Tokyo — In nearly four decades of existence, "Zelda," Nintendo's action-adventure video game series, including a new installment, been available since Friday, has influenced a large number of creators with its mechanics and its unique universe. Here are a few examples:
Inspiration for creators
"Zelda is a reference and even a bible" for developers, says Katsuhiko Hayashi, editor-in-chief of the Japanese trade magazine Famitsu.
"Many games have sought to take elements of influential titles like +DOOM+, +Metroid+ or +Metal Gear Solid+," said Mark Brown, who analyzes the design of the games on his YouTube channel "Game Maker's Toolkit".
But "Zelda," he says, "has always been different: the developers have often been inspired by a more general feeling that they describe as one of exploration, adventure, mystery, surprise, and progression" of the hero.
Among the creators who have "confessed their love for the series and created games inspired by their experience," he cites Hideki Kamiya ("Okami"), Hidetaka Miyazaki ("Dark Souls") or Fumito Ueda ("Ico"). "More recently, we've also seen indie developers who loved Zelda as a child try to capture these sensations in their creations," like "Fez" or "Tunic."
A pioneer of the "open world"
From "Grand Theft Auto" ("GTA") to "Skyrim", "open world" games, which allow you to move freely and interact at will in a huge world, are now legion.
This element was already present in the first "Zelda" in 1986, explains Kiyoshi Tane, an author specializing in the history of video games: "The scale of the game was enormous at a time when most games finished in an hour or two. The map was designed with a real focus on exploration and, from that point of view, it was sort of the pioneer of what open-world games would become."
The latest episode of the series — "Breath of the Wild," released in 2017 — "came at a time when people were starting to tire of the open world" and helped reinvent it, Tane said.
He "challenged many preconceptions, for example, trusting players to explore (the universe) on their own, instead of listing all the points of interest on the map," Brown said.
Samurai to the Rescue of Technology
While working on "Ocarina of Time", the first 3D installment released in 1998, its creators run into a major problem: how to allow the player to easily aim at an enemy accurately in a three-dimensional universe?
The trigger for Nintendo's developers occurs while watching a samurai movie, whose hero is surrounded by ninjas that he faces one after the other. An enemy throws his kusarigama (a sickle connected to a chain) and moves in a circle around the hero, to whom he is bound by this stretched chain.