So, as you may know, I started taking testosterone recently because I sleep like a koala, focus like a goldfish, and fuck like a physics textbook. As you may also know, taking testosterone makes one strongly prone to long posts of nonsensical bullshit. I decided, now that I'm really starting to mentally feel the heat of this little patch on my gums, and since it's been a long time since I made one of these traditional hiatus posts and I've sure as hell gone on a few hiatusses (Hiati?) without making any, that I should review every Zelda Game I've ever played from best to worst in my compromised state and see how hilarious it gets.
The First Game:
Now, I'm a little bit old fashioned. I like soda like it was way back before they had carbonation, because carbonation sucks, I like women chubby and full of sandwiches, just like they did in the 1800s, and I prefer smacking really annoying bastards in the face rather than trying to reason with them, just like they did all the time up until the 80s. However, even though I may be partial to more antiquated ideas, as long as they aren't particularly racist or assholey, I think we can all agree that nothing provides adventure quite like the old Zelda, aside from maybe Dark Souls, but Dark Souls is depressing and it makes me want to hurl sometimes.
Zelda I is pleasantly difficult, and there's cool shit just around every corner. Your items are useful everywhere and in the most unexpected of places as opposed to just the dungeons you found them in, and you have to find out about everything yourself, just like a real adventure. There's not even that much of a plot or motivation or anything, and the graphics are just vague enough that you can really get creative filling in all the blanks. The quest becomes uniquely yours as you play it, and that's something that no game since (Zelda or otherwise) has quite been able to capture.
Majora's Mask:
Everything I like about old games, it's surreal, it's easy to lose yourself in, it's just the right amount of engaging, tantalizing, and infuriating, and Navi has an actual personality, and it's rife with opportunities to traumatize children. It's also the best-written game in the entire series. Not because it's been written by a master or anything, but all the characters have a personality and tangibility to them that makes them especially human. It's one of the few games where I actually want to do mini-quests for something other than the reward. However, the water temple does suck balls, and the part where you have to chase the butler around sucks too. It's almost like they forget how much Link sucks at platforming sometimes. The game can also be fairly linear in the dungeon department as well, which definitely downgrades the exploration aspect, but it's still good.
Legend of Zelda II:
I can't believe, out of all the fucking games, that this is the one people hate. Yeah, there's a lot of cheap tricks thrown in to pad out the length of the game, and yes, it does pull a Castlevania 2 and make you look for obscure-as-shit things with obscure-as-shit clues, but I imagine that's what it would be like if you were an actual adventurer who was going on a legendary quest to save the world when you didn't have fucking gods and fairies and deus ex machinas jumping out in cutscenes at the end of the dungeons in order to tell you where to fucking go all the damn time. This game is realistic, and it's cool, and it truly establishes the fact that Link is a straight-up badass.
Wind Waker:
This game is probably the second best-written game in the series. Of course, that's not saying much, partly because it's not the best-written game in the series, partly because video games as a whole aren't very well written, (not even TLOU!) and partly because I like to spend the majority of Zelda Games making up my own plot as I trollop about the land doing cool shit. However, it does support and encourage adventuring and exploring more than any of the other games, and there's a lot more love and design put into all the random optional dungeons than there are in any of the other games. It definitely doesn't provide me with the same feeling of adventure as some of the earlier games did, being that it's still a linear path of completion and the story still forces you to visit most of the dungeons throughout the game, but it's definitely still awesome.
Four Swords:
You know those charming item puzzles they have in the 2-D zelda games with items and shit? Can you imagine the joy and hilarious frustration that would happen if you did that with multiple people?
That's why this game is awesome as hell. Especially so, since I think this is the one where you can piss off the chickens and then run inside and leave your hombres to deal with that shit.
Twilight Princess:
Better than Ocarina of Time in every way. They even fixed the Navi problem by making her adorable (SPOILERS: and then moderately sexy) and giving her just the right amount of attitude, so everything she says is mildly interesting without getting bitchy. A big upgrade from the first iteration, but there were better ones earlier in the series. I especially like the combat, because that was far more polished and better paced than it's been in any other Zelda, and the ability to shoot bomb arrows, carry up to 180 fucking bombs, and use bombs under fucking water was a definite point of awesomeness.
Ocarina of Time
Exactly TP, from the order and theme of the dungeons, to the customization screen, to the villain. Except it's clunky, slower-paced, and the camera and level design can be an ass sometimes. It's an interesting cinematic experience, and it doesn't shove the plot down your throat as much as Link to the Past, so I guess that makes it better. However, I gotta say, I like the design of the tunics, shields, and swords here way better than the ones you could change around in Twilight Princess, and nothing makes you feel more accomplished than walking around wearing your golden gloves, blue tunic, wingboots, and mirror shield, then showing it off to your friends.
A Link to the Past:
A good game held back by several things: Mainly the melodramatic plot craze of the 1990s, which means the game will shove text down your throat like a 4th grade English Teacher on PCP, and that all the dungeons are supposed to be completed in a specific order, so all the fucking exploration and joy that was in the other games is sucked out of it. Still, it's an okay game, but merely okay.
The gameboy ones:
I didn't have a gameboy when I was a wee lad, and when I did, I used it to play pokemon. I guess these ones were okay. My favorite Mario characters joined the fray as well, (Shy Guy and Chain Chomp) so props to them, I guess. This is the official turning point where I stop praising shit and get really angry, because, surprisingly enough, that hasn't happened already... Brb, I gotta go work myself up into an unhealthy rage.
~INTERMISSION~
The fucking Boat Game:
It sucked. The sailing takes for-fucking ever, there's no exploration, and you can't just wait out the sailing, because there's fucking sharks and shit and you have to keep them from killing you. Fuck that! Stupid fucking Boat Link and his Johnny Depp clone can suck my dick and die in that fucking shark water for all I care! Fuck the hourglass, fuck yourself for even considering playing this game, and fuck anything you happen to be holding in your hands at the moment because it would be kinda funny if you injured your genitals.
The fucking Train Game:
It was so terrible that I didn't even play it, because the demo looked and felt so much like the boat game.
Assward fucking Sword:
Everything the 3D zeldas started doing wrong, except this fucking time Link is a pussy who can't run, jump, or even climb a fucking tree for more than 8 seconds without shitting himself and dying of cardiac arrest, and he fights like someone who just fucking joined the Alcoholic Relapse Committee.
Not only do we get to learn how Link's basic, unrealistic sword fighting techniques are shitty in practical application firsthand, but we also have to fucking aim them by our fucking selves. And it's not like I'm bad at doing that or anything. I'm a professional axe fighter! I know the fucking ins and outs of swinging vertically and horizontally for maximum effect! No, the problem is that the fucking motion controls can't tell the fucking difference between the headlong swing of a Viking with a Fire Hydrant and the forlorn twitching of a man with his arm dislocated and tied to a chandelier behind him.
And despite the fact that Nintendo very well knows at this point that motion controls are fucking shit, and that Link, in his perpetually opiate-induced stupor, may or may not decide to follow your commands without bending over backwards and flopping his sword all over the ground like a fucking toy walrus, they still insist, with their fucking denial, that it be used. This game is precisely what would happen if Nintendo pulled a random, basement-dwelling, asthmatic cosplayer off the street and told him to actually be Link and save the world.
And the writing sucks.
And the art style sucks.
Hyrule-ass Fucking Warriors:
After 3 years on this site, anything with the word "warriors" in the title is cause for suspicion. Especially when it turns out that it's fucking Dynasty Warriors re-skinned. What does that mean? It means you have to suffer through hours and hours of repettitive-ass, sickeningly unrealistic combat mechanics. Now, I'm all for some unrealistic combat. I love piledriving people off of buildings, I love grabbing people with webs and hooks and spinning them over my head like an olympic hammer, and I love buttstomping dinosaurs to death. But there's only one problem when you're fighting an army of un-mutilatable kevlar dolls filled with milk and jello, and that is your fucking inaccurate-as-shit, aggravatingly animu sword-spins and twirls and fancy-ass bullshit loses any impact it might have had, and suddenly you're struggling to break physics and juggle your fucking enemies in the air like tennis balls so you can hit them more times before they die. WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF STUPID GAME MECHANIC IS THAT!? I fucking hate combos on enemies that are supposed to be dead! The object of warfare is to be able to rek the most dudes with the least hits! It's not awesome if you have to juggle a million dudes at once for an hour so they'll die properly! It's not badass when you have to smack someone a hundred bajllion fucking times and they're still kicking afterwards! Link's sword is made of fucking rubber! And so are Ganon's once superhuman fists, apparently! AND THE HOOKSHOT ATTACK PULLS DOWN THE MOON FROM MAJORA'S MASK! WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF WITCHCRAFT IS THIS!? WHAT THE FUCK DOES THE OOT-ASS FUCKING HOOKSHOT HAVE TO DO WITH THE FUCKING MOON!? BULLSHIT! FUCKING BULLSHIT! SERIOUSLY! IT'S LIKE THIS GAME WAS MADE BY PEOPLE WHO KNOW FUCK ALL ABOUT THE SOURCE MATERIAL, JUST LIKE PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING ELSE PEOPLE MAKE ABOUT EVERYTHING TODAY!
Link's Fucking Crossbow Fucking Training:
Let's start off by saying: What the fuck is this bullshit!? How the fuck did this even get made!? This is some serious fucking bullshit! How!? First, I gotta explain to you what the hell this monstrous shitplosion of a jitstain on the increasingly crusty fabric of Nintendo's reputation is. Link's Goddamn Bastard crossbow-ass Training (LGBT) is a miscarriage-inducing wreck that's a combination of the two worst fucking kinds of games that came with the Wii era:
Monstrosity A: of those fucking disgusting cash-ins on old Nintendo properties that they threw in our fucking faces so we'd give them more money.
Abomination B: a broken, stupid, boring minigame fest meant to half-assedly showcase the shitty motion controls that everyone else was trying to forget the Wii even fucking had.
One of them on their own is worth chucking into a woodchipper on the spot, but both? Simul-fucking-taneously? In a way that breaks canon and core gameplay ridiculously!? It's fucking disgusting and humanity should not have to put up with its disgusting fucking, dried-lube-encrusted, fungus-ridden existence. This game should have been fucking buried with all the copies of E.T. those stupid shitfucks! Does it even explain why the hell Link even has a fucking crossbow!? He's not on a fucking quest or anything, he doesn't fight any world-ending evil. Like, one degraded miniboss from TP shows up and he fucking kills it, but that's about as much fucking story as it gets. Where's the logic!? Why doesn't the bowgun show up anywhere else? BECAUSE IT'S A FUCKING BROKEN, STUPID-ASS CONCEPT, THAT'S WHY!
