 Hey everybody, it's Nathaniel Rufflejantz, your favorite webmaster and owner from ZeldaInformer.com. And this is my first little video podcast I've done in a while. We noticed in a post that I made yesterday that we were asked for suggestions and discussion on the future of the website that people want more video features. So consider your prayers answered. In reality, we're actually working on a few video features, but before I get into any of all the video features that we plan to be doing, note plan, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen, but we want it to happen, let's just get into a little discussion here because it's been breaking out pretty heavily lately. And that's kind of the new school Zelda formula versus the old school Zelda formula in particular what Zelda is today versus what it was in the original, the Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo Entertainment System. There's been a lot of back and forth ever since the whole, ever since it was basically posted at our site that E.G. Enomu, however you pronounce, I'm pretty sure it's E.G. Enomu, but it doesn't like the original, the Legend of Zelda. He's probably never even beat the first dungeon, I think it's just too hard, there's no hand holding, I mean, there's no direction. It's what a lot of people actually liked about the original game and a lot of people didn't like to be fair, but obviously enough people liked it for there to be an ongoing series that has led to what we know today is the Zelda series. 16 games later things are going pretty well for the series. One thing that most gamers really, really, really want to return from the Legend of Zelda series or, I'm sorry, the Legend of Zelda for the NES is the freedom of exploration. I mean there's a lot of other things that people want to change, you know, less hand holding, less, you know, more use with the items and a set of one dungeon. There's a whole bunch of stuff you can talk about. Let's just talk about this one aspect, freedom of exploration. Now it's true that there have been Zelda games that have allowed freedom of exploration since the original, the Legend of Zelda. The only, well there's kind of two 3D games that kind of broke the mold, that Ocarina of Time set up and really started with the link to the past and Link's Awakening and that would be Majora's Mask and The Wind Waker. Sure, both games were linear, but they were linear in a way that allowed you to still freely explore. The Wind Waker kind of set you on a path for, you know, the first couple hours where you had no real freedom to explore anything and then as soon as you get your sail and you have a little good time, suddenly you can just sail the whole open sea freely and truly actually go anywhere you want and go exploring. This is an aspect that really was from the original, The Legend of Zelda. And it's also an aspect that a lot of people kind of didn't like only because the sailing was boring. In the original Legend of Zelda, you were fighting new enemies every single screen. There were secret passageways to find. There was dungeon entrances to find. And in The Wind Waker, yeah, there was islands to find, but between the islands, there really wasn't a whole lot. I mean, there was a few enemies, some tornadoes, some fish, some buried treasure. But in the end, it was pretty boring. Even though I find it peaceful to sail the open sea in The Wind Waker, if you're actually just trying to explore and not just traveling between, you know, your destinations, it did get a little boring. In Phantom Hourglass, it became completely linear. They barely ever let you just sail where you wanted in there. Or I'm sorry, steamboat where you wanted. But I digress. The Wind Waker had a lot of freedom of exploration. A lot of people liked it. A lot of people didn't. Kind of like in the original Zelda game. In Majora's Mask, you did have a lot of freedom because the game had a lot of focus and side quests. And you can pretty much do the side quests any time you want in pretty much any order that you want. The dungeon still kind of had a linear feel to go to the forest temple, and then the ice temple was next to the water. I don't remember. Anyways, the point is that you still had a kind of a linear pattern set up to get to the end of the game. But there was so much content packed into such a small area that it actually, I want to say that it kind of encouraged you to explore. I guess is what I want to say there. And Twilight Princess had none of that. That's well documented. Twilight Princess was one of the most linear Zelda games ever made. It took you what I've been calling station to station. Station to station, basically you start in one spot. You can explore that spot, but you're not allowed to leave. You can't go off and do what you want. You're stuck there until you follow the linear set path that takes you to the next location. And then you can explore that location, and you can go back and explore your previous location. But you're still confined. You're stuck. You can't go anywhere else that the game doesn't let you go to. And I've been using this example a lot. When you go to Kakariko Village for the first time in Twilight Princess, you actually have to cross part of Hyrule Field to get to Kakariko Village. OK, you're in Hyrule Field. Well, if Hyrule Field is the main hub of the overworld, which it is, I mean, everything in the world is connected to Hyrule Field, then why can't I just go wherever I want and just go to Kakariko Village when I feel like it to continue the story? I don't know. Nintendo didn't want you to do that. They wanted you to keep pushing forward, keep pushing forward. And sure, you finally eventually get to a point where you can freely explore every place in the world any time you want. But by the time you get to that point, you've already been to all those places and you've already explored them through your station to station method. At least if you're me and you're looking for everything you can possibly find, you explored it when you were there. So someone say, well, why do we need a big old moral when you're just going to explore each station you go to? And it's more so because the game is confining you to have to play the game that way. Like, say when I first leave Ordon Village, I actually, you know, I have a fishing pole. Maybe I want to go try fishing at Lake Helia, or Hylia, or however you pronounce it. Game doesn't let you do it. You can't go there right away. You have to go do other stuff. And that's, I think what I personally want back from the original game is the freedom to go anywhere you want. I don't care. I understand the story is going to have to have some linearity to it. You're going to have to perform certain events to cause other events to happen and to progress the storyline and to go whatever. I mean, I don't even care if you have to all do the dungeons in a certain order. To me, that wasn't really that big a deal. I know we're not going to have time. You can do some dungeons on the water. To me, doing a lot of order isn't a big deal because, oh, say I want to go to the fire temple before the water temple, even though the water temple might be first in the unofficial order. It really doesn't make a difference. I mean, it's nice, but it's not really freedom of exploration to me. That's just more like you're just taking different paths to get to the exact same end, which is another point of having alternate endings and different ways you can go in the game to cause the story to change. That's something that's far another discussion. But so we have the freedom of the legend of Zelda with exploration. We have what we got with Twilight Princess and a lot of the games since Ocarina of Time have been pretty similar. Even with the Wind Waker, it was so boring that who really wanted to explore it anyways. I mean, I still did because I am sailing on the ocean that I've never been in Zelda before, but it did get all my second, third, fourth play through. So that all being said, would you guys like to see some of that exploration come back? And do you think Nintendo, sorry for my voice, it's a little raspy from, I had some adventures last night. That's just put it that way. Would you like to see Nintendo, and maybe in Skyward Sword itself, have a bit more of that freedom and exploration? We know there's flights. We assume at some point you'll be able to fly wherever you want. But would you like some more options? You get past the Sky Temple, which is the first temple and it appears the game's pretty linear to that point. Would you like to be able to just go wherever you want after that? Is that something you're interested in or do you prefer the more station to station, you're kind of forced down a set path, really discouraged from exploring? Is that, you know, what method do you prefer? And I do think what can actually encourage exploration is the same thing that encouraged it in Majora's Mask. And that is taking your massive overworld or in Majora's Mask is a small overworld and just jam packing it with content. Lots of enemies, lots of side quests, lots of everything that makes you actually, hey, what's this over here? I wanna go look. I wanna go see what this NPC is going on because he's not just gonna be sitting there like, oh, ho hum, I like looking at trees. No, he actually might have a quest for you to do. I'm sorry, I just called it a quest. What is this, World of Warcraft? Anyways, you get my point. It might have a side quest for you to do and a lot of that or not. Anyways, that's my opinion. I just wanna hear what you guys think. In terms of video features, we do have a mailbag. That was a hotly requested feature. We will have our very first ever, well not ever, we're very first, audio slash video mailbag tomorrow. Alex Plant is actually working on it right now. It's just an intro mailbag. He, you know, I'm mostly just getting, you know, whatever, getting you guys to submit questions to him. He'll be doing the mailbag every week. Hopefully he'll get a new webcam so he can actually record video. Then we also have, people have been wondering whatever happened to the top 100 list. We left off at number 71, I believe is where we left out that. So we've done 71 through 100. So we still have 70 spots left. The list does exist first off. So I don't doubt that I was just making it up on the fly. The list actually physically exists. And we are doing the rest of that in a video feature. And we'll be doing it in 20 spots at a time segments up to the top 10, which will have a longer video feature. And, you know, a lot more cool stuff. Well, we're trying to get a podcast together. We don't have a name for the podcast yet. We have one member, maybe two so far for the team. We'd like to get at least one more for the core group. And then we can have special guests on every episode. Hopefully we can make it a weekly event because, hey, we cover a lot of news and it's nice to have a podcast that summarizes the news as well as creates discussions. So we don't have to have necessarily video features like this. Other video stuff we have going on. Well, let's see. We just hired someone who I think is going to be finishing a timeline video. That should be pretty cool. And we're presently in talks about creating a web app for you guys to create your own timeline by dropping games on a set list. And you can have different options in the timeline. You could save the timeline. You could share it with your friends. Just to kind of give a better format, I guess, instead of people on the forums always being like, oh well, blah, blah, blah. No, you can just link your timeline and people can look at it in picture form and get a better grasp of what you're saying if they don't understand the abbreviations. It's just, it's more user friendly and it's just kind of fun to do. That's not really a video feature, but it is something that we are hopefully going to have for you before the end of the year. That's about it. You might not want any more video logs from me. I tend to ramble. It's cool. Stay classy, Zelda and Farmer.