Yeah i have no idea what the team was thinking with the outdoor Ganon fight. It was so bad that i was confused on whether or not it was even intended to be a real boss fight. It gave me flashbacks to the Mario Galaxy 2 final Bowser "fight" which was over in five seconds.
Agreed with you on the soundtrack.
Will probably be hard to find someone who would argue against that boss lol.
And you agreeing on the soundtrack would mean that at least in that point I brought a good argument where the linear approach leads to a more desireable outcome no? :P
I'm not sure that i agree with you on the notion that devs took into account how powerful the player was. I mean it's a lovely notion and it makes sense on paper but i just think the Zelda team never really did it properly, in the 3D Zelda games at least. All of them have been ridiculously easy thanks to really basic enemy,combat design and the small amount of damage the enemies did. Basic sword attacks were more than enough to get the job done for 99% of the enemy encounters. That is even without taking into consideration how OP the shield and the dodge move have always been in 3D Zelda. (Botw has these problems too to some degree but everything about the core combat, enemy and difficulty was worse in the previous games) To top it all of if you don't want the games to end up feeling like you activated god mode halfway through then you basically have to avoid looking for the heart pieces. Which have always been a poor reward for the player thanks to the overall low difficulty and challenge of the games and if you chose not to look for them then well that basically throws what little bit of exploration the 3D Zelda games had. The economy is also something that has been completely messed up in Zelda since OOT. The games give you a unhealthy amount of rupees to the point where they lose all sense of purpose and the items that you can get with them are usually pretty inconsequential. I mean when was the last time in a 3D Zelda pre BOTW that you bought a crucial item from the shop?
Oh, I would never argue that the Zelda team made good use of the potential balancing advantages a linear approach brings, especially not with Wind Waker lol. Just saying the advantage is there. And to some extent they really did it better because while the games never were hard, at least the bosses didn't become gradually easier imo, unlike BotW. The shield and dodge being OP has nothing to do with linear/non-linear approach though.
I would argue that heartpieces were a good enough item to find after a puzzle/small exploration, at least not worse than the spheres in BotW. And some of the Windfall Island stuff from Wind Waker is better than any sidequest in BotW, not to mention pretty much all of Majora's and OoT's sidequests, imo.
The sense of progression is kind of a thing that i hate about Pre Botw Zelda. Because it always felt so artificial. When you get down to it all major items that you acquired in the games are rarely ever used outside of their respective dungeons. They mostly serve to padd out the inventory screen. Most items are sadly context sensitive and can't be used in a organic way like the items you get in BOTW. The games never really gave you enough reasons to use them, other than to find a couple of heart pieces in the over world, which as i already said felt nearly pointless.
Oh it always felt gamey, yeah. The different games had varying success in using those items outside of dungeons for sure, especially Twilight Princess is a major offender in that regard. But for example stuff like the Wind Temple in WW, where you have to combine the iron boots with the hookshot or deku leaf are, fantastic and some of the instances where it doesn't feel artificial either.
3D Zelda games rarely required any decision making form the player. It was always about doing the exact thing the game wants you to and the optimal strategies in combat like using basic sword attacks on enemies and constant dodging have no downsides, so why not use them? Other than the fact that you might get bored form the monotony. The dungeons were about nothing other than following a linear path finding keys to find more keys and the items themselves functioned like over glorified keys themselves. There wasn't ever really any decision that you had to make, it's always just do these very obvious and specific things in this exact order and fight a simple as well as formulaic boss and move on to the next dungeon. Because why wouldn't you? There is barely anything meaningful to do in between dungeons. There were a few times where the dungeons were more interesting specifically the nonlinear ones but Nintendo was less keen on designing dungeons like that as the series progressed. They did have some cool atmosphere to them but that is a trait that is not really tied to linear 3D Zelda.
But I never get that feeling of knowing what the dev thought and proceeding anywhere else in gaming that well as in this series. You seem to not like that, I find things like the Water and Forest Temple absolutely wonderful because of that. That's why the pre-BotW template worked so well for me and others for so long (Outside of Skyward Sword, because Skyward sword sucks outside some things like timestones.)
We only have one example of no-linear Zelda dungeon atmosphere and I have to say that it doesn't even come close to the old stuff, but maybe they can do better on that front with the next entry. I really hope they do.
OOT is a shorter game but i would not really say it's a more repayable one. To me it's always been a one and done sort of deal. I really see no reason to replay it because the game will force me to play it in a very specific way. This includes Majora, WW, TP and especially SS. I mean that is what is so tragic to me about most Zelda games. i that had they at least allowed for a few more ways to approach major scenarios. The games would be much more repayable and would not feel if i'm being completely honest here, shallow. Like so much opportunity was wasted in the years because the devs did not want any chance of even the most casual of causal players to end up lost or not being able to see the end credits. It would get so bad that the games would even spoil the solutions to the few decent puzzles the games did have.
I don't know, I replay OoT, MM and WW almost yearly. Granted, that's mainly for the unique atmosphere all of those three games bring to the table and reliving childhood memories, but I can't say I grow bored of them.
I wholeheartedly agree with the bolded, but that's not something tied to the linear design. Dark Souls 3 is fairly linear but challenging. I think if Nintendo found the attitude of trusting the player's intelligence earlier than they made their open world entry, we wouldn't make this point.
I by no means mean any disrespect to Anouma but based on the development for multiple games that i read, he has almost certainly done the series very few favors. He seems to dislike the first Zelda game and was never able to beat it and yet he was somehow put in charge of the series after or during the development of OOT. I still can't believe that he was surprised with how successful BOTW was and he apparently did not know that people wanted less patronizing tutorials and more exploration as well as some challenge in a Zelda game. Like come on seriously? This should have been as obvious as the sky being blue, why did it take him so long to realize that the Zelda series needed these things?
Because he started with the series at a point where the game he worked on was considered on of the best of all time and it wasn't challenging, and at some point I guess nobody around him challenged that view on game design. As I already mentioned a lot of the more personal/charming NPC sidequests from earlier entries are missing here. There are some sure, but they are even more streched thin than back then. The only time where that got lost under Aonuma was TP, and for obvious reasons.
BOTW is far from perfect but it and to some degree Link Between Worlds finally made me optimistic about the series again. contrasted with Skyward Sword where i just assumed the series would soon be dead.
I think Link Between Worlds had good a good approach, but some things like completely unpersonal item gets and the dungeons being kind of bland don't work in it's favours.
I'd have an idea for a compromise in the regards of item/dungeon/story progression. Why not have the first 3 dungeons being accessible fomr the start, and make the items you get in there (getting items in dungeons always felt special to me.) keys for the locks of the next 3? You still have agency what to do first and when, but when you come to the second batch of dungeons they can balance them better since they know what you progressed through earlier and have more intricate puzzles based on the 3 items you got in the first ones. You can also tell a more linear story like that without sacrificing freedom of choice completely.
