NES Review: The Legend of Zelda

Review by: Pierst179

The Legend of Zelda is one of the most revolutionary game ever. It was released at a time where most games where short, linear and had a simple goal, but as they did with Super Mario Bros in 1985, Nintendo decided to take a risk and when The Legend of Zelda arrived at the stores a new genre of games had been created.

By the time you start playing this game you will be overwhelmed by the huge overworld you will have to explore. It is something you will not find in any games of the NES era, you will just go exploring, you can head to wherever you want.

This game is also the first one to give players the chance to save their progress in order to keep playing it at another time, this is a proof of how lengthy is this game’s adventure.

The storyline is simple yet compelling, the evil Ganon was chasing Princess Zelda trhough all Hyrule in order to get her part of the Triforce, fearing that the king of evil would succeed our Princess decided to shatter her piece of the Triforce and hide it in dungeons spread through the overworld, so it is your duty as a hero to explore and find all pieces to save the kingdom from Ganon's evil hands.

You will play as Link and as you advance through the vast land of Hyrule you will find some pretty familiar items such as bombs and the boomerang. During your adventure you will find many enemies, fighting them is really nice and all the controls are responsive and simple. Hyrule has many hidden caves and shortcuts, finding them is another amazing challenge that gamers will encounter in the first installment of the series. If you are a Zelda fan you are probably now wondering how many dungeons there are on this game. There are eight of them, it is fun to go through them and see where everything started, how were the puzzles made 20 years ago, actually some of them may seem really stupid if you compare them to Twilight Princess’s ones, but in 1987 those dungeons were challenging and compelling.

The best thing when it comes to these dungeons is that you can enter them in any order you would like to, of course finding the first one is much easier than the others, but if by any chance you encounter the third one first you can go in without worrying, you will eventually have some problems with the enemies as they will probably be much stronger than Link but as every Zelda fan likes a good challenge such as finishing a game with three heart containers, this option to explore the dungeons out of order sounds attractive.

The sound is amazing, although the quality of the NES sound isn’t great when compared to nowadays’ standards, most of the songs are really addictive and you will catch yourself humming them while walking on the street or taking a shower. Another fact that shows how perfect is this soundtrack is that up to now most of these songs can be heard at any Zelda game the only difference is that those songs are usually remixed versions.

The graphics are nice. However they are not the best in the system, I believe that this game world is so big that Nintendo couldn’t do much more for the graphics, but they are amazing anyway, some enemies could have been better designed and some textures could be more detailed, for example, the only thing that changes when you go from a forest to a mountain is the color the scenario has, although it sounds nice for that time this game's graphics just feel outdated when compare to the ones in Super Mario Bros 3, a game that was released only 2 years after this one.

In a nutshell, The Legend of Zelda is indeed a revolutionary game that set the bar for any game that would follow in its footsteps, it changed the game world in many different ways and it was the first installment of one of the best series ever created. With a huge overworld and many hours of challenge, thrill and exploration you will be amazed by everything Nintendo managed to do such a long time ago, and believe me this game isn’t getting any old, it will still be a classic when our children start playing videogames.