Endgame: The Legend of Zelda, Second Quest

As it turned out, I couldn’t do it.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. I actually set out to do the one thing I hadn’t tried in the overworld: I went through each screen — every single one — one by one, and bombed, burned, pushed, and whistled my way through them. I found a small pile of secrets to everybody. I found many more grumpy old men who made me pay to fix their doors. I found a couple of shops, some old ladies selling potions, and a shocking number of money making games.

And yet, I never found the seventh dungeon.

As a fun fellow who calls himself Octopus Prime mentions in this thread, “It lies concealed under a completely innocuous shrub on a screen full of shrubs.” Even as I willed myself the patience of exiting and re-entering each highly forested room to try and burn down every god forsaken tree, I never found it. My suspicion is that I “missed” – that my attempts to burn multiple trees at once in order to reduce the time it took to go through every single one got slightly lazier than it was allowed to; that while I thought I had tried to burn that bush, I never actually did. Once I was done with that room — once I could assure myself that I had tried everything there was to try in that room — I never went back. There was no reason to, unless I wanted to try bombing trees.

Thankfully, I never did try bombing trees. While I did go ahead and force my way through dungeon 8 before I ever found dungeon 7 (something that goes against the pseudo-OCD behaviors I typically display while running through games like this), I never got desperate enough to think that maybe shooting arrows at rocks would help, or anything like that. This is where, long ago, the primitive sort of crowdsourcing was the only way to win; advice from a friend, or a couple of hours of play in the hands of my brother. I can confidently say I never would have found that dungeon, and I’d have put the game down having still (still!) never finished the second quest.

I’m glad even my stubbornness has its limits. If I had spent another 10 hours looking for that dungeon, eventually finding it, and then almost immediately finding the red candle that lives in it, I’d have had to seek a refund for my shattered 3DS on account of “a destructive sense of irony”.

That out of the way, and free to get back to the business of exploring things whose existence I had not yet come to doubt, it didn’t take all that long (comparatively) to finish out the rest of the game. Even finding the red ring and silver arrow didn’t feel like terrible awful trudges through the unknown. Other than a mildly insidious multi-room moving block puzzle in the final dungeon, it was pretty straightforward the rest of the way through. Awful blue wizzrobes here, awful red bubbles there, and a couple of awful triple dodongo rooms later, Ganon showed himself once again, and with no new tricks up his sleeve, he quickly fell to dust once again:

And then, The Legend of Zelda told me I was “great”, for lo, I had only (well, “only”) died 24 times over the course of two separate adventures:

And I thought, “you know what? I am great.” Then I powered down.

There’s a beautiful balance that The Legend of Zelda strikes, between setting a certain set of expectations and rules, and then slowly breaking them down. You see this a bit in the first adventure — figuring out that you can bomb your way into rooms unmarked on a dungeon map is one of the great little secrets that everyone who conquers the first adventure eventually has to come to realize, since finding these unmarked rooms is actually necessary in the final dungeon. The second adventure, however, is full of this — between walls you can walk through, advice whose meaning changes, and whistles that could blow open a staircase pretty much anywhere, the second quest is a tremendous mash of “everything you know is wrong”. There are even old men more ornery than the “door repair charge” guys, old men who demand either 50 coins or a heart container(!) before they allow you to proceed.

The beauty of it is that if you’ve put the time into conquering the first quest, none of the second quest will really feel impossible. It’ll throw you for a loop, sure, but the ways in which the rules break in the second quest are introduced just as gradually as those same rules were set in the first. Throw your assumptions about what you can and can’t do out the window a bit, and you find an open world that’s even more “open” than the first quest even suggests.

Maybe you won’t find everything, but it won’t be because the game cheated. It’ll only be for lack of diligence.

Even as it delayed my progress on other things, taking on the second quest was a pursuit worth doing. Best of all, I can finally claim the mastery of it that should accompany my other Legend of Zelda-related claim: namely, that it is the best game the NES ever saw.

Took long enough.

The Legend of Zelda. Second Quest. Search for the Seventh Dungeon. Day 8.

I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.

Until now, a random survey was enough. Explore the world I know, set some bombs in the conspicuous spots, explore the dungeons as thoroughly as I can muster, and try to burn every tree I find. And now, it’s suddenly not enough.

I almost gave up at the sixth dungeon. It almost had me. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I’d be blowing a whistle to make a gravestone disappear. I’d tried to move that same gravestone countless times before that, sure that I had simply not pushed for long enough, or perhaps that I had let my fingers slip and gave it a crooked push. It never budged. It was waiting for a melody.

The Legend of Zelda‘s second quest has that effect on you. Every time it breaks the rules that the first quest laid out, every time it opens up one more possible place to hide something, you don’t feel as though you’ve accomplished something by making that possibility a reality. Rather, there’s a despair with uncovering the secrets of the second quest. It’s the knowledge, once you blow the whistle and open up a random stairwell in the desert, that you’re going to have to blow the whistle in every single screen of the overworld if you want to uncover all its secrets.

Scratch that — it’s not just the secrets you need to uncover. It’s the dungeons. These are the necessary pieces of conquering the quest. And they could be anywhere.

It’s the terror of the unknown. It breaks you down. It makes GameFAQs look awfully enticing.

I mean seriously, are you kidding me with this?

Part of my goal in returning to these old games was to inspire the nostalgia of playing games before the internet age. Playing games felt different in a time before spoilers were inevitable and answers were readily available. When you ran into a dead end and you had no idea how to progress, you typically had three options: crowdsource an answer from any friends who might also have been playing the game, spend some money to call a hotline or buy a strategy guide, or just run bull-headed back into the game convinced that this was it, this was the attempt when a solution was going to become clear.

Really, it’s not that different from the paid-DLC model that instantly levels up your character. How much money could Nintendo have made if they had come up with a way to offer $4.99 paid “Dungeon-Finder” DLC? What if they offered the Master Sword as a bonus?

It certainly would have been awfully enticing in a time like this.

At least it was obvious what to do here.

I mean, what kind of sadistic game encourages you to not only bomb every wall in every dungeon, but attempt to walk through it? The very first dungeon in the second quest makes it very clear that the map means nothing, so it doesn’t even matter if you think there’s a room there. You’d better try and get through that wall, or risk missing something very important.

I thought I could hold out. I did. I thought I had the patience to look under every rock, to methodically search every room. I am operating under a few basic assumptions: there is a maximum of one visible or hidden door, combined, in every overworld panel. Every treasure necessary to uncover a higher-numbered dungeon can be found either in the overworld or in a lower-numbered dungeon.

Rafts need docks to be launched.

Even the master sword can’t break down a wall like a bomb can.

How do I know that any of these are even valid? In my searching, I’ve found the entrances to the eighth and ninth dungeons. How do I know that I won’t find the entrance to the seventh dungeon somewhere inside the eighth dungeon?

That’s the issue. I don’t know. And I don’t know how much longer I can keep up the search.

A Legend that Lasts

It’s funny how the faces of some games shine brighter, even on a tiny little screen.

After what turned out to be the relative disappointment of Ice Climber, I needed something that I knew I would enjoy, something that had never disappointed me no matter how many times I returned to it. Looking at the 8-bit offerings on display, my eyes kept flitting back and forth, back and forth…

…Zelda…Metroid…Zelda…Metroid…

Zelda.

The Legend of Zelda might actually be my favorite NES game of all time. Mere mention of the name triggers the “Overworld Theme” in my head, a miniature 8-bit symphony that can last for days. It’s the only game that I’ve played start to finish enough times to legitimately have a case that I’ve memorized it; I could tell you where the blue ring is, where every heart container is, which gravestone the old man with the magical sword is in, and so on. It’s a game I’ve been able to relax and enjoy while whipping through it, taking down dungeons and bosses like it’s my job, planting bombs on inconspicuous walls to find even the most hidden of treasures (though I do still have to pay the “door repair charge” on occasion).

My only real hiccup so far has been the sixth dungeon, in which the ever-despised Blue Wizzrobes took me for a ride after one of those walking gullets called Like-Likes took my fancy shield away.

As of this writing, I am on the 9th dungeon and looking for a Red Ring, a Silver Arrow, and Ganon himself. The 9th dungeon is something like the 1986 version of Ocarina of Time‘s famous and infamous Water Dungeon, a confusing and difficult slog through difficult enemies, passageways that lead to other passageways, and a factory’s worth of doors that require keys. It is a dungeon that reminded me of 8-bit gaming’s utter willingness to trap you in a place where your only means of escape is either suicide or the Reset button.

Yes, I forgot to dig the Master Key out of the eighth dungeon. Of course, I paid dearly for my oversight, reduced to stabbing an old man so his fire would slowly, painfully (shoot fireballs at me and) kill me.

(An aside: the map for the fourth dungeon always reminds me of the Atari 2600's rendition of E.T.. Is it just me?)

Being trapped in The Legend of Zelda is a startling thing, given that it is largely an extremely open and forgiving game, full of fairies and potions and stray hearts all strategically placed in such a way as to keep you going and make sure you can stay alive and explore as much of the world is possible, almost at your leisure. Sure, it’s not really a good idea to go anywhere near the sword-throwing Lynels before you have a Magical Shield or a Blue Ring, but even that’s not impossible if you’re determined enough. That the game would actually physically keep me from progression due to an oversight on my part, well, I hadn’t experienced that since maybe 1987. Given the intricacy of the dungeon design elsewhere, it’s honestly pretty impressive that such situations don’t happen more often.

Pondering the difficulty of this ninth dungeon, it seems hard to imagine that Zelda‘s second quest could offer up a more difficult version. It occurs to me that for all the times I’ve played through the first quest, I have never actually beaten the second quest; as a purist who tries to refuse all outside help in solving a given game, the second quest has always eluded me. I have always given up before conquering it; putting as much work as I did into learning the first quest exhausted my capacity for adventure. I suspect I moved on to something else meaning to cleanse my palette, never coming back as I intended.

This realization reveals a hole in my Legend of Zelda experience, a hole that must quickly be filled.

Onward, then.

The Limits of Nostalgia: Ice Climber

It’s like life, yes? Always another mountain to climb.

Being spoiled on modern games is the type of experience that makes Ice Climber feel even older than it is. Yeah, it’s an NES game, but it’s unremarkable even in an eight-bit context. These characters have names, but they’re essentially interchangeable as palette swaps of one another. The enemies are innocent birds, bears, and (um) fuzzballs, that are mostly minding their own business unless they are actually trying to repair the mountain that is their habitat.

Clearly, environmental conservation wasn’t on the minds of the developers here, nor those who enjoyed the game.

Worse than the lack of an identifiable central character and the fact that the route to completion is via destruction rather than construction is the physics. Momo and Popo can apparently jump three times their height upwards, but side to side, their jumps are hopelessly feeble. It’s like their knees work, but their ankles don’t. Even if you build up a head of steam on your way to a jump, your momentum actually slows down when you make the jump.

There’s not even a defined goal! Why are we jumping? Is it because the pterodactyl stole the eggplants? Is it because the Ice Climbers are trying to get home, and only the eggplant (or pumpkin, or pickle) stealing pterodactyl can get them there?

Good Lord, this game’s a mess.

I never owned Ice Climber, though I did covet it. As one of the original NES experiences, complete with standardized, pixelated pseudo-screenshot cover art and the types of generic names we might now more readily associate with the Atari 2600, I just kind of took for granted that it was, you know, a good game. Maybe not Mario good, I guess, but good, whatever that even meant in the context of the early NES. Maybe “good” just meant that there was more to it than your average Atari game, that it did something that nothing in the previous generation could. I’d go to friends’ houses and ask to play it. Sometimes we’d play together. Sometimes I’d borrow it and play it with my brother on my own NES. It probably got just as many hours out of me as a modern blockbuster. And I can’t for the life of me fathom why.

Even as the “Nintendo Ambassador” crowd of games was announced, I found that still, I coveted Ice Climber, and it became one of my top two or three anticipated games when I found out I’d be getting 10 NES games on my 3DS at no charge. It had been forever since I played it, and the romantic notion of it still stuck in my head. Even as I knew I’d be playing for score, even as I knew there was no defined ending other than to start over again in a more difficult iteration of the first 32 levels, I wanted to play it and conquer it.

It turns out, nostalgia can only take a gaming experience so far.

My gaming habits have been largely tied to nostalgia essentially since I entered college. Some of the first NES emulators were just hitting the internet at that point, and the idea that I could play these games that I loved, not ported but utterly unchanged, was extremely appealing. I got to play games I never knew existed, I got to play games that I loved that I thought had disappeared to time. While I understood that the mechanics, music, and visuals of these games were primitive, I would still defend them anyway to those who might not have played them when they were, you know, new. Take away the modern-day expectations that we have for video game experiences, and there was true, unassailable quality to be found.

There’s a limit to that nostalgia, and it is Ice Climber. While it does properly invoke nostalgia for a time when my standards were low enough that I would enjoy any game set in front of me, it does not hold up as a gaming experience, either now or in the context of its contemporaries.

* * *

“Ambassadorship” is a new category that will concern itself with looks at the 20 games offered by the 3DS Ambassador program. As one of the lucky ones who ended up with these retro games, it’s a way to get me to play them (again) and look at the effect of time and nostalgia on some of the better games of their respective generations.