Twilight Princess was a dark Zelda. It was my least favorite console Zelda although still great. I feel as though a dark Zelda could be amazing, but it needs to have more lively and interesting towns than TP did, AND it needs to have the contrast of happy and sad. By this I mean it cannot be dark 24/7. Sadness and despair don't set in as heavy if the world feels like that all the time. I feel as though Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker did this really well. Especially Ocarina of Time. The world seems happy and relatively at peace as a kid, but when years pass the world just goes to hell and the feeling is ominous.
NaveedLife
Yes, because Link should be some wisecracking, angsty womanising teenager. Splattered in blood and constantly blurring the lines between good and evil.
Yes, lets make zelda dark and gritty, OWAIT we already did that with Twighlight Princess. And what was the end result? A souless game with a chronic identity crisis. The only reason the game was made like that is because GCN fans' wanted their own 'GTA', to proove nintendo wasn't kiddy. But just Like GTA4 everyone is singing it's praises at firt, but fast forward 2 years and everyone is agreement that they're both well crafted pieces of coal.
You do gritty reboots, you take out the charm. Hey you might get some good in return as Warrior Within, but both games are completely immemorable without the charm.
Zelda needs evolution, not revolution. Stick with the mechanics from WW with a few additions; have a fleshed out storyline, elongated yet meaningful sidequests, and a more content filled overworld jam packed with charming and funny characters. Thats what the story needs, not cross-genre bullsh*t, if you want it to have other games mechanics, why not just appreciate those games instead?
YoYo278
Nice posts, I agree.
I especially agree with NaveedLife's take on contrast, especially when we're talking about a series like Zelda. We're not talking about Deus Ex here, where the gritty feel is there for obvious reasons throughout the whole game and it works, the Zelda universe on the other hand functions in a different manner.
The environment in the Zelda series is a very important element in the game, it's vibrant and alive, always changing, in a sense, it bears just as much of an importance as character development and in fact the games environment follows that exact pattern.
You also see this in Majora's Mask--the shaking of the earth becoming more violent as the last day draws near, bad weather, or the desertion of the population on the last day, when just two days ago, Clocktown was filled with rapture. These are the sort of details that makes Zelda and other games that follow this formula special. People have a habbit of just categorizing this sorts of games as kiddy, but they sometimes have no idea how much thought and detail was put into these games... the sort of detail that makes you think about the possibilities of the medium. Detail that you can't find even in favorites like Shadow of the Colossus for instance, where the world is indeed artistically beautiful, but it's also static and purposefully dead.
Twilight for instance was missing this. The world was already plunged in darkness and had very little development to it outside of just characterization, I still find that the game missed a lot of what the series were building on. I agree with YoYo, not to bring out the whole TP hate thing, but while I found the game to be far from dead, it just didn't have the living soul to me that other games in the series had.
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