Posted by: thepinetree on 02/26/2007 09:54 AM
Updated by: thepinetree on 08/01/2007 07:16 AM
Expires: 01/01/2012 12:00 AM
:
In Media Res....More on Zelda! By Raven and Coyote
Every major gaming franchise I've dealt with, no matter how good, has always had a couple of games that just make you wince that the franchise name was ever attached to it. You wonder, perhaps, whose brilliant idea it was to come up with that game, and why the individual responsible for such a travesty wasn't tarred and feathered. In this respect, The Legend of Zelda series was no different....
  
And this month, and a kind of post-script to the last article, I'm going to talk about two LoZ games that I'm not entirely proud to be admitting that I've played. Dubbed the “Unholy Triforce” by disgruntled and disappointed fans, this trilogy of Legend of Zelda games was released for the Philips CD-I platform.
A short history on the series and the system, taken from Wikipedia runs as follows:
“In 1989, Nintendo signed a deal with Sony to begin development of a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Famicom. However, Nintendo suddenly broke the contract and instead signed with Philips (this fallout with Sony later led to the development of the Sony PlayStation). The CD-ROM add-on was later dropped, but Nintendo had already licensed the rights to Philips to use some of its characters, including Link, Princess Zelda, and Ganon. This was done in hopes of gaining Philips as a partner on the way to making the compact disc-based console. Contracting out to independent studios, Philips subsequently used the characters to create three games for its own "CD-i" console, without influence from Nintendo or the chief Zelda series developers Shigeru Miyamoto or Eiji Aonuma. The characters and artwork were based on the Legend of Zeldal cartoon series.”
There were, as the nickname implies, three games in this series:
* Link: The Faces of Evil
* Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon
* Zelda's Adventure
The first two games were released by Animation Magic in 1993, while Zelda's Adventure was released a year later by a different company, Viridis. And it showed. Each game was given a relatively low budget of 600,000 dollars. Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon were also developed in tandem, in the hopes of effectively using the budget. It would seem that was almost the only wise choice they made, however.
Since the CD-I was a CD-Rom format machine, the games' stories were told almost exclusively through FMV cutscenes. While this was cutting-edge for the time, it wasn't without its drawbacks. The artwork, based heavily on the art used in the Legend of Zelda animated series, was outsourced to Russia. The artwork itself was almost painfully simple, and the gesturing of the characters is overly-dramatic and jerky. The voice acting was even worse, quickly outstripping the original Resident Evil, which is infamous for its bad B-Movie voice acting.
Faces of Evil cover Wand of Gamelon cover
In Faces of Evil, Link jumps at the chance to be a hero elsewhere, feeling useless now that peace has been established in Hyrule. Only the setting, the Island of Koridai, is really new, however. The story follows the same Legend of Zelda formula. Ganon has taken over the island (hence the requirement for Link's intervention, as its written in some unnamed prophecy that only Link can defeat Ganon) and kidnapped Princess Zelda. In Wand of Gamelon, both Link and the King of Hyrule have gone off to face Ganon and disappeared, so Zelda decides to take matters into her own hands, and try to save them.
Both of these games utilized the side-scrolling set-up used in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, but the CD-I's controller wasn't well suited to the game, and there was a pretty steep learning curve. You had to kneel to access the inventory, and to pick up items or speak with other characters, you had to strike them with your sword. After all, nothing says “Let's chat!” like a blade to the stomach.
Zelda's Adventure, a semi-sequel to these two games, was a bit different. It seemed to be trying to emulate the original game series more. The game was shown with an overhead view reminiscent of the original Legend of Zelda. The characters were all created using motion capture, and the FMVs in this particular game were all live-action. The game, however, was never actually released outside of Europe, in spite of having been filmed in Los Angeles, and is considered the most rare of all the Legend of Zelda games that were commercially released. And it, like Wand of Gamelon and Faces of Evil, isn't considered a “canon” part of the Zelda timeline, owing to the fact that Nintendo had almost nothing to do with these projects.
Zelda's Adventure cover
There was one thing about two of these three games that still strikes me as extremely interesting, however, even in spite of all their flaws. Zelda's Adventure and Wand of Gamelon were the only two games in the entire Legend of Zelda series that featured Zelda not only as a main character, but as a playable character. And that's something that Raven, as a female gamer, has always hoped to see in the licensed series.
So, to sum up this “unholy triforce” of games, they had interesting ideas, but were poorly executed. Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon faded into obscurity along with the Philips CD-I, and overall, that's probably for the best.
Questions? Comments? Drop us a line at In Media Res!
|
