One Down... 59,999 to Go!

How on Earth did Nintendo ever expect anyone to beat the first Zelda game without spending 99 cents a minute on the Nintendo Hotline (with your parents permission of course). On top of that... how the Hell did I ever do it?

I actually remember the first time I beat it because it was the first video game I ever "beat". It was totally awesome. I vaguely remember my mom being pissed because I stayed inside all day on a summer day to finish the last level. I was totally in awe, as if there should be some further reward for BEATING A NINTENDO GAME aside from a scrolling screen of text or two and then the words "The End". The real question though, is how the hell did I do it?

First think about this compared to most of today's games. Ummm... Lets see... what have I played recently? It's not the greatest example but it still follows most of the current game trends; I played Portal about a month ago for the first time. In that game the first few levels are there to orient you with how the game works... shoot this hole thing here, you'll go through it and end up there. From there on the whole thing is pretty linear... "No seriously shoot THAT portal HERE, then shoot the other one HERE! I SWEAR! It'll get you where you need to go! (BTW the cake is lie)" Three hours later I was done. I'll admit I did have to use GameFAQs for one puzzle, but aside from that the "hardest most mind boggling game ever" (as it had been hyped up to me) proved nothing but a fun physics toy that I was done with in one evening. Most of that was due to the fact that the whole thing is pretty damn linear and straightforward even with all the physics mind-fucks thrown in. That and I'm 23 years old. I can follow directions, even if they're subtle. A picture of a dude falling out of one portal into another to gain momentum at the start of the level means, that's what I'm gonna have'ta do to pass the damn level!

Now... Let's go back to another time called "1991 or so" where a precocious five year old was plopped down in the middle of a seemingly massive world with absolutely no directions and basically told, "figure that shit out!" That world was called Hyrule and the game was Zelda. Months and months, possibly years later... I don't remember when, but somehow I beat it before the internet existed. No internet. No directions. No Nintendo Power. No nothing... except for a tattered overworld map that may have shown entrance locations for the nine dungeons and nothing more that I remember coming with the game. I'm not sure if that actually existed or I'm making it up. Can someone confirm that for me?

To give you an idea of the sheer difficulty of this game lets take this scenario... My sister recently bought me the original Zelda for Nintendo Wii on virtual console. I'm currently blowing my way through it to reorient myself and then I will try to take on the secret second quest that I still to this day, two decades after the games release, have not beaten. Everything was going all right until I got to the seventh level and you go to a room which you can not pass and are faced only with a single Moblin (or whatever they're called) saying "grumble grumble". Oh shit! I forgot to get the meat, an item which only has one use in the whole game, you put it in front of this guy in this one dungeon to advance. For the life of me I could not remember which store it was in, and some of the stores are hidden under rocks, bushes, and bad guys that you either have to bomb, set on fire, or push to find. This item is sold in one of those stores. Well, after about ten minutes of globe trotting I remembered it's in the same store as the Blue Ring. Simple enough. I go and buy it, give it to the guy, and I'm moving right along.

Now lets think of that scenario from the perspective of the five year old who has never played this game, lives in a time when the internet does not exist, and can barely read, let alone make sense of what this monster thing means by "grumble grumble". To really blow your minds, consider the scope of this game. That item, should the dumb kid be able to figure out that the monster is indeed asking for something to eat, is sold in one of those hidden shops I mentioned earlier.

The way older games worked is that each screen was tiled and active object that could be affected were called sprites. Generally a sprite was either a character that moved, something that could be moved or acted upon in some way, or designated a border which can not be passed. In Zelda each screen of the overworld is about 20 tiles wide by 16 tiles high. This means that each screen of the game has about 320 tiles on it which could contain sprites. Of those sprite containing tiles lets say about half of them on each screen (give or take) are on a border or out in the open so that they can be pushed, blown up, or lit on fire by Link. And before I go on, here's another kicker; it wasn't until the third Zelda game that surfaces with secrets behind or under them were cracked or altered in some way to give you visual hints. These things were 100% hidden. There were no hints whatsoever to tell you "hey, bomb this wall!" So anyway, now we're down to 160 potentially active tiles per screen. But the overworld map is 24X18 screens so... now we have somewhere in the area of 69,000 tiles that maintain sprites that may or may not have secrets hidden under them that you may or may not to get to, to obtain an item that you may or may not have to feed to some monster, who then may or may not let you pass and complete the dungeon you've been stuck on for days. And the only clue, direction, hint, whatever you want to call it, that you have is "grumble grumble".

What the fuck?!

Before I go on... for those of you who have lived under a rock for the past twenty-two years and never played this game, here's the map I'm talking about:

Legend of Zelda Overworld Map

Now, the Angry Video Game Nerd recently had a gripe about a simillar issue with the game "Milon's Secret Castle" (yup, here comes another link... no embedable video for this one):

AVGN takes on Milon's Secret Castle

So in my honest opinion, the odds of finding what you need in Zelda seem way more stacked against you then they are in Milon's... however, I must admit that I didn't make it past those first two door's he mentions in that video in MSC at about the same age when I somehow plowed all the way through the original Zelda... it's a mystery I've yet to figure out.

So all this ranting and the original question still remains... How in the hell did I ever beat this game?!

All I really know is that the Zelda series is either the best or worst game series ever created. There's no grey area there... but I'll continue giving them my money because the bastards have had me mesmerized for damn near my entire life.