As a lifelong Zelda fan, I’ve never cared much for the stories of Zelda games anyways. Like Mario games, they’re always incredibly simple placeholders that boil down to “princess gone, defeat evil that took her”. These games got their start when that was the only story that you could fit on the cartridge anyways, so I could see why Nintendo would want to keep that spirit alive.
Plus, in an open world game, is story really that important? I’d rather have the excellent gameplay of TOTK than something like Red Dead 2 which is a great story with excruciatingly boring gameplay.
I really enjoyed the writing of the side characters in the N64 games. Sure most only had two maybe three things to say outside a side quest but they all had a nugget of commentary on the human condition.
Personally I thought that N64 and the beginning of GC had the best cadence of Zelda games; a retelling of the main “legend” (evil ganon, triforce power corrupted, magical princess captured to use towards ultimate evil plan, hero appears, master sword, open path to ganon, defeat, time/space/existence saved) which was OOT, followed up by “here’s another adventure the hero went on that has almost nothing to don’t any of that, and it’s more character driven” which was Majoras Mask. It looked like we’d repeat that cycle with WindWaker (and to some extent I guess we did with Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks) but then we got TP and nothing and SS and nothing and they got so bogged down into turning Zelda into a lore dump. Now we don’t even have dungeons and item anymore. Dungeons and items were the core gameplay! Imagine being able to hook shot around in BotW?
The stories in most Nintendo games are weak and mostly pointless. I loved BOTW but strrrrrrrruggled to enjoy TOTK. It just felt too gimmicky. And I adore RDR2, story and gameplay.
As a lifelong Zelda fan, I’ve never cared much for the stories of Zelda games anyways. Like Mario games, they’re always incredibly simple placeholders that boil down to “princess gone, defeat evil that took her”. These games got their start when that was the only story that you could fit on the cartridge anyways, so I could see why Nintendo would want to keep that spirit alive.
Plus, in an open world game, is story really that important? I’d rather have the excellent gameplay of TOTK than something like Red Dead 2 which is a great story with excruciatingly boring gameplay.
I really enjoyed the writing of the side characters in the N64 games. Sure most only had two maybe three things to say outside a side quest but they all had a nugget of commentary on the human condition.
Personally I thought that N64 and the beginning of GC had the best cadence of Zelda games; a retelling of the main “legend” (evil ganon, triforce power corrupted, magical princess captured to use towards ultimate evil plan, hero appears, master sword, open path to ganon, defeat, time/space/existence saved) which was OOT, followed up by “here’s another adventure the hero went on that has almost nothing to don’t any of that, and it’s more character driven” which was Majoras Mask. It looked like we’d repeat that cycle with WindWaker (and to some extent I guess we did with Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks) but then we got TP and nothing and SS and nothing and they got so bogged down into turning Zelda into a lore dump. Now we don’t even have dungeons and item anymore. Dungeons and items were the core gameplay! Imagine being able to hook shot around in BotW?
The stories in most Nintendo games are weak and mostly pointless. I loved BOTW but strrrrrrrruggled to enjoy TOTK. It just felt too gimmicky. And I adore RDR2, story and gameplay.