Zelda, Metroid, and the Meaning of Life
Ignore this video, I’m just using it here so that this essay will have a header image when I post it.
I guess when it comes down to it, I’ll always be a Nintendo kid. They had the consoles I gravitated towards growing up (because they had Pokémon, you see), and as I get older, I find myself happier with my Switch Lite than I am whenever a friend gives me the opportunity to play around on their PlayStation or Xbox. While both those systems have historically been home to some games and series that I truly adore (Portal 2, Shadow of the Colossus, and Silent Hill 2, among others, are games that you simply can’t play on a Nintendo system, unfortunately), I have to admit that Nintendo also has my heart when it comes to console exclusives.
Like I’ve emphasized a few times now, when I was growing up, the only video games I actively cared about were Pokémon and Tony Hawk games. But for some reason, when the pandemic caused me to reconsider video games as a potential hobby, I cast back through my memories of playing games at my friends’ houses growing up and it occurred to me that I’d actually played a ton of games from The Legend of Zelda series (and, when my family had a Wii, Twilight Princess was one of the few non-Pokémon or Dragon Ball Z-related titles we owned). In my mind at the time, I’m sure my thought process was something like, “Well this ain’t Pokémon, but it’ll have to do,” but lately it seems like those early Zelda experiences planted a Deku seed within me that only now has been blooming to full fruition.
In the process of playing Zelda and learning more about its development history, I also started to dip my toes into the Metroid games— and it turns out Metroid is a series just as deep and rich as the Zelda games, both thematically and mechanically. Together, the two series have become integrated into my life in ways that I didn’t think were possible for things that I didn’t discover in my adolescence. I think it’s pretty safe to say that The Legend of Zelda and the 2D Metroid games have become my favorite game series, and I wanna talk about them here, at length, so strap in.
First, some general notes. Originally, I wanted to talk about Zelda almost exclusively, with perhaps a sidebar about the Metroid series, but since the latter just kept coming up in my thoughts, and since I think both series have some interesting commonalities, I’m gonna be weaving together some thoughts about both, although overall this is probably still mostly about Zelda. I never thought I’d say this, but regretfully, I do not own a Wii U, which unfortunately has boxed me out of the easiest and most accessible ways to own several games in either series. I only want to talk about the games with which I’ve had tactile experience, so for full transparency, here’s a handy little reference list:
GAMES WHICH I OWN & HAVE PLAYED
The Legend of Zelda (1987, NES)
Metroid (1987, NES)
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1988, NES)
Metroid II: The Return of Samus (1991, Game Boy)
A Link to the Past (1992, Super Nintendo)
Super Metroid (1994, Super Nintendo)
Link’s Awakening DX (1998, Game Boy Color)
Ocarina of Time (2011, 3DS remake)
Majora’s Mask (2015, 3DS remake)
Breath of the Wild (2017, Switch)
Metroid Dread (2021, Switch)
GAMES WHICH I HAVE PLAYED, BUT DO NOT CURRENTLY OWN
The Wind Waker (2003, GameCube)
The Minish Cap (2005, Game Boy Advance)
Twilight Princess (2006, Wii)
GAMES WHICH I OWN, BUT HAVE NOT YET PLAYED
Oracle of Seasons (2001, Game Boy Color)
Oracle of Ages (2001, Game Boy Color)
GAMES WHICH I DO NOT OWN AND HAVEN’T PLAYED
Metroid Fusion (2002, Game Boy Advance)
Metroid Prime series (2002-2007, GameCube/Wii)
Four Swords (2002, Game Boy Advance)
Four Swords Adventures (2004, GameCube)
Metroid: Zero Mission (2004, Game Boy Advance)
Phantom Hourglass (2007, Nintendo DS)
Spirit Tracks (2009, Nintendo DS)
Skyward Sword (2011, Wii U)
A Link Between Worlds (2013, 3DS)
Tri Force Heroes (2015, 3DS)
Metroid: Samus Returns (2017, 3DS)
Got it? Cool.
THE ZELDA/METROID CONNECTION
Aside from the fact that both series are Nintendo exclusives with diehard fanbases, what really connects these two series? There are a few superficial similarities: both series received early sequels on the Game Boy that were absolute bops; both series reached medium-defining apexes on the Super Nintendo (my favorite console of all time, natch— shout-out EarthBound!); both series redefined themselves in the 3D era to overwhelmingly warm reception; and both recently released critically-acclaimed mainline entries on the Switch that are occasionally regarded as the best games in each series.
But the fact remains that on the surface level, they are extremely different. The Legend of Zelda is an action/adventure series with elements of dungeon-crawling and hack-and-slash RPGs (series creator Shigeru Miyamoto classifies the series as “real-time adventure” games, claiming he doesn’t like to get bogged down in numbers and stats); Metroid is a platforming series with entries that toggle between 2D side-scrolling and first-person shooting.
Additionally, the atmospheres that each series attempts to evoke are, on a fundamental level, diametrically opposed to each other. The Legend of Zelda is high fantasy, filled with swords, shields, magic, and prophecies; particularly as the series goes on, there is an exceptional amount of emphasis placed on interacting and developing relationships with NPCs, which helps make the medieval land of Hyrule (or the various other locales that Link explores throughout the series) feel like it is teeming with life and opportunity.
Metroid is over on the opposite end of the speculative fiction spectrum, with both feet placed firmly in science fiction. As Samus Aran, the player makes their way through dead, empty worlds, fighting aggressive aliens with only themselves to rely on. The overall sensation is one of hostile, oppressive loneliness and isolation, and this is by design.
The world of The Legend of Zelda was inspired by Tolkien, Peter Pan, and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The world of Metroid was inspired by the Alien series: the dread and dark, quiet solitude of the Ridley Scott original; the shoot-your-way-out-of-the-horror mentality of the James Cameron sequel; the surrealistic creature designs of HR Giger.
But when you look at the original NES iterations of both games, the connection makes sense. Famously, the inspiration for the first Zelda game struck Miyamoto while he was designing the whimsical Super Mario Bros. He wanted to push beyond the simple “keep going right” ethos we now associate with early Nintendo games and in the process crafted the first of what modern audiences think of as an open-world games, keeping in mind his experiences as a boy exploring the forests and caves of Sonobe, Japan. The massive scope of what became the original map of Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda required the invention of battery-saving on the cartridge itself so that players could fully experience Hyrule without starting the game over each time it booted up or getting bogged down in a laborious password system.
While the original Metroid game is perhaps the poster child for “laborious password system,” it, too, represented an advancement far beyond the simplistic level progression that was then the standard in game design. While Miyamoto was the lynchpin of early Nintendo game design, Metroid was spearheaded by Nintendo’s Research & Development 1 arm, and heavily guided by producer Gunpei Yokoi in particular; you have Yokoi to thank for the invention of handheld gaming as we know it, since he created both the Game & Watch and the Game Boy, but he also invented the goddamn D-pad, so that’s the level of innovation we’re dealing with here. The interconnected boxes within Metroid represented the platforming mentality of Mario married to the open world of Zelda, and the gated progression required players to think much, much harder about how they moved through the world and how they kept track of where they were.
Modern fans of both series are quick to point out how poorly the original NES iterations of Zelda and Metroid have aged, but because I’m a freak, I like to put myself as much in the shoes of the original players as possible. The original Zelda, supposedly, is far too cryptic and open-ended for modern players. While the original Zelda manual helps a lot with guidance in the early going of the game, the in-game map is pretty bare-bones. With Metroid, the single biggest complaint is that there is no map to speak of, and since the endless hallways of the planet Zebes look remarkably samey, this can lead to lots of frustration (particularly since every time you die, you automatically restart with your initial levels of health and, while you keep the base power-ups you’ve gathered throughout the game, you have to farm ammo to get yourself back to where you were at before your demise).
The answer to both these problems, without using the internet, is to go analog. With Zelda, if you can get your hands on the original game manual or print it out, there is a full map of Hyrule that you can tack up on your wall and mark important locations to cross-reference with the in-game map. With Metroid, good old graphing paper is your friend, and you can grid out your own rudimentary version of the game’s map. Both tactics, which I can see being ungodly annoying to most, are incredibly immersive and, to me, represent the central pleasure which ties both games and, ultimately, both series together: the simple, childlike joy of exploration.
EMO KIDS, NOSTALGIA, & COMING-OF-AGE
One thing that’s struck me in recent months while getting into both of these series is how much emo kids fucking love them, especially The Legend of Zelda. Because this is You Don’t Need Maps, you know I gotta talk about that shit, and do a little armchair psychoanalysis about why emo kids are predisposed to these games while I’m at it.
Emo is a genre based on, if not whimsy, then wistfulness; there is a fundamental nostalgia at the heart of the music, and in my mind, the definitive albums of the form— Rites of Spring, Embrace, Diary, Nothing Feels Good, Clarity, Some Kind of Cadwallader, Home Like NoPlace Is There, and so on— evoke a sense of instant nostalgia that places the listener in a specific headspace. It’s hard to articulate in tangible terms, but I would say that it’s the union of melancholy and discovery. My most vivid memories of childhood are tinged with both of those feelings— the joy of breaking open the boundaries of the world as I previously knew it, the sadness of knowing that I’ve left behind a small piece of childhood innocence in the process, and the bittersweet spot where those two emotions meet. That is the space in which both The Legend of Zelda and 2D Metroid games thrive.
Think of the definitive, epochal titles in Zelda— they are all coming-of-age stories, and many are preternaturally concerned with the passage of time. The story of the original, told mostly wordlessly, is that of a ten-year-old boy thrust into circumstances far beyond his comprehension, and slowly but surely rising to the occasion. Ocarina of Time is about a boy whose childhood is stolen from him so that he can become the hero his world needs, and concludes with him being given the opportunity to reclaim that childhood, reintegrating it with the adulthood he’s already experienced in order to become a whole person.
The Wind Waker (much like the Gen 3 Pokémon games of the same era) wraps a subtle undercurrent of commentary about environmentalism and climate change into a bildungsroman narrative about a child’s dedication to family, and concludes with Link burying his sword into Ganon’s head in a jarring juxtaposition between the cel-shaded cartoon aesthetic and the dark reality of the game’s world. Breath of the Wild is built entirely around the idea of the player being given the choice of how much to participate in the narrative, and just about everyone who has ever played that game eventually made the choice to fight the Ganon-as-eldritch-monstrosity in the end, making explicit the implied connection between becoming an adult and choosing to take the responsibility to act like one.
Even the Zelda titles that are less in-your-face with this reading play heavily with elements of these themes and dichotomies. A Link to the Past and Twilight Princess are both predicated upon contrasts between “light worlds” and “dark worlds”— contrasts between naivety and wickedness— and suggest that maturity lies in the ability to reconcile the two realities. My two favorite games in the series, Link’s Awakening and Majora’s Mask, are at heart about deeply existential moral dilemmas, and both end with a tacit acknowledgment that regardless of if the events of the plot “really” happened, they had an irreversible impact on Link’s development as a person. (More on those later.) Even the black sheep of the series, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, introduces the character of Dark Link, asking the player to do battle with their own worst impulses and further exploring the way that maturity forces one to grapple with the capacity for moral actions and immoral actions that constantly exists within us all.
Although emo’s relationship with gender and sexuality has historically been fraught, the genre was founded upon taking a style that was, at the time, coded as “masculine” (hardcore) and applying “feminine”-coded approaches to the expression of emotion and aesthetics to that framework. And, as I’ve written about before, emo has been steadily moving in a direction that is altogether more inclusive in terms of gender and sexuality than ever before.
I don’t care enough to get too much into gender theory and/or queer theory, but as a non-binary person, if I might choose to read Link’s arcs throughout each game as a reclamation of healthy adult masculinity— as a decision to accept the traditionally masculine role within fantasy stories of the sword-wielding, world-saving adventurer, without sacrificing his fundamentally good-hearted urge to help those around him without judgment— then I might also choose to read Samus’s arc throughout the main Metroid titles as the same in terms of femininity.
The reveal at the end of the original Metroid that Samus is a girl was meant to be a shock to the player’s system. Spiritually descended from Alien’s Ellen Ripley, Samus is a hard-boiled bounty hunter who is capable of destroying anything in her path. In Metroid II, Samus is given the task of exterminating an entire population of Metroids, and at the end of the game, she, probably much like the player, is left exhausted by the death and destruction, and makes the conscious choice, as the final Metroid egg hatches, to leave that Metroid alive as it imprints upon her.
Without expressly delving into spoiler territory, this decision— which can be read as a decision to turn her back on her initial role as an amoral bounty-hunter-for-hire and embrace the traditionally feminine role of nurturer and caregiver, again, without sacrificing any of the things that make her a stone-cold badass— results in what is, in my opinion, one of the most emotionally affecting moments in video game history by the end of Super Metroid. (I say this as someone who has played Silent Hill 2 and The Last of Us, by the way, and only the former comes close to the gravitas of the aforementioned moment.)
As far as my own personal experience is concerned, being non-binary is about the embrace of the best elements of the outdated concepts that we use to denote “man” and “woman”; in that regard, the synthesis of Link and Samus is, as corny as it sounds, something that I kind of aspire to.
To tie it back to the themes of coming-of-age, the 2D Metroid games chart a similar path of forward progression as Samus starts out completely underpowered and slowly becomes completely unstoppable as she explores the terrain of the abandoned planets. A combination of environmental storytelling, expert game design that relies on the naturalistic impulse of the player and a constantly satisfying drip-feed of new abilities, and excellent, challenging boss fights all contribute to a growing sense of empowerment and confidence on the part of the player as the massive, daunting, empty worlds become known to them like the back of their hand. Exploration → discovery → maturity. (The implied melancholy comes from the aforementioned loneliness, environmental storytelling, and ludic plot elements like the slow erosion of your will to kill throughout Metroid II.)
Like finding your favorite new underground emo band, Zelda and Metroid are at their best when they embrace the joy of discovery without forgetting— nay, by rewarding— the innocent, childlike curiosity that brought us there. The navigation-puzzle-based gameplay of Metroid’s labyrinths and Zelda’s dungeons both excel at what game designers call “finding the flow state”— giving the player a constant level of satisfying challenge without frustrating them to the point of quitting— by simply indulging the fundamentally childlike joy of solving puzzles. If you don’t believe me, think of the most satisfying musical cues in gaming: the twinkly theme that plays when Link figures out how to open the next door, and the understated triumph of the tones that appear, oh-so-sparsely, when Samus finds a new power-up. They give me the same charge as when I hear a new emo or DIY album that truly excites me (say, dltzk’s Frailty). And, like those albums, they ignite that same sense of instant nostalgia.
ZELDA, METROID, & HORROR
You best believe I’m not gonna let this newsletter go without talking about horror! Of the two series, Metroid is by far the more obviously horror-influenced on the face of it. Smothering isolation, terrifying alien creatures, constantly worrying about being unprepared for what lies beyond the next corner, and an openly-admitted influence from Alien— Metroid is one of the earliest examples of a game that actually felt “scary,” exacerbated by the eerie, spare sound design. Metroid Dread takes this to its logical conclusion by incorporating survival-horror-influenced stealth sections in which the player is forced to avoid EMMIs, malevolent androids who stalk Samus through claustrophobic corridors and kill her on contact.
In contrast, Zelda feels whimsical and upbeat— or does it? Both the original Zelda and Breath of the Wild are founded on the same sense of free-flowing exploration and never knowing what you’re going to find next. While this provides a sense of breathless adventure, there’s a fear of the unknown there, too, and it’s only emphasized when the player accidentally stumbles into an area that requires vast amounts of resources and experience beyond what they’ve so far accrued. In the context of the series as a whole, there’s also the obvious dark-fantasy-influenced villains Link encounters throughout his quests, from the ReDeads who paralyze him with their haunting stares to the Wallmasters, disembodied hands who pick him up and drop him back at the start of dungeons without warning.
But if we’re to return to my two favorite Zelda titles, Link’s Awakening and Majora’s Mask, the horror is baked directly into the themes of the games themselves. Both are surrealistic tales of existential tragedy and macabre moral dilemmas, despite being leavened with traditional Zelda doses of whimsy and humor (Goombas, alien invasions, etc).
Link’s Awakening opens with Link stranded on the beach of Koholint Island, possessing no memory of how he ended up there. The game follows Link as he obeys the cryptic directions of a talking owl, who tasks him with collecting myriad musical instruments with which to wake the mysterious “Wind Fish.” Inspired by Twin Peaks, Link’s Awakening thrives when the player becomes acquainted with the various denizens of Koholint, all of whom are quirky and charming in their own way, but none of whom can seem to remember how or why they ended up on the island either. This dissonance between the low-key small-town quaint comforts and the growing sense of hallucinatory unease slowly ratchets up over the course of the game until Link finally encounters and fights said “Wind Fish,” who is neither Wind nor Fish but in fact some sort of incomprehensible Lovecraftian entity that constantly shape-shifts in battle, even taking on the form of Ganon at one point in order to psychically torment Link.
The game ends as Link vanquishes the Wind Fish, but there’s a huge twist— the island only exists as the Wind Fish’s dream, and when it is defeated, the island and all its inhabitants slowly disappear into the ether. There’s a fundamental moral ambivalence on the part of the game towards this development, and it’s left to the player to decide if the other characters were imaginary enough to let go of, or if their interactions with Link gave them enough humanity to be regarded as individuals whose lives Link has essentially put to an unceremonious end. It’s uncomfortable, existential, and more than a little tragic, and it’s one of the few games in the series to ask whether Link is justified in his quests.
But the existential tragedy of Link’s Awakening pales in comparison to Majora’s Mask, which has long been regarded as the strangest and darkest entry in the series, if not the video game canon as a whole. Taking place in Termina, a sort of parallel universe to Hyrule, Link is cursed by a mask-wearing Skull Kid, who transforms him into a Deku Scrub. In order to reverse the curse, Link makes a pact with a Happy Mask Salesman, who agrees to help him under the condition that he retrieve the Skull Kid’s mask, in addition to the Ocarina of Time, within three days’ time.
What follows is an absolutely byzantine plot that’s hard to condense into simple terms, but essentially, the Skull Kid’s mask is revealed to be an instrument of Termina’s apocalypse, as the moon slowly approaches the land and you are given but three in-game days (which pass over the course of an hour or so) in order to save everyone. The twist is that you can’t do this, at least not at first, but with the help of the Ocarina of Time, you can warp back to the beginning of the three-day cycle as many times as you need to accomplish everything you can. In the process, you meet and become invested in the stories of many characters, all of whom are dealing with their own personal strife and are reckoning with the coming apocalypse in their own ways. The overall feeling of the game is one of inevitable, impending doom, emphasized every time you look up at the sky and see the malevolent face of the moon looming ever closer.
It’s an ingenious, deep, and mechanically complex game, which has lent itself to as many interpretations as players throughout the years, spawning theories that range from the fascinatingly abstract (the game is about the five stages of grief) to the perversely depressing (Link is actually dead and Termina is purgatory). Even when the player finally manages to figure everything out and achieve the impossible, the sense of triumph is dampened and darkened by all the end-of-days horror you’ve been confronted with throughout your time in Termina.
Beyond specific games, another link (if you’ll excuse the pun) between Zelda, Metroid, and horror is each series’ fascination with monsters (a fascination that I wholeheartedly share). In the case of Zelda, beyond the fiendish fantasy creatures you face off against— ranging from fire-breathing beasts like the Dodongos to creepy-crawly Skulltulas— the player also, over the course of the series, becomes acquainted with a wide variety of curious beings, such as the rock-eating Gorons and the fish-like Zora, all of whom are given a strong sense of biology as well as history and culture. (And lots of them are pretty damn cute!)
Meanwhile, in the case of Metroid, Samus is faced with all sorts of varieties of creatures with which to do battle, from the Space Pirates, who come in a variety of forms from the insect-like to the draconian and are controlled by the horrifying Mother Brain, to the Metroids themselves, which are parasitic jellyfish-like creatures who were initially created as a sort of bioweapon by an ancient race of beings known as the Chozo. But while the series begins with Samus indiscriminately destroying the Metroids, she comes to understand that they are simply creatures like any other, whose powers can be harnessed for good or evil.
Her evolving relationship with the Metroids is the most consistent arc within the games. Her decision to spare the Baby Metroid at the ending of Metroid II reverberates into Super Metroid when (SPOILER ALERT) that Baby Metroid, all grown up, rescues her at the eleventh hour, gifts her the all-powerful Hyper Beam attack, and sacrifices itself so that she can defeat Mother Brain. Then, in Metroid Fusion (which, again, I have not played), she is injected with a vaccine made from cells taken from that Baby Metroid, which makes her part-Metroid— she, and by extension the player, partially become the same species which only a few games ago you were mercilessly exterminating.
(The moral implications of said extermination become more pronounced when the player learns that the parasitic, shape-shifting X organisms that now populate SR388 have thrived as a result of Samus destroying that planet’s Metroid population in Metroid II. Fusion also forces Samus to do battle with SA-X, an X mutation that mimics Samus at full power-suit capacity, echoing the Dark Link motif of Zelda II. I’d really like to play this game!)
Like many of the best horror films that luxuriate in imaginative creature designs— The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Godzilla, Cronenberg’s The Fly— Zelda and Metroid never settle for letting the player see these monsters as simply faceless villains that must be snuffed out of existence. Many of them are dangerous, yes, but there’s an underlying empathy to both series’ approaches which forces the player to ask themselves what it is about these monsters that repels us, and what we can learn from them, whether it be the “don’t fuck with the ecosystem” philosophy that Metroid subtly imparts or the Zelda series’ encouragement to become allies with and learn from the best of the Zora and the Gorons. I would love to see someone like, say, Guillermo del Toro become involved with the development of a Zelda or Metroid project. Like me and, I’m sure, many of you, he loves his monsters, and that’s the sort of love that the monsters of these series deserve.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
I fuckin’ love The Legend of Zelda. And I love the 2D Metroid games. When I first started writing this piece, I thought I would just end up exploring stuff like game design philosophy, the addictiveness of gameplay, and other mechanical meat-and-potatoes stuff, but I ended up realizing that, in asking myself what it is about these games that appeals to me, I’ve actually learned a lot about myself— not just in terms of what I value in things like game design, but the values that I try to live my life by. If that sounds a smidge melodramatic for what amounts to, like, some fuckin’ Nintendo games, then it’s really important to remember that I’m a dumbass emo kid and being melodramatic about innocuous things is just what. we. do.
I’d like to close this newsletter out in You Don’t Need Maps tradition by ranking my favorite games in each series. Originally, I tried to rank ‘em all together, but that’s kinda pointless, especially since I haven’t played every game in either series. Also, it’s important to acknowledge that all these games fuckin’ rock, so they aren’t ranked worst-to-best; they’re ranked from amazing-but-not-perfect to best-that-the-medium-has-to-offer.
ZELDA RANKINGS:
Great-Tier:
10. The Minish Cap. I haven’t played this game in forever, but I have fond memories of Ezlo and our shrinky-dinky adventures. I would like to think that if it were truly on the level of my new favorite Zelda games, they would have made me a fan for life at a much younger age.
9. The Wind Waker. I’m sure this is probably heresy, but I just don’t remember falling in absolute love with this game. I remember really enjoying the aesthetic and the extremely polished combat system, but I wasn’t a huge fan of the endless sailing and, at the end of the day, I’m just not that into pirates.
8. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. When I first started brain-storming this post, I would have ranked this game dead last. But over the last week or so, I’ve grown more fond of Zelda II than I ever was previously. While the incorporation of side-scrolling and level-based RPG elements are not as seamless as they could be, by the standards of a 1980s NES game, they are very well done, and the combat system is A. built on extremely responsive controls and B. completely fair even at its most mercilessly difficult. It’s just a classic Nintendo Hard game along the lines of Castlevania III, not a cheap, frustrating one like, say, BattleToads or Fester’s Quest. I also really like late-80s NES-era jankiness, so you can go ahead and inject “I am error” directly into my veins.
Wonderful-Tier:
7. Ocarina of Time. Time may have eroded this game’s many innovations— which include everything from the contemporary open-world format to lock-on targeting to context-sensitive buttons— but the core gameplay is as addictive as it ever was, and it’s one of several Zelda games to perfect the flow-state platonic ideal of game design… sometimes. Other times, it’s either embarrassingly easy to the point of tedium (the stealth section outside of the Hyrule Castle) or hair-pullingly frustrating to the point of exhaustion (even the 3DS remake can’t save you from the fuckin’ Water Temple), and since it’s both the first game to establish the 3D Zelda formula and is obviously slavishly modeled after A Link to the Past, it felt especially rickety in my latest play-through. Additionally, man, fuck Navi. I don’t necessarily dislike handholding linearity in my games as a rule, but that fairy needs to shut the fuck up sometimes.
6. The Legend of Zelda. For as much shit as this game often gets for “aging poorly” and “being cryptic,” I find it to be really playable. I like the controls— I found movement and combat to be both responsive and satisfying. I like the jankiness of the amateur translations. And I actually find its obtuse nature— which necessitates a much greater degree of player involvement and immersion— to be one of its strongest elements, especially coming back to it after dealing with Navi. And this might annoy some people, but unlike Zelda II, which is truly Nintendo Hard, this game is really only difficult if you don’t understand how 2D gameplay even works. Like most NES games, if you get a hold of the manual and make the effort to learn the gameplay loops and systems, it’s not nearly as frustrating as people make it out to be.
5. Twilight Princess. I really did love this game as a kid, and in retrospect, much of that had to do with the game’s aesthetic; it’s the first T-rated Zelda game, and with the Wolf-Link mechanic, it’s certainly the most Hot Topic Zelda game ever made. But while the game has plenty of positives— the quirky yeti couple, the solid dungeon designs, and Midna, who is the single best companion character in the history of the series— there’s also plenty of negatives. The endless tutorial. The long stretches of drab, boring open world. The under-utilization of the horseback mechanic. The wonky Wiimote sword controls. And the plot is a mixed bag, constantly flopping between truly compelling character development and rote repetition of the 3D Zelda formula. Still, the nostalgia factor is strong.
Phenomenal-Tier:
4. Breath of the Wild. I found myself going back and forth on whether I wanted this game in third or fourth place, despite the ultimate quality being basically interchangeable, but at the end of the day, I’m going to put it here. When this game does well, it absolutely excels: the combat system and physics are divine, the world is absolutely gorgeous, and the underlying philosophy of the game design is not only ingenious, but refreshingly respectful and a really lovely callback to the spirit and goals of the original. But I can’t deny there’s a lot of dead space here that hurts the game’s replay value (which, to be clear, is still considerable). The survival elements, which implement crafting and weather mechanics, get pretty tedious for me, and I wanted some real dungeons. But none of that can take away from how good this game feels, physically, to play, or the very real achievements and advancements in the form that this game offers, and I can see it being as influential to the future of game design as the original and Ocarina before it.
3. A Link to the Past. When it comes to the fusion of high-quality 2D Zelda gameplay and the high-fantasy epic adventure feeling that Zelda games traditionally attempt to capture, there is just none better. You want dungeons with navigation-based-puzzles that strike just the right balance of making you scratch your head before you hit the eureka moment without making you want to melt your controller in the oven? Here you go. You want a classic fantasy tale merged with light elements of revenge thriller? Here you go. You want to explore a Hyrule that has an actual sense of place and history, with solid, fun characters and an excellent, Pokémon-like variety in townships? Here you go. For my money, when I think of a “typical” Zelda game, this is what immediately comes to mind, and that’s for damn sure a great thing. This is, along with EarthBound and Super Metroid, one of the main reasons that the Super Nintendo is my favorite console of all time.
Transcendent-Tier:
1 & 2: Link’s Awakening and Majora’s Mask. I’m not sure what more I can add to the conversations about these games, but it’s fitting, to me, that my personal picks for the best in the Zelda series come in the form of these trippy little side-adventures that don’t quite fit into either the traditional Zelda format nor the patterns established by their highly-influential immediate predecessors. Surreal and existential, absurd in both the comedic and melancholic senses of the word, and immensely satisfying on a sheer gameplay level, these games represent the best of the 2D and 3D Zelda worlds to me.
METROID RANKINGS:
Damn Fine-Tier:
4. Metroid. It pains my contrarian side to place this game at the bottom, but for as odd and ahead-of-its-time as this game is, it is admittedly just not quite as fun to play as the other games in the series I’ve sampled. I can bitch and moan about the bitching-and-moaning-about-Quality-of-Life people as much as I want, but the fact remains that this game just isn’t as pick-up-and-play-able as the other three in my list. However, I maintain that the tough-as-nails gameplay is perfectly fair thanks to finely-tuned controls; the thing that makes the game feel unfair is the start-from-scratch repercussion every time you die, but if you’re a fan of, like, Dark Souls, I feel like you can hardly complain about that. If you play purely— making your own map as you go and shutting your brain off to grind for resources when you need to— you’ll be fine.
Excellent-Tier:
3. Metroid Dread. Listen. I know this is an insane placement. This has probably the best controls in the series, it has an invaluable mechanic in the form of the counter-attack, and the integration of the survival-horror sequences is divine. But— and hear me out— this game feels just a little bit too big for me. I understand that nonlinear, incremental exploration of an enormous world is kind of the entire appeal of Metroidvanias (let alone an actual Metroid game), but this one kind of overwhelmed me, and although the slow accumulation of power-ups is as rewarding as ever, that alone didn’t quite feel like enough in comparison to the sheer scope here, and in conjunction with, honestly, some boss fights that I felt could have been better, I was left just a little bit wanting here. However, I understand that the size of ZDR is probably a selling point for a lot of players, and make no mistake, this is by far the most well-polished of all the 2D Metroids; the remarkably non-intrusive way the plot unfolds throughout the game is another huge plus. I know I’m nitpicking, and I won’t pretend like this is anything other than a stellar game, but personal taste is personal taste.
Superb-Tier
2. Metroid II: Return of Samus. Yes, you read that right. Not the 3DS remake, Samus Returns (which I have not yet played), but the black-and-white Game Boy title with the muddled music, the cramped screen, and no map. Unlike the NES Metroid, I didn’t find myself reaching for prehistoric methods to craft my own map, however; the hallways of SR388 are distinct enough, even in tiny monochrome form, that I was pretty easily able to keep everything stored in my memory banks. Save stations at regular intervals and markedly less aggressive enemies also help to curb much of the issues that make the NES original a bit of a grueling undertaking. But, although the music falls a bit short of where the developers clearly wanted it to be, I find the claustrophobia of this game to be both compelling and extremely effective in conjunction with its story’s themes of exhaustion and the slow-but-sure erosion of Samus’s confidence in her mission. For a 1991 Game Boy game, this thing is pretty thematically meaty and substantial (though not quite to the degree of Link’s Awakening), and the gameplay is smooth enough to stay out of the way and still provide some satisfyingly cathartic moments of challenge and payoff. I can easily imagine Metroid Fusion taking this one’s spot if and when I ever manage to play it, but I do truly enjoy this one a lot.
Unreal-Tier:
1. Super Metroid. When people are right, they’re right; this game is an actual masterpiece. There’s an ocean of words devoted to dissecting what makes this game such an untouchable classic, and even when they disagree on why it’s so fantastic, they’re never in disagreement about its overall quality, and I think that speaks to the sheer depth of the game design. Unless you’re deliberately trying for it, it’s pretty much impossible to play this game the same way twice, and the differences aren’t just cosmetic; the sheer amount of paths you can forge for yourself through these cold, unforgiving alien hallways all feel deliberate, as if the developers accounted for every possible action the player could take. Of course, they didn’t— the game is just so tightly-constructed, yet shockingly fluid, that the options are boundless. Yeah, the controls can feel a bit stiff— the awkward button placement in particular got my wires a bit crossed when I first picked this game up— but the rhythm eventually comes to you, and before long, you’re completely immersed. If you’re anything like me, you get that same level of immersion every time you play. This game’s opening moments are literally taught in game design classes as pinnacles of how to convey crazy amounts of important information to players as cleanly as possible without reliance on text, so if there’s anyone out there who’s worried about the controls being an issue in terms of understanding how to play this game, that non-existent person should just pick it up and figure it out. This is one of those rare games that actually is perfect. While in some ways, the sheer clockwork precision and coldly craftsmanlike construction of the gameplay and world design could make it feel somewhat robotic, it’s all in service of an experience that gets you more emotionally invested than you would have ever expected (with the assistance of some truly peerless environmental storytelling). I truly don’t believe there’s anyone reading this who hasn’t played Super Metroid, but I’m telling you now: play it. If you’ve played it before, play it again. If you’re a world-class Super Metroid speed-runner, play it one more time. You’ll never be disappointed.
Super Nintendo forever.
-xoxo, Ellie
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