50 Years of Video Games: The Legend of Zelda (NES)

The Nintendo Entertainment System certainly isn’t lacking when it comes to groundbreaking titles, Nintendo kicking off many of their iconic franchises or giving them the shot in the arm they needed to be successful with the installments featured on this system. However, even before people knew the spot many of these titles would hold in the history of the medium, a certain 1987 release was already easily identified as something special. The Legend of Zelda is practically Nintendo’s prestige brand, the action-adventure series able to craft fantasy epics without delving too deep into the more systems-focused approaches role-playing games rely on. When it was time to bring The Legend of Zelda over from Japan, the U.S. branch of the company went the extra mile by printing the game on shiny gold-colored carts and gave it a cover more like that of a thick leather tome of old stories than a video game. This was to be the start of a legendary game series, and Nintendo made sure that everyone would treat it as such.

A bit unfortunately though the game introduces its plot with a screen full of broken English. While the manual sorted things out better and rereleases since then have cleaned up that scrolling story text that appears if you let the game idle on the title screen, the initial release didn’t even spell its main villain’s name properly. Ignoring such sentences as “Many years ago Prince Darkness ‘Gannon’ stole one of the Triforce with Power”, the story when properly relayed by other means involves the land of Hyrule where a powerful artifact known as the Triforce resides. One of its pieces, the Triforce of Power, has been taken by the dark lord Ganon to fuel his conquering of the region, and when he moves to capture Princess Zelda and take her Triforce of Wisdom, she shatters it into eight pieces to place in dungeons beneath Hyrule. One day an unassuming boy named Link hears of the danger spreading across his homeland and sets out to be the one to take down Ganon, first needing to assemble the Triforce of Wisdom so he can hope to stand a chance against the conqueror.

Funnily enough though, Link sets out for his adventure with nothing but a small shield, but luckily for him and the player, this top-down action game starts him right next to an opening in a cave. Curiosity draws the player inside, and with the now iconic quote “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this!” an old man grants Link a sword he can use to start fighting back against the monsters spread across the land. This simple opening moment already encourages the player’s adventuring spirit with the simple idea that great rewards await those who pursue their curiosity, and while this man does give you a sword to start your quest with, he doesn’t set you out with any clue on where to go next. Instead, The Legend of Zelda invites the player to head out into the world and explore on their own, a fairly large world map made of interlinked single-screen areas providing many places to poke around for useful items, dungeon entrances, and hidden secrets.

As you begin to explore the world though you’ll quickly run into hostile creatures. Many of these creatures, whether they are land-dwelling octopus monsters known as Octorocks, the Moblin pig-men, or the hooded wizards in dungeons known as Wizzrobes, rely on one of two ways of damaging you. All of your enemies are dangerous to the touch, the severity of the sting varying depending on how powerful the monster is. The other attack method is some form of forward firing projectile. The movement is grid-based so you can only move up, down, right, or left, and with some of the screen always occupied by important information up at the top like health, your current equipped items, and map information, the fighting space is deliberately kept close so that you are both at greater risk of taking damage and can get in close to deal damage yourself. Your sword only stabs out a bit in front of you, the blade reaching far enough ahead to prod monsters without being overly risky but still requiring you to get close enough to endanger yourself if it is a particularly fast or feisty foe. At full health you can fire a sword beam with each forward thrust though, giving you a projectile even before you get new equipment and incentivizing you to approach even simple fights with a small level of caution to keep this useful skill.

While most enemies fall into the two categories of ones that want to ram into you and ones who wish to fire at you from afar, there is some decent variation in how this is handled to make for a steady increase in danger when you enter areas that are meant to be a later part of your adventure. The snakes known as Ropes will charge towards you if they spot you, Wallmaster hands scoop you up and drop you at the start of a dungeon, and the Like-Like will gobble up your shield if it gets a hold of you. While many of the enemies simply have different movement types like the Keese bats having movement that ignores the grid and the bugs known as Tektites bounding around so they’re hard to pin down, there are some unique creatures in the mix so that the ones that go for the simple “touch to damage” approach can have more bite to them. Projectile monsters like the Wizzrobe might teleport about so you need to find your opening to attack them before they disappear and some rooms pack in unbreakable statues that pester the fight with small fireballs while you’re trying to deal with other foes, and while it’s not too uncommon to find a room or screen where the challenge is just to beat a bunch of one enemy type, the moments they are combined more cleverly can provide some decently dangerous fights.

As you travel across Hyrule and start to find dungeon entrances you’ll find areas that start to add more to the action than just fighting monsters though. Each dungeon has a special item you can add to your inventory, these including useful fighting tools like a bow and arrow, helpful navigational aids like a ladder you can use to cross gaps, and multipurpose items like the bombs that can both damage enemies or break apart walls to reveal secret areas. Fights can be made more involved when you can whip out a magic wand to zap foes from afar even when you’re not at full health and the expansions to how you can travel through the world and dungeons help feed into the adventuring experience as you can start to enter new areas, and even outside of the dungeons there are shops where you can buy new stuff with the money you get from killing monsters.

There are times where maybe The Legend of Zelda leans more on the sense of wonder in exploring a foreign world without much direction too strongly though. While a few important areas can be found just by poking around every corner of a location, as you get deeper into the game, the adventure starts to lean on uncovering important things in odd ways. Sometimes there will be no visual hint that a wall can be broken open with a bomb to get to somewhere important, a later dungeon even heavily involving bombs in its navigation despite them being a limited resource you’ll have to refresh if you guessed the wrong walls. Important upgrades to your sword and defense can be found in unusual places, and while finding old people with hints can provide some clues to their locations, they can also be hidden or even a little cryptic in their advice. An old woman can say to meet an old man at a grave but the cemetery has 72 graves, touching an incorrect one spawns an angry ghost, and the relevant one looks just like the others. Luckily most of the truly obtuse hidden areas from doing things like burning the right random tree of the hundreds featured in the game will usually lead to things that aren’t technically required like stores, money making games, and health expansions, but without a map it can be easy to get lost in the expansive world as you haven’t yet come across the one thing that will help you realize where you need to go or give you the means to do so.

That bit of confusion can lead to some periods where the sense of adventure starts to lose its charm, but usually that can be refreshed when you do find a new dungeon or area or have gained an item that opens up new possibilities. Within the dungeons though the rooms can start to feel a bit similar in concept. There aren’t truly puzzles in this first Legend of Zelda title, the solutions for clearing a room where the door locks often fairly simple. This can involve killing every baddy in the room, something that grows a bit stale late in the game where the armored knights can only be hit from the sides but turn to face you often so the packed rooms can be slow to clear. Usually though this can force you to stand and fight with some of the more dangerous foes, so it is usually a simple idea but one that keeps feeding the player action as they explore. The other main way of opening exits or revealing special staircases in a room though is to push one of the blocks out of formation, this never really requiring much beyond experimenting with the options and only really a good way of gating process when there’s some sort of trap or foe pestering you so you can’t just get to the staircase right away. The simplicity of these two concepts ends up not harming things too much since they are mostly excuses to require some more of the entertaining action, but they do mean that exploring these areas doesn’t have as much depth as it could have since they mostly stand out from fights elsewhere through the dungeon-specific foes you fight.

Bosses in The Legend of Zelda are certainly interesting in how wildly they can vary. With the right items sometimes a boss can be killed almost instantly, however later that boss is likely to reappear in a small capacity in another dungeon where they’re surprisingly much stronger than before. Some like the dragon Aquamentus and the multi-headed Gleeok are all about getting in and striking between attacks while others like the spider Ghoma focus on a projectile exchange. Most of them slot into that same “simple yet challenging” spot that the normal fights fill, and while sometimes difficulty does seem achieved by dealing heavy damage if you haven’t found those optional upgrades, the boss battles do always reward you with an extra heart when they’re the climax of a dungeon. Some of these do lean into expecting the player to find the right old person with a tip on how to fight them, but the only battle that really feels like it is outright flawed is actually the final one. Before then, fights could be underwhelming at first but the boss rematches when they’re more formidable later on can start to help the battle feel more involved. The final boss though is invisible most of the fight and has a set of randomly selected teleportation patterns for the fight, so the big finale ends up with a lot of sword flailing until you can figure out his location.

You can get to a very high amount of hearts, carry a full heal potion, and save files allow the journey to be continued later so you can overcome some of the moments where the difficulty skew might not match what you have found at the time, and those broader options afforded by a world you can approach so openly do help patch over some of the problems it causes. Sure, you can stumble into a dungeon that’s too powerful for you early on, but you won’t lose anything after you die and learn to come back later. One of the better telegraphed hidden areas in the game is a way of letting you get to other ends of the large map quickly, and the game will sometimes whip up a new type of challenge like the Lost Woods where you’ll loop around the same screen over and over unless you learned the right path from, yet again, an old person. Perhaps tying so many important clues to old people huddled in caves or cordoned off in sealed dungeon rooms wasn’t the best way of designing the few areas that are almost proper puzzles, but having the mystery behind strange situations and unusual circumstance solved by deeper exploration of nearby areas does at least continue to provide rewards for pursuing your curiosity right up until the end of the adventure.

THE VERDICT: The Legend of Zelda makes a lot of out some very simple foundational ideas. By making navigating the world to find your next dungeon a challenge in itself, you get player-guided exploration that is full of beneficial discoveries to encourage them to poke around more. While your tools in a fight aren’t too expansive, your extra items add to it a bit and the enemy types can bring new little twists to how you approach the simple affair. Sometimes progress can be stymied just because you didn’t find the one odd old man with the right tip on what to do or where to go and not many of the game’s meager puzzles are really meant to be figured out so much as executed when you have the answer, but a focus on navigation and battles mean it’s still an adventure with more thrills than meandering.

And so, I give The Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A GOOD rating. This wasn’t my first time playing The Legend of Zelda so I did go in knowing some things from previous playthroughs long ago, but even then there were moments where I felt like there was no clear way forward until I had poked around until I found the one screen I had missed with the right clue or path onward. It can be exciting to have a world teeming with things to find even if some of them aren’t really hidden in ways players will naturally come across, but The Legend of Zelda mostly gets it right when placing important content down a path of natural curiosity and the light variation found within how you can journey about the world and fight foes means the game has interesting things to offer when you’re on the right path. These aren’t incredibly fascinating, more a series of enjoyable battles and some moments spiced up when a special item can be thrown into the mix, but the funny thing is those moments of being slightly lost aren’t what keep this game from being better.

The Legend of Zelda was poised as a prestige experience from the start and many were happy to buy into the idea, and many future games definitely live up to that identity. However, the original’s experience, while revolutionary at the time, is one that seems buoyed by things like nostalgia, the availability of online help, and the legacy the experience has. Beyond remembering areas and tips old people give you it’s not a game that is asking you to figure things out often and when it does it’s a simple action like bombing the right spot, something you probably did to two walls before picking the right one finally. The fights really feel like they have to carry a lot of the experience and while it does feel like there’s probably a sweet spot of quality between the easy early fights and the slow battles with armored knights later on, at least only the final battle ever feels like it pushes too hard into a weak form of variation for its battle system. This certainly feels like a case where I might be overexplaining the flaws since the game is heaped with glowing praise, but The Legend of Zelda doesn’t need to be some perfect paragon of gaming just because it came on a shiny gold cartridge. It’s a fun game with some creative ways of making more out of its action and area designs, and for its time it was able to capture the idea of a fantasy adventure better than its contemporaries thanks to its world full of mysteries and dangerous monsters. Modern hyperbole will only lead to new players underwhelmed or perhaps worse, they might end up lavishing praise on it simply because it is expected. We do not live in a world of extremes though, and The Legend of Zelda does hold up despite some of its old-fashioned ideas on how to provide puzzle solutions or hide secrets. It is okay for a legendary game to simply be good, and The Legend of Zelda is still a game with effective ideas you can enjoy today.