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+Link's Awakening only has few good puzzles. The third boss (Splitting the eyeball), the 7th dungeon's premise (Navigating the tower with a ball) and the moving floor things in the 8th dungeon.
+They aren't hard though. They are opaque. I was stuck for several months as a child due to the first in that list. Not being a native English speaker didn't help me either back then.
+Yet this made me wonder, what was the better solution? Nintendo's answer has since then been to outright tell us when a puzzle is a puzzle, and since they're never really complex, telling us about a puzzle is equivalent to telling us the solution.
+The sentiment mentioned by developers like Phil Fish and Jonathan blow in _Indie Game Life After_speaks about how some western developers today, would probably rather see the puzzles slowly transition into much more fiendish puzzles (without outright explaining everything along the way). Kind of like how the puzzles in The Witness probably transition[1] from easy to devious.
+What I'm suggesting is probably gonna sound like fanboy Stockholm Syndrome, but what if the best solution, for these games at least, was the way Nintendo has done so far?
+Zelda games are part action games, part puzzle games. They're light on plot and lore, but big on world building through quirkily animated characters, great music and interesting locations. Things move at a brisk pace. Enemies have little health, Link can often roll (or backflip) to move faster and eventually, the player acquires some means of fast-travel (Bird, tornado).
+The puzzles don't slow things down. In fact, since they hardly even act as cerebral stopping points, they can hardly be called puzzles, that's just convention [2].
+Instead, the puzzles are slight mechanical interruptions, alterations or additions. Shooting the obvious eye above a door with a slingshot is no more difficult than wailing on a Lizard dude but it changes up the flow and sometimes feels good.
+A good lesson to learn from this, is that the tools of Zelda are manifestations of different mechanics, and they puzzleize straight-up hack-'n-slash gameplay. As noted earlier, this is of course a way of thought that has frustrated many players and developers for all sorts of reasons, but damnit, I like it, and I believe there can be a huge difference in my game design if I make use of this way of thought deliberately, instead of simply making my game accessible.
+Sodagirl already contains elements of this way of thinking, but having specifically detailed how it works, gives me a better tool for iterating and changing. Puzzleizing barebones combat changes up the basic gameplay, but doesn't break the flow and speed, and sometimes even allow the player to branch out, performing the occasionally repetitive tasks of video games, in personal ways.
+Lots of late posts this week, but I gotta say, it was still a good one. This video of Ririri (「りりり」) is so fucking full of energy, and was one of the original inspirations for Sodagirl. I always feel like getting stuff done when I hear this.
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Around december I spoke with the butter-voiced-blessed Declan Dineen, for his podcast show Checkpoints.
Now that it's out there, and our conversation has been edited into a pleasant little bite, I thought, well, it's nice and all that I'm praising learning how to code, but it's important never to forget: Getting started is never as easy as an experienced person might make it sound.
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+So a few weeks ago, I wrote about how traditional Japanese aesthetics can help make games seem bigger and full of life with mere suggestion.
+This doesn’t change that sometimes, some games are just fucking huge.
+Take the original Pokémon games (red and green, 1996). They contain one hundred and fifty monsters. The number of Pokémon is currently ridiculously high, but for the initial pair of games to contain so many unique monsters, that act both as enemies and playable characters, each with their own sprite, blows me away. Compare this to the first Final Fantasy (FF1), which had 128 enemies. Granted, the Pokémon R/B/G world really isn’t so big by itself (Not including dungeons). Yet the areas that seem to be just unnecessarily stretched and winding corridors, are actually playing two parts: They are sort of dungeons by themselves, and most importantly, they are wildernes to hunt more pokémon.
+While the individual Pokémon don’t really differentiate mechanically, the game does have 55 different spells/attacks, divided across the now classic expanded rock/paper/scissors system. Again, compare this to FF1. 32 spells. It’s a lot, especially from such an old game, but Pokemon just seems huge in comparison.
+Another GameBoy title that manages to feel huge by simply just containing an enourmous amount of content, is Link’s Awakening (LA). This game is structurally pretty much a remake of the original Legend of Zelda (LoZ), but with more advanced controls, more complex tools, an actual narrative and a fuller world. While LoZ was 8x16 screens big, plus 8 dungeons of monsters to kill, LA is 16x16 screens big and has 8 far more complex dungeons of unique architecture, changing perspectives, and even a few good puzzles. The game even has __eighty-one_ enemies, 16 traps and 9 bosses, many of which function mechanically pretty differently from each other, which is pretty damn impressive.
+Size doesn’t matter, but when somebody manages to fit games like the original Pokémon and LA on friggin’ GameBoy cartridges, I can’t help but be impressed.
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