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Notes -
I recently got a Sega Dreamcast and have been enjoying games I first played on the Game Cube. Soul Calibur holds up really well and looks beautiful. Sonic Adventure... not so much. Anybody else been getting into retro game stuff?
I recently gathered up all the major 8bit and 16bit Zelda games to play through via emulator. I've tried playing the later games before but lacking the rose coloured glasses of childhood nostalgia meant I couldn't get into them and found them to suffer from the familiar issue with open world games of using a map that is too large for the amount of content. Combined with the Zelda games' approach of making everything a multistep puzzle resulted in time spent mostly travelling from one side of the map to the other searching high and low for whatever tiny clue I'd overlooked to unlock the next level.
Which ones do you mean with "later" ? At least for the N64 ones I didn't get this impression - though I admittedly don't mind open plains much.
The 3D era games. To be honest I only played Ocarina of Time as it's rated so highly and since I didn't enjoy playing that one I don't see much point in trying any others. I'll admit that I use a walkthrough for handholding when I get really stuck, at this age I don't have the time or the patience, but I like to give the puzzles an honest try first. It's embarrassing to admit but for OoT I literally had to look up a walkthrough just to get out of the introduction and training area after scouring every inch of it, and it continued in the same vein until eventually the telecomms workmen repaired our broadband connection and I happily switched it off forever.
I think it might be because the 2D worlds are broken up into discrete screens and so you can mentally map the world to a series of separate tiles that you travel between, each one with at least some kind of distinct feature, while the 3D ones largely just roll on and on in every direction. That works well in an action game but in a puzzle game it ends up feeling like looking for a correct sequence of needles in a haystack.
Funny coincidence: I've been half- watching a friend do a completionist run of Twilight Princess, because I'd never played anything other than OoT and apparently missed out on the best waifu in the series.
The actual dungeon puzzles don't seem awful, at least compared to my memories of the OoT water temple, but the side quests are ridiculous.
Huge open world to explore? Sure. But needing to fly a chicken to revisit a specific hidden ledge, at night, only after you can control your wolf transformation and have talked to a specific NPC in a subbasement on the other side of the world... Yeah, that gets a bit much. Playing it blind would require searching every inch of the world about 10 times over.
I can imagine it would get annoying to play if you're not as obsessive as my friend, but Midna's ass covereth as many sins as it inspireth new ones.
I haven't played Twilight Princess, but looking up Midna on Google Images gives me a disturbing possibility: you like weird goblin looking things.
I was pretty disturbed when it was revealed that my former progressive college acquaintances (I think everyone screenshotted is either nonbinary or trans now) vocally expressed their support for some image in the manga where Link is embracing the little fucked up imp thing in a sexual manner.
Twilight Princess is great, but yeah the Midna thing with some of the fans is hella weird. She does tell you the whole time that the imp form isn't what she normally looks like. And when you do finally see her with the curse broken, she is a fairly normal (for a fantasy setting) young woman. But generally you don't see the fans gushing over the real Midna, it's always her imp form.
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