The Top 9 Ways The Legend of Zelda Changed Gaming FOREVER!

The year is 1986,
and an unsuspecting world is about to be changed forever.
Nintendo, a rapidly growing company
in the video game industry has just released
a new game in Japan called The Legend of Zelda
for its Famicom Disk System and it's gaining notoriety fast.
In just one short year,
the company will release the game to the western world
on the Nintendo Entertainment System,
unknowingly changing life as we know for good.
Three decades later, the world is a much different place
but the Zelda franchise remains strong.
With a new instalment just around the corner,
having influenced the industry in many ways
throughout its lifetime,
people around the world owe their childhoods
and even careers to the many games
in The Legend of Zelda series.
But in what ways did the franchise
really change gaming as we know it?
Grab those wooden swords and shields, kiddos,
'cause we're venturing on our way
through nine ways The Legend of Zelda franchise
changed gaming forever.
Number nine, saving.
This first one may be obvious to some
but its impact on the gaming industry
was the most useful
out of all the other points on our list.
I'll admit it isn't the most super glamorous,
so we're starting off with it, save files.
If you didn't know pre Legend of Zelda,
there wasn't really much way of saving games on consoles.
The check just didn't exist.
Games are made to be played in one sitting
and would maybe track, you know, some high scores.
If you wanted to pick up where you left off,
well, then you better hope your parents didn't mind
letting you leave the console running for hours unattended
or pray the game you're playing had those long level codes
so that you could just jot them down
in your handy-dandy notebook.
But thankfully, the innovators over at good old Nintendo
upended everything everyone knew
by having a small amount of battery powered RAM
that could preserve progress.
It's not the most elegant solution,
I know, the battery will die out
without some serious maintenance.
And once it's gone, you don't just lose your save
but the ability to save.
Still it reshaped how we could design games and challenges
when we didn't need to start from scratch.
Number eight, silent protagonist in a talkative world.
Link may not be the most talkative video game protagonist
ever created but he was one of the first to be relatable.
The best part is that he did so without saying a word.
Silent protagonists are all over the place,
especially in Nintendo games.
An important quirk with Link, however,
is that the world talks to him.
Samus and Mario don't speak
but there's almost no dialogue or text in any of those games.
Link lives in a world with people
going about their lives.
With everyone else having some amount of personality,
it's easy to fit our own lives into Link
and feel like his adventures are our adventures.
The fact that Link still doesn't speak after 30 years,
further solidifies Nintendo intent
on making his adventures
less about him and more about the player.
Even with a voice-acted Zelda coming out,
we're still not going to see Link speak.
This gives players the ability to internalise
what they feel his responses would be.
Role-playing as the young adventurer,
thus forcing them to relate to him
as if they are him because they are on the inside.
And I know that Link did speak in both the CDI games
and his own cartoon,
but maybe, that's part of the reason
both of those are terrible.
Link works well as a character because he's you
or he's you if you were a young elf boy.
Number seven, an expansive world with expansive lore.
Let's chat about the story for a minute.
The Legend of Zelda franchise is brimming with stuff
and its focus on world building
has been an inspiration to the industry.
Sure, the first two games like other games of its time
weren't full of backstory or any story
beside save the princess,
but what those games did do is set up the world of players
that many generations would come to love.
With the release of A Link To The Past in 1991
and Ocarina of Time several years later,
it was clear that Hyrule and its residents
had a lot of stuff going on.
It was these games that got gamers obsessed
with the storyline of Zelda, and for a while,
it was the obsession that plagued Nintendo
and with each release, players wanted to know
where it fit into the Zelda timeline.
But it wasn't until 2011 that Nintendo released
an official timeline which revealed
there are multiple timelines in the Zelda universe.
Now, the Legend of Zelda wasn't the first
to create an extensive story spanning multiple instalments,
but it no doubt pushed the envelope
and helped inspire other games to do the same.
Number six, side objectives.
Lots of games in the era of the NES had optional secrets,
everything from wall chickens in Castlevania
to Warp Whistles in Mario Brothers 3.
The Legend of Zelda didn't invent optional content
but it did help popularise it.
Even in the first title, there were goodies
that you never needed to complete the game
but were a boon in your quest.
You could get a raft to get hard pieces
and you could find secret caves of the guy
who just gave you money.
And some of these weren't hidden.
They just demanded you come back when you had what you needed.
Take the raft example, you could see across the water
and you knew you wanted to get there
but you wouldn't be able to unless you got the raft.
Then you could backtrack and claim your rewards.
It breathes a little more life into the world
by giving you optional content.
Another great example of this is the quest for Biggoron's sword
in Ocarina of Time.
After completing a bunch of side quests
that had nothing to do with the game's main story,
you are rewarded with a very strong weapon
that is super useful
but not necessary to complete the game.
Stuff like this give the world of Hyrule more depth
and it made it worth exploring.
And this way of getting players to venture beyond the main story
has continued throughout the Zelda franchises.
Number five, control over the world.
After A Link To The Past, almost every game in the series,
even the spin-offs has something in common.
Link could control something about the world.
The first two Zelda games introduced us to a new world
with new creatures to meet and or kill.
But even the most imaginative worlds gets old.
What? You don't believe me?
I mean, look at all the re-hashing
of Tolkien's world.
Dwarves dig, elves live in trees,
yada-yada-yada, yes, I know, we've all been there before.
So when we get to game three, A Link To The Past,
when we've seen a lot of the same enemies and people,
developers decided to re-contextualise
the world as we knew it.
It's still Hyrule but now there's a dark world
with creepier and stranger inhabitants.
Later games will have you travel through time,
change the seasons, and slipped into
alternative dimensions through cracks in reality.
And just when we've thought we've seen everything
there is to Hyrule, we get another way to play with it.
With A Link To The Past, Nintendo set a new standard
for themselves in gaming.
It wasn't enough anymore to just give players a world to explore,
you also had to give them the tools to alter it.
Number four is Z-targeting.
Next on our list, we're going to narrow things down
to Ocarina of Time's control scheme.
In the young days of 3D games,
controls were often finicky and clunky
which made them frustrating for transitioning gamers.
And if you've played a lot of games at this time,
you saw this happen.
I mean, come on, remember Castlevania 64?
Probably not, because it was awful.
We can think a single feature
for Ocarina's next level controls
and that's Z or lock-on targeting.
This is the feature that made combat in Ocarina
not only tolerable but enjoyable.
Pressing a button would let the player
set sights on a specific enemy,
so instead of having to fumble around with the camera,
they could focus on the battle at hand.
This addition laid the path for how real-time combat
in a 3D environment should be handled for years.
Even if you think Ocarina shows its age,
consider that this single mechanic is still used in games
like Dark Souls today.
Number three, the music.
Nintendo has one of the largest libraries
of memorable medleys in the gaming industry.
And part of the reason is The Legend of Zelda.
Even from game one, we could see more wonderful melodies.
Forget The Legend of Zelda for a minute.
I want to talk about the legend of Koji Kondo,
the composer on all of these games.
Even if you've never played the original Legend of Zelda,
you know a lot of the music in this game.
Why? Because they've used it over and over again.
But even if they keep using the same enduring melodies,
the Legend of Zelda didn't rest on its laurels.
The original game had strong melody
but with A Link To The Past,
we could see how that melody
would become a sweeping composition,
featuring different instruments and a percussion track.
The emotional parts got a little bit more emotional,
and the intense parts got a little more intense.
Zelda wasn't the only game to try and do more with sound,
but they were right there at the forefront
proving that games were a medium
that could convey a full fantasy saga
with a soundtrack to match.
Number two, puzzles.
The second to last spot on the list
goes to all Zelda games and their continued support
of the good old-fashioned dungeon puzzle.
Dungeons and adventure games in general
can be boiled down to a maze
or room after room of large amounts of enemies,
but the Zelda franchise tends to have a fair balance
of figuring out where to go, fighting off enemies,
and taking a moment to look around
and figure out what you have to do next.
What makes Zelda puzzles so good in my eyes
is their constant incorporation of items
you found on your quest.
Puzzles show you how you've grown over your journey
and all of the dungeons
and in one of the greatest feeling kinds of puzzles,
the boss fight, where the items you get in the dungeon
becomes the beast's downfall.
But how did this mastery of design
affect the world of video games?
Well, to start, you could look at
all the action adventure games
to incorporate puzzles that followed Zelda.
Secret of Mana, Jak and Daxter, Okami, and Darksiders,
I mean, just to name a few,
I'm not saying that without Zelda
the genre wouldn't exist
but the series' success definitely spawn some interest.
Number one, over worlds, towns, and dungeons.
It's easy to look back at the NES era
as one big amalgamation of games.
But it turns out the games released years apart
inspired each other.
The Legend of Zelda came out pretty early
and despite the fact that most people remember it
as an adventure game,
it also helped inspire the over world
and dungeon dichotomy that would come to define RPGs.
Think of tap down RPGs,
you explore a big open area with several locations
that contain either towns or dungeons,
it's the bread and butter of early final fantasy games.
But The Legend of Zelda and The Legend of Zelda 2
which featured towns in an over world
where it had both Final Fantasy 1
and Dragon Warrior and no doubt inspired those games.
The Legend of Zelda will always have a lasting legacy
in the adventure games genre.
But some of its greatest contributions
will be linked to RPGs.
Well, there you have it, nine ways
The Legend of Zelda changed gaming forever.
For franchises like this, it's tough to touch
upon everything it's done for the industry.
So if you have some opinions
or you wanna expand upon some of ours,
feel free to post in the comments below.
And as we approach the release of Breath of The Wild,
make sure to be on the lookout
for some more Zelda inspired videos.
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The Top 9 Ways The Legend of Zelda Changed Gaming FOREVER! | @ArcadeCloud

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