looks, it’s really like barren and sparse. And it doesn’t really look like a link to the past, like at all. But that has such a distinct look and like flavour to it. I was always kind of surprised at how wide that kind of golf was. But, you know, they’re kind of, I think it was very much like mechanics first, which fundamentally is what’s good about this game. So, you know, can’t really knock it. But, yeah, so A Link Between Worlds gets, it scrapes in. Yeah, that’s interesting. This is one of the ones I didn’t read the Inwater Aspire because I thought, well, I know that Matthew is notoriously down on this game, so it won’t make his top 10. Therefore, I’m kind of surprised. No, I’ve warmed to it. I like replaying a bit of it. It’s also got, you can go into the bar and they play like acoustic versions of classic Link to the Past songs and those are amazing. Yeah, that I do remember. So yeah, it’s an interesting choice. I think that the graphics in this one have dated worse than probably all of the other handheld ones personally, as an 8 year old game. But even at the time, I don’t think it looked dazzling. But that’s not to say it looks bad. That’s just more of a compliment for how good the Game Boy Color, GBA and DS games look. But Matthew, that’s an interesting choice for a number 10. So why don’t we go with your number 9? My number 9 is The Legend of Zelda, Oracle of Ages. Interesting. So is this the only Oracle game on your list? This is the only, yeah, this is the better of the two Oracle games. Okay, so I always heard that Seasons was, people were rating Seasons to me because I think it has the like visual palette swap thing, right? And what is the fundamental difference between the two Oracle games? Yeah, so for people who don’t know, these were actually conceived as a trio of games, the idea being that each one was going to be about a different bit of the Triforce of power, courage and wisdom. And the idea is that Oracle of Ages is Triforce of Wisdom, and that means it’s more puzzle heavy. And Oracle of Seasons is the Triforce of Power, which means it’s more combat heavy than Ages. So that’s a bit of a mechanical difference. The dungeons are much, much harder and more complicated in Oracle of Ages. They’re a bit more traditional action gauntlets in Seasons, though there’s still plenty of puzzles. And at the heart of them, they each have a big defining mechanic. In Oracle of Seasons, it’s the ability to change between the four seasons, which changes the world map and there are some obvious changes. So in the winter, a lake freezes over and you can walk across it and certain things will grow in the spring and this, that and the other. Where in ages is a much more traditional like time jump. Present day in the past. Oh no, present day in the future. So you can, there’s a lot of like, you do something here to kind of manipulate the landscape and much more like, you know, you’d be familiar with as like kid and adult Link in Ocarina of Time. I wouldn’t say like either of those central mechanics is like, seriously like impressive or kind of complicated. You know, they’re different enough to like warrant playing them both and they’ve both got like, complete different stories, objectives, dungeons, the works, they’re two separate games. This isn’t like a Pokemon Red Blue deal. It’s, you know, two games to play through, which is, which is exciting. Really, really a lot of dungeons in this. I think this has a lot more kind of sophisticated ideas that kind of come, it feels more like Link’s Awakening. It’s not as good as Link’s Awakening, but it borrows a lot more. So it’s a 2D Zelda, like Link to the Past, but has like more kind of creative approaches to like the bosses. A lot of the bosses have like more puzzle kind of based solutions to them. So that classic Zelda thing of the item you find in the dungeon is the item that kind of proves the undoing of the boss. Now a massive cliche, at the time, a bit more exciting. This is the kind of time that idea is kind of taking shape and they’re getting their head around it and experimenting with it. So it’s kind of interesting from that perspective. I feel like both of these games are worth celebrating in that they’re available now. Like you can download them on 3DS. And I feel like a lot of people didn’t play them because I don’t know how many people had a Game Boy Color. I feel like they’re kind of slightly forgotten Zeldas. Like I only played these when I was on official Nintendo and they re-released them on 3DS. And I was just like, wow, these really hold up. Like, these are great. And we reviewed it. Joe played Oracle of Seasons. I did Aegis. And then we did this like, sort of joint kind of conversation review where we were kind of comparing and contrasting our two experiences since played Seasons as well. But I just think they are almost as good as Link’s Awakening, which means that like, really everyone should have played them. You know, the idea that I think if there is a Zelda you haven’t played, it’s probably this one. And there is no reason to ignore it. Like, for me, it was like, oh shit, there are some great Zeldas for me to discover. Like, how lucky am I? Which is kind of what I wanted to convey by putting them in, putting Oracle of Ages in the list. Yeah, so I am first of all, your little comparison feature thing with Joe makes me miss Nintendo magazines as a thing, because that’s a great, I would love to read that. I bought both of these as soon as they landed on the 3DS. I’ve played seasons, but not ages. I’ve played about four or five hours of seasons. And I do think that one thing that was kind of like counting against it is it’s a 2001 Game Boy Color game. That is like late for a Game Boy game. Yeah. So I think that’s even after gold and silver launches in the US, I think. So it’s really, really late on. And yeah, I think that what’s interesting about these games, and there’s another Zelda game I’m sure will be on your list that we’ll talk about, is in some ways they do feel like asset flip fan games. They’re like, you know, they take, they literally take assets from Link’s Awakening and reuse them. And like, first of all, that would be a great list feature, like Half-Life Opposing Force, the Zelda oracles games. I’m sure there are others, like what are the best asset flip games? But it’s funny when I was playing, I was playing this the other day, just a little bit to kind of come into this with some thoughts. And like one of the first characters you meet is one of the little boys who are in like the village in Link’s Awakening, where they’re like, yeah, I’ve heard that if you swing your sword, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But don’t ask me, I’m just a kid. And it’s like, well, you disappeared at the end of Link’s Awakening. I remember it. You like, you vanished along with everyone else. And here you are in this game. And I quite like how brazen that is. Obviously, this is these are Capcom developed games, right? They’re not in-house Nintendo. Yeah. But what’s really interesting is that Hidemaru Fujibayashi, I hope I’m pronouncing his name properly. Yeah. You know, he makes Oracle of Seasons, he makes Four Swords, The Minish Cap, and then he moves from Capcom to Nintendo and becomes, you know, basically the director for the two mainline Zelda games that would follow, Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild. So, you know, his journey with Zelda begins here and that seems enormously significant. There is a 100% Fujibayashi through line in his games and it is something that really resonates with me. This is a guy, he, like, you can tell he loves dungeons. He fucking loves weird gadgets. His games all have the best Zelda items in them. They are so playful. Skyward Sword, a game which is just puzzle, puzzle, puzzle, puzzle. It is just, it’s like, that is Fujibayashi unchained, you know? And I kind of, maybe I’m imposing that reading on this myself and these teams are far too complicated for one person to dominate them like that. I just think it is too much of a coincidence that all the Zeldas he worked on, like, they are the ones which introduce, like, wacky items. They have, like, big gimmicky dungeons. They’re super into that element of the game, you know, and he cuts his teeth in the 2D space, he takes it to Skyward Sword. Like, when I was playing HD, I was saying to Catherine, there’s actually something about this that kind of reminds me of a handheld game and I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like, at the time I thought it was like the DS games in that it’s a game built around a control scheme so specifically and it’s so sort of small feeling in that it’s these very dense areas, it doesn’t have an overworld. It almost feels like it’s working within the tech limitations of a handheld game by not having a Hyrule feel to gallop across. And I just wonder if it’s like, that’s just a total hangover of, this is the guy who has only worked on handheld Zeldas up until now. Of course the theory goes to shit in that he then directs the open world game to end to all open world games, which is just absurd. It does not fit with him. A game which has pretty much no dungeons. I would love to pick that guy’s mind for half an hour and just say, what is up with this? I know you love dungeons. You cannot say you don’t. There is the evidence. But yeah, that is the great mystery of Breath of the Wild, is how did that guy make this game? Interesting stuff. What an interesting pick. I wonder if one of these might make your list. Any other thoughts on this one, Matthew? Or should we move on? No, let’s power through them. Alright, what’s number 8? I guess I like to break my record. It’s The Legend of Zelda, Minish Cap. Well, we’ve got another handheld Zelda here, so let’s think, by process of elimination, is every single handheld Zelda game on your list, apart from the Game & Watch ones? And I guess Oracle of Seasons as well? No, there’s a couple of exceptions. Okay, interesting. Well, talk me through why this one made your list. This is, again, Fujiibayashi Zelda, which means it has some wacky items. It has the gust jar. It has the, I think it’s called the cane, I don’t know how it’s pronounced, the cane of Pachi, P-A-C-C-I, which flips things over. They’re very, very playful. It’s got great dungeon gimmicks, like rubbery mushrooms that fire you. The gimmick isn’t just in the item, which is something I really like. It’s very sort of playful in that sense. Well, I think the main thing is this doesn’t look like any other handheld Zelda. This is like… I’ve read interviews with Fujiyoshi and Anuma about this, where they are like, at the time it’s another Capcom one, and they set out with a mission to Capcom Zelda art. They’re like, what do we do that is better than anyone? Amazing sprite art. We are going to blow Nintendo’s mind with this sprite art, like stuff you’ve never seen before. And compared to the other 2D Zeldas, I think it does. It’s this astonishing looking game. It obviously has the GBA to play with, rather than the Game Boy Color, but it’s got this big cartoony style, this really playful mechanic where you can shrink right down to a tiny little gnat. And when you do, you’re suddenly walking around, and it’s a bit honey-a-shrunk for kids, you’ve suddenly got giant props and you’re walking around huge blades of grass and floorboards look like canyons. And it’s really convincingly done with sprite work. It’s very nicely done. It’s got this great bombastic Capcom energy to the boss fights particularly, which play with the shrinking thing. So there’s… I’m terrible. Zelda… this is a side note. Zelda bosses have like universally shit names. I can never remember any of them because they’re all just like weird references to… you know, that’s a complete side note. It’s got this boss with like… you sort of shoot him in his hands to sort of stun him. So a classic bow and arrow boss. But then you shrink down and you run into his open mouth and you basically go into his head and start like wrecking his brain in there. It’s like a Platinum boss fight. It’s really crazily done, but it’s got this… you know, for a handheld game, it’s got this big scope to it. It’s got a boss in the cloud temple dungeon. There’s basically a level set up in the clouds where you’re jumping between a lot of clouds. There’s a lot of jumping in this game. It’s quite arcade-y in that way. But it’s set on the back of a giant stingray, and this other stingray is attacking you, so you’re having to dodge that. And it’s got this mechanic where you can stand on this block and kind of clone Link. I think it actually comes from one of the Four Swords games. If you were playing alone, you can make these ghostly clone Links. You have to basically clone a little army of Links to hit all these different weak spots at once. And it’s just like crazy innovative. A real crowd pleaser adventure adventure feels so much bigger than a handheld game. People are sometimes down on this, it’s quite short, you can kind of really power through it, maybe ten hours or something. But the density of ideas is really impressive. I feel like of all the stuff they did with Capcom this is the one where they really bought a bit of their own DNA to the mix. It’s a bit of a nightmare to play these days. I don’t know if you can buy it. Maybe you can buy it on the Wii U, weirdly. But they gave this away free to 3DS owners. Remember everyone who bought it at launch, then they dropped the price. They gave us all ten Game Boy Advance games which they never released again on that platform. Yeah, I indeed own those. I bought a 3DS just before that cut off. I’ve got that, I’ve got Super Fusion, I’ve got Wario Land 4. Annoying that they did the price cut but a pretty sweet haul of games. Yeah, I think it’s lovely to turn on my 3DS and see all those on there. Even if you get a new 3DS you can still re-download them. It doesn’t have all the functionality of a virtual console game. You have to just turn off your 3DS when you’re done playing it as opposed to going into the menu like you can with playing Earthbound or something on there. You have to wait for the batteries to run out and for the console to hard reset. You’re like, really, Nintendo? This doesn’t seem great. Yeah, exactly. So I think that’s why they never sold them, because they thought, well, we’ve kind of hacked these into the work on the 3DS. That is so dumb. That is so dumb that you can’t buy all Game Boy Advance games, because that is a console generation that is just going to vanish super easily without that. Yeah, I mean, there’s a really good argument to be made for the fact that these games, why are these games not on Nintendo Switch Online, but we’re fucking waiting forever while they add loads of like really obscure SNES games that people don’t give a shit about. And so, you know, that’s just my very sort of like mainstream perspective on it, I suppose. But I think what is interesting as well, Matthew, is that when you look at the Game Boy Advance era, Nintendo isn’t making like loads of original stuff for the big series. So this is the only like full single player Zelda game that releases on GBA. Yeah. Yeah. So that itself is significant. And it doesn’t release any new Mario games, I believe this generation, right? They are all the SNES ones. Yeah, like the Super Mario Brothers Advance, which are nice enough, but they’re, yeah, it’s not really what you want. Okay, so an interesting era for them. The sprite art for this is beautiful, actually. And I think it also illustrates, we’ll talk about this later, but that people were acclimatizing to the sort of Toon Link style very quickly, and we’re really digging it by this point. Yeah. So yeah. Oh, it’s a great game. It’s really good. Again, like, if you haven’t played it, you’re so lucky you just get to discover this like, mech, like this absolute gem. Yep, on your Wii U controller. What a treat. Yeah, on that horrible Wii U screen. I’m never plugging in my Wii U ever again. Oh, okay, good stuff. So what’s your number seven, Matthew? My number seven is The Legend of Zelda, Link’s Awakening. Okay, can I lead on this one? Yeah, go for it. Yeah, sure. So this is the game. I’ve completed this three times, I think. So I completed the original Game Boy one, the Game Boy Color version when it was released on 3DS, and the remake for the Switch that they did. I’m like 99% sure that the Game Boy Color one is the one to play. It’s got, I think that it does look good, what they did for the Switch, but it’s got some framerate problems. Oh boy, has it got some framerate problems. It really does. Considering that Breath of the Wild runs pretty smoothly, it’s kind of mystifying, but obviously Grezzo did that sort of remake, but I think that the sprite art for the Game Boy Color one, it is like system seller quality. I know it’s just the same stuff, but with like color on top of it, but obviously they added a new dungeon as well, the colored dungeon. I love this because of the sort of strangeness of it. I think that as the Zelda game I kind of covered the most and know the most, it’s quite odd to play some of the other series with this as my frame of reference because it’s just such an outlier. Like obviously you are washed up on this island, there is a giant egg on top of this mountain, and it’s very strongly suggested that you are part of a dream world conjured up by this egg. In fact, there’s literally like a poster you find that just tells you that in the game, which is quite a funny way to kind of unravel its lore, but I think it does a really good job with its music and storytelling of creating a sense of mystery. There’s obviously a spooky owl, you know, that’s a kind of a common thing in Zelda games, but a spooky owl who kind of like an exposition owl who’s like, oh, go over here and maybe you’ll learn more about the wind fish. And then there’s like a town that’s just animals dancing and having a nice time. It’s just I really like the kind of dream like vibe of it. And yeah, like I say, for a Game Boy game, this was just so impressive. It was an entire world packed into this cartridge. And just that wasn’t so much the ethos of what, you know, major developers were doing with the game with Game Boy games. It was like, you know, platformers puzzle games a lot of the time. So something this detail was kind of kind of unmatched. So yeah, I adore this. I think the dungeon design is great. I think the way that it brings in the different tools is fantastic. I really like the way that the bosses link up with the different tools you get. And the other the fact that none of them are really just like batter the boss and hope for the best. All of them require you to combine your different tools to to beat them. I really love that some of these bosses I got stuck on for months at a time in a pre internet age. Yeah, I adore it Matthew. So yeah, why don’t you tell me how you feel about it? Yeah, I mean, very similar relationship with to this issue. I for a while I wondered if it was just nostalgia, like because I had this this childhood connection to it. I’ve been replaying, actually playing, so didn’t play when it first came out, the Switch, Link’s Awakening. And while I think you’re right, like, I don’t think the Switch is the natural home. Like it’s a it’s a handheld game through and through and it’s quite short for that money, I would say on Switch. Not to make it all just about that. But it’s yeah, the tone of it is really wild. I love the what they do with the overworld. I love the trading quest is, you know, obviously introduced here that becomes a bit of a Zelda staple. Yeah, you’re right about like the use of items in dungeons. Unlike Link to the Past, this is the game where the you know, the item you get kind of changes what you can do in that dungeon and sort of unlocks its potential and that becomes like that is just what Zelda dungeons are from that point on a really important decision. I don’t know why they didn’t do it more in in Link to the Past, but we will never know. I mean, they did a lot of other stuff making about 5,000 dungeons, I guess. I am still to this day, wigged out by that horrible snake boss in the first dungeon. The snake boss has been in several Zeldas. You know, you remember this guy, right? Yeah, with the weird eyes and they’re like the weird eyes and he’s got to hit his tail. His movement is like he’s the most unholy character I think in all the video games. He’s so unpredictable. He doesn’t follow any pattern. He’s just a pure agent of chaos. He stressed me out when I was a kid. I was playing it the other day and I got to him and I was like, oh, this guy, he’s really stressed out by him as a kid. And then it stressed me out all again. And they’ve used that boss in a few of them, but he’s just so unknowable. He just zips all over the place. He looks like he’s coming for you and then he dodges out the way. Whoever programmed that is an absolute fucker. That thing is a nightmare. But yeah, that side, that’s still good. It’s characterful. Yeah, really fun game. They always, in the Iwataras, it’s come up a few times, they say it was inspired by Twin Peaks. Do you remember this? Yeah, yeah. So I read this too. And this comes back to the suspicious characters thing, right? Yeah. It’s odd because Nintendo live in this sort of bubble where they don’t really recognise anything outside of Nintendo. Like whenever they ask Miyamoto what he’s playing, he’s like, Mario. Literally. Which is quite funny and endearing. But it does mean that the only pop culture reference I think any Nintendo executive has ever made has been to Twin Peaks. I just like the idea that they were all watching it in Japan at the time, being equally freaked out as like everyone over here. And just that their read on it was like, let’s go make this fucking balmy Zelda game, which is always Mario sprites in it. And it’s such a weird reaction to that show. Probably the weirdest reaction to that show. Yeah. I mean, it’s just mad that David Lynch sort of has a hand somewhere in the Zelda story. Yeah, I suppose like the dreamlike nature of the game generally sort of, there’s a bit of commonality there. But I definitely think it comes down to these, this volley of absolute fucking oddballs you meet throughout the world. I mean, what about the like the goat woman who’s catfishing that guy and sends him like photos of herself, which are actually Princess Peach? And like, that’s like, I don’t know if that’s just in the Game Boy one, but that was so the Game Boy Color one, but that was really funny. All the stuff with like the weird telephone booths where you got the tips, and then you go to the house of the guy who’s giving them and he like refuses to talk to you, because he’s like this weird sort of shut-in. That’s just games journalists on Twitter, isn’t it? He gives it all the big talk on the phone. Yeah, he’s all hot takes on the phone and then you meet him in person, he’s like, can’t make eye contact, you know? It’s not really hot takes, it’s just very literal, he’s just like, go to the swamp with bombs, which isn’t really a hot take. One of the things I really loved in that It Was Us about this was when they couldn’t remember if they’d asked How Laboratory for permission to use Kirby in the game, they were like, I think we asked them, but I’m not entirely sure, because some of the imagery, I never really twigged at the time that Mario was supposed to be Mario until much later, and it’s like, oh yeah, of course that’s what that is, but he’s just kind of like a sort of bumbling oddball who’s just going in forests and eating random shit and kind of having a midlife crisis on that island. I’m very fond of that character. But yeah, I have loads of affection for this game, I think it’s wonderful. I still think if you’ve got a 3DS you should play that Game Boy Color version, it’s like £4.79 or something, it’s no money at all. And I think that, yeah, the Switch one’s good, but £40 is a lot for that, I agree. I think that’s like a die-hard thing only. I’m really pleased they made it. Some of the music they redid was amazing for that one. Yeah. That’s the thing with all of these. They could just do soundtrack releases of these old games with like orchestrations and they’d sell like hotcakes. Yeah, there’s one really specific like arrangement they did. There’s one piece of music that only plays briefly in the game. It’s before, it’s when you’ve woken up on the beach and before you get the sword, there’s a little bit of music that plays before you get the sword. And that’s like an amazing bit of music that has done so well in the Switch version that I’m going to put in this podcast so people know which one is it talking about. That’s good. It is great when you get the sword and it’s, you know, suddenly gets all, the Zelda music kicks in and it’s just like, yeah, we’re going on an adventure. Great sense of style. I should maybe put this higher up in my list. Well, I think that because this is one of the few ones where I’ve got like really strong opinions on it, I may be igniting your interest in it. No, no, it’s, it’s, no, it’s, you know, everything’s, everything’s right. It marks a sort of split in my list between 2D and 3D, so maybe that’s it. Interesting stuff. Well then, let’s progress then Matthew. So we’re up to number six, is that right? Yeah. Number six is The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess. So my read on this at the time was that there was a backlash to Wind Waker, that they felt fairly heavily within Nintendo. Not that they thought they did bad work, but they did admit that it threw them off a little bit. They were kind of, it was hanging over them a bit. This looked from the outside, from the outside looking in, this seemed like a return to something slightly more conventional looking. But then obviously you have this, you know, this wolf mechanic as well. So, do you read this as like quite a trad 3D Zelda game, Matthew, or do you think it’s kind of underrated for what it did in an innovation capacity? The cliché about this is it’s kind of like Ocarina Redux. Like after Wind Waker, it’s basically an Ocarina of Time remake in terms of the structure of the thing, the first three temples, then the kind of change and then you get into the rest of the game. I think that it broadly, like if you laid the plans of the two over them, they broadly line them up but it’s still got loads of weird ass ideas of its own. This is, what I love about this game is I think it has some astonishing dungeons. I think there is a run of dungeons in this which is the Arbiter’s Grounds, Snowpeak Ruins, Temple of Time and City in the Sky. I think they have four of the best dungeons they ever made. They come one after another, it is such an amazing middle act of the game, it is so strong. It’s like bang, bang, bang. Every single dungeon gives you a really fun item or a fun twist on an old item. They use them in really good ways. The problem is it feels like the items and the dungeons have been made so closely together that out in the overworld a lot of the items don’t really have much to do because they’re so bespoke for a specific mechanic. And it’s the overworld and the overarching story of this game which brings it down for me. It says, the Skyward Sword fan, I found this one quite plodding. The tone of it is like super bleak. The kind of Twilight realm thing is kind of gloomy. It’s not dark. It’s not particularly dark as in like really unpleasant things happen. It’s just a really unhappy place to spend such a long time. And you could argue that a lot of Zelda, Ocarina of Time, once he’s adult Link, it’s all gone a bit bleak. It’s not like a barrel of laughs. But this game is just like the palette of it is so brown, it’s so autumnal. I think if this was winter, this may be higher up in my list because I hold that it’s an amazing Christmas game. It’s got this really frosty kind of isolation to it. It’s all about you hunkering down in these quite kind of chilly, grim environments. It really suits playing at that time of year. I famously played this when I was flat sitting with the rats with the explosive shit. Like it is forever intertwined with that memory. Imagine you’ve never listened to our podcast before, this is your first episode. And this famous anecdote where some rats do explosive shitting, and that’s like all the content. They basically shat across the room while I was playing Twilight Princess and I couldn’t work out whether there was a rat on the loose because I was finding poos so far from their cage and it turned out it was just projectile pooping, is the short version. So that’s tied with this. It’s a bit of an arbitrary Wii port, like the Wii Remote swordplay and the aiming the arrows and everything. This was made for Gamecube. I’ve never actually played it on Gamecube. I’ve only played the Wii version and the HD remake actually on Wii U. Yeah, it really just comes down to the dungeons. Why I love this one. I wanted to bring out Snowpeak Route. Have you played this one? So not really, to be honest. I’ve briefly played it, played both versions, the Wii version and the Wii version. And I must admit, not to kind of take you off guard here, but visually I didn’t think either version looked particularly good. And it might just be because it was that pre-HD, combined with the colour palette. There is a bit of that. I mean, like, that was less of a problem working on a Nintendo map, because it’s just what we had. You know, this is what the Wii can do. This is like an amazingly ornate game. Like for the time and for what the Wii could do and for the fact they were working on, you know, design for like a CRTV. It has like, it really feels like Nintendo going all out. Like, it’s incredibly detailed to the point of like, there’s almost a messiness to the image which hasn’t aged well. It hasn’t got like, as distinct an art style. It seems to be going more for realism. In fact, they were to us about this, there’s a lot of chat about they really doubled down on like cute little touches. It’s basically a game of like a thousand tiny animation quirks that people might not notice, but they kind of got a bit of mania about it. It’s kind of the chopping the signs and then throwing the signs in the water and watching them floating, kind of writ large. Like they really kind of, they were really trying to Ocarina of Time it with this one. They were going epic. They were going like super reactive. I just think they made a world which isn’t like amazingly fun to spend time in between the dungeons, but some of the dungeons are amazing. I wanted to call out Snowpeak Ruins, which is like a haunted house, frozen ice level, but haunted house, with this like creepy ass yeti who you don’t know if they have sinister intentions for you. It’s quite narrative heavy for a Zelda dungeon. You keep returning to this yeti and she keeps opening bits of this house up for you and it’s her house. Something really sinister has happened in it. It’s spooky as hell, but it’s got so much character to it. You have the dungeon in the sky where you’ve got the jewel hook shots. So you’re basically spider manning it around. That ends with this amazing boss fight which is basically a Shadow of the Colossus boss where you’re getting onto the head of this flying thing to stab it in the head. The bosses in this game are absolutely astonishing. I think if the overworld and the stuff in between had been a bit jollier or a bit faster moving I think this would be in the conversation for like the best Zelda ever. But it just… it’s like half of a good game which really lets it down. But it’d be interesting because this is one of the ones rumoured for the HD remake will be released on Switch later in the year. I mean people have said basically like… reliable people have said like this is 100% happening. So I can’t you know it sounds like they’re going to bundle it with Wind Waker you would think would be the obvious thing to do. And certainly that’s that you know if they do do that that HD one is the way to play it because it does sort of sharpen it up and bring a lot more of it kind of you know into perspective but it is it is a slog. The Wolf Link stuff I never found very fun like it just it isn’t a that you know that is the kind of dual world mechanic kind of Link and Wolf Link but it it’s a little bit repetitive it doesn’t really go anywhere but you know all the exact accusations people will point at Skyward Sword that I’m about I will dismiss so. So one of the things I noted from that from the Iwatarasu on this one is so okay first of all there was a big decision to delay the game by a year right where they’re kind of one of the sort of conditions that was they had to implement motion controls to make the game work on the Wii because they knew that was coming. The other thing was that when we talk about what is the kind of influence of Miyamoto on later Zelda games I believe one of the stipulations for this was I don’t want there to be a whole game where the camera is behind like a dog, like a wolf, like a four legged character so that’s why there’s this like a little dude on top of the wolf and that’s kind of like the Miyamoto one of the contributions to this game is that basically like there has to be a full character and not just you’re behind a wolf for hours and hours. I thought that was kind of interesting. Yeah and Midna is a good character she’s got like an impish sense of style she’s one of the better companions you know this is an area where these games have have flubbed it I mean Minish Cap famously has the talking hat which gets in the way a lot that’s a Fujii Bashi special he obviously then gives us the talking sword which gets away a lot in Skyward Sword that’s another of his tropes he didn’t have anything to do with Twilight Princess which maybe explains why Midna is a bit more agreeable we named one of our cats after her. Right right yes of course I apologize for not bringing much knowledge to this one but no no it’s right no it’s it’s it’s a this is one which when I was making the list it pinged up and down sometimes I think this you know because I really rate the dungeons and I love they’re a big part of why I love Zelda and for me they are marvelous so yeah well I do own the Wii U version of this this is a super late Wii U release if I remember as well so yeah yeah and yeah it’s sort of it definitely doesn’t feel as kind of like polished as the Wind Waker one was that they did internally. It’s more of a sharpening rather than a complete do-over okay interesting so yeah keep an eye out for that HD version coming to Switch hopefully later in the year so we’re on to your number five Matthew yes this is The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. So I have played this one for about 10 hours on two different formats so obviously you know this I think a lot of people would have this at number one I guess traditional Zelda fans but what’s your read on this one yeah for me this is like this is the Star Wars a new hope of Zelda games in that it’s the important one it like invents everything it does everything right but it’s also now a little safe you’ve seen it one too many times you know all the bits you like tick tick tick yes yes yes very good it’s a game that’s probably more important than it is brilliant to play I think this is the thing I was saying about the danger of going back with zelda’s it’s because it’s one of the only Nintendo games which one of the only Nintendo series which I think maybe in being an open world adventure is kind of competing with like other open world adventures outside of Nintendo this there’s not a lot Nintendo games that do have to compete with anything because no one is in I think the genre of open world games and organic living worlds has moved on. I think it moves on quite fast, and they are harder to come back to. They do not hold up as well. And one of the… You know, they made this 3DS remake, which is beautifully made, but the big danger of that is it does put it into a rather stark light, like how old this game now feels. I was never completely sold that 3DS was the natural home of this. This was a game about epic scale, crushing it down on a tiny little screen, can only dent that. Even though it looks sharper and plays better, that was always going to be a problem with this game. This was the game that invented the cliché of like, you’re in this world, if you can see there you can go anywhere. This was the game that blew everyone’s minds. Now when you go in it, feels like a bit Hyrule Field, feels quite threadbare. It feels like what it is, a hub. It’s a big field with six spokes, goes off to different dungeons, feels like a very artificial game space, which I found quite shocking when I played the 3DS on. I was like, wow, obviously, it was the first game to do anything like this, so you didn’t think about it in those terms. But if you have played any other open world games, you can’t help but see the limitations of it now, which isn’t its fault. It’s still a mate, like the dungeons are great, the boss designs are great, for a game to basically invent the rules of a lot of 3D action adventures, and to invent them perfectly with a first attempt. I mean, that’s astonishing. What an astonishing thing. You can’t knock it for that. And it is still kind of weird around the edges in a way that I respect. I like that there are quite weird characters, and jaunty little tunes, and weird side quests. It’s still a game with mysteries buried deep. It doesn’t serve everything up on a platter, like those Wii and DS Zelda games. It’s still… I remember reading stuff about this in N64 months after it came out and being like, wow, did you know you could do this? And you were like, how did anyone ever work that out? You know, it’s still a game which hasn’t been like… If you kind of went in blind, it can still really surprise you. It has got a lot of depth to it, but it’s just… It’s got the impossible task of being the first living world all those years ago. I mean, tough gig. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this was… This is 1998. We are talking about the earliest days of 3D games. One of the earliest 3D games is like Shadows of the Empire on N64. And it has nothing figured out about how to shoot, how to jump, how to really do anything. It’s like a very clumsy Star Wars game that I quite enjoy. You go forward in time only two years and you get this. I think what’s interesting is that this kind of solves so many of the rules of how you do this so that other developers don’t have to. And that’s its significance. To share my memory of this game, Matthew, like I mentioned earlier, a friend of mine had this and basically gave me a sort of guided tour of it. And I remember the world around him changing and Link becoming an adult. And that seemed amazing, just dazzling in a way where it was like, I have to play this game. That’s a 23-year-old memory now. And I remember it so clearly, just what it was like and what that transition was like, that transition between the dual worlds. And I just, I can’t imagine what an impact this must have had to people playing it at the time. Just like, yeah, unbelievable. Weirdly, I was quite, I remember immediately quite cool on this because I shared the N64 with my brother Alex and we both got a game for Christmas. He got Ocarina of Time. I can’t actually remember what I got. But I saw him playing his Ocarina. Basically every minute he was playing Ocarina of Time was a minute I wasn’t playing my thing. So I kind of took a rather contrarian like screw Ocarina of Time stance for a while. You know, it took me quite a while to get on board with this. So that’s how stupid an idiot I was when I was a kid. Is that because, what was your game? Was it the Xen of the Warrior Princess? No, I think it was, I think it was of all things Pilot Wing 64, which is great, but it’s not like, it’s not Ocarina is it? Oh dear, yeah, that’s a tough comparison. Also, I like the idea that, did your Christmas list have that on there? No, no, I don’t know why I wasn’t interested. At a period of time, I can’t really remember what was going through my head and what motivated my feeling. I think because, you know, I was super into GoldenEye and stuff. I don’t know if I saw it as being a little kind of like kiddy-ish or on paper, the idea of it didn’t really click with me. I can’t put my hand up and say I’m this super Zelda early adopter. It took me… it was probably only really Wind Waker that I become a mega mega fan and I’m super invested in whatever happens next and whatever they do next. But obviously I’ve played all these things since then and gone back and everything and it’s… yeah, a weird one Ocarina. Brilliant, but kind of almost boringly so. Can you remember the moment that it did come to your imagination that your opinion on it changed? Like I say, it probably is Wind Waker. It’s probably watching like a free video that came with like NGC of like their E3 trailers. It was like the best of Nintendo and watching this footage of something and it getting to the Wind Waker bit and thinking, wait a second, that can’t be a game. Nothing looks like that. Nothing like that. That’s like a cartoon. That’s like genuinely being so excited and just rewinding this thing over and over again to rewatch it and thinking that that is I’ve never seen anything like that. And then buying that, you know, I think Wind Waker was the first Zelda I bought with my own money, which obviously is a bit more meaningful. And then having it and it being as spectacular as it was like visually, it was so like I couldn’t believe it. That’s that’s that’s where the series like really gets its hooks into me. Though that, like I say, that link to the past Dark World Revelation, that’s in there too is like a oh my God, what a thing. With the mysterious boys across the river. When we’ve we’re planning on doing a best N64 games episode in September, right? Possibly with someone from the N64 magazine lineage. So I’m sure we’ll revisit this down the line. But that’s an interesting observation about it being sort of like, yeah, almost boringly safe. I think that I had the same frustration playing the 3DS version, like the gyroscope aiming stuff the added was just terrible. That was like the bump in frame rate. I think it runs at 30 frames on there and it does have nicer textures and doesn’t have the blur of playing the N64 one. That’s obviously like a kind of scourge of a lot of N64 games. You can map the iron boots to a touchscreen button, which means you can take them on and off in game without going into the menu, which is like the mechanic at the heart of the water temple where you have to sink to the bottom by putting on the iron boots and then float up by taking them off. You have to do it so often that just the constant menu malarkey in the original one killed that temple dead. But when you don’t have that stuff, like when you can just play it as it’s meant to be played, you appreciate it for this. People haven’t played it, it’s this mad 3D spatial puzzle where you’re raising and lowering water levels to reach different bits of this temple. And you basically have to retain this idea of this 3D model of this dungeon in your head to solve it. It’s like a huge navigation puzzle. That’s an Eiji Onuma special, he designed that. It’s like shorthand for like fucking horrible dungeon, like water temple, but when I played it on the 3DS, I was actually thinking, actually this is like, this is a pretty spectacular challenge, like to have kind of single handedly invented 3D action venturing and to do something so crazy ambitious with one of those dungeons is kind of wild. Like how much they got right. So Eiji Onuma, a genius for life. A narrative that got stuck in my head after listening to the podcast RetroNauts actually was the idea that the N64 era for Nintendo, like Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time become so all-encompassing for Nintendo that it’s almost like it pulls so much of their attention just of getting those two games to be masterpieces that that basically kind of hurts the software library overall compared to the PlayStation, which is just obviously rife with like, you know, great third-party games, but so much of what Nintendo was at the time was just sank into making these games right, and that defined the narrative of the console. You think so? They had to walk so everyone else could run. They invented the genres. Yeah. You know, like, they did it. Yeah, I think I read an interview with one of the houses, they talked about how the 3D GTAs just owe a lot to these games. I mean, everyone does, right? I mean, it just, yeah. Actually, I was at a podcast the other day where someone was saying that technically Mega Man Legends was doing similar 3D action adventure stuff before Ocarina of Time. But I haven’t played that game, so I have absolutely no idea if that’s true or not, but it sounded like a bit of a contrarian hot take. Because if someone really had done this better, you’d think we’d be talking about it. Yeah, so I think one of the other things I remember from the Iwataras for this one, Matthew, was something about how, like, I think it was maybe the Zedlock system was inspired by a visit to a theme park. Yeah. I thought that was quite interesting. I felt like it should get. Yeah, they went to basically like a martial arts demonstration, basically like a Universal Studios type thing for, is it Toei Films? Yeah, that’s right. And they saw… But the funny thing was the two blokes, they both had completely different reads on how it inspired it. Because one guy was like, oh, we went to watch it, and at one point, they sort of flung a chain at the warrior, and he grabbed onto it with his hand and was circling around it. And I thought, oh yeah, the Zed targeting will kind of tether you to someone like that movement. And then the other guy was like, no, no, no, it was because he was surrounded and they took turns fighting him. So he decided that the Zed trigger would basically inform, tell an enemy it was okay to attack, because that was the enemy you were focused on, to kind of create that sense of a duel. And I loved the idea that they both went to the same thing, but it had completely different anecdotes. Yeah, I thought I was a great explainer of how the AI worked, actually. I found that instead of just having all these enemies hit you at once, that was, that’s a great Iwatarasu, actually. The other anecdote I really like in it is the guy who invented the fishing mini-game is like this programmer who’s just obsessed with fishing. Not his job to invent content at all. And he basically, he makes it work in a, he prototypes it in what’s the boss room from the water temple where you fight Morpher, which is just like a pool of water in the middle of a room. And he had a fish asset, so he put it in there and then he kind of bodged together. And he started playing this like fishing game on his own time in the boss room. Everyone was like, came around and was like, wow, it looks amazing. So they basically just carved a door into the side of Hyrule Field. Because it is literally just a door, like by Lake Hylia rather. You just go through this door and there’s like this amazing fishing minigame, which people wasted like tens of hours on. And it’s just because this like random bloke was like, I want to go fishing. I think there’s another good story in there as well. I think about how when they realized they would have to do both, you know, young Link and old Link, that the animation guy was like kind of a cold sweat. My workload just suddenly doubled. How the fuck am I going to do this? That was quite a good story as well. Yeah, they’re great. Those are like what an absolute treasure trove. I mean, between those and like the GDC video vault, that’s like all the game design education you need. Yeah, I really loved it. And I think the half remembered nature of it makes them more endearing. And I cannot under emphasize enough just how much the word laughs in brackets is doing the heavy lifting on these things. Yeah, they’re wonderful. I’m glad they’re all still up and hopefully they will be forever because they’re an amazing resource. So what’s your number five, Matthew? Number four is Skyward Sword. Okay, well then we covered it a bit earlier in the episode. Is there anything kind of new you wanted to add on it, Matthew? I simply flagged this as I’m a dungeon puzzle boy. This is the dungeon puzzle Zelda. I like the motion controls. I think it’s a very romantic Zelda 2. I think it’s got this Zelda is more of a character. Like there is more focus on story and it does work. You know, it’s about the founding of Hyrule. It’s the first Zelda. So it has this sort of like slight charge to it that you’re exploring this stuff for the first time. Except you go down there and there’s like fucking Gorons walking around. You’re like, all right. And you’re like, it doesn’t feel like, you know, undiscovered country. They’re not like, holy shit, it’s a human. You know, they’re just like, oh, right. Cheers mate. Also, there’s a bloke up in Skyloft, which is like the cloud area where you live, who’s got loads of stuff that could only have come down from beneath the clouds. So like, it’s bullshit that you’re like the first person to ever go down there as well. But that’s, you know, that’s picking nits. Okay, yeah, fair enough. Yeah, so there’s more questions I want to ask you about dungeons, but I feel like we should talk about that when we get to what I assume is going to be your number one. So, yeah. Is there anything else from the Iwata-Ras that you drew from this one, Matthew, that you want to kind of discuss? I sort of, I must admit. They, again, they just sort of, they keep coming to this word of like density. Like, the controls are definitely a hurdle. Like, they set out, right, we’re going to make it about Motion Plus. That defines a lot of the game. Like, it is going to be about the controls. But then they just go mad with, like, mechanics and wanting to cram puzzles in everywhere. Which is why, you know, I think the word I used in my Guardian review is that the overworld sections, they feel too composed. Like, it feels hand designed. None of it feels, like, it doesn’t feel like there’s any mystery to discovering this world. It wants you to see every bit of how clever it’s been. And that is, like, it’s kind of what’s brilliant about it. It’s also kind of what’s terrible about it, depending on what you want from a Zelda. Okay, great stuff. Well, I feel like I know what your top three are going to be, but why don’t you hit me with your number three? My number three is The Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask. The Iwatarasu for this one is so fucking good. I read the whole thing last night. We should call this episode The 10 Best Zelda Iwatarasus. Some YouTube channels are just this, aren’t they? Like people just reading out Iwatarasus and being like… There are a lot of people who take YouTube, yeah, take these Iwatarasus and have basically launched a semi-academic career off the back of it. But listen, we won’t go into that. Yeah, exactly. We’ll save that for the Patreon only… Yeah, the Patreon, the bitching hour. The libel cast, yeah. Yeah, so it’s such a good… Why don’t you talk a bit about the game first and we’ll kind of circle back to that. Yeah, so this is famously the Zelda, which comes after Ocarina of Time, made in record time. It’s basically a… Like, at the time you might have called it like a DLC or an expansion in that it kind of takes the ideas of that and just builds on it. They turned it around super fast. It’s sort of… Asset Flip makes it sound lazy, but it takes a lot of the assets from that game, kind of remixes them, which gives it this sense of like a fever dream. A bit like Link’s Awakening, it’s got very similar energy of like I’ve seen all this stuff recently, but everyone’s behaving differently and everyone serves a different role. And it definitely plays on that energy. Interestingly, it’s pitched as a continuation. They expect people who play this game have played Ocarina of Time. So it goes in quite hard and quite weird from the outset, which isn’t very modern Nintendo at all. They would never do that. But the difficulty curve picks up where Ocarina ends. It goes in, it throws it at the deep end, it’s quite confusing. The moon is about to hit this town and destroy the world. It’s going to do this in three days. You are trapped in a time loop and have to learn to navigate this time loop and manipulate it in order to find a solution to this moon problem. This time pressure is big, it’s pretty extreme. I remember when I was younger playing this, or playing my brother’s copy, because again, he was the Zelda Vanguard with this, thinking, too stressful, too difficult, like, not my bag at all. This would have been much lower down on my list. This may not even have appeared on my list had I not very recently played the 3DS version. So I thought, you know what, I should refresh my memory of it. And this game is an absolute banger. It is so weird. It is so strange. It plays unlike any other Zelda, but it’s built from 100% familiar parts. That is what an interesting approach to your ideas. That they, like, invent this genre and then do something so crazy in that space so soon after is kind of wild to me. Also makes me feel sad that they didn’t do it again. You know, that they didn’t, you know… Having put all this work into Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild, they didn’t ever try this mad campaign within this world that we’ve already established kind of model. I sort of hoped they were going to do that with Breath of the Wild DLC, but that was a bit of a bust, I thought. Yeah, I thought what if that’s because so many of these games land quite late in the life cycle of the consoles, whereas Ocarina of Time landed sort of in the middle of the N64’s lifespan? Yeah, time-wise, when they’ve spent like five years on it, they’re like, we can’t really waste a year, two years pissing about. We’ve got to get on with the next of these things. It’s really, really strange. It feels like an Ocarina deep cut at a time where just Ocarina hadn’t really had time to establish itself, which is such a sort of ballsy move. Only got like four dungeons, arguably the main dungeons. There are other dungeon-like areas and what you do in between them is a bit more quirky and puzzle-filled as well, but they’re all absolute winners built around these sort of transformations that you do into a Zora, a Deku Shrub and a Goron. That kind of unlocks a set of powers associated with those sort of races. I mean, it’s like the most experimental Zelda ever and they never ever did anything like it again, which is mad. Something I really liked in the Iwata-arse about this is that they described Ocarina of Time as hospitality and then they described this as a challenge. So it was like you say, they did design it. So, okay, we are assuming that you have finished Ocarina of Time and that you’re ready for this. Something else I thought was interesting is I think that obviously it’s a three-day cycle. I believe Aonuma came up with ideas for a whole week of like a time loop thing and then basically had to compress the game. And that’s why I think Iwata observes this is why the game feels so packed with ideas and like interesting stuff is because originally Aonuma is going to do a week long time loop, but then it will break people’s brains basically. A week would have been too long because, you know, there comes a point in this game where there is a lot of like waiting for stuff to happen and fast forwarding time with like songs and things. That’s like it would strain to fill a week, I think. Yeah, for sure. It was some it’s interesting as well that it was meant to be made in a year. Like I think he started didn’t he start just messing around with dungeons possibly for like the Master Quest version of Ocarina of Time or? Yeah, he sort of tells us he gets set to make the Master Quest, which is like a remix of Ocarina of Time. He’s basically like, I can’t be fucked with this. You know, like, I’d rather be making actual new interesting stuff. So he sort of does that and then goes to Miyamoto with those bits and says, yeah, why don’t we why don’t we make this like spin off? And he’s like, go on then. But you can only have a year. And then later on says, you could have longer than a year. But by that point, it sounds like A&M has driven himself slightly mad. Just trying to get this thing done. Yeah, yeah. They’re all like, we would never ever go back to that time. This is the one I think. Where he’s like, there’s something haunted about his words. Yeah, there was also that thing where I think he, I think it might be one of the other ones, where he says, well, I was younger than I am now. And that would like, tell the whole story of like, yeah, I mean, you know, I was in my 20s or late 20s or early 30s or whatever. This has got to go back to my earlier metaphor. This has got big A&M has just been given. He’s got a normal issue to do and a booker’s lean. Yeah, he’s me in 2015. Yeah. He’s got a PC gamer show to organise as well. And he’s got to redesign the magazine and the booker’s lean at the same time. Yeah, I really love the insights for this one. I thought it sounded great. I must confess though, it’s a game I’ve never played, Matthew. I should complete Ocarina of Time and play this. It’s great. It’s this, because it is a smaller, weirder game. It actually doesn’t suffer from that thing that’s talking about with Ocarina on 3DS where it loses its epic scale. It does have some bigger open areas, but they’re generally much more smaller and ornate. So for me, the 3DS version of this, it’s a better fit than Ocarina on 3DS. You don’t lose the kind of well factor. Because it didn’t sort of have it to begin with. It’s kind of a weird little thing. The time element, that you can dip into it and chip away at a few of its mysteries, makes it actually quite a nice handheld game. So yeah, the 3DS version of this, I do recommend. Okay, great stuff. I feel like the reputation of this game has only gone up over time as well. Maybe in a way that none of the other Zelda games have. At times I wondered if it was a bit of a contrarian’s favourite. It says more about you than anything. It’s like, I like Madra’s mask, I like the weird one, I like his earlier, weirder work. But it is great. Maybe it’s great because they never did anything else like this. Maybe this is an idea they could have also run into the ground, but obviously not. If they want to do Madra’s mask style development going forward, I would definitely welcome it. More Zelda on a quicker time frame can only be a good thing for me. Not for them, not for their mental health. For my greed, definitely. For a little while I thought that’s what Breath of the Wild 2 was about. Because they announced it two years ago now. The stuff they’ve shown of it has a weird vibe. It’s all dark and purple energy, and there’s a zombie grabbing him. It’s a little bit scary. If a Zelda game is scary, it is this one. This is arguably a type of game that is created here as well. The roguelite thing runs parallel to this. But Outer Wilds is very inspired by this. This really borrows a lot of tricks from this. Again, for a first time, it gets so much right. Wizarding stuff. Great stuff, Matthew. What’s your number two? My number two is The Legend of Zelda, The Wind Waker. Like you say, your young Matthew is reading NGC. He gets a cover-mounted DVD that maybe the sellotape rips part of the cover off, who knows. And you put this in, you watch this, and this was the first time I remember… Well, no, that’s not true. Riding in Metal Gear Solid 2 is the first time I remember the internet losing its shit in gaming. But this is one of the first times where there was a massive backlash to the look of a game. So talk me through how you felt about it at the time. So honestly, this backlash, I know it existed. I never saw it. I never felt it. Because everyone I knew who was into Zelda, when they saw this, they were like, holy shit, that is the most beautiful looking game ever made. And it remains one of the most beautiful looking games ever made. If you had a problem with it, I simply couldn’t comprehend the type of person who would have been upset about this. Like I just didn’t have that attachment to that early gritty tech demo that everyone seemed to be so attached to. So if this played out on the internet, then it was pretty me being on the internet much, I guess. Because I feel like I was pretty incited from this. NGC was super pumped for this game, they really liked it and they celebrated it. And that’s kind of how I felt about it. And I’ve always felt a bit fake talking about The Backlash. Not to like do your question down or anything, but did you see this manifesting more? Well, if I’m being honest, it feels like something that was… Maybe it was just a narrative that was told to me by magazines. Maybe I didn’t experience this firsthand. I don’t actually remember anyone in person. It came from somewhere, because I know it exists. But it’s this backlash which I actually have no evidence of. So obviously this game has this cell shaded style. And radically different for the time. One of the things I really like in the Iwatarasu on this is that they had to start thinking of the animations, the characters, the facial expressions in a completely different way. You couldn’t do realistic facial expressions with this art style, and it makes sense. But you could do loads of quite weird and wild expressions that would look amazing in that art style. And I think you could really tell that from how Link’s expressions in this game are just wonderful. And this game looks astonishing for something that’s almost 20 years old. Like, it’s just unbelievable. Not that you should do this, but, you know, emulated, like, full HD. The original version of this still looks amazing. Slight different than the colour palette with the Wii U one, but yeah. Go on, Matthew, talk about it some more. Yeah, I mean, to me this looks like the Zelda that should play on a tiny purple box that the GameCube was. This looks like the Zelda that should come out of that machine. It’s just 100% like the definitive GameCube game in my head for just the vibe of that machine. The look of the game and the look of the controller are kind of a match. It’s got weird buttons, it’s kind of cartoonish and fun. Everything about this is in sync. That’s why the backlash stuff still surprises me because it so belongs and it belonged instantly. I think it kind of does everything right. I think this is really the only Zelda, even more so than my number one pick, I would say, that gives me everything I want from a Zelda game. It’s got the dungeons, it’s got the items, it’s got big characters done in this amazing cel-shaded style. It has the ocean and the sense of exploration for me is such a key part. That’s the other half of the Zelda coin is these very ornate puzzle dungeons and a sense of discovery and for me sailing towards these tiny blips on the horizon, getting there even if it’s just a rock with like a little choo-choo on there and you just chopped its head off and it got back in your boat. I didn’t care because I felt like I was discovering rocks and discovering things. This sense that I was really uncovering this world and then it kind of existed and there was something out there was so potent that I didn’t care if like most of the ocean was empty. Or it took ages to get there. We had to kept kind of conducting the wind to fill your sail with winds and change direction. None of that mattered because that sense of like I’m going to go there. I’m going to find something like when you got that little island, there’s like a little kind of hidden paradise, their private oasis, I think it’s called, which is like your island. I felt like I actually owned something in this world. I was like, oh my God, this is my island. It’s just like an island with a house on it. It’s not too, not too exciting. But this, this, that place seems so alive to me that actually even that like really, really mattered. And that’s, that’s the feeling of Breath of the Wild also. Like that is the magic of Breath of the Wild. But for me, this, this here is like way more convincing than Ocarina’s Hyrule, Twilight Princess Hyrule. Like this, this was the place that, you know, it’s few cinematic moments that it does have going down to the kind of the, the sunken Hyrule in that castle where there’s the big frozen battle. Couldn’t believe it. I thought, oh, that is the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen. Up to that, that final battle with Gandalf, probably one of the best, you know, not technically maybe the most exciting, but like just one of the most satisfying like death blows in all of gaming. When you drive that sword into his head, it’s absolutely magic. You know, the problem with this and the reason it isn’t my number one is that it just does feel like half a game to me. Like it’s well known that this was meant to have more dungeons than it did. It’s very, very light on that stuff and it does suffer for it. It has this long stretch where you collect all the Triforce charts, which even for someone like me who loved that Ocean, I thought was kind of taking the piss a bit. And even though they sped it up in the HD remake, it’s still a, it’s still filler for something that’s missing. And, you know, I feel like maybe it’s crude and clumsy to say like, if it had more, I’d like it more. I want more, more, more. But like for me, this is like, like if it had another four dungeons, if it had the scale of a Ocarina or Twilight Princess, I think this could, this, this might actually be my favorite Zelda of all time. I feel like they own this in the Iwatarask as well. They’re like, the players consider the first half to be divine, I think is the word they use. And then it sort of trails off and there’s the obviously like, yeah, the the content sort of runs out. I mean, of all the games on your list, Matthew, this is the one where I would love to see what a direct sequel looks like. I definitely think there’s an argument to be made that the the way the world is laid out in Breath of the World owes something to this. There’s definitely something in that. But I would love to just see the actual sailing element of it and the very sort of like the very unique idea of discovering an island in a world and not knowing what’s there, like that feeling that is very specific to this game. I do think it’s something that’s got more potential and it’s, yeah. That’s like pure adventure, isn’t it? Like, oh, this is it. I’m here. I sail to this place. I stopped my boat. I jumped out of my boat. It’s all seamless. I can jump onto the island. Oh, it’s just what a magic thing. Yeah, for sure. So Matthew, this is a really granular question, but do you have a preference in colour palette between the original and the slightly changed? They did make a change to the colour palette in the way you want. Do you have a preference? Slightly. Well, it’s got different lighting effects. I actually, I think I prefer the look of the remake. It is lovely. I think it’s just the convenience of playing that and it’s nice and widescreen and beautiful. My biggest complaint with the remake is that they didn’t fully orchestrate that amazing music. Because the tunes in this game are banging, but they’re like honking little midi things. They don’t sound quite right. And when you’ve heard like the Zelda Orchestra concerts play the Wind Waker suite, you were like, why the fuck doesn’t the game sound like that? That is amazing. It’s so like folksy and big and grand. It’s one of the best Zelda soundtracks, but I cannot listen to the original GameCube soundtrack because it’s just it’s too bleepy, bleepy and I don’t know. It’s just not quite right. Yeah, I guess like it feels to me like it’s a real tragedy that this is not on Switch already, that it’s taken this many years for them to not get on there because Nintendo did treat it like a full new release at the time. I remember them making a big push for it the same time this came out. I think they kind of pushed this and The Link Between Worlds at the same time. I remember because I think we did a cover on Endgame’s TM. Their messaging at the time was like this was the thing they did to kind of cut their teeth on next generation graphics for Breath of the Wild. They were like to get our head around new lighting systems and all this kind of stuff. We thought we’d remake it and this is what it looks like. So they always sold it as a stepping stone to something else. I find Nintendo’s re-release and re-packaging of things and the pricing around them, it’s a bit tedious to get into but it is sometimes a little steep how they kind of gouge us on this stuff. We’re like loyal fans and this game has paid for itself several times over at this point. I know they have put a lot of work into it but equal amount of work goes into other ports which are much cheaper. But maybe that’s a discussion for another time. This is fundamentally a good thing that it re-exists. This is of all the Zeldas that got re-released. This is the only one when I went back and replayed it for review. It didn’t diminish in my eyes which has been a bit of a theme through this list. It’s actually that playing these games later you go, oh yikes, this has been surpassed, and this one is just so singular and timeless in its graphics that I don’t really see that it will ever truly age. I think it will always sort of be perfect. Okay, fantastic. Well, on that note then Matthew, that’s a perfect time to move on to your number one, so go for it. Yeah, number one, I mean kind of the most boring number one you can possibly imagine is The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. Maybe a bit of a weird choice given what I’ve said about how important dungeons and pulses are to me because if there is a criticism of Breath of the Wild, it is that it is the Zelda that abandons most of the modern Zelda conventions. I say modern because, like I say, it’s… Nintendo pitch it as a… well, this is actually like a next-gen, in-credi version of the original Legend of Zelda in that it’s just total freedom to approach it as you want and do the dungeons in any order and all this kind of stuff, and basically all the kind of stuff that came after was sort of noise that we kind of cut through, and, you know, there is part of me that is disappointed that this incredible world, probably the greatest video game world ever built, doesn’t have, I feel like the cherry on top would be if it had like some more substantial amazing dungeons, because it does have the puzzle mechanics, it does have the gadgets, it has the goods, you know, the fact that it sustains, you know, a hundred of these shrines across the map, which are themselves dense with a few puzzles each, I mean, they kind of are eight Zelda dungeons split up and spread across the map, I’m not sure if we can catch them all. I don’t know if we can catch them all. I don’t know if we can catch them all. I don’t know if we can catch them all. I don’t know if we can catch them all. I don’t know if we can catch them all. I don’t know if we can catch them all. I don’t know if we can catch them all. I don’t know if we can catch them all. I don’t know if we can catch them all. I don’t know if we can catch them all. I don’t know if we can catch them all. I don’t know if we can catch them all. I don’t know if we can catch them all. You know, just like the alchemy of like electricity and fire and what that can do, or your central gadgets, or the survival systems with the cooking and the managing your resources. All of those individual things are substantial enough to stand alone, but the fact that they all play together is just… Mm, chef’s kiss. Yeah, I’ve got this game. You know what? We’ve said this before as well. I kind of fucking hate talking about it. Well, it’s a tough one to discuss, for sure. Like, let me ask you one… It’s just like hyperbole-central, isn’t it? You should have just like, oh yes, and this, and just squish it. Well, if I could describe a bit of my own journey with Zelda. So I think one of the reasons I don’t really get into Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword is that these are games that are releasing around the time that Rockstar are making games, like big 3D games. So obviously Twilight Princess is after San Andreas, and there’s like Red Dead, and I’m not saying like there’s a lot of commonality between them. I’m just saying that what I valued as a player was quite firm at the time. I did want big open world experiences. I did want sort of lightly systemic stuff. I’m not like massive on, you know, things have to be kind of out of control and wild and creating micro narratives all the time. It doesn’t have to be that breathless, but I do like the idea of a world that responds to you. And I thought these those two games, Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, looked very trad to me in a way that wasn’t that appealing as someone who was primarily playing HD console games. So when something like this comes along, I did play the demo of this E3 because Ashley Day, you know, listener who we bring up quite a lot, he’ll have to go on the bingo board soon with Rich Stanton as people we bring up. He worked for Nintendo, even though I was on PC Gamer, very kindly let me go behind the velvet rope and play this demo. And, you know, just it basically is just like the first bit of the map and it was just, you know, revelatory. It was like, oh, wow, I mean, Nintendo is always at its most exciting to me when it’s it’s on this experimental streak, but it’s not being there are two Nintendo sometimes there is like the more conservative Nintendo of like New Super Mario Brothers and stuff like that. I’m saying this as someone who, you know, Nintendo is not my primary passion. So I’m sure that frustrates a lot of people. Nintendo likes money. Yes, exactly. But I like the breath of the wild Mario Galaxy Nintendo. I like the, you know, just here’s something you have never seen before. Here’s us pushing, here’s us figuring out what the next version of this thing looks like and kind of changing influencing other sort of like developers around it. And so, you know, I don’t feel like I’ve seen much of the influence of this game beyond like, you know, some of the sort of well, that Immortals game for the Ubisoft one kind of like, borrowing a lot from it, but yeah. It’s never right, then it’s never right. It’s always like a pale imitation. It’s like a bit of it, but they didn’t fully understand what the magic of it was, you know, like having like the gliding or whatever from from this, you know, and treating it as like, well, you’ll glide, you know, this is how you glide to get to this island, you know, in like a, you know, that amort, that phoenix, immortals rising, whatever, you know, oh, this glide will help you pass over these particular gaps or whatever, where actually, like, the glide is just good unto itself in Breath of the Wild, you know, the magic of the glide is warping to the top of one of those tall towers and then gliding down because it affords you an amazing view of this landscape. It just looks beautiful. Like, yes, there were strategic times that guide helped me, but most of the time I was just going to high places and chucking myself off, knowing that I could soar and it was like that. That’s like more like pilot wings than anything. I just enjoyed the experience of floating in the air and being above that world and looking down on that landscape from a place that I sort of shouldn’t be. And that’s the magic of just being that I don’t think many people have, not many people have the confidence to just do that and have that. That’s so much of it, so much of this just ticks the boxes of like what your childhood idea of adventure is. The famous cliché about Zelda is that the idea stems from Miyamoto exploring the fields around his childhood home and seeing a cave and thinking, oh, I wonder what is in that. And that is something that never leaves you. Like there is always a sense of kind of curiosity and, you know, kind of what if or what’s there or what’s behind there, what’s up there, what’s on top of that. And just like this is just a game about being able to like answer that curiosity. It doesn’t say like there will necessarily be something there more often than not there is and not just an arbitrary pickup. But it’s a game where you move and explore for the sake of moving and exploring. And that isn’t really something I’ve ever seen in any other game. Yeah, like the sense of climbing up high just because you want to be up high in this world because you know it will look amazing. And then it does. And it was a hard climb and you actually had to think about it and you had to pack supplies to eat food on the way up to get up there because that’s what climbing is. It sort of… yeah, it really is like a thousand little things with this game. And that thing you talked about earlier on about hospitality in Ocarina, I think they refer to it. One of them, when he initially brings it up, it’s this aspect of hospitality and that the world accommodates everything you do. It’s this sense of if you can think of it or if you try it, something will happen. And it’s kind of the defining feature of lots of my favourite games. Very few people do it because it’s really hard. Like, this obviously benefits from… it has these big systemic things which support like, like basic experimentation. Like there is a, if you do this, then this will happen. But like, on top of that, and what this game doesn’t always get like, well it does get credit for, but it gets overshadowed by that bigger, sexier stuff, is it still has that ethos of like, someone has thought, if someone does this, there should be a reaction and maybe that is a more bottled reaction than it is fully emergent, you know, like, if you drop a piece of food by a dog, that dog will fall in love with you and follow you around. You know, I have come up with that moment, like, if you can think of it, someone at Nintendo has probably already thought of it and is ready to be, like, catch you. And that moment when they do, like, isn’t that like, the purest magic in all games? Like, the only other person who really does that is, like, weirdly like Kojima, you know, who is like, if you can do it, it has to do something, you know, like, something has to happen to every reaction in this game. And that is, like, that is alive more than anything else I can think of in a game. Oh, geez, hard to follow that up. That was a good, like, sort of unifying statement on this game. I think that, I think something really basic that open world games don’t do is making open world exploration fun. We talked about this with Assassin’s Creed 2 in our 2009 episode, it’s like Ubisoft strips out the platforming from Assassin’s Creed, it decides to do it for you. And it’s like, well, I would say that that’s a failure then, because the act of exploring, if you’re an open world game about exploration, and you’re taking out the part that makes the exploration bit fun, then have you not failed somewhat as you know, when it comes to game design. But that’s something I didn’t even really think about until I played this game. Because this game does ask, like, how do you make every element of exploration from the climbing to the gliding to the simple act of looking at stuff and collecting stuff really exciting and interesting to the player and like you and always stimulating. And like instead, like open world games have become like you play GTA online, you are driving from one end of the map to the other and you’re switching off. You’re like, oh, I’ve done this a million times and I don’t care. And like, I just think that this kind of recaptures, oh, yeah, do you remember that, you know, the reason you’re doing this is that it’s fun to explore and all of the mechanics feed into that. But I didn’t, I didn’t articulate that as well as you did with that last point. That’s honestly blown me out of the water, Matthew. So yeah, that’s feeling self-conscious about it now, but nobody joking. I’ve written so much about this game, it’s a struggle, when I reviewed this it was a nightmare. It’s the first time in like… basically since editing Nintendo Mags, the first time in like 12 years, I actually had to give my review to Rich Stanton. And I was just like, I just need to make sure I’m not really wide in the mark with this, can you take a look at this? And I’m too proud to do that most times, I would never hand my work to someone else, but I was just like, just like a sense check on this, because I feel like this game is escaping me a bit, and you know, it gave me some really, really good notes on it, and I’m super proud of that review, but it is a… it’s a game that is so massive in its ideas that it’s so hard to pin down, it should just kind of be, I think. So even if it isn’t like the classic Zelda by the criteria I’ve laid out through this list, like, it’s the best game to have the Zelda name on it, and I think that’s kind of got to count for something. Let me ask you one more question that ties us back to Skyward Sword. So why does Nintendo go so far in the other direction? You have this constrained game with quite dense dungeon design to this game that’s all about the stuff outside the dungeon, and where, like, the actual dungeon content is arguably light or at least broken up. So what do you think motivates that change? I mean, I imagine the reaction to Skyward Sword has to be part of it. It’s critically acclaimed, but not beloved by the fans necessarily, and numbers-wise I don’t know. That has to play a part. When you read Dota water asks, I think you get a bit of insight into how Nintendo do a lot of their top-level design, is they start with a very broad idea, and then they follow that idea through the project. They don’t just go, well, we’ve got these basics of Zelda. It really does feel like they start afresh. We want to have the thing for Skyward Sword is motion control, is the sense of a sword in your hand or something, whatever it is, and that governs everything. I wonder if the change here is just, like, the remit they give themselves is so broad that it gives them a space to just absolutely spread their wings. They basically say, I think it’s something as simple as, like, get back to basics and challenge conventions or something. And it almost has no direction to it. And maybe they just gave themselves too much direction. Maybe they set themselves too narrow a goal and they’re too effective at chasing those goals that actually they delivered exactly what they set out to with Skyward Sword, Twilight Princess, Spirit Tracks, Phantom Hourglass. They just had to set themselves a goal that was big enough that when they deliver on it, you know, it’s a big idea. It’s sort of the read I have on it. Yeah, that makes sense for sure. But it’s like I say, like the director of this game is the director of Skyward Sword, you know, and in those Iwatarasu interviews, he is proud of Skyward Sword. He is clearly proud of what they have achieved. You know, he is really excited about what he has made. It’s clearly satisfied him. But then, you know, he goes and does this and, you know, there isn’t an Iwatarasu about this. There is a very nice set of YouTube documents, like 10 minute docs, like four makings of that Nintendo made about this with the team. And it’s just the same. It sounds like the way they talk about Skyward Sword. It just sounds like the same process. It just took them to this wildly different place. You know, and I mean, come on, Breath of the Wild 2 is going to be amazing. It’s got to be amazing. The team that made this, they can’t. How exciting. What a thing to look forward to. There’s going to be more of this, this thing, they made. Yeah, maybe if it would be OK if it was just the same, but with like some clouds that you float around in. Just skydiving into Hyrule, that is going to be, if it’s seamless, if it’s not like partition like it is in Skyward Sword, that is going to be a fucking game of all time moment. Well, perfect, Matthew. I think that’s a good place to leave it on that one. I think we’ve, I’ve no doubt that game will come up on this podcast again and again and again. Yeah, we can talk about weapons breaking another time, but… Oh, fuck that. Fuck, what a boring conversation to have about something so magical. That’s, that’s, that’s a sign of a fucking tedious mind, if that’s what you think. Fucking no interest. Oh, I’m so glad I asked about that now. Oh, boring. I think that’s a good place to end it, Matthew, because if people want to hear your thoughts on the DS ones, which are probably like the missing piece there, you have talked about them on the 2007 and 2000 ones. Yeah. Yeah. So people can go listen to those podcasts if they want to hear your thoughts on those, but I think that’s a great list. It was a true pleasure to hear you talk about those games. Oh, well, I hope it wasn’t just me monologuing at you, Samuel, but thanks for letting me wank on about Zelda for two hours. That was a treat. Oh, it was great, yeah, for sure. Okay, so thank you very much for listening to the podcast. If you’d like to follow us on Twitter, we’re Back Page: Pod on Twitter. You can also email us questions at backpagegames.gmail.com. We will answer a bunch of questions in the episode after this one. Just it’s been a little while since we’ve done a list of questions because we’ve had such a run of dense episodes, but we always appreciate hearing from you, so thank you. And Matthew, where can people find you on Twitter? I am MrBattle, underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. We’ll be back next week with a lighter episode after these two very chunky boys in a row. So thank you very much for listening and we’ll be back next week.