The Legend of Zelda: Majority's Mask

As I was sifting through my Backloggery in search of inspiration for my next GameCola article, I came to the stunning realization that I had beaten a lot of Zelda games. Ten of them, to be specific--as in, all but two or three of the games anyone's ever heard of. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, except for the fact that I don't really like Zelda all that much.

Blasphemy, I know. Everyone loves The Legend of Zelda. Hey, there are a few Zelda games I like well enough, and there's only one, maybe two games I've played that might actually qualify as bad. It's a solid series, but there's not a lot about the basic elements of the game that hook me.

I play games with lots of different weapon options, like Mega Man and No One Lives Forever. Zelda gives you a sword, a boomerang, arrows and bombs. In every game. And that's pretty much it. They're fine weapons, but I need to switch things up more often. I LOVE unmasking the Iron Mask enemies with the Hook Shot and setting everything on fire with the Fire Rod in Link's Awakening, but these kinds of novelty weapons often show up too late in the game or are too limited in their offensive usefulness to see enough use.

I also miss jumping. The jump-bestowing Roc's Feather in the Game Boy games and the ability to make your boat hop in Phantom Hourglass make me very happy, because I use jumping as a means of self-defense in everything from platformers to first-person shooters, and I still can't get used to dodging by not being in an enemy's line of fire to begin with.

On the flip side, I'm a big fan of puzzles, and Zelda is bursting at the seams with 'em. They may not always be as complex or mentally taxing as the ones in Space Quest or Monkey Island--quite often it's a matter of pushing blocks around or skillfully completing a task with the shiny new toy you found in this dungeon--but there's enough cause to pause and think on a regular basis, and that's good enough for me. Plus, it's nice to never worry about pretty much dooming yourself to failure halfway through because you forgot to pick up a tiny widget at the very beginning of the game. Stupid widget.

I'm not averse to item collection, otherwise I'd never have liked Metroid, another series that's very similar in style to Zelda. The key reasons I prefer Metroid are that it's platforming over top-down action, sci-fi over fantasy, and exploration over linear progression.

Zelda does have its fair share of open areas and hidden locations to explore, but the real focus is on the dungeons and bosses. It's all about getting from A to B and occasionally doodling around in-between. With Zelda, so much of the world outside of the dungeons feels like filler to me, whereas with Metroid, there's not always a clear objective or destination, so getting from A to B might as well be a dungeon in itself.

Linearity isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there's just enough of a mix of linearity and freeform exploration in Zelda for me to want more of one and less of the other. The bottom line, though, is that I like Zelda well enough...but not nearly enough to warrant owning nine of the Zelda games I've played through (having beaten Four Swords Adventures with three other friends at someone else's house).

Granted, most of my best friends are big Zelda fans, so I've received about half of my collection as gifts. Regardless, I was the one who made the decision to pick up the GBA Zelda II re-release, and I'm the one who chose to play through every game I owned before tackling things in my backlog that seemed more up my alley, such as Star Trek: Legacy and Sam & Max: Season Two.

I've noticed a growing trend of compulsively collecting and playing games from series I'm not wild about. It's not just Zelda, but also Final Fantasy, Wario Land, and even Police Quest. For one thing, I'm a completionist, so it simply won't do to have played one of these games without trying the others. I also find it's good for conversation and writing inspiration to have all these popular games under my belt. Yet there's more to it than just these things.

There are things about all these series that I like, but there are so many things that bother me or aren't as exciting to me as they're supposed to be. I'm giving these series second and third and tenth chances because I want to see what my friends see in these games. I want to find more than one installment that's enjoyable enough for me to replay simply because I miss playing it. I have a few favorites in the aforementioned series that fit this criteria, but they're all ones I played during the era of nostalgia when everything was a favorite. And I assure you that none of them are ones any "real fan" would pick as their favorites.

I'm looking forward to trying out Final Fantasy VII and discovering that, for the first time since Mario 3 and Super Metroid, I agree with the opinion of the masses about which game in a series is the absolute best. And I'm hopeful that Minish Cap or even Zelda's Adventure will be weird enough to win me over. I may have played most of the games in these two series, but don't let that fool you into thinking I'm a fanboy.

Whether I'm a naïve optimist or just a hopeless collector, I'll keep buying and trying these games until I can honestly call myself a fan...or until I realize I should've saved my money this whole time and written out one big check to Capcom to help finance the best Mega Man game ever.