Hi. My name’s Mark and this is Boss Keys - a series about the dungeon design in the Legend
of Zelda games.
We’re almost at the end of this journey.
But before we finish this series - I wanted to go back to where it all began, and look
at the very first two Zelda games.
Well, actually I didn’t want to.
But, I got a lot of requests to include these games, so here we are.
If this episode sucks, it’s your fault.
So let’s start with The Legend of Zelda.
This game was made as in attempt to capture designer Shigeru Miyamoto’s childhood experiences
of exploring the Japanese countryside.
So the game is mysterious and surprising - it begs you to simply wander off from the starting
screen and explore this strange, sprawling landscape.
Oh, and hopefully find eight pieces of the triforce and save princess Zelda.
You’ll get those pieces in the dungeons.
Yes, right back in the very first game, Zelda was split between the overworld and the underworld,
and had you exploring a number of underground mazes where you’d fight a boss and get a
new piece of the triforce.
And these labyrinths absolutely established a lot of the ideas that would go on to define
a Zelda dungeon in future games.
Every one of these mazes has a boss, an item, a map, a compass, and a bunch of small keys
and locks.
And while almost every room is a tricky combat challenge, the real goal is just finding your
way to the exit.
You’ll notice that the rooms are not laid out in a linear fashion, but are interconnected
and littered with locked doors and obstacles, which means you’ll need to be careful to
not get lost, and must go on the hunt for things like keys and items.
Unfortunately, pretty much everything Zelda 1 established in terms of dungeons, was quite...
unrefined.
And most of this stuff would get rethought and fixed up in later games.
Take the keys.
Every Zelda game has small keys.
They can be used on any normal door, but they disappear as soon as you use them.
In a typical Zelda game, these keys are restricted to the dungeon where you find them - but that’s
not true in Zelda 1, where a key can be used in any door in the entire game.
And, predictably, this leads to all kinds of messy situations.
It most often means that you have more keys than you need.
There are several dungeons with excess keys, and plenty of locked rooms that you never
need to unlock because they just contain optional items like the compass or a hint.
So that means you might saunter into a dungeon with a handful of keys already in your pocket,
making the dungeon a bit of a cakewalk.
That’s not ideal, but it’s much better than walking into a dungeon and finding yourself
with not enough keys - which can happen if you unlock every door you come across, or
don’t explore every dungeon thoroughly.
And there are dungeons where there aren’t enough keys in the dungeon itself to open
all the doors.
Take Level 6.
If you walk into the dungeon with no keys, you’ll immediately pick up one key and be
faced with two locked doors.
The one on the right merely leads to a hint room and then... well, you’re screwed.
It’s either back to an earlier dungeon to hunt down a key.
Ugh.
Or you can buy one from the shop.
Which feels like a bit of a messy fix, and these keys are super expensive, which sucks
when rupees are so quite hard to come by.
Ultimately, Zelda dungeons just work best as self contained spaces - so the change to
restrict a small key to the dungeon where you found it, was a good decision.
Here’s something else that later Zelda games fixed.
In Zelda 1, many dungeons let you finish the level without ever picking up the key item.
In Level 1, it’s really easy to just completely miss the bow and arrow, and you might not
even realise you did until Level 6, where you need the arrows to kill this spider boss.
Now, the solution to this problem can be found... in the game itself.
In another dungeon, the fourth one, you can’t get to the boss room because of this water.
So you need to find the stepladder, elsewhere in the dungeon, to advance.
It’s a simple solution to ensure that everyone who finished level 4 has found the stepladder.
But this still wasn’t fully implemented even in Link to the Past where you can finish
the Tower of Hera without picking up the Moon Pearl.
It wasn’t until Link’s Awakening that Nintendo established that you’d need to
get the dungeon’s item to reach the boss room.
Which makes a lot of sense.
By all means, let less observant players go straight past optional items, like the magic
rod, upgraded candle, power ring, bible, and magical key.
But if the player needs to get an item to finish the game, then don’t let them leave
dungeon three without the raft.
This brings us onto bombs.
And this is where things start getting really messy.
One complaint that’s often levelled at Zelda 1 is that you need to burn every bush and
bomb every wall.
Unlike later Zelda games where you can clearly see which walls can be blown up, in Zelda
1, destructible walls just look like normal walls.
And yes, it’s true that pretty much every screen on the overworld hides some kind of
secret room.
But there’s only one bush you HAVE to burn - the entrance to dungeon 8 - and one wall
you HAVE to blow up - the entrance to dungeon 9 - and they are both hinted at.
Everything else, though, is optional.
You do want the goodies because things like heart containers and extra rupees are tremendously
helpful - but they’re not critical.
In the dungeons, though, it’s a different story.
So in the first four dungeons, there are walls you can blow up to make shortcuts, bypass
locked doors, and even discover secret rooms like this hidden stash of rupees.
That’s cool.
But, again, they’re optional.
But in the later dungeons, you have to blow up random walls just to get to the boss.
And this can be a maddening experience of wasting bombs, and grinding for extra ones,
and basically having to draw out a map just to mark down which walls you have and have
not tried to blow up.
Now, okay, let me give Nintendo a small bit of credit.
In the fifth dungeon, you get locked in this room.
You get given some bombs.
And you can see from the map, if you’ve picked it up, that there’s a room to your left.
So the only way to advance is to figure out that you need to blow up a hole in the left wall.
This is basically your tutorial - a way for Nintendo to say “hey, from now on, you might
have to blow up walls just to get through the dungeon”.
So at least you are warned.
But it’s not much of a consolation, really.
In dungeon 7, you need to blow holes in four different walls to get to the boss.
And the first room you blow your way into isn’t even shown on the map - it’s just
a hole!
This is a tremendously bad bit of design, if you ask me.
And couple this with Zelda’s 1’s clumsy “puzzle” design, and I’m using like
19 pairs of quotes around puzzle - where you have to push one random block in the room,
but only after all the enemies are dead, and you’ve got a recipe for a dungeon that goes
beyond challenging, to just unfair, and silly.
Look, I’ll defend the overworld design of Zelda 1 forever, but some of these later dungeons
just suck.
I can appreciate this game for laying the ground work for how dungeons would work in
the Zelda series - but I’m glad to see that Nintendo changed and fixed pretty much everything
about them in later games.
Right. Zelda 2. (Epilepsy Warning: Footage Contains Some Flashing Images)
Zelda 2 is a weird game.
It’s now a side scrolling platformer, with a dedicated jump button no less.
Except when you’re on the top-down overworld - which has random battles, like Final Fantasy.
It’s got intensely precise sword fighting combat, and magic spells.
There’s experience points and levelling - which inevitably means grinding.
And it’s punishingly difficult.
Just... brutally hard.
But while pretty much everything it did would be forgotten by later games - it’s not totally
unrecognisable as a Zelda game.
In fact, the move towards a more linear structure and the inclusion of small quests you must
complete between dungeons would filter into future games.
And the dungeons are still non-linear, interconnected, and have series staples like a boss, small
keys and locked doors, and a key item.
No map or compass though.
So if we look at the first dungeon, Parapa Palace, we can see that the path to the boss
room, and the path and the key item - a candle - are locked behind various doors and so we’ll
need to explore other rooms to find keys.
Annoyingly, Zelda 2 has a habit of putting keys off at the end of a long hallway, and
then - once you get it - you just have to walk all the way back.
This is the worst kind of backtracking - and would later be solved by loops in the level design.
Now, Zelda 2 did try to fix a few issues from Zelda 1.
Each dungeon now has the right number of keys and locks.
Which means dungeons are now self contained sections, with no intention for you to carry
keys from one dungeon to the next.
Hey, I could even make graphs for these dungeons if I wanted to, and they’d almost look like
normal Zelda dungeons.
Zelda 1 on the other hand is like "what is going on..."
But you can still use keys in different dungeons so if you start sequence breaking you could
potentially screw things up?
Maybe? I dunno.
Either way, it’s still a half step towards the proper solution.
Also, you can still leave the dungeon without the item in most cases.
Only one dungeon, the second one, puts an obstacle in your way that forces you to get
the item before facing the boss.
But at least the dungeons turn to ruins on the overworld if you have both found the item
and killed the boss, so you won’t backtrack into old areas unnecessarily.
Again, it’s a half step.
Also, Zelda 2 still lets you go into dungeons without the necessary gear.
I hope you found the somewhat secret upward thrust move from Darunia Town, otherwise you’ll
be screwed when you get to this room.
And I hope you have the reflect spell and the thunder spell before fighting the bosses
of dungeons four and seven, respectively, or it’s game over.
Finally, the game has no bombs at all - so you don’t have to worry about that - but
there’s still a secret wall you have to walk through because, why not, eh?
Really, though, the dungeons in Zelda 2 are not all that difficult to navigate.
They’re mostly quite small, and the only thing to worry about is keys and locks - there
are basically no other puzzles or obstacles.
And as soon as the dungeons get much bigger, you unlock a magic key which means that you
don’t even need to look for keys in the last two dungeons.
You may lose your bearings, simply because everything looks so damn similar.
Zelda 1 had that problem too.
But as long as you keep a quick map of the dungeon - mental or otherwise - I think you’ll
be fine.
But it’s the demanding combat, the invisible pits, getting knocked back into lava, going
into pointless dead ends, and so on, that will truly challenge you.
And if you die too many times, you’ve got to go all the way back to the very first screen,
because screw you.
All of which makes you not want to explore because it’s so fraught with danger and
frustration.
Zelda games would eventually learn that more linear dungeons can have difficult fights,
but more open and exploratory levels would have fewer enemies so as to not frustrate
you during the backtracking.
So, there we have it.
Zelda 1 and 2 both set the groundwork for the franchise.
But it’s clear that Nintendo made some mistakes when designing the dungeons for these early
games - and it wasn’t until A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening that these issues
were fixed.
Those games added actual puzzles.
They made the dungeons much more distinct from one another, and the individual rooms
more unique also.
And they introduced more elements to keep track of, like a big key or more obstacles
that could only be overcome with the dungeon’s new item.
Then, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask brought those ideas into the third dimension.
Suddenly, dungeons weren’t just sprawling mazes but intricate 3D spaces that unlocked
like a puzzle box.
On handheld, another developer, Capcom, confidently explored different dungeon designs in the
Oracle games and Minish Cap.
Meanwhile, on console, Nintendo decided to make the dungeons easier to navigate in Wind
Waker and Twilight Princess, as they focused more on individual puzzles, combat, and memorable
moments.
The DS games followed suit, but the Temple of the Ocean King in Phantom Hourglass and
the Tower of Spirits in Spirit Tracks gave Zelda players something new, with dungeons
that you’d revisit over the course of the adventure.
And Skyward Sword helped Nintendo return to brain-busting architectural puzzles, with
places like the time-travelling Sandship and the shifting rooms of Sky Keep.
On 3DS, Nintendo would start to rethink the Zelda formula entirely, with the non-linear
A Link Between Worlds.
Which, in retrospect, was a dress rehearsal for the most radically different Zelda game
ever made.
Part retro throwback, part modern masterpiece, Breath of the Wild is a complete reinvention
of the Zelda formula and it will be the focus of the final episode, of Boss Keys.