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[s0]

The only difference is puzzle replace by customization and pvp

combat encounters = puzzles in d* souls. and they're multi solution puzzles too!

anyway i dont think souls is "the new zelda", it just takes a bunch of shit from old RPGs that also happened to be in zelda. u have to remember that zelda itself built on games like dragon slayer, xanadu and hydlide.

[gimymblert]

well technically combat are (light) puzzle in zelda too you must figure out the pattern of each enemy/boss to defeat them, so just flailing the sword around, which allow them to keep combat low key and less complex to handle (less skill base) and keep enough variety to have the player entertain. At its worst it became wait and attack on opening (too common in ss) instead of figure out weakness, provoke, attack and use context env.

However in sequeletis his observation are wrong about the combat in OOT, wait is the noob tactic, provoking and evading cut the wait and allow to attack at dead angles.

[Praying Mantis]

Note that I'm not actually replying to or agreeing with anyone. I just wanted to use this gif somewhere.

[Alevice]

SirNiko, aside from what gimmy pointed, I could condense my point in just looking at the video and while he describes NES TLOZ, change the name to D*Souls and tell he the comparisons are not alike. I think the most notable difference between TLOZ and D*Souls is atmosphere (even then just in the mood, the whole sense of loneliness prevails on both TLOZ and D*Souls) and character customization.

I dont agree with what CAS mentions, at least on the japanese side. JRPGs since the times of Dragon Warrior have been structurally far more linear and rigid (but thou must!) than TLOZ.

Please note that anytime i refer to TLOZ i mean only the very first game in the whole series. LA could qualify too, but that thing got me quite bored so i couldnt effectively compare.


Because my comment seemed far more controversial that I would have imagined (as in non controversial at all), i will add more fuel to the fire by saying that Tokyo Jungle is structurally a spiritual sequel to Alley Cat

[s0]

I dont agree with what CAS mentions, at least on the japanese side. JRPGs since the times of Dragon Warrior have been structurally far more linear and rigid (but thou must!) than TLOZ.

dragon SLAYER, not dragon WARRIOR, different game. out of the games i mentioned, the xanadu expansion and hydlide (iirc) are somewhat nonlinear.

anyway i think i worded my post a bit poorly. what i meant was, nonlinearity was a common feature in rpgs way before tloz ever came out and tloz itself was basically an update of the older japanese action rpgs i mentioned. i.e. the "zelda-like" elements in d* souls are, imo, really just common rpg elements.

here's a developer quote:

What were your ambitions when you first started making Demon’s Souls?

Hidetaka Miyazaki: It was to express all the cool and interesting things from classic CRPG titles through the latest consoles and technologies, and to add inspiring elements achieved by the use of network technology.

http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2013/01/22/demons-souls-creator-looks-back-at-the-making-of-an-rpg-classic/

[Alevice]

I actually missed the names you listed, haha. But you seem to be right, I frankly forgot of the dark ages of jrpgs.

[gimymblert]

just a footnote the atmosphere in place like shadow temple and the village well in zelda OOT is almost comparable with draksouls, complete with vague and twisted lore background. And zelda is a rather drab series when you think about it when you look at the hint, the hero bring less hope that it bring relief, bad things happen in the past and bad things always happen in the future. Thanks koizumi now get back to the series 

[Slader16]

Random text ain't thread pollution

[SirNiko]

Ocarina of Time had some atmospheric levels, but there wasn't much in the way of background. D*Souls interlaces its lore a bit, with placement of items, dialogue of characters and backgrounds of creatures coming together to form fodder for theories. By contrast, Zelda is mostly made up of generic, recurring creatures that don't suggest any particular history. D*Souls does its atmosphere in a really rare way. They're both good, but D*Souls goes an extra mile with it.

Only Dark Souls was really nonlinear. Demons' Souls had a pretty linear structure (albeit with optional backtracking) and Dark Souls 2 was similarly structured with levels radiating from a hub in a relatively structured fashion.

CA's got the point - a lot of the elements being compared are singularly common in older games. Any one of them alone isn't really making it a reincarnation of Zelda because it could just as easily be a reference to any of those other games.

I feel like Link to Another World (which I haven't played yet) is approaching a modern version of classic Zelda, with an open world and less reliance on a strict order of collecting items and completing dungeons.

Also, Dragon Slayer 4 is a fantastic game and I would love to play more games with a similar structure. I think maybe its broad similarities to La Mulana is what made me love that game, since I never played Maze of Galious as a child (I only played it after the freeware version of La Mulana).

But, there's nothing wrong with playing Dark Souls and finding the things you like about it appeal to the same emotions that you had when playing the original Zelda. That's normal and sensible, even if the games are ultimately different in many ways. It's just not a comparison I would make. La Mulana and Dragon Slayer 4 are really different, but both appeal to me similarly because of the huge, diverse and continuous dungeons you get to explore.

[s0]

just a footnote the atmosphere in place like shadow temple and the village well in zelda OOT is almost comparable with draksouls, complete with vague and twisted lore background. And zelda is a rather drab series when you think about it when you look at the hint, the hero bring less hope that it bring relief, bad things happen in the past and bad things always happen in the future. Thanks koizumi now get back to the series 

i actually think zelda in general is pretty good when it comes to atmosphere. atmosphere is one of the main reasons i like OOT, MM and links awakening.

[s0]

Btw, Alevice, have you played King's Field? Sounds like you would like it (if you can up with some of the shittiest combat mechanics ever that is).

[gimymblert]

I can't believe I have forget about majora's mask  

Ocarina of Time had some atmospheric levels, but there wasn't much in the way of background. D*Souls interlaces its lore a bit, with placement of items, dialogue of characters and backgrounds of creatures coming together to form fodder for theories. By contrast, Zelda is mostly made up of generic, recurring creatures that don't suggest any particular history. D*Souls does its atmosphere in a really rare way. They're both good, but D*Souls goes an extra mile with it.

You can't be more wrong, and guess why there is so many fan theory out there? In fact most things in zelda are really not what they seems to be, the games are generally cheerful only at a surface level ... I mean allusion to tortures are all other the place in OOT and made by the "good guy". And ikana valley in majora is full of mysteries that are creepy, weird and strange ...

[SirNiko]

Majora's Mask had some really great zones, I'll give you that. Did the game ever indicate the purpose of the Great Bay Temple, though? It seems like all the dungeons in that game were there for the sake of dungeons, while Demons' Souls made dungeons out of other places. I loved the Great Bay Temple, but I would've loved it even more if it gave an indication of why there were all those valves and pipes other than serving as a complicated locking mechanism. And the same for the Cistern dungeon in Skyward Sword - it was lovely and had that mysterious underground section with the skulls, but the game never gave the player any clues regarding why it existed, at least that I discovered.

The fan theories are based very largely on putting information together in a complete vacuum - trying to assign importance to things with no information. The Timeline isn't a thing you could logically piece together via in-game hints (The series were alternate timelines?). Compare that to Demons' Souls where boss monsters and enemies in each dungeon fit together in a web of NPCs that spans the history of the land, and weapons give hints regarding who owned them and where they came from.

It's two different ways of conveying an atmosphere to the player, one where players can speculate openly based on unrelated snatches and another where the speculation is intentional and guided with lots of small hints. Zelda tends to wear its story on its sleeve when it has it, and when it doesn't there's no deeper significance to a place except what's told to you in the map heading.

As an aside, that was one thing I really liked about the first Darksiders - the subway station dungeon really impressed me because of the thought of it being a real place with a real purpose that only turned into a dungeon inadvertently later.

[gimymblert]

That's not true about the timeline, a lot of zelda did have direct reference to other zelda, specifically the 3D one (in fact it's a series of timelines). It's not from a vacuum. It's less straightforward than dragon souls for sure, but they were explicit but cryptic hint nonetheless. The alternate timeline are explicit in wind waker and twilight princess. It's only the 3 first zelda that mess things up, and even them had direct reference to each other, zelda 2 is a direct sequel to zelda 1, you can even see the entire map of zelda 1 in it. You didn't see it because you hasn't care I can break down a lot of things for you that aren't speculation BUT it's not the place for it, it will be too long. The great bay temple for example is a long tradition of remnant of a hi tech civilization that have been hinted many time in zelda (most blatantly in skyward sword) and wich zelda wiiU reference even more directly in is teaser (but I can mention the tower of gods in ww too). Even the music hint at relation (the serenade of water when hyrules is flooded in ww after deafeating ganon or the evolution of gerudo mixing with the hylian in twilight princess. There is definite continuity.

However SS is the most broken of the bunch, many things seems to have been made hastily there.

[s0]

zelda dungeons are def more "gamey". i dont think its that important to know the lore to enjoy the souls games but the way the  lore seems to guide the level design is the key to why the games are so atmospheric.

in zelda the dungeons dont really *feel* like places that would exist for any reason other than to be obstacle courses in a videogame. the atmosphere in zelda is mostly in the overworlds. sometimes the dungeons DO have a bit of a sense of place like in OOT but even that pales in comparison to sth like boletaria palace.

[gimymblert]

Sure zelda is not on the same spectrum place than DS, but it's a spectrum. zelda place gameplay first then justify it with lore. Even important story point just happen to be gameplay concern first, many zelda fan were floored to learn that midna, a rather important character in tp was kind of an afterthought and exist only because gameplay concern. But when this happen they build upon it to create atmosphere and add a sense of place even if the gamey part is still prevalent. It's more abstract but it is there.

[SirNiko]

I knew about the Zelda 1 map appearing in Zelda 2, and there are obvious links between a few of the games (direct sequels which advertise themselves clearly as such such as the Oracles games ending with Link boarding the raft, indicating Link's Awakening is next) but a lot of the timeline is arbitrary. Who would have ever guessed that Twilight Princess exists in a distinct timeline with Four Swords Adventures (Which borrows heavily from Link to the Past, which occurs in another timeline), or that Link's Awakening is supposed to be a prequel to the original game? Those connections existed without hints, and suggest to me that they were never intended to be connected when they were created.

The other big difference is that lore exists only across the series as a whole as opposed to the Souls games connecting the lore within an individual title with looser connections between the series.

On the other hand, I don't mind that Zelda's worlds are disconnected. The individual areas are lovely and interesting, and you don't need a detailed background for a mysterious gravity reversing tower to enjoy the bizarre sights of looking down at the sky.

Speculating in a vacuum isn't a bad thing, though. I think there is a lot of fun to be had designing a big, complicated game, littering it with arbitrary creatures and items and locations with recurring symbols and then letting players have the fun of connecting them when there exists no intentional connection. Yumi Nikki seemed to do that, and I really enjoyed it.

[Praying Mantis]

Yeah while it's true that a couple of Zelda games hint at a larger world beyond what we see, it doesn't happen often. Gimym is on the mark by saying that in Zelda gameplay comes first and the story after. While there is an official Zelda timeline, it's pretty clear that very little thought was ever actually put into the lore behind the series, and they kind of made it up as they went and strung it together however they could (made particularly evident by the existence of 3 seperate timeline divergences, which have pretty poor justifications).

Heck, they'll often completely disregard the plot that transpires in previous games. Take The Minish Cap for example. The game is essentially an origin story for the pointed green cap, and explains why all subsequent Heroes of time wear it. However Skyward Sword (a game set before Minish Cap) shows Link wearing the cap, even though it doesn't make any sense for him to do so. These plot holes and lore inconsistencies make it fairly obvious to me that story in Zelda games is almost always an afterthought.

[airman4]

Yeah while it's true that a couple of Zelda games hint at a larger world beyond what we see, it doesn't happen often. Gimym is on the mark by saying that in Zelda gameplay comes first and the story after. While there is an official Zelda timeline, it's pretty clear that very little thought was ever actually put into the lore behind the series, and they kind of made it up as they went and strung it together however they could (made particularly evident by the existence of 3 seperate timeline divergences, which have pretty poor justifications).

Heck, they'll often completely disregard the plot that transpires in previous games. Take The Minish Cap for example. The game is essentially an origin story for the pointed green cap, and explains why all subsequent Heroes of time wear it. However Skyward Sword (a game set before Minish Cap) shows Link wearing the cap, even though it doesn't make any sense for him to do so. These plot holes and lore inconsistencies make it fairly obvious to me that story in Zelda games is almost always an afterthought.

wow
you killed the whole zelda timeline just like that ...

[s_l_m]

Yeah while it's true that a couple of Zelda games hint at a larger world beyond what we see, it doesn't happen often. Gimym is on the mark by saying that in Zelda gameplay comes first and the story after. While there is an official Zelda timeline, it's pretty clear that very little thought was ever actually put into the lore behind the series, and they kind of made it up as they went and strung it together however they could (made particularly evident by the existence of 3 seperate timeline divergences, which have pretty poor justifications).

Heck, they'll often completely disregard the plot that transpires in previous games. Take The Minish Cap for example. The game is essentially an origin story for the pointed green cap, and explains why all subsequent Heroes of time wear it. However Skyward Sword (a game set before Minish Cap) shows Link wearing the cap, even though it doesn't make any sense for him to do so. These plot holes and lore inconsistencies make it fairly obvious to me that story in Zelda games is almost always an afterthought.

wow
you killed the whole zelda timeline just like that ...

I used to frequent a site (unfortunately doesn't exist any more) that was all about Zelda Theory's. It's not exactly hard to poke massive wholes in the Timeline...