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The Legend of Zelda: Type A or Type B?


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Poll: Type A or B

Is The Legend of Zelda a Type A or Type B Quest.

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#16 Rambly

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Posted 31 March 2021 - 02:19 PM

Sounds good, then I can market my quest as being TYPE X and make it all mysterious and cool


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#17 Aslion

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Posted 31 March 2021 - 03:35 PM

type pp


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#18 Mani Kanina

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Posted 31 March 2021 - 06:31 PM

From now on my quests will be for Bun Type players only.


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#19 Professor Bedwetter

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Posted 31 March 2021 - 11:39 PM

Can we have more Types that are better than A and B?
 
Like Type  C
Type D
Type E
Type S
 
Ranks?
etc.*


No

#20 Rambly

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Posted 01 April 2021 - 01:07 AM

No

That's just the sort of tough, challenging, non-crowd-pleasing answer you'd expect from a Type B questmaker; good job


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#21 Nicholas Steel

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Posted 01 April 2021 - 07:56 AM

1st Quest = Type A
2nd Quest = Type B


Blue Wizzrobes and Blue Darknuts are the only enemies that are threatening after you get the blue tunic. The game starts tough, but the difficulty is an informational barrier, not necessarily an execution one. Once you know to farm the blue ring and get the overworld hearts, it becomes trivial for a large chunk of the game. By the time you get to Ganon, he's so afraid of how strong you've become he can't even bring himself to show his face.

The game doesn't sledgehammer your scrotum enough in comparison to other NES games of its time, like Mitch said.

With all the optional Heart Containers & Dungeon 7 being easier than Dungeon 6, you can get the Magical Sword before stepping in the 6th dungeon and trivialize the Blue Wizzrobe & Like Like's. Assuming you're playing the first quest.


Edited by Nicholas Steel, 04 April 2021 - 05:16 PM.


#22 SkyLizardGirl

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Posted 02 April 2021 - 12:19 AM

Type Z

 

Anyways, i refuse to be categorized as A and B Type Quests.

It's just not Diverse enough for ZC quests.


Edited by SkyLizardGirl, 02 April 2021 - 12:20 AM.

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#23 Haylee

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Posted 02 April 2021 - 12:59 AM

type pp

type puyo puyo?


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#24 TheManHimself

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Posted 15 May 2021 - 11:07 AM

Type B, but with the trappings of type A.

The two aren't mutually exclusive, and a decade of Souls should attest to that!



#25 SkyLizardGirl

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Posted 23 May 2021 - 02:20 PM

ZC Quests need 'more diversity'  not just seen as A and B as quests.



#26 James24

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Posted 23 May 2021 - 08:48 PM

Let me tell you something about the history of NES Zelda and Super Mario Brothers because this might shed some light on this.  From what I've seen on the internet and as far as I know, both games were designed by legendary game maker and pioneer Shigeru Miyamoto and sold with a Nintendo license.  You can see the similarity between the two because after you defeat the first quest there's a 2nd quest which is much more difficult.  In Super Mario, once you defeat the first King Koopa, there's another set of levels which is very similar to the first but much harder.  Same thing occurs with NES Zelda.  Once you defeat the first quest there's the 2nd quest which is much more difficult.

 

Super Mario Brothers went on to become one of the best selling games of all time.  Shigeru was asked to make a sequel and he did so with Super Mario Brothers 2 - the Japanese version.  If you've ever played it, its on par with my LoH:IU in terms of difficulty.  Its frighteningly hard and there can be no dispute that it is truly a type B game.  When Super Mario Brothers 2, the Japanese version, came to Nintendo of America, the review team there headed by Howard Phillips rejected the game simply because the average Amercian player would find it a very unenjoyable game with its huge difficulty and it wouldn't sell very well and not turn a profit.  So, they replaced the whole game with another game and replaced Mario and Luigi as the main characters.  If you play the American version of Super Mario Brothers 2, you can see that its a very different game and this explains it.

 

So, the designer is undoubtably type B, but why the type A elements in NES Zelda then?  Well, I'm guessing he was told to do it by his Nintendo bosses in exchange for his salary.  He was following James's third law of quest making.  Big paychecks from large companies tend to influence game design in ways that most people can't imagine - simply because most people have never paid a huge paycheck for a game before.  Most can't imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars for a single game.  Its only at this point that you can truly wield huge influence over a game.  So Shigeru toned down NES Zelda to incorporate type A tastes, but there is still traces of type B remaining.  You can see it in dungeon 6.  You can somewhat see it in the 2nd quest.


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#27 SkyLizardGirl

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Posted 23 May 2021 - 10:49 PM

All Nintendo games now hold the players by the hand now
Because of the lack of instruction booklets.



#28 NoeL

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Posted 24 May 2021 - 12:45 AM

People in the 80's would run circles around players

nowadays 'that need' to be guided by the hand through tutorials and 'how to' at the beginning of games.

...

My boyfriend is hardcore Nintendo and says, he doesn't want to know anything about the game, he just wants to pick it up and play it and 'learn everything himself' by throughly playing, calling people that need tutorials, clues and hints weak new age players. 

This is a pretty flawed take IMO, for a few reasons:

  1. Games back then had instructions for playing, which is the equivalent of tutorials now. The only difference is that they were found in the manual because games didn't have the storage space to include them in the software. Games from the 80's have the illusion of being newbie-unfriendly because people only retrospectively look at the game in isolation, rather than the game + manual. That said,
  2. Many games were newbie-unfriendly back then. Game design wasn't figured out to the degree it was today, and many game designers weren't very good by today's standards. It's mostly these games that got it right and successfully taught their players that are cherished, while the cryptic trash is forgotten outside of nostalgia.
  3. Kids in the 80s/90s had a far more limited access to games than they do today. Back then, you rented one game and that was your entertainment for the weekend. If it was tricky to figure out, you were shit outta luck - you either persisted with it or you didn't play that weekend. Nowadays games are everywhere - if a game wastes your time with cryptic bullshit, it's easy to move on to something else. Old-school gamers are only "strong" because that's what the medium demanded at that time, not because they're superior gamers or anything like that. Had gamers had today's access back then, they would've moved on just as quickly.
  4. Games today are, largely, more complex than games of the 80s, and are therefore more mentally demanding. With that complexity comes a higher learning curve and a greater need for player instruction. Tutorials and in-game instructions exist because "press every button" is no longer sufficient to teach you how to play. An 80s gamer would struggle just as much - likely more so - trying to figure out a modern game without instructions than a modern gamer would - particularly if it held more closely to modern design conventions.
  5. Granted, there was a generation or two where the pendulum swung the other way and many games held players' hands too much. I think it's come back to a more sensible middle ground now though.

 

TL:DR: Your bf's "strength" is the product of his environment - nothing inherent to himself to take pride in. His attitude towards tutorials and "weak new age players" is naive.


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#29 Russ

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Posted 24 May 2021 - 11:35 AM

So, the designer is undoubtably type B, but why the type A elements in NES Zelda then?  Well, I'm guessing he was told to do it by his Nintendo bosses in exchange for his salary.  He was following James's third law of quest making.  Big paychecks from large companies tend to influence game design in ways that most people can't imagine - simply because most people have never paid a huge paycheck for a game before.  Most can't imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars for a single game.  Its only at this point that you can truly wield huge influence over a game.  So Shigeru toned down NES Zelda to incorporate type A tastes, but there is still traces of type B remaining.  You can see it in dungeon 6.  You can somewhat see it in the 2nd quest.


I just want to point out that this is objectively wrong. In the beta versions of Zelda 1, from not too long before release, Level 6 was significantly easier. The difficulty spike there was a last minute change to the game, not some remnant of a supposed type B designer being stifled by a company's need to appeal to the lowest common denominator for money.

While we're at it, your takes on Mario 2 also aren't entirely grounded in reality. While it wasn't initially released in the US, it sold very well in Japan, and it was ultimately enjoyed when it did come to the US in the SNES era.

I think your whole vision of Miyamoto as some Type B designer being forced to sacrifice her vision is laughably off the mark and at odds with basically all the evidence. If anything, his direction typically pushes games in the other direction.


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#30 Mitchfork

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Posted 24 May 2021 - 02:13 PM

Super Mario Brothers went on to become one of the best selling games of all time.  Shigeru was asked to make a sequel and he did so with Super Mario Brothers 2 - the Japanese version.  If you've ever played it, its on par with my LoH:IU in terms of difficulty.  Its frighteningly hard and there can be no dispute that it is truly a type B game.  When Super Mario Brothers 2, the Japanese version, came to Nintendo of America, the review team there headed by Howard Phillips rejected the game simply because the average Amercian player would find it a very unenjoyable game with its huge difficulty and it wouldn't sell very well and not turn a profit.  So, they replaced the whole game with another game and replaced Mario and Luigi as the main characters.  If you play the American version of Super Mario Brothers 2, you can see that its a very different game and this explains it.

 

It's a little difficult to parse the entire Mario 2 story (video game credits are notoriously unreliable for a lot of reasons and Japanese games tend to have different words for certain roles), but Miyamoto did not design the Lost Levels SMB2 - this was done by another internal Nintendo department as he was busy doing the design for The Legend of Zelda at the time. He actually did co-design the prototype for Doki Doki Panic SMB2 - like actually did programming for certain elements of the game.  If you're looking at Miyamoto's later career trajectory, I think Doki Doki Panic is much more illustrative of his style and game design values.

 

As an aside, it's hard to say how much influence Miyamoto has on the games that come out of Nintendo since he stopped being credited for direct design work after the N64 era, but if you're approaching it from a money perspective, Miyamoto is the money and influence now in his career.  If he's Type B, you'd expect him to be directing the team to make a lot more Type B products, instead of, you know, pitching Nintendogs internally.


Edited by Mitchfork, 24 May 2021 - 02:14 PM.

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