This old man kept showing up all around the game. What a creep. Like, do you just hang out in these dungeons and caves? All by yourself? I don't think so. I'll take the sword, but you can keep those "hints" to yourself.
Weirdly enough, this is the first game I played on my Switch 2. The Mario Kart World download took forever, so in the meantime I booted up the NES app. I was also able to make great use of the Nintendo Switch NES controller joycons they released a while ago, which added a much-needed extra layer of fun.
The Legend of Zelda games are my absolute favorite games of all time. Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64 got it's hooks in me young, and hasn't let go since. The itch comes around every year, like an old wizard showing up at my door with a copy of one of these games, and saying "Let's play Zelda!" I mean when that happens, you just gotta say yes. Otherwise, Gandalf the Gamer will be sad. It's the adventure, I think. You're always finding new things, and going to new places. You can do this in a lot of games, but I think many would agree that the Zelda games have an extra something special about them.
Anyway, I was thinking about which one to play next. I wanted to play one to completion, really stick with it to the end. While I've played almost all of them, I've only beaten a select few. On that line of thinking, I drifted to contemplating which ones I'd probably never beat, and poof. The original popped right into mind.
The Legend of Zelda, the original source of the ether, the wellspring of adventure. The great-grandfather of my favorite games. Too bad this great-grandfather hasn't aged very well. I mean, Peepaw's got a bit of a reputation nowadays, right? Boring, obtuse, ugly, out-of-touch, OLD. But it's the original, and how cool would it be to be able to say I beat it? Not very cool, honestly. But that's not my department.
So I set out on my quest. I probably made the same mistake a lot of ambitious gamers make when starting this for the first time, which is trying to beat it without any kind of online guides or assistance. Not even kidding, I broke this rule in the first 5 minutes. This game is hard. It's just so vague, screen after screen of basically empty space, filled with monsters that don't feel like they should be as difficult as they are. Especially being so used to modern games, it was hard for me to even just comprehend what I was looking at. I know it's part of the charm, these are old games that took our ancestors months to beat. They utilized secrets they could only learn from their friends at school. Different times, man... Different times.
It was sort of a trippy experience once I got into it. I could recognize most of the enemies and items. My brain would think "Oh, that's the boomerang from Ocarina of Time" but it's really the other way around. So many staples of these games were established in game one, and have been iterated on or perpetuated through more games for 38 years.
It was mainly those feelings and thoughts that carried me through this opaque mystery I'm now calling a journey.
After countless visits to the Zelda Dungeon walkthrough, and the downright abuse of the rewind feature, I finally beat it. By the end, I was pretty over the whole experience. I could really feel myself forcing it. But I gotta say... I felt really good after beating the first iteration of Ganon, and finding the very first pixelated sprite of Princess Zelda.
Lost it to a like-like not 5 minutes later, never again.
Just look at that thing. It's like a cursed wedding cake.