N'Gai Croal
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Oct 30, 2007 12:15 AM
In which N'Gai and Stephen resume their epic battle--not in their customary epistolary form of email, but rather in a face-to-face conversation--and compare The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for the DS to its Nintendo 64 predecessors Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.
Over the past couple of months, there has been a small but influential handful of voices who have called for a Vs. Mode podcast: a smattering of developers, publishers, fellow journalists, forum posters and readers alike. But as the staff of Level Up and our sparring partner--MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo--explore our multimedia options, we've seized upon the opportunity afforded by our own ignorance of Zelda gameplay to bring you the next best thing: A Very Special Vs. Mode.
Last Saturday, the Level Up team made the trek to Totilo's Brooklyn apartment--not far from where the Notorious B.I.G. grew up--where Totilo guided us through some key moments in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, then handed us the controller to play the first section of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Immediately following the playthrough, we recorded our discussion of the the Zelda series, which we present to you today and tomorrow as Round 2 and Round 3 of our Vs. Mode exchange. An excerpt:
N'Gai Croal: Did Majora's Mask feel like a radically different Zelda when it came out?
Stephen Totilo: It felt like they had put enough aside and done enough that was new that at the time I thought, "Well, this is a worthwhile and different enough experience. We’re going from a game where it’s primarily about explore the territory at age 7 and then age 14, I can sort of see the distinctions." So taking that idea and warping it so that it’s this 72-hour repeated cycle, and then adding the whole mask system in--which was a whole new way to interact with the world--seemed like a significant addition to the formula. At the time there had only been a handful of Zeldas before it. Since that Majora's Mask game there have been two Gamecube Zeldas; a Game Boy Advance Zelda; two Game Boy color Zeldas; and a Wii Zelda so there have been six Zeldas since then and that’s part of where--at the time the world could’ve still used more high quality Zeldas--but they’ve knocked it out of the park enough times that that’s where I’m feeling like, "Maybe they don’t need to make any more."
Croal: Well, it’s an interesting design choice, looking at the mask system and the 72-hour system repeated. Because I wonder if any game developers making games now--you look at this whole thing of shorter games; some people were complaining that Heavenly Hours is just six hours and--
Totilo: Heavenly Sword. Certainly not Heavenly Hours.
Croal: [Laughs.] Heavenly Sword is only six hours and Gears of War is only nine or ten hours. What you get out of designing a game [like Majora's Mask] in that way--and it would be interesting to sort of go back and talk to the people who worked on the game to see if that was something they thought about--is you get density of game play as opposed to scope of gameplay. The world itself doesn’t need to be as massive to give you that rich gameplay experience. You can use a more limited amount of architecture, levels and dungeons, but make it denser because the mask system brings those areas of the world to life in new ways once you've accessed a new mask.
To read Round 2 of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below.
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