After Chubby Cherub, I decided it would be much more appropriate to celebrate Valentine’s Day, a day designed to celebrate predominantly romantic love, with one of the greatest love stories ever told by way of video games, The Legend of Zelda. That being said, I think I’m getting ahead of myself and didn’t begin that tradition until Zelda 2, so this was just a let’s play the Legend of Zelda video just because. Truth be told you don’t need any reason to play this classic: I’ve said before that Nintendo didn’t mess around with their original programming and this is a good an example as any game they’ve ever released.
Let’s Play the Legend of Zelda:
It kind of boggles the mind that this game was released in 1986 and is 30 years old at the time of my writing this, considering the caliber of games which preceded it by just a couple of years. This game is so, fricking, good, and would go on to influence generations of video games for years and years to come.
As if you didn’t know, you play as Link (don’t call him Zelda), a guy who is charged with saving Princess Zelda. I say “a guy” because I really don’t know how much of the story was intact in 1986 for the first installment.
This was the first game I remember playing with a massive world to traverse which wasn’t linear in any way. The world map is tiny by today’s games’ standards, but it was pretty cool having to memorize where different things were and planning your journey accordingly. It seems like a small thing now, but it was huge for its day, just a few years after the most basic arcade games were just coming out.
A number of different enemies and bosses to fight in dungeons to explore with a dozen or so items and upgrades to get, there was nothing like this game when it came out and not much else like to for years to come. It’s also one of the few NES games which manages to take several hours to complete and that’s if you know where to go and what you’re doing, not even counting the BONUS quest when everything was in a different place and more difficult. That’s a feat in of itself considering most games of that era could be completed in less time than it would take to get your pizza delivered. Great game, a real classic.