Retro My favourite 2D Zelda is still Zelda 1. Am I alone in this?

[Irene]

This is a factoid that is maybe not very surprising for someone who has Breath of the Wild as a favourite Zelda game. Zelda often comes in two, after all. The Oracle games, the DS games, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.. and now Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

But Breath of the Wild always feels to me as a title intrinsically tied to another title in the series, namely Zelda 1. For all intents and purposes, Zelda 1 is Breath of the Wild. The precursor to it. Not surprising, given how much it inspired Breath of the Wild's development.

Going through them both, playing them back to back, it's evident, clear as day, how much Zelda 1 has inspired my favourite Zelda. The lack of direction, the non-linear exploration, doing stuff in any order, all things that has been discussed in reviews and interviews. But there's more intricate and more subtle ways that they are similar. The fact that you have to bring Dinraal's scale to the Spring of Power - maybe going to the spring first and wondering who the heck Dinraal is - feels like a direct mirror to bringing the letter to the old lady. Every shrine has a hidden treasure chest: Like the bow in the first dungeon, it's something that is never required, but that is always there, should you be thorough enough with your exploration and ingenuity. Requiring 13 hearts to pull the Master Sword is straight out of "Master using this and you can have it". An old man. The Lost Woods. Some Great Fairies. And so on. (Then there's the Octoroks inspiring how the Guardians look, which is more widely known)

In both spirit and essence, these games truly feel like two sides of the same coin to me, set so far apart in technical advancement and graphics, but are mirrors in design philosophy. The way that you're just dumped into this unknown worlds, and is force to find your way forward relying only on your skills with combat and your sense of navigation. You have a firm, set goal - assembling the triforce - so you don't feel truly lost, but the way forward is up to you.

What I love about the games, then, are the discovery, the exploration, and the way that it leads to secrets. So many secrets! Nintendo ain't no strangers to secrets as a game feature (the company who put a secret world inside a secret world inside the world in Super Mario World) and they just went all out in Zelda 1. Look beneath tombstones, behind rocks. Yes, at times you might need to, to cite the critics, "burn every bush and bomb every wall", but the game can still feel rewarding to explore and to slowly uncover, gathering hearts, finding cryptic clues that always feel fun to decipher, maybe barring "GRUMBLE GRUMBLE".

Zelda 1 even has something it does better than Breath of the Wild in my opinion, namely a proper difficulty curve. You can do a set number of dungeons in a certain order, but the game is still stern on insisting that maybe you should do the first dungeon, well, first. But I really think that the curve is carefully considered enough so that it feels like it steadily becomes more and more challenging, but you can outsmart it with wit and perseverance. It's a balancing act, but one I think the game pulls off. It's also helped by some small but smart softlocks, with the Raft and the Ladder being 2 items needed to fully access the whole world.

Breath of the Wild is, in philosophy, still a better game in my opinion. It places a wider focus on non-linearity that flattens the difficulty curve considerably in order to encourage you to go truly anywhere, but it does benefit the sense of exploring the unknown more, and the game still packs secrets and mystery everywhere, making said exploration truly thrilling. But Zelda 1 skates into similar territory of creating a feeling of mystery and exploration that feels, to me, truly magical from start to finish. This is why my favourite 2D Zelda is - still - Zelda 1.

Anyone else sharing this feeling?

 

[PixelKnight]

Great write-up!

I’m not sure whether it’s my favourite really, I like so many of the 2D ones for different things. The simple notes of sadness in the last third or so of Link’s Awakening, the flute kid in LTTP and the reveal of the Dark World, those elements really stuck with me in the early 90s. The element of LoZ that sits with me though is that I kept a notebook for it. I kept a notebook for a lot of games at the time due to the obscure hints in various games like Simon’s Quest on NES and Mystic Quest (FF Adventure) on GB, and also stuff like Zelda and Super Metroid. Long before I really got into ‘Metroidvania’ stuff, I was writing lists of ‘weird clues to problems I haven’t seen yet’ and ‘places to return to with new tools/items’ and ‘sidequests- NPC x wants y’, for games that didn’t log them for you.

My notebook for Zelda 1 was huge. I mapped out the overworld fairly accurately on a piece of A3 paper (as you could see the grid and where you hadn’t been), which meant I could annotate the caves and shops with who sold what, and where I needed to return to, and routes I hadn’t taken yet. It was folded up in the book, and bound shut with a shoelace. In my head it was like an adventurer’s journal from Indiana Jones or something! And that’s the feeling I really associate with both Zelda 1 and BOTW. Being an adventurer without a strict list of where to go next. You make your own priority lists, whether that’s in your head or on paper or, now, in the game I guess.

All in all, I feel like LTTP is my all-round 2D favourite, it feels more polished than Zelda 1 but only in the sense that almost all 16-bit iterations of 8-bit games did- they felt like they smoothed off the rough edges, were slightly more forgiving, more attractive pixel art, a bit more direction about where to go, a bit more balanced. But Zelda 1 has the sense of adventure that’s crucial to the series for me. LA abandons a sense of adventure for a linear action tale, but gains a sense of pace with it, and Minish Cap is just weird and doesn’t get enough credit for a ton of new ideas.

I generally prefer the 2D ones, but would really struggle to put them in an order of preference. The Oracles and the DS games I’m less keen on but still enjoyed them all, and LBW was a huge return to form for me, showing off how to have a simple mechanic work though combat, puzzles, story, traversal and experimentation.

I’d put Zelda 1, LTTP and LBW as my personal top tier I think.
Then Minish Cap and LA.
Than the Oracles and Zelda 2.
Then Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks.
I enjoyed them all, but I think the top 5 I’ve played through many times and would replay on a moments notice, and the bottom 5 I don’t think I’d play again. Not sure why.

 

[RochHoch]

Zelda 1 was before my time, so I have no thoughts on it. It's too antiquated for me to go back to

Link Between Worlds is king

 

[Deleted member 887]

The first Zelda is the only video game I finished as a kid and is so tied up the story of my whole damn life that it is hard to be objective about it. But it is my favorite, partially for that reason.

But also partially because it's a game that has never really been replicated. Breath of the Wild really does feel like a return to what the first game offers, absolutely. And plenty of games before it featured secrets that were difficult to uncover and vague narratives. The influence of early American video games are often ignored because of the Atari crash, but Adventure is all over The Legend of Zelda even as the series went in a totally different direction. But very few games hit that exact spot. Breath of the Wild manages to translate it into a modern form, Tunic is a pretty remarkable recreation of some of it. But while the series continued, it really did feel like the games were trying different things.

The Legend of Zelda is very different from The Adventure of Link which retains some of the feeling of brutal difficulty and exploration, but totally changes the gameplay. Link to the Past restores the gameplay, and when I played it for the first time the world felt huge and vast with lots of things to do, but it very cleverly creates that as an illusion, with gating of the overworld to story elements and dungeon items.

Link to the Past is an incredible game, but it invents a new gameplay loop. Grind the overworld for sidequests to increase power, try tightly constructed dungeon, which opens up more overworld. In the original Zelda, the dungeons are just discoveries to be made like any other secret, and yes, the overworld/dungeon interaction is there but you could play the original for hours and never discover a dungeon or even know they existed. I know, because I did.

In that way, the 3D Zeldas after LttP feel like they are of a piece with it, till BotW, with BotW feeling like a spiritual successor to the first game, and AoL a long forgotten dead end. I would actually argue that Skyward Sword actually represents a fourth type of Zelda game, a second evolutionary dead end, that changes up the loop more radically than it seems, making the primary game world one mega dungeon, and the "overworld" is really just 2 islands, with one single mega side quest, inverting the basic loop of LttP. That's actually an interesting design strategy, one that I think is perceived as a failure because of other problems with SS, but I am glad that the series went back to what I loved most about its roots.

(I could write about Zelda's design for hours, thank you for the opportunity to "yes I agree!!!" at you)

 

[Kingpin Rogers]

I can't go that far personally but I certainly like it more than alltp.

 

[em]

The Legend of Zelda (NES) is the most ideal realization of the series, IMO, and although I like it a lot more than any 3D Zelda (including BotW), A Link to the Past and A Link Between Worlds have so many quality of life and mechanical improvements that I can't honestly say that The Legend of Zelda (NES) is my favorite 2D Zelda to play.

 

[Maronic03]

ALBW is legit the only Zelda game that's super fun to do 100%, so that's my favorite.

I do think the Zelda 1 aged super well for a NES game though.

 

[SammyJ9]

The Oracles are still my favorites for their dungeons, bright colors, sense of exploration, and so much more.

But I totally love the sense of dangerous atmosphere and mystery that Zelda 1 has. It's all so obscure and hidden, and the dungeons feel like a grind (in a good way), it's hard to describe but it's still a good game.

 

[freedomseekr]

Zelda 1, for me, falls under the category of "I can appreciate its influence and what it does, but I don't LOVE it". Maybe it's age (my own tastes were more formed in the late 90s and early 2000s whereas the NES and parts of the SNES passed me by), but for me, it's difficult to find that same spark of enthusiasm for The Legend of Zelda that I have for, say, Majora's Mask.

 

[Phosphorescent Skeleton]

Love Zelda 1 so much, has a style and vibe missing from every other Zelda game. I understand that many people have trouble going back to it, but like with most things, I wish people could adjust their mindset to experience art from the past. They're not made worse, just different. Games like Zelda 1 offer things you won't find anywhere else.