How Zelda Became Uninteresting

The Legend of Zelda, for a brief period of time, was one of the most vibrant, experimental video game franchises around. Now it's a shell, having been browbeaten into apology after apology for having dared be so interesting. The "trilogy" of Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Wind Waker, spanning 1998 to 2003, are the key games in the series, as they represent the apex, destruction, and transformation of the design that began with the original Zelda in 1986.

Zelda series helmsman, Eiji Aonuma, who took over from Shigeru Miyamoto after Ocarina of Time, has said repeatedly he feels haunted by that game. It looms large in the imagination of gamers as The Classic, never to be equaled, and Aonuma's job has increasingly become to replicate this platonic phantom - this mythical 'ideal Zelda' - that arguable never existed. Nostalgia is a powerful thing. Enough to hold a man's entire career hostage.

I was at Aonuma's talk at GDC 2007, which was a double apology. First he apologized for making Wind Waker. Then he apologized for making Twilight Princess, the game that was an apology for Wind Waker. After the Western gaming press responded badly to Wind Waker, he tried to guess what this mysterious audience wanted. He did his best. He threw in a werewolf because he didn't have any better ideas (yes, he said that). But he still wasn't personally thrilled with it. The game was still a polished piece of craft, but the spark was gone, the bravery that made Majora's Mask and Wind Waker such stand out experiments, almost arthouse games.

Twilight Princess was a ploy to regain the audience that had rejected the creative direction the series was going after Ocarina - the right creative direction. This direction was not only different, fresh, and exciting. It was the only logical thing to do after the classic Zelda formula reached its highest expression. Ocarina of Time was the classic, dumb hero tale of every other Zelda game (boy has to save girl, goes through trials, finds sacred items, defeats wizard, etc.) done with exceptional epic flourish, culminating in the most awesome knight-versus-bad-mutherfuckin'-wizard fight ever in a video game. It was the game every other Zelda had been trying to be, and there it finally was. Done. What's next?

What came next was a marvelous dark fantasy mind-fuck. Majora's Mask was not only thematically and narratively the best thing ever associated with the Zelda name (it was what Shadow of the Colossus would get credit for being some years later, only deeper, richer); it was one of the most complete narrative worlds in a commercial game. Ocarina had dabbled in world-simulation, with its day-night cycles and open 3D terrain, but Majora's Mask was like Ultima VII on redbull. In a time when 3D graphics where inspiring most developers to make big, shallow worlds (Morrowind, GTAIII) Majora's Mask focused on being narrow and deep. Its nuance, the lives of NPCs as they existed in time, was unseen. And the time-travel mechanics, the clockwork social puzzle they formed, has never been equaled.

This all dovetailed together into one of the most total experiences I've had in a game. Majora's Mask inverted, subvert, destroyed - it ravaged Zelda every which way, all with a wicked smile. Never has a formula's self-destruction been so well-deserved, so resonant, and so wonderful. It did for Zelda what Watchmen did for superheroes, what Planescape: Torment did for Dungeons & Dragons. Saying it was the best Zelda game doesn’t begin to express its value. No other game in the series comes close. No game in the series ever will.

If Major'as Mask was the bonfire that burned Ocarina to the ground, Wind Waker was the phoenix that arose from its ashes. It was a Zelda game about a changed world, a post-apocolyptic regeneration to Majora's apocalyptic misery, though it remains one of the brightest, most pleasant destroyed worlds you’ll visit. It goes out of its way at every turn to emphasize the changed-ness of Zelda, from the cel-shaded graphics to the sailing mechanics to the story about how Hyrule is a relic of a dead past that should stay dead. Wind Waker is, if you’re clever enough to notice, an elegy for the series, a meditation on its irreversible transformation.

Ganon is the villain of Wind Waker because he wants to resurrect the Zelda formula. Why can’t things be like the good ‘ol days in Ocarina of Time, when everything was cool and epic? Because we all have to grow up sometime. Ironic that Wind Waker’s cel-shaded graphics got labeled “childish” by mouth-foaming fanboys who pined for their adolescent notions of adulthood, their cool wizard fights, their Link and Ganon who looked like they were drawn for Marvel Comics. Wind Waker’s gentle plea was a very adult one, and its rejection proof of how children, of all sorts, still hold sway over the art form.

Wind Waker was one from the heart, a game close to Aonuma. (His band, in which he plays percussion, is called 'The Wind Wakers'.) Twilight Princess, on the other hand, radiates desperation. Aonuma was grasping at something, anything, to give the global market what it seemed to want. What it wanted of course was crawl back into the womb, into its fuzzy memories of Ocarina, but have this infantile nostalgia obfuscated with so-called "darker" content... as if werewolves, shadows, a scarier Ganon with big biceps, and a mean-lookin’ teenage Link were the very definition of seriousness.

Twilight Princess is sheer pap of course, just a muddled variation on Ocarina’s good-versus-evil nonsense. It has none of Majora’s moral anguish and none of Waker’s transformative maturity. It barely registers in memory next to Ocarina, which at least had the benefit of straight-forward mythic simplicity. People liked it, but since it’s chief value was reminding people of Ocarina, it lacked any sort of future-trajectory of its own, rendering the creative evolution of the series effectively dead.

Skyward Sword represents a cautious step back towards the creative energy the series once had. Traumatized, but yearning to pick up its lost strands of inspiration, Skyward feels like a calculated attempt to bring back the color and spark of Wind Waker while avoiding the superficial elements that drive petty fans berserk.

Link and Zelda are cool-looking teens, with relatively human proportions, but the world and characters around them exhibit a stylized freedom closer to Wind Waker's. The fully open sky world, with its endless billowing clouds and floating islands, feels like a reiteration of the ocean from Wind Waker. The town and characters are fleshed out in a way closer to Majora's Mask, and the puzzle/dungeon design - which makes extensive, often ingenious use of the Wii motion controls - gives the most basic challenges (combat, navigation) a sense of newness. 

Who knows what Zelda might be today had it not been side-tracked by the blood sacrifice Aonuma was forced to make to the Western market. Skyward Sword might be truly exciting, yet another balls-out experiment in world/game/story fusion, rather than a surprisingly well-executed puzzle/dungeon exercise with clearly partition barriers between innovation and fan-service. While it's nice to see the series regain a bit of its purpose, this surgical approach to innovation makes it clear Nintendo is still scared shitless.

Where will it go from here? No doubt Aonuma is up nights trying to figure that one out.  God help him.

Bringing 3D to the Masses

Super Mario 3D Land may look cute and colorful, but it's actually an insidious plot to corrupt 2D gamers into 3D gamers. This happened 16 years ago with Mario 64, a game that wrote the book on a lot of 3D gaming concepts (analog-stick movement, simultaneous character and camera control, etc.) even though today it hardly ever gets credit for them. While brilliant, it ultimately failed to make 3D accessible to a broad audience. The games that followed in 64's footsteps abandoned its careful scaffolding and banked on an ever narrowing hardcore demographic, one that could already parse its complicated conventions. 3D Land - much more than other recent 3D Mario efforts - is a do-over, a back-to-basics attempt to get things right.

At first I was disappointed at 3D Land's simplified controls. Mario 64 was brilliant partially for its use of the then-novel analog stick, still the most nuanced and responsive uses of the interface (and somewhat due to hardware design of the N64 analog itself, far more sensitive and flexible than modern analog sticks). 3D Land, like many modern games, opts for a 'run' button, rather than mapping speed to the stick itself. Over the years we have proven ourselves impatient, unsubtle creatures with thumbsticks. We'd rather yank them around than carefully modulate our input, even when the controls respond to such modulation beautifully.

3D Land's choices aren't a knee-jerk acquiescence to modern gaming, however. They are a careful indoctrination strategy, designed to lull 2D gamers into a state of comfort. It takes only one level to realize 3D Land's template is not Mario 64 but New Super Mario Bros., the reboot of old-school 2D Mario that came out a few years ago (and proved very popular). 3D Land is quite obviously a 2D game modified to be a 3D game, not the other way around. This explains the 'run' button, the lack of a heath meter, the simplistic swimming mechanics, the appearance of the classic flagpole at the end of stages, and the profoundly 2D nature of its 3D spaces. It's classic Mario straight from 1986... except you can walk around things instead of having to jump over them.

Astute players should recognize this strategy - of embodying the "2D-ness" of a space in the level architecture, not the controls - from Metroid Other M, another recent Nintendo reboot/update. Other M's medieval sexism distracted a lot of people from noticing it was doing some very interesting things with 3D. It was a throwback to the early days of 3D, when developers tended to preserve the strong orthogonal logic of 2D worlds in their 3D worlds. As much as hardcore gamers hate to admit it (and they do) there's a simplicity to north, south, east, west orientation that more complex 3D worlds struggle to achieve. Try to teach a non-gamer to play both Asteroids and Assassin's Creed and you will see what I mean. The literacy gap between 2D and 3D interfaces is massive. Gamers understand them, but the rest of the world was left behind in the 90s.

3D Land is the most calculated experiment I've seen in shepherding players from 2D to 3D, mostly because of how openly it plays with the idea of 2D versus 3D, inviting the user to engage with these concepts in a self-conscious way. 3D Land bares more than a passing resemblance to Paper Mario, the surreal Mario spin-off that parodies the concepts of 2D and 3D by allowing the player to look at a 2D world "sideways" and see all its inhabitants as flat strips (hence the title). The way the world looks when switching between views in Paper Mario is almost exactly the difference between 8-bit Mario and 3D Land, a fact 3D Land seems to acknowledge with its occasional "fake enemies made of cardboard" gag.

The impression left is that someone took a 2D Mario level and "built it" in real life, and now you're navigating through it - a human video game. 2D platformers have been recreated in real life before, most notably in the late-80's Japanese game show Takeshi's Castle. (The idea of "being in a video game" was one of the organizing principles of the show, as seen in the short pixel art animations that introduced each event.) Nintendo imported this idea to the U.S. for the New York launch of Super Mario 3D Land, setting up a Takeshi's Castle-style platforming challenge in Times Square.

This is a great way to teach 3D to people. Everyone understands these kinds of spacial constraints when encountered in the real world, so why not just replicate them in a video game? The irony of 3D gaming is that 3D space is "real" in a sense. It is unabstract, a 1-to-1 simulation of space as it actually exists. 2D space is abstract, an imaginary reduction of real space onto a flat plane. So why then is 2D much easier to navigate than 3D? Because, if we acknowledge the complete reality of video games, we must acknowledge that they take place on a screen, and screens are flat.

North, south, east, west are the most logical orientations for anyone controlling an object on a screen. 2D games take place unabashedly in screen-space, not real-space, and designing to that reality makes games more intuitive, more connected with the matter-of-fact-ness of mediated televisual experience. 3D games don't take place on a screen, they take place in a screen. But since we are never in the screen with them, we need all sorts of convoluted gear to bridge the barrier. 3D games that fail to acknowledge the screen always feel awkward, because they fail to acknowledge the primary agent that shapes our interaction, instead pretending like we're "immersed" in some world... but can never feel more immersive than remote-controlling a robot via video.

Games like Super Mario 3D Land are built around the screen, around its logics, its limits, its shape. They are 3D spaces articulated in the language of 2D spaces, because that is ALWAYS the language of screens. This is why when 3D Land indulges in some of the more esoteric 3D conventions, it carefully constructs screen-based metaphors around them. As an adept 3D gamer I missed the ability to enter first-person view at any time like I could in Galaxy, but I have to admit re-imagining that convention as tourist binoculars - the kind you might find at Niagra Falls or the Empire State Building - is a stroke of genius. Like all clever scaffolding they make you realize 'first-person view' has always been like using tourist binoculars.

Super Mario 3D Land may not be everything I want out of a 3D Mario game. But I find it hard not to be impressed by its laser-thin shrewdness when it comes to reaching a 3D-averse audience. It slips the drug of 3D - the drug of Mario 64, of Galaxy, that intoxicated me so long ago - into their soup, in doses small enough to give them a gradual, imperceptible high.

As the game progresses the levels slowly open up, like those in Mario 64, but the transition is subtle and seamless. All the while the game presents the stereoscopic 3D, the selling point of the 3DS, as if that were the innovation of the game. It's just a ruse, a good excuse to get a second shot at the vast swathes of people who have been kept from the pleasures of 3D gaming by a decade of dual-analog controllers and byzantine level architecture.

The people who fail to understand those things are not the freaks. We are.