A reader has a suggestion for how Nintendo can keep releasing old school Zelda games as well as Tears Of The Kingdom style titles.
They say there’s nothing as limiting as success. Well, I don’t know if they do say that; I just made it up, but it sounds good to me, and I think it’s generally true in most fields. You become successful for one thing, and it doesn’t make any sense to go back to what you were doing before or try anything new. Either because it wouldn’t make as much money, or your fans don’t want you to – usually both.
Nintendo is in that position right now with The Legend Of Zelda. They claim they’re going to do something next time, with the game after Tears Of The Kingdom, which could be true, but what they have made clear is that they’re not going back to the old formula. Which is understandable, I guess, but that does create kind of a problem for people like me that preferred the old style of games and would like to see them continue.
I’m not going to complain in the normal internet manner, by issuing death threats and writing petitions in bad English, but I do have a constructive suggestion: let Capcom make those sorts of games instead, just like they used to.
Many people may have forgot by now, but Capcom has made four really good Zelda games: Oracle of Seasons, Oracle of Ages, Four Swords, and The Minish Cap. Four Swords was an experimental multiplayer game, that I thought was really good, while the other three games were basically traditional Zelda games that were almost as good as those made by Nintendo, and all had interesting gimmicks.
I’m sure a lot of the people involved have moved on now (The Minish Cap was actually produced by Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune) but Capcom are on a roll at the moment, so I’m sure they could find a bunch of people that were up to making a new game and could come up with some original ideas.
I do agree that the Zelda series was getting stuck in a rut and Breath Of The Wild was probably necessary but that doesn’t mean you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Not only could the Capcom games be more old school, but they could be smaller scale too, maybe keep a top-down view, and then we could have multiple Zelda games coming out every few years, instead of waiting six years for a new one.
Work out a schedule and maybe they could link them together, like the Oracle games. There’s tons you could do and all Nintendo has to do is renew their friendship with Capcom, who they’ve always seemed to get on with.
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To be honest, I think this could be the answer to reviving a lot of their older franchises. Nintendo turned to third parties a lot in the GameCube era, and I guess they’re a bit stung that most of that didn’t work out. But that was when they were asking the studios to make the big new entries in the franchises, the ones that were meant to push them forward.
This time they’d be making purposefully retro, smaller projects. Sega, Namco, PlatinumGames… I’m sure there’s a bunch of Japanese studios they could go to for help, and it would be a great way to fill out the release schedules for the Switch 2. Especially as they won’t be able to rely on Wii U ports this time.
I’m not predicting Nintendo here, I know that’s pointless, but I am trying to point out that there’s things they could do that are consistent with what they’ve done in the past. Whether they’ll go that route I don’t know but I hope there is some way to keep both the new Zelda and the old alive at the same time.
By reader Onibee
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