Zelda And The Unintentional Sidequest into Middle Earth

Hello (!) and Welcome (!!) to the inaugural post of Press Repeatedly, a blog featuring thoughts from my brain. Thoughts from my brain that have grown appendages, broken free from their tanks, found a keyboard, and chicken pecked their way through hundreds of words about video games and video game culture. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?

So let’s talk vidyuh games.

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First things first. I'm a huge fan of the series, but seriously, they need to deLordoftheRingsify Zelda.

There’s a lot of common ground shared between Hyrule and Middle Earth. Nothing wrong with this. All Medievally themed fantasy worlds need orcs and elves like Disneyland needs Mickey Mouse. The bow and arrow can stay, but what needs to go is all the other stuff. It wasn’t until Ocarina of Time that things started going down this road. Wind Waker was a brief detour back into the bright colors and cartoony charm of the earlier iterations, but then it went back to the muddled colors and “adult” theming in Twilight Princess.

And it went deeep.
Designs, motifs, character designs, enemies riding on boar-like creatures….
I’m not even talking about story because nobody plays Zelda for the story anyway. It’s just a way to loosely connect boomerangs and squids.

Honestly, I was never quite sure TP was a Zelda game. It had all the familiar elements, and even added a dradleboard to make Link an elvish Tony Hawk, but overall, Hyrule felt generic. Really, really generic.

It may be a result of just years and years of formulaic rehashing of the same ideas. Nintendo really likes their video game mechanics. Mario will and always be about running and jumping. Metroid will always be about exploring areas, getting items, and then re-exploring areas with said items in tow. Zelda is about exploring dungeons, getting items, and then using the newly-acquired item to get back out of the dungeon.

There is only so much to do with these themes before they start to get tired, and Twilight Princess certainly started to feel tired. At least it didn’t have Tingle. That dude was a pedophile-tastic version of JarJar Binks in green tights.

More to come on this topic.
I have some ideas.