Like the Helmasaur King's mask after the final hammer blow, A Link to the Past's linearity is now broken.
Armed with the Magic Hammer, I figured I'd see what new areas of the Dark World could be broken into. A vague memory pulled me to the Lost Woods, where, at one of the exits to Kakariko Village, I found a portal. After jumping through, I was primed to storm Theives' Town (so called), and quickly retrieved the Titan Mitts. With those great gloves on Link's hot hands, the entire structure of the game came crashing down.
The duck that was trapped in the village weather vane is now free. Link's sword was tempered by the dwarf smiths. The final bottle was retrieved. And, the cape that turns Link invisible was pulled from the Light World's graveyard.
This freedom of movement is what makes A Link to the Past great. If you know the game well, you're not just rewarded with cool stuff, but with the freedom to play its latter two thirds in just about any order you wish. That freedom is a true reward for skill because it puts so much power into a player's hands.
Though, this reward comes at the cost of story. A Link to the Past has one, of course. It's also an important part of the Zelda timeline, but so much of the game's story is in its atmosphere and NPCs, rather than in dialogues or exposition dumps. Or even cutscenes, for that matter. I think you can count the number of cutscenes in A Link to the Past on one hand.
The question is, though, has there ever been a story-heavy game that plays non-linearly if the player knows a trick or two?
I would venture that, in an asburdly easy-to-find-non-linearity way, the Elder Scrolls games do exactly this. The tutorial and the first dungeon or two are tightly scripted intros, after which you can proceed in linear fashion through the game--travel directly to talk to your next quest seed, and so on. It's a little more complicated than Zelda, if only because now NPCs don't occupy the same square until spoken to; they eat, sleep, and go about the business of their daily lives, which means you sometimes have to track them down, and sometimes fall off the beaten path along the way.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, you can also say "to hell with it," have a full-on Radagast the Brown breakdown, and spend the rest of the game traipsing through fields gathering mushrooms and wildflowers for crazy potions, and forget completely about where you were supposed to be going or why. You can settle into the first town on your way, buy a house, settle down, and make a decent living as a woodchopper or tanner, and live out a happy life without saving the kingdom. As the peasants under Harald Fairhair knew, "reclaiming the kingdom" usually meant a radical upheaval in the upper echelons, but not a lot of meaningful change for the average peasant. You can live out the rest of your days in Skyrim plying a simple trade until your bored soul passes on the GTA V and your character dies a peaceful death in his save-game sleep. You can also make a long, long life of side-quests; as soon as the turorial's done, the open world is there. I myself cling to the main quest, at least part of the time, like a life raft. The ocean is just too big to navigate otherwise.
In the generation of console games you're talking about, though, I always internally imagined the airships in Final Fantasy IV and VI as the moment when the game goes "off book" and the open world becomes fully explorable. It's not unlike the rush of freedom that finally comes with being given the car keys for the first time: you can go where you like, go back to places you've already been, find secrets, pick up stray items... much of the effect you're talking about in a Zelda conflict.
Luke, all of that makes Skyrim (and the other Elder Scrolls games) sound like things I should play. And like things that I should never play.
DeleteI agree with your comparing getting the airship in Final Fantasy IV and VI to going "off book" in A Link to the Past. It's definitely the same feeling of freedom. But breaking from the prescribed path in Zelda also involves exploiting paths that seem like they were accidentally left in the game. So you need to really know the game to break its linearity.
Though the same sort of knowledge is definitely rewarded in games like Final Fantasy VI. Who would've guessed that finishing the game with just Celes, Edgar, and Setzer was even possible?