In the original Zelda, the closest thing to a block puzzle consisted of pushing a single block one space. In effect, it’s just a hidden switch; not a puzzle-as-such. A secret trigger. The same as the book or andiron you move to open the staircase behind the bookshelf in the old mansion. Whoa, you think. Who knew that was there.

This is how Zelda works: obfuscation. Any object might hold any amount of potential. You’re never told you can bomb walls in the dungeons — and usually you don’t need to. Yet if you do, you can often make shortcuts or find secret areas. No one tells you you can push against the walls, in the second quest, to phase through. It’s just another hidden quality.

No one tells you you can burn bushes, or bomb rocks. No one tells you you can move blocks. No one tells you about those warp staircases. Or that the statues come alive when you touch them. Hell, is there a reason those stones look like turtles?

This all gives the game environment a sense of mystery and vitality. You have the surface: walls, trees, cliff faces. And then you have another level, where you’re never quite sure what’s possible and what isn’t. Anything could, hypothetically, mean anything. Anything could be anywhere.

That’s where the awe and wonder come from: this sense of endless possibility, once you start making discoveries. Once you get a taste of the world’s hidden logic. It all feels magical. You feel like maybe, just maybe if you’re clever enough, you’ll find something, some secret no one else has ever seen before. I had dreams about this stuff. About a whole other world I’d find, by burning just the right bush.

And the reason this all works, again, is that the world doesn’t feel set out for the player. Beyond the forbidding nature of the overworld — where the game sets barriers just out of difficulty; you don’t want to stray too far, lest you find yourself in real trouble — there’s this whole second layer. It’s totally hidden. If you find it, it’s your own doing. It’s up to you to make of it what you will.

The dungeons don’t exist for the player to go through. They don’t have special puzzles set out in a special order, so that the player can solve them and take all of the dungeon’s treasure and kill all of the monsters. They’re not tests. They’re just there. Because they’ve always been there. Relics of some earlier time, that we can’t know about. They’re meant to be dangerous. Dank, abandoned holes in the ground where monsters have come to lurk. Maybe if you survive you can pull something neat out of there — just because no one else has been stupid enough to enter in centuries. That’s up to you, though.

And so on. This is the quality that I associate with Zelda. It’s what attracts me to the game, from the gold cartride to the music at the title screen, to that cave in the first screen where you pick up your first item — your sword — to Spectacle Rock, to the bizarre hints the old men give, to that place on the upper-right, where you have to climb up through the rocks, to “IT’S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY”, to the way the Power Bracelet is just sitting there, under that suit of armor, right in the open.

You just never know.

It’s what makes it more than just a series of gameplay mechanisms and items and characters. Which is what the series has been since the third game, to one extent or another.

The whole lock-and-key exploration thing, in particular, is a problem. If not inherently, then at least in the approach that we’ve come to accept.

You must acquire tools to expand your range!

…

um.

That’s not what I get out of Zelda. I mean. Technically, yeah, it is a mechanism in the original structure. To say it’s a focus of the game, though, and inherently enjoyable, is kind of like saying… oh, I don’t know.

You’re tarnishing something, with that attitude. Mistaking a process for a purpose. Ritual for meaning.

Maybe it’ll help to break down the tools in the original game, and how they relate to the game’s progression. Offhand, the ladder and the raft are the only two items I can recall which are immediately… practical, in this sense. In that they inherently open new territory. And compared to the way these mechanisms are used in other games, they’re relatively tame.

There are only a couple of docks in the game where the raft may be used. And you don’t really know what the docks are for. You don’t see any destination. You don’t think “Gee, I wish I had a raft so I could get over there…” You don’t even know what’s over there. Or realize you could get there over the water. It doesn’t occur to you. Later you find a raft, and you start to wonder what to do with the thing. You go to the dock, and you’re magically carried away to a place you have never seen before. It all works on a similar hidden level to what I was talking about before. The raft kind of unlocks a hidden purpose — much as the flute does, especially in the second quest.

And the ladder — well. It’s automatic, in a similar way though on a smaller scale. It isn’t dramatic at all; it’s just practical. Hell, a ladder isn’t even perhaps an ideal item for its use in the game: for bridging gaps. It’s just, it works. The game doesn’t make a big deal of it. It’s just — “oh, you know, you can use this to cross gaps now.”

I don’t know that there are too many places where the player just can’t progress without a ladder. Most of the map, most of the dungeons are open either way. Sometimes, though, there are gaps. The player is used to it. He isn’t waiting for a way to bridge them. He just accepts that he isn’t able to cross them. The game makes the barriers clear enough.

And after he gets the ladder, he still can’t — not unless the gaps are very narrow.

The tools, when they come about, present themselves as useful or wondrous rather than as neccessary. (In truth, you do need them; that isn’t the immediate concern, though.) In future games, you don’t have that. You just expect the items. You never really appreciate them, for how handy they can be, for the extra levels they bring to the experience, because you NEED them to progress.

It sounds paradoxical in a way; you never really value them, because they’re too precious. Precious to the point where they’re obstacles because you don’t have them. And when you find them, you don’t think “hey, neat!”: you think “Oh god, finally.” Or, worse: “Oh, there it is. Now I can do x.”

Ugh.

How logical. How… insensitive.

The deal is — gameplay mechanics aren’t interesting or fun just because they exist. They exist to solve some kind of problem. That problem should usually have some emotional component, or consideration — since, ultimately, the goal of a videogame is to engage, to affect the player.

The player is not engaged, not affected, implicitly because he has a task and is told to complete it: there’s a barrier; now find a way across! Keep expanding! Affecting the player is a more subtle, more indirect process. The more mechanical, the more mathematical your design, the more artificial it feels. The more the player feels like he’s just being taken for a ride (in one sense or another), rather than having a human experience of some sort.

I think maybe the most interesting items in Zelda are the ones that don’t need to be there. The magic wand — there’s no reason for it, except that it’s special. It serves no purpose in the quest, lending that much more reality to the items which do serve a purpose. It’s more plausible that they’re not just there because the player will need them. It feels more like luck that the player can find a use for them.

And hell, there’s even a magic book — even more useless than the wand, as it serves no purpose but to add a second, unneeded function to the original, unneded function. Yet it’s in another dungeon, as another treasure linked to a previous treasure. These were treasures to someone, and now they’re treasures to Link, and the player.

The boomerang and magical boomerang are helpful, but never needed. The magical one, especially; it’s just another upgrade. And heck, they’re not even treasures in an official sense; you just pick them up from felled opponents. You MAKE them treasures.

Would the game not be as interesting if I actually needed all of this crap? I think that is so. I feel it is so. It’s special because it’s special to ME; not because I need it. I need my latch keys and my state ID, but they’re not special to me. What I consider treasures are the things which help me, which make my life more full — yet which I could, technically, function without.

I could survive without good food. That makes it all the easier to appreciate. I could survive without what people I care about (and they might not always be there for me); that makes me care about them. When you’re young, you don’t give a huge damn about your parents because you need them to survive. When you’re a teenager, they even become an obstacle for that same reason. When you’re older, and you don’t depend on them anymore, you can learn to appreciate them as people instead of as parents.

You see what I’m saying?