Zelda – Parry Everything

Door Key Mechanics

It’s been a short, busy month, so this time I wanted to talk about something that might be of particular concern to me, specifically. One of my pet peeves. A real bee-in-my-bonnet moment. I’m going to get into why this particular design pattern bothers me so much in a moment, but first what am I talking about?

You ever find yourself at the heart of a deadly dungeon, having just slain a cursed demon dragon of darkness? Of course you have. You open up the chest he was guarding, and viola! A super cool, exciting, new weapon, spell, or other tool. You’re so hyped to get back out in the field and use this thing, but first you’ve got to figure out how to use it to make your way out of here. You start playing around with it, but pretty quickly you find that its use cases are rather… limited. Maybe it’s a whip that doesn’t really damage enemies – but it’s sure useful for hitting distant switches to open doors! Maybe it’s a freeze gun. It’s cool – I mean it can’t freeze enemies or bodies of water, but it can freeze waterfalls, to unblock doors. Maybe it’s a grappling hook! You can’t control the grapple or decide where to use it – it just pulls you to fixed targets so that you can reach previously inaccessible… doors.

You have just encountered, what I like to call the Door Key Mechanic. It’s a game feature masquerading as a fancy new play mechanic, but it’s not really. When you zoom out, and take a high-level top-down look at what all these mechanics actually do in the context of the play space… they just open doors. Maybe they pull specialized switches that then open doors. Maybe they disable electric fences so you can get to the doors behind them. Maybe they transport you to doors you couldn’t get to before in a predefined way, but that’s it. Above all it is interactivity that makes game mechanics compelling to me, and these are interactive in the most rudimentary way possible – do the thing, and a door opens.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having features in your game that specifically exist to remove some gate to the player’s progress. These sorts of items are all over the place. I mean, literal keys, for one. It’s an important purpose to fill. The presence of an inaccessible door is inherently tantalizing to the player, and finding an appropriate key gives a sense of puzzle-solving or excitement. The trouble comes in when it’s something a lot more complicated than a key or a special inventory item pretending to be more important than it is. Need some examples? Let’s do some examples.

I think the most egregious example I can think of is the last game produced by Sonic The Hedgehog creator and indicted insider trader Yuji Naka, Balan Wonderworld. It’s a great instance of what I’m talking about, because it also highlights the crux of the problem. You see, this game had several marketing angles, such as Naka’s involvement, the visual and stylistic echoes of cult classic games like NiGHTS Into Dreams, and most relevantly here, the fact that the game would feature EIGHTY different costumes! Each with unique abilities! Or in other words, game mechanics. Ignoring that several of the costumes are just variations or upgrades of others, we have to interrogate how meaningful and interactive these costume mechanics actually are.

A child in a pig costume runs over to a silver piston in a grassy field and slams the ground with its bottom, forcing one piston down and causing a different piston to shoot up. The child jumps onto it and grabs a gem.

Well, we have a ground slam for a start, the Pounding Pig, which doesn’t do anything except hammer posts and break blocks – basically just opening specific doors. There are jellyfish and dolphin costumes, which do little else but allow access to water terrain that otherwise gates you. There’s a spider costume that allows you to climb webs, which are also just simple obstacles – doors in other words. The Itsy-Bitsy Elf costume “Allows the wearer to pass through tiny doors” and nothing else. Lickshot Lizard sounds like a grappling hook, but it only works on stationary targets that are trivial to target – it’s just opening a door with extra steps. Happy Horn activates an event when stepping onto a pre-placed stage. Functionally the same as a key item. Gear King allows you to use specific gear switches, to open doors. Hothead lets you light torches to open doors.

A child in a rock star costume runs over to a stage in a grass field and plays a short concert to some monsters, and they turn into gems.

Riveting Stuff.

Important to note that ‘door’ here proverbially means any simple gate preventing player progress, but a gate of minimal player interactions. Flipping a switch causing a bridge to appear. Destroying a block to reveal a staircase. That’s all the same as opening a door. Like, there’s Balan‘s Laser Launcher costume…

“A robot costume that shoots a laser from its chest. Use the laser to break blocks and flip switches.” -Official Website Description

I can use the robot to open doors, OR open doors you say!? Okay granted, a lot of these very simplistic costumes in Balan can also be used for combat, but that is such a bare minimum. Doorkey Mechanics make one wonder ‘why is this even here?’ Like, why do you need a spider costume to climb webs? Most game characters can just do that, like on their own.

A small armored alien, Ratchet from Ratchet and Clank, traverses a small gap in a broken bridge amidst a futuristic sci fi metropolis. He does so using an energy tether thrown into a rift portal.

“Does it do anything?”

“It allows you traverse this door bridging a very small gap.”

“Yeah but does it do anything??”

It’s easy to criticize Balan. Door Key mechanics pop up in some of my favorite games too, though.

I adore A Hat In Time. It’s a delightful, fully-featured, cute, and compelling indie game in the style of classic 3D platform games. It feels great to control, it’s pretty to look at, and it’s just an overall fun time. We need more games like A Hat In Time. That said, of the six hats available in the game, which each provide unique abilities, I couldn’t help but wish the Ice Hat and Brewing Hat were more generally useful. The sprint hat makes you dash at breakneck pace, allowing you to bound over great distances – it’s super fun and super useful. The Kid’s Hat helpfully guides you where to go if you ever lose your way. The Time Stop Hat does what it says. However, the Ice and Brewing Hats flip switches and break barriers, respectively, only in hyper-specific scenarios. They can technically be used in combat, but I never once felt it was prudent to do so next to just, say, smacking enemies with my umbrella.

The Door Key Mechanic is a sliding scale, too. Game mechanics can be more or less door key-like. Hi-Fi Rush, a game I should really talk more about sometime, has mechanics that are Door Key-adjacent in the form of your party’s assist moves. Macaron’s punch assist breaks down hyper-specific walls and Peppermint’s gun assist shoots switches, but they can both be used in combat. The difference between Hi-Fi and say Balan, is that Hi-Fi Rush has very robust combat mechanics where that addition is not a footnote. Assists can be woven into combos and used in a variety of ways, defensively or offensively, to uniquely color each player’s experience. That’s interactivity, and that’s what makes a Door Key Mechanic less noticeable. The Legend of Zelda series has been occasionally guilty of making legacy items more door keyish. For instance, take the hookshot / claw shot item.

When first introduced in A Link To The Past, the hookshot was a metal spike on a spring loaded chain that could latch onto blocks, chests, rocks, and pots to pull Link rapidly to the target location. Not only that, but it can grab distant items and pull them to link, hit switches, stun some enemies, and outright defeat others. It’s used for unlocking doors, sure, but also for combat and traversal in interesting ways. Its uses are fairly prescribed, but not so much that it doesn’t feel generally useful.

In the sequel, Ocarina of Time, the hookshot was brought into 3D and it became even more generally useful. It still activates switches, pulls in items, stuns some enemies at a distance, and defeats others, but now in three dimensions. In addition, the list of things it can latch onto has been expanded to include most wooden or soft surfaces, like climbing vines, tree branches, rooftops, and rafters. The hookshot doesn’t just latch onto specific predefined targets, it also lets you grapple to anything it can stick into around the world! And there’s a logic and consistency to this general use that makes it feel like an organic part of that world. That kind of flavoring and context can also help alleviate the sense of artificiality that Door Key Mechanics invoke.

Later Zelda games would not be so magnanimous with the use of their hookshot analogues. The hookshot in The Wind Waker feels noticeably more limited, with fewer viable targets. Where in Ocarina of Time there were a lot more organic environmental targets to hit, Wind Waker and Twilight Princess lean somewhat heavily into literal bullseye targets, and floating targets, obviously specifically placed for Link’s benefit. The difference is stark in Skyward Sword, where the clawshot is used for little else other than clearing gaps to reach brightly colored, artificial bullseyes that exist in the world without context. The interactivity of the clawshot in Skyward Sword is severely limited.

My point is not that the more limited hookshots make these games bad – but rather that it makes specifically the hookshot item in those games a lot less compelling. Compare it to the Shieka Slate spells in Breath of The Wild, which can be employed almost anywhere, and used for almost anything – crossing gaps, attacking, blocking projectiles, climbing cliffs, retrieving items, escaping… flying, if you use them just right. That’s interactivity.

Here’s another Zelda example. In Majora’s Mask for the N64, the ice arrows allow you to shoot projectiles encased in freezing magic. Shooting the arrow at any body of water. *Any* body of water, an icy platform is produced, that Link can walk on. I’m sure you can already imagine the applications of that. This is in addition to the arrows being useful for stopping waterfalls, freezing enemies to use as platforms, or freezing them just to more easily defeat them.

In a dark interior pipeworks chamber flooded with water, Link from The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask. Link shoots two magic ice arrows into the water, creating two ice platforms, which he hops across.

In the remake, the developers opted to instead restrict how these arrows can be used. There are shiny blue sparkles on the surfaces of water where the ice arrows were intended to be used. Shooting them there creates the usual ice platforms, however… they also opted to prevent the platforms from ever being created elsewhere, severely limiting the interactivity of this item, and risking the player engagement. Originally, the ice arrows were a tool – a new avenue of possibilities that gets the player thinking and invested in what they’re doing. The latter version makes them a prescribed door key to access only a very specific planned path, with no engagement required on the player’s part. I find game mechanics most exciting when they expand possibilities, not limit them.

In an interior pipeworks chamber flooded with water, there are some conspicuous sparkles on the water. Link from The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask, shoots magic ice arrows at each sparkle, although misses his target once, and the ice arrow fizzles on the water.

Heaven forbid anybody be required to do some lateral thinking while playing a video game.

When developing a new mechanic or feature for your game that might be a significant undertaking, ask yourself some questions; does this feature open up interesting interactions or decisions? Does it expand the play space? What are its use cases? How does the player interact with it? What does it accomplish? If the conclusion is that the feature accomplishes a similar level of interaction to simply unlocking a door with a key – if its use is no greater than removing a proverbial gate to the player’s progress, consider whether the feature is even worth developing, especially early on. Some of these features, such as the Balan Wonderworld costumes offer very little interactivity or engagement, but would have cost a huge amount of development resources for character models, bespoke animations, sound effects, and program implementation. The decision to add a feature is not one that should be done without forethought. Think about what each of your new features actually adds to the experience.

Link from The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time runs up to an ornate golden chest in a dank dungeon. Light pours forth from it, and slowly, dramatically, Link holds aloft a golden key inset with a red skull jewel.

A key opens doors…

Bayonetta’s Witch Time is Better Than Most of Its Derivatives

Man it’s been an absolute hurricane of a month for me, and I am freaking exhausted. It’s Halloween night, so I’m going to indulge myself and ramble about what else? A parry mechanic. Ramble about a parry mechanic whilst complaining and making perhaps uncharitable comparisons between vastly different games. Like I said, I’ve chosen to indulge myself. Nothing scarier than unfiltered opinions. It’ll be a good time. Let’s go.

Bayonetta is an action game from 2009 that grew to a franchise that is apparently worth $450 million. No, do I not have a source for that number. In seriousness, while the niche-ness of Bayonetta may have placed her more in the financial category of a God of War (2005) as opposed to a God of War (2018), she seems to have made a much heavier mark upon combat design, particularly in regards to action games heavy on the spectacle. ‘Spectacle Fighter’ or ‘Character Action’ were a couple of vague and unhelpful terms spun up around the time of Bayonetta‘s release to try and encompass the really different way that certain games started doing things following Bayonetta. Of course there were plenty of games that slotted into the category of ‘spectacle fighter’ before, Bayonetta herself owing much of her DNA to games like Devil May Cry which came long before. And as I said, Bayo was plenty niche, but among the melee-action hardcores, both players and designers, it seems as though she’s had a very last impact.

One of the most noteworthy features of Bayonetta, which set it apart, was the ‘witch time’ mechanic, essentially the game’s parry mechanic. In Bayonetta, if you dodge at the last possible moment, the entire game’s time scale will slow to crawl, except for the titular player character Bayonetta herself, who can the walk about as she pleases, and unleash a flurry of attacks against her hapless foes. Games like Max Payne and even some of Bayonetta‘s own predecessors like Viewtiful Joe made use of a slow-motion effect to allow players to more tactically navigate chaotic and fast-paced situations. Bayonetta‘s wrinkle of hyper-specificity, in that witch time can only be brought forth in response to player performance and situational awareness is what really made this particular mechanic special, I think.

The black catsuit-wearing witch Bayonetta fights two angelic lizard monsters in a quaint yet abandoned European town. She dodges nimbly out of the way of an axe strike, as time slows around her in a purple haze. She leaps into the air and beats one of the lizards to death while he can hardly move.

Bayonetta, primarily inspired by Devil May Cry, features a robust combo and score system by which the player is expected to not just mow down hordes of monsters, but to do it in style. While other games were killing framerates, making characters run like tanks, and restricting camera controls to make games feel more cinematic, Bayonetta opted to pull its camera back and give the player the tools of an editor; the ability to slow time and navigate a mid-massacre diorama like it were an art exhibit, for snippets at a time. If spectacle was the goal, if spectacle is a design pillar of this series, then witch time gives the player the space to think through their masterwork, their fireworks show. Action games like these have big and complicated combo systems for juggling enemies in the air and performing outrageous feats of acrobatics. They can be hard enough to master on their own, let alone while bloodthirsty monsters are swarming about. Bayonetta really seems interested in on-boarding newbies despite its niche appeal, and witch time reinforces this by giving the player a pause with which to set up or practice their big combos stress-free, like a batter swinging at a teed up ball. The Bayonetta loading screens, which opt for a playable void in which you’re free to practice combos at your leisure, makes me quite confident this was one of the goals. With very little practice, witch time allows players to come to grips with the combo system in a more controlled environment, as well as looking cool as heck.

What’s more is what it does for the interest curve of a given battle. Parries in action games typically embody a kind of crescendo, where the intensity of the battle reaches its peak because the player is at the greatest risk – they’ve put themselves in harm’s way to deflect an oncoming attack. Bayonetta takes this further with an invigorating lull in the action to follow, a denouement so to speak. This creates a great rhythm of rising and falling action that allows one to navigate the battlefield in a way that’s a bit more planned and elegant, less improvisational and chaotic than in many other games, which certainly fits the bill of Bayonetta‘s atmosphere. It’s a game about an incredibly stylish witch who always seems to be one step ahead, and just a tad more confident than is warranted by any given situation.

The black catsuit-wearing witch Bayonetta fights an angelic lizard creature with a horn instrument in a gothic temple courtyard. She dodges a strike from it, causing time to slow around her in a purple haze. She then strikes the enemy so hard he is catapulted into the air, where Bayonetta juggles him about with a series of gunshots and rapid melee strikes.

I say that Bayonetta seems to have had a big impact despite it’s somewhat limited first splash because it really seems like tons of games took after it. Bayonetta‘s developer Platinum Games ran with the ‘character action’ style of game, with a slew of them to follow, including Bayonetta‘s own sequels, as well as collaborations like Nier:Automata, a game which shares a huge amount of DNA with Bayonetta including witch time as an option mechanic. As a brief aside, what I’m going to complain about with Automata is that the witch time equivalent in that game is so instantly satisfying to use, that it makes me wish it was a baseline feature of the game as with Bayonetta! Ah well.

Interestingly, I see Bayonetta inspirations in even heavier hitters like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild. I think one of the magical parts of game design is that like, even more so than in many other art forms, the practices and learned lessons of design can be studied and adopted in direct ways freely. It’s magical to see wildly different games borrowing great ideas from one another, putting their own spin on it, and creating some truly great experiences. Breath of The Wild did not do that with witch time. Oh yeah, complaining about botw let’s DO THIS. So, in BotW you can induce a slow-motion of sorts by dodging out of the way of enemy’s attack at the last moment, just like in Bayonetta. After this, you are.. permitted to spawn the attack button and unleash a pre-baked, non-interactive series of attacks. Or, you can do nothing, and the slow-mo promptly just ends. It’s, um, well it’s got the spirit anyway.

The key problem with implementations of parries like this lies in the lack of interactivity, I think. The problem starts with the dodge that initiates it. Dodging in Botw is so digital and rigid, as opposed to games like Bayonetta which have more of an analogue omni-directional approach. Then, the result of the dodge is non-interactive. The only player input is continue, or don’t. Not really much of a choice, meaningful for otherwise. Witch time allows the player to do anything they’d otherwise be able to do, but against an army of nearly paralyzed vulnerable opponents, and has so many options to bear against them at that. Imagine if Link from Breath of The Wild was able to, say, use one of his Shieka Slate gadgets during the slow-mo time, planting a bomb, bashing a foe with a big piece of metal, or even just shooting a bunch of them with arrows. To be clear, BotW does have a lot of weird glitches involving its slow-mo effect that make some strange interactions possible, but these are clearly not intended as every perfect does is accompanies with a big flashing “PRESS BUTTON NOW TO FLURRY RUSH DO IT NOW”, and these glitches are not likely to be noticed by casual players.

A blonde young man with a sword and shield side-step dodges a jumping attack from a pig-demon as time slows to a crawl atop a brick stone pathway overgrown with grass. The young man veeeery sloowlly does a combination attack on the pig demon.

Parries are fun, but mostly as tools of personal expression through play, and signs of mastery to enhance performance during play. In the former case, BotW is functional as a basic parry mechanic – you can choose, meaningfully whether to go for flurries or not depending on the combat situation, but it lacks the follow-through of witch time’s setting up for complex combos in a way that feels satisfying. The pre-baked combo of the flurry rush is also really long and time consuming. I said earlier that a parry should mark a big crescendo, a spark of heightened action, but the flurry rush just takes so damn long to resolve, and since enemies in BotW can often be damage sponges, it doesn’t really have the oomph I’d want. The thing could resolve in a fifth of the time and be much more effective in terms of feel, I think. Kirby and The Forgotten land does just this with its own witch time mechanic, and I feel it works much better there. Feels looser and more free-form, too.

The round pink creature Kirby dodges a charging fox in an open grassy field, as time slows to a crawl. Time resumes as kirby goes in to inhale and swallow the fox whole.

In the latter case, where parries accentuate mastery, this only really matters, in my opinion, if it can be significantly felt, most often by making fights shorter. If you can parry a lot, then you can counter a lot, then you can dispatch enemies quickly, in most games that have that feature. Flurry rushes take so long that even if they technically shave time off of beating baddies, it rarely feels like it. I often feel, in BotW that I’d save more time by just wailing on dudes. The game lacks the same goals of defeating enemies stylishly, in an explicit capacity anyway, so I personally feel more compelled to dispatch efficiently, and flurry rush has friction with that.

The round pink creature Kirby dodges a charging fox in an open grassy field, as time slows to a crawl. Time resumes as kirby goes in for a switch strike with his sword.

So what’d we learn from all this? Witch Time is great. It synthetically manipulates the interest curve to have natural highs and lows, but explains it away with a clever and intuitive mechanic that ties in with the style of Bayonetta the game and Bayonetta the character. Witch Time eases players in to high-intensity action games and sets up those really cool combos that everyone wants to pull off. Parry mechanics should have a material impact on gameplay so that their role as a barometer of mastery can be felt. Parry mechanics ideally can also serve as a vector of player creativity and agency during combat. I got to complain about Breath of The Wild. It’s all good here.

I hope you enjoyed this slightly indulgent Halloween special. Stay spooky and be good to each other.

A demonic dragon head made of black hair appears from a purple portal in quaint yet abandoned European town, and violently bites into a strange reptilian creature, spraying blood every as the dragon jostles the limp creature about, before biting down hard, reducing it to spatters.

You’ve been naughty…

How To Fight Things in Three Dimensions: Zelda’s Z-Targeting

Can’t believe I haven’t done one of these on this topic yet. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time is rightfully revered for how it set the tone for what action and adventure games could be in what was the relatively new frontier of polygonal 3D games in 1998. Moving to 3D comes with a whole host of problems, though, especially when it comes to active combat. Our real three dimensional space is very complicated, and abstracting that to a computer program can have some disorienting results if not done with care. One of Zelda‘s most notable contributions to the craft, I think is the Z-Targeting system. “Z-Targeting” is the name for Ocarina of Time‘s 3D targeting system which would let the player focus the game camera’s attention on a single point of interest by tapping the “Z” button. It gets plenty of mention, but honestly I feel like sometimes this one innovation doesn’t get praised enough. It kind of set the standard for how real-time gameplay involving two moving bodies works even to this day. There are also a lot of little things that helped this first iteration of a 3D targeting system work remarkably well, despite its age.

Child Link (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) strafes to the left and right while a targeting crosshair focuses on a rock in a grassy forest. The rock remains center-camera, while Link shifts to either side of the camera. — The rock was very patient with me during the filming of this clip.

Notice in the image above how the camera smoothly and automatically situates Link to one side. You may have heard of the rule of thirds, an stylistic concept in art for generating compelling composition. By dividing an image into thirds and placing the subject of your art into the first or last of those thirds helps emphasize their importance, and draws the eye. It also frames the remaining, more open two thirds as a point of interest to the subject, a place they might be looking or going. Link is the subject in this scenario, and the camera essentially enforces the rules of thirds while Z-target is active. It’s not only very aesthetically pleasing, and helps draw the player into the drama of a good sword fight, but it’s very functional. But ensuring Link and the target occupy opposite ends of the screen, then it becomes very rare that Link himself will obscure his target from the player sitting on their couch. In this way essential information conveyed by your target, like an incoming attack, isn’t accidentally hidden from the player. This diagonal framing also helps keep the spacial relationship between Link and his target clear and unambiguous, which as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is essential to satisfying combat.

This mechanic of making Link’s position relative to his target unambiguous is very strictly upheld. The camera will eagerly clip into walls to ensure the target remains properly framed, but this isn’t a problem as obscuring geometry will often not be rendered, so the camera’s over-commitment to framing is actually an advantage. It’s very intuitive. In an interview with the game’s general director, Toru Osawa, it was said that the system was inspired by a ninja and samurai themed performance. A ninja attacked with a sickle on a chain which was caught by the samurai. The ninja moved in a circle around his opponent as the chain connecting them was pulled tight. It seems drawing an invisible and unbreakable line between two entities helped the developers visualize how this new system would work. Link will always circle around his target in-game, and inputs on the controller are changed during a Z-target to reference the subject of the target. Moving Link “Left” means he will move clockwise around his target. “Right” means he will move counterclockwise around his target. It is as if Link is moving on a 2D plane, but bent and wrapped around the target. This abstraction expands into a rather robust system.

Child Link (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) sidles up to a wall while a targeting crosshair focuses on a giant spider. The camera moved through the nearby wall, but the wall fades from view as this happens, allowing Link to see the spider's underside, which he shoots with his slingshot. — With the spider conveniently framed by the camera, even through this wall, Link is able to sneak a shot in to hit its vulnerable underside.

Another thing I noticed while playing Ocarina of Time recently is how movement during Z-targeting relates to the input of the gamepad controller. I’ll give you an example. While a Z-target is active, Link can do a quick side-step or back flip to avoid enemies. Holding the control stick back, toward yourself, when you press the action button will initiate a back flip. Holding the control stick to the left or right will initiate a side-step when the action button is pressed. So it seems the game is tracking Link’s relative facing direction to the camera for the purposes of his evasive jumps. If Link is facing perpendicular to the camera, or in other words, if his shoulder line forms a right angle with the plane of the game screen, then a “right” or “left” input on the control stick is considered “back” for the purposes of evasion. You can see this illustrated below:

Child Link (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) hops to the side repeatedly in a naturalistic wooden interior. A targeting crosshair focuses on a giant cyclopic bug. When Link is almost side-on to the camera, he does a back flip. — During this clip, I am holding only the “right” direction, but Link eventually back flips anyway.

In this above clip, I am holding “right” on the control stick throughout. Once Link’s angle to the camera becomes too extreme, he no longer side-steps, and instead back flips. However, Link’s stride never changes. “Right” on the control stick is always considered to be Link’s right, relative to his current standing position, for the purposes of calculating what direction Link should be running. I can imagine a couple of reasons this might be. Changing Link’s continuous move direction on a dime would be very disorienting for the player. Link’s stride is not really changing in the previous clip, only the player’s angle of observation, so it’s unintuitive to think that a change in input is required to keep that stride in any scenario. The evasive jumps, however, are discreet units of movement and thus are not jarring when their operation changes based on camera position. Further, if Link were to side-step while side-on to the camera, it would be difficult to tell if he had done much of anything. By changing it to a back flip, the feedback of Link making an evasive move is maintained.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, being the first 3D Zelda game, obviously utilizes its verticality in ways that previous Zelda games could not. Zelda is a series well known for an arsenal of unique weapons and tools for solving puzzles and dispatching enemies. Iconic tools like the boomerang and hero’s bow are very compelling. It would have been a drastic admission of defeat to not translate such things into the first 3D Zelda. They have some hefty inherent problems, though. Control sticks are, frankly, not best suited for precision pinpoint aiming compared to a computer mouse, a gyroscope, or a photonic motion sensor. Ocarina of Time still offers the option of manually aiming projectiles through a first-person perspective, which is convenient for solving puzzles, but not ideal for most combat encounters. The Z-Targeting system rather elegantly solved this problem as well. The drawback is that the player doesn’t do much aiming at all when utilizing their bow and arrow in combat, which could be argued as part of the skill set of playing the old Zelda games, but in trade Ocarina gets the advantage of keeping airborne enemies in focus and keeping the use of projectiles in combat practical. Zelda combat is typically more about understanding the best tool for the job than skillful execution anyway, so I think it was a savvy decision to enable ranged combat in this way.

Child Link (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) shoots a strange giant egg off of a ceiling, in a naturalistic wooden interior, using his slingshot. He then stabs a nearby giant bug with his sword, then shoots it as it runs away. — There was an intent focus in this game on making your tools practical and functional, even if they’re not always the most complex or involved.

So many modern games utilize an automated camera or targeting system that can be traced directly back to Z-targeting, so I felt it deserved its own appreciation post here. The mechanic is unintrusive, fit-for-purpose, artistically sound, and practically seamless. It even has its own little diegetic explanation of your partner fairy, Navi acting as the source of your target’s focus. You might notice her dancing around targeted enemies in the clips I’ve provided. Helps reinforce her as an important partner to Link, even in spite of her infamous chattiness. Honestly, after looking into it, there are some features that even some modern targeting systems don’t do as well as Ocarina of Time. There have been perhaps more elegant, more robust, and even more interesting targeting systems since, but it’s absolutely astounding how much Zelda nailed it on its first try, and set the stage for the iteration of 3D navigation for many years to come.

Child Link (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) pursues an elephant-sized cyclopic insect as it climbs up a wall in a dark cavern. Link aims up at it with a targeting crosshair focused on it, then shoots its eye with his slingshot.

Time passes, people move. Like a river’s flow, it never ends…

Majora’s Mask Boss Fight Remakes: Boss Design Goals

This is part two of an analysis on the boss design of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and its remake. Part one can be found here.

Something I’d like to talk about while reviewing these last two bosses is the utility of bosses in general. Rather, what design goals are you fulfilling by including a boss? People love bosses, but why? They tend to be notable spikes in gameplay intensity marking the end of a chapter, level, or other extended segment. Bosses can serve a number of functions be it as a narrative component, accentuating a certain gameplay mechanic, simply being a restrictive challenge, among many others. Considering the design goals of a boss helps keep the experience focused and in-line with what you’re trying to design. I’m going to look at these next two bosses through this lens.

Gargantuan Masked Fish Gyorg is next on the chopping block. As his name implies, this beast will fight you primarily from his home in the water. The fight takes place in a large, deep pool with a single round platform in the center raised just above the water’s surface for the player to stand on. At this point in the game the player will also have access to the Zora form, a power which allows them to breathe and maneuver adaptably underwater by running along the pool’s bottom or swimming at high speeds like a dolphin. I’d definitely call Gyorg the weakest of the original N64 Majora’s Mask boss fights. With very little going on, and a rather disruptive camera, I never find myself looking forward to fighting him.

N64 Gyorg’s fight is kind of confusing, to be honest. While the fight is completely player-directed, it’s also not always clear exactly what you need to be doing in this fight. If you stand on the central platform, Gyorg flails about and tries to knock you off, indicating clearly that you’re meant to fight him in the much more spacious pool, although blind-firing arrows at him with your bow from dry land is also possible. The camera is not very kind when it comes to this method, however. You seem to be punished for not being in Zora form, and once in Zora form Gyorg still just seems to swim aimlessly, occasionally going for a bite at you. There’s so little structure to this fight that one can just sort of… try things out, most of which will only kind of work. What I think you’re supposed to do is use the Zora form’s boomerang ability to stun him.. Then use it again while he is stunned to damage him. He has a weak point you need to hit, but it is targeted automatically if you use the targeting mode. A little odd, a little unclear. If you get the timing right, you can stun lock Gyorg forever and there basically is no boss fight. Get it wrong, and you’ll be seeing a lot of the inside of Gyorg’s mouth in rather frustrating fashion. The problem is, while the targeting mode tries to frame the camera, Gyorg’s wildly moving body will swing it around in an abrupt fashion. Unfortunate, since using the targeting mode is the ideal way to attack him. After he takes some damage, he will release a swarm of small fish to attack you, though they can be largely ignored as one continues to stun-lock Gyorg.

The total lack of structure in this fight makes me wish it was more environment-directed, and makes me question what the design goals with this fight are. It does not utilize this dungeon’s item at all, nor is it very friendly to using most of the Zora’s powers. Swimming at Gyorg can potentially harm him, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s not very fun or effective to do. Since actually swimming is not much involved in this fight, it doesn’t really serve as a capstone to the mechanics of the dungeon its found in either. Gyorg is a bit of a low point for me in Majora’s Mask, not providing much by way of narrative, challenge, or mastery for the player. The most effective strategy “throw boomerangs at him repeatedly”, does not make much intuitive sense, and goes to show how some environmental-direction, either through the boss’s actions or the area they are fought in, can help make a fight’s design goals clearer and more effective.

3DS Gyorg sees a lot more structure and direction by the environment in his boss fight, to become a much more effective boss in my opinion.

Once again we have that obvious orange eyeball-weakspot, but also a notable change to Gyorg’s design. Before his body was a continuous color but now his face is a notable stony gray in contrast to a softer looking red-orange body. The structure of the fight is being communicated. On the 3DS it’s a lot more clear what you’re actually hitting; anything besides Gyorg’s mask. It’s the mask that’s armored, but not his body, indicating it is vulnerable. The camera has been improved immensely when it comes to shooting Gyorg with the bow and arrow. He now jumps into the air or swims along the surface of the water like a shark, framing his bright orange body nicely against the blue arena for some bow shots. It’s a lot more satisfying already. It works so well it seems as though fighting Gyorg from the land is the intended method, although the Zora also still works like in the old game.

This still looks so incredibly silly to me.

This time, once Gyorg has taken enough damage, the land disappears, forcing the player to engage as a Zora. The implementation of the Zora’s gameplay mechanics are still not stellar in this part of the fight, but it’s a marked improvement over the original game. Here, the Zora’s swimming ability is incentivized to quickly release sea mines, whose very presence is a good clue as to what the structure of this fight is. Gyorg will often open his gullet to try and suck you in, but will suck in any stray mines instead, stunning him and opening him for attack.

Hey-hey! Swimming to fight him actually.. kind of works now.

This phase is a little janky as the timing for getting Gyorg to start inhaling and releasing a mine is rather narrow and doesn’t feel as smooth as the mechanics of many other Zelda bosses. Still, overall the changes to Gyorg make him feel like a much more complete experience that actually utilizes mechanics from his dungeon such as the Zora swimming. There’s a lot more variety and feedback for what you should actually be doing. If the design goals here were to engage the player to think about how to adapt to an aquatic foe, it succeeds on that front. I’d give the 3DS version of Gyorg a solid thumbs up over his predecessor.

By janky I mean… well it’s a little disorienting to even figure out what’s going on here.

The final boss I’ll be talking about from Majora’s Mask is the Giant Masked Insect Twinmold. With a somewhat misleading yet somewhat appropriate title, Twinmold is actually two giant masked centipede… worm… things, plural.

The original Nintendo 64 version of this boss fight is extremely open ended, extremely player-directed. There is a special dungeon item you obtain in the hours leading up to Twinmold’s confrontation, but it, like many such items before it, in Majora’s Mask is entirely unnecessary to defeating its dungeon boss. Although you are clearly intended to use it. In fact, Twinmold’s boss room is the only location in the game in which that special item, the giant’s mask, can be used. It grants the player titanic proportions, using some visual trickery to transport the player to a scaled-down version of the boss arena inhabited by scaled down Twinmolds that can be much more easily reached with your now colossal sword.

Whether you decide to don the giant’s mask or not, the concept of this boss fight is extremely simple; Twinmold is invulnerable everywhere along its long body except at the head and tip of its tail. The player’s goal is to strike the head and/or tail of each Twinmold until they die, while avoiding their sharp, undulating bodies. If the player is using their limited magic to do so, such as in utilizing the giant’s mask, they must keep on eye on this magic resource and shrink back down to normal size in order to replenish, risking some greater threat to their health in the process. It’s a straightforward rule set borrowed from previous 2D Zelda games where fighting a giant worm meant aiming for its constantly-moving tail, but adapted to 3D space. It works really well! Rarely are you required to keep exact stock of the player’s sword in 3D space in this way, so it’s refreshing and interesting.

I quite like this iteration of the Twinmold fight. It’s simple, but after the difficult and daunting experience that is their home dungeon, it’s a bit refreshing to just stroll up with this huge amount of power in the giant’s mask and let loose. It seems that, along with spectacle, power fantasy was a major design goal of Twinmold, specifically the power fantasy of gaining the might to outmatch an overwhelming evil, as is often the case with Zelda. It’s a bit of relief from the high-intensity part of the interest curve that makes up much of Majora’s Mask’s later stages. Twinmold is not very difficult, but it is very satisfying and momentous. With the final of four major evils stricken from the world, it feels as though the player has truly accomplished something great. Giving them the freedom to completely direct the boss fight helps reinforce this, by making it a labor of their own agency.

3DS remake Twinmold works quite a bit differently. The fight is now a two-phase affair. In the first phase, the player will not have access to the giant’s mask. On the Nintendo 64 this mask was obtained within the dungeon itself. On the 3DS, the mask is obtained after defeating one of the two Twinmolds. This first Twinmold prefers to fly overhead, and has those large orange eyeball-weakspots on its underside. Shooting it with light arrows will take it down. While shooting, the player must be cognizant of the other Twinmold, which will shell the ground with fire balls.

Really, it kind of feels like he’s **asking** to get killed

Now, fighting Twinmold without the giant’s mask on the Nintendo 64 is very fun but very daunting. It’s difficult, requiring the player to be constantly aware of their surroundings to quickly position themselves such that they can reach Twinmold with their attacks. The concept of having to defeat one Twinmold against all odds as a tiny normal-sized person before getting the giant’s mask and unleashing overwhelming force against the second is an appealing one. It builds tension and anticipation of the fight to come, adds some nice challenge to this late-game boss, and makes that ultimate power fantasy all the sweeter. It’s a good change in isolation, though I do wish this first phase on the 3DS was more player-directed, with less reliance on those eyeball-weakpoints, which at this very late stage of the game feel somewhat passe. Having to defeat Twinmold in the same fashion as both a human and a giant would better highlight the contrast between the experiences.

3DS Twinmold’s biggest problems come in the form of the changes to the giant form. Giant form on the N64 controls exactly the same as normal form, you’re just now giant, with reach to match. On the 3DS, however, you become lumbering, slow, and very limited in your moveset. You no longer have access to your sword, instead punching the air in front of you with each press of the attack button. This form on the 3DS just does not feel good to play. It’s cumbersome, difficult to position correctly, and frustrating to hit your targets with. Twinmold is no longer vulnerable on the head and tail, and instead punching it anywhere along its body is viable, presumably because positioning the giant form is so difficult that were the old vulnerabilities in play it would be nigh-on impossible to connect any attacks with Twinmold.

No- yeah, okay. I’ll just… wait here on the ground. You can let me hit you when you’re ready.

Since the player can barely move as a giant, the fight is almost the antithesis of the open-ended fight of the N64, with the player constantly waiting for Twinmold to swing by in a fashion that will allow the player to hit them without accidentally meandering into Twinmold’s spiky body and getting knocked onto the ground. There are also some boulders the player can throw, but you will once again have to wait for Twinmold to hold still in order for them to do anything, and once those boulders are gone, they’re gone. The result is a fight whose exceedingly sluggish flow is determined by the environment, where the player is stuck in a frankly frustrating and unwieldy control scheme unlike anything else in the game.

Gonna go make a sandwich while this is happening.

The fight also lasts forever. This is just a tuning problem – Twinmold clearly has too much health – but I nonetheless became exceptionally bored by the time I had swung Twinmold around like one of those fuzzy worm toys for the fourth time. Where the previous Twinmold’s design goals were clear the 3DS version’s seem somewhat muddied and confused, with good ideas being overshadowed by frustrations and missteps. There’s no power fantasy here, and little sense of awe either. The first Twinmold’s weakness is too obvious, and the second Twinmold is too frustrating.

A mixed bag is how I would describe the remade Majora’s Mask bosses, ultimately. In my estimation, Odalwa is a bit of a step back, Goht has some improvements and some awkward changes, Gyorg is a clear improvement but by no means perfect, and Twinmold is an overall inferior experience despite some good ideas. Aside from my opinion of quality, however, I hope comparing and contrasting the surprisingly different ways all the versions of these bosses were designed helped highlight some of the things to be thinking about when designing bosses. How in control does the player feel? What design goals is your boss meant to fulfill and do they make good on that? Odolwa made me feel the rush of a life or death battle against a swordsman wielding inhuman powers, but some of that is lost if you make the methods by which you can fight him too restrictive. On the opposite end, Gyorg’s confused and meandering original boss fight was markedly improved by the introduction of some structure and environmental cues. Boss design is a deep and broad topic that I’ve only scratched the surface of, but looking at all these different boss designs have given me a lot to think about.

You’re the bad guy. And when you’re bad, you just run. That’s fine, right?

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask: Remaking Boss Fights

Alright, time to talk about one of my favorite games of all time, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. It’s an odd one in the Zelda canon, a direct sequel to the seminal Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time developed in only a year, known for its oppressively somber atmosphere and mature themes. It’s a game where an ominous title card greets you at the start of each day, counting down to the end of the world. It’s a weird one, which is probably why I love it so much. I was lucky enough to see one of my favorites receive a total remaster, featuring a big leap in hardware from the Nintendo 64 to the newer, portable, Nintendo 3DS. Remakes and remasters are always a fun topic. What actually gets changed in such revisions? What’s sacred and cannot be touched? I wanted to specifically take a look at the boss battle designs of these two versions of the game as Nintendo made some notably significant changes in this area in particular, while much, though not all, of the game’s other mechanics remain faithfully identical between the two versions. I’d like to breakdown a few of the boss designs to see where the design goals of the versions diverged, while thinking about a concept I’ll call player-directed vs environment-directed boss fights. There’s a lot to go over here, so I won’t be breaking down every single mechanic of every fight and what those elements accomplish (Although, that sounds like a lot of fun. Maybe for another time). Moreover, I want to see how the changes made affected my experience with the bosses. Let’s get started.

This is what I see every Thursday morning

The first major boss of Majora’s Mask for the Nintendo 64 is the Masked Jungle Warrior Odolwa, a demonic swordsman who commands swarms of carnivorous insects. So I mentioned that Majora’s Mask is a weird game, and even its debut boss is proving this true. Traditionally, Zelda boss fights work in a pretty standard fashion. You receive some new item or weapon, and you utilize it in a specific method to exploit a well-marked weakness the boss has. In this way you progress the encounter, like solving a puzzle. Zelda boss fights are usually not very open-ended. This is not universally the case, but it tends to be the norm. That would be an environmentally-directed boss, where it is aspects of the game’s behavior and scripting that dictate the pace of the fight. One can’t shoot the big-eye monster until it opens its big-eye. Boss encounters that can be progressed at the player’s agency, such as where the boss enemy is always vulnerable, are more player-directed. This is not a binary, and there’s a lot of fluctuation on a spectrum between these two styles of boss design. Zelda partakes in both from time to time, sometimes within the same encounter, though I’d say trending more toward environmental-direction.

This boss attack leaves an intentionally designed opening, where striking Odolwa is easy

Odolwa bucks this trend entirely. You can hit Odolwa at any time with a number of implements. In fact, the weapon you find in Odolwa’s dungeon, the Hero’s Bow, is entirely unnecessary for defeating him. It certainly is advantageous to use it, but entirely optional. Odolwa has no obvious weakness, he has no obvious repeating pattern. He has a collection of patterns and behaviors that respond to the player, of which some leave him open to attack, and others less so. Even still, it’s possible to damage him during times that don’t seem like obvious openings, so long as you can connect sword to swordsman. The sum of this is that ‘openings’ are not taken for granted, not guaranteed progress. There is an element of execution and performance required of the player, instead of just following a script.

This attack leaves an intentionally designed opening, where striking Odolwa is- “Insects? Oh god fire!? AHH!”

During the fight Odolwa will summon beetles to hound you from the ground, and butterflies to swarm you from the skies. The beetles can be easily dispatched with sword strikes, while the butterflies need to be more carefully maneuvered around. What I find so distinctive about the Odolwa fight for a Zelda First Boss is how firmly the player directs the pace of the fight. I’m never waiting for anything specific to happen, never just nodding along with Odolwa’s preplanned script. Much more than many other Zelda fights, Odolwa’s encounter on the N64 can go in a wide variety of directions very quickly. He’s basically always vulnerable to attack, and so fighting him becomes a skillful test of how the player can handle an increasingly complex bevy of spacial information. So long as I’m willing to risk it, and I have the finesse to get around Odolwa’s shield, I can deal as much damage as I want as quickly as I want, and even end the fight quite promptly.

In the 3DS version of the game, Odolwa’s been altered quite a lot. Immediately attention is drawn to his new, glaring orange eyeball weak spot. I must compliment the animators for how elegantly it’s conveyed in its intro, much more so than such eyeballs will be in later Majora’s Mask 3D bosses, as it does communicate the new direction the design this fight has taken rather well.

Hmmm… I wonder where his weak spot could be.

On the other hand, while his weakness is clear, a lot of the aspects that made Odolwa unique, if somewhat intimidating, have been dummied out. For one, it is now impossible to deal sword damage to Odolwa while he is brandishing his sword at you. A bit baffling, to be honest, seeing as how Odolwa is a swordsman. It seems rather obvious a player would want to go blade-to-blade with him, yeah? Whereas in the N64 version, Odolwa would use his shield to make hitting him with the player’s sword more troublesome, here it’s all for show. Odolwa is completely immune to sword strikes period.

Blue sparks = no damage. Why does he even need that thing?

Odolwa is once again vulnerable to a variety of attacks, but now they all seem very restrictive, and kind of arbitrary. It seems the goal here was to make the fight more environmentally-directed. One can only damage Odolwa when he presents his new eye, which demands use of the dungeon’s Hero’s Bow item, or the Deku Mask. Perhaps this was in an effort to make the boss more approachable – one advantage of environmentally-directed boss fights is that the player is given a more definitive answer to the problem of how to take down an obstacle, making it more of a puzzle than an actual fight, which is naturally somewhat less stressful. I think there is something to be said for establishing the monsters of Majora’s Mask as these intimidating, aggressive and stress-inducing beasts, however. Some of Odolwa 3D’s changes work against this.

For example, 3D Odolwa suddenly becomes very passive when the player is utilizing a flower with the Deku Mask power, as this is another ‘correct’ answer to the problem of hitting Odolwa’s glowing, orange, eyeball-weak spot. It makes Odolwa seem kind of… stupid, and less of a threat. He stands around patiently to be pelted in the face with an aerial bombardment. It highlights the artificiality of the encounter and could potentially draw a player out of the all-encompassing atmosphere Majora’s Mask is known for. Some of Odolwa’s tricks have also been removed, seemingly, such as his ability to summon a ring of fire to entrap the player. If it seems as though I am being overly harsh on poor Odolwa, it’s just that I really want to highlight the difference in design ethos here. I suspect the 3DS version of this game was meant to be more generally accessible, as Majora was always a niche as far as Zeldas go. These changes seem to be made toward making the experience more familiar to standard Zelda games.

You gonna… You not gonna try and stop me Odolwa?

There are games with much more environmentally-directed boss fights than Zelda, where the boss’ behavior is entirely divorced from anything the player does, where the player just has to wait and act as they are meant to, or fail to progress. As I said, there’s a lot of variation out there. Ultimately, a lot of the changes to Odolwa are an issue of presentation. The big eye, the initial immunity to sword strikes; it all builds up this sense that you have to be very specific about how you approach the encounter, where in reality a lot of the same strategies work between both versions of the game. The N64 version is just a lot more free-form, and open to more experimentation, while the 3DS version excels in clarity of its intentions.

From N64 Odolwa I felt the malice of a monster in fighting him. Things got chaotic toward the end as I was engulfed in a ring of fire, my enemy gleefully taunting me from just beyond sword’s reach. Then I realized; I could skewer the arrogant warrior with the bow I found in the dungeon! But I’d have to be careful, man-eating butterflies and beetles swarmed me. It really felt like a struggle for survival. 3DS Odolwa gave me the feeling of solving a puzzle. It’s more like dissecting a more strict set of rules, as Odolwa behaved much more predictably.

Masked Mechanical Monster Goht, our second major boss enemy, sees much less drastic changes than his little brother in the jump from Nintendo 64 to Nintendo 3DS, but there are still some noteworthy ones. Goht is a giant mechanical, erm, goat of sorts with the face of a man. His fight involves chasing him around a circuit in the form of a rolling goron wheel at high speeds. The player’s goron wheel takes some time to rev up, and requires a magic resource to maintain its speed, but once it does, it protrudes spikes that can be used to damage Goht by ramming into him. Hitting his legs deals damage, but hitting his back by going off of a ramp and landing on him knocks him down, allowing the player to strike him directly with powerful punching attacks.

This fight is almost entirely player-directed, entirely open-ended. Chasing Goht is the name of the game, but how you go about this is wholly up to you. Goht is vulnerable at any time, and the pace of the fight is determined by how well the player can execute on the chase. Knocking Goht down is advantageous, but by no means necessary, and the methods to do so are rather open ended, with the complex mechanics of the spinning goron wheel offering a number of options. If ever the player runs low on resources, it is up to them to decide when and how to replenish by hitting the magic jars speeding by on the circuit, and what risks they are willing to take to do so.

As I said, 3DS Goht is mostly the same, but the changes he does have are significant. For one, Goht can now be knocked down by repeatedly hitting his legs, or by landing on top of him. The ramps lining the circuit are now regularly shaped, and require much less speed to initiate a jump. Since Goht can be knocked down either by landing on his back or by clipping his heels now, and since landing on his back is now much easier in this version, the entire decision is less significant. Both options are still there, but neither provides any clear risks or advantages.

The reason for this is that knocking Goht down is now required to deal direct damage to him. When grounded, Goht reveals a huge eyeball weakspot, in a rather goofy and incongruous fashion. At this point, the player must remove their goron power and take out the dungeon’s item, the Fire Arrows, to deal damage to the eye. This makes the fight simultaneously more stiff, moving away from that more loose player-directed design ethos of the N64 boss fights, if only slightly in this case, while also adding an extra step. It’s a little strange, as though the eyeball only exists as an excuse to make the fire arrows relevant to this boss fight. It also disrupts the pacing of the fight, forcing the player to change from a goron to a human with a slow animation, and then shooting this fast-running monster while standing completely stationary. For N64 Goht, hitting him while knocked down blends seamlessly from chasing him, as one does not even need to change out from being a goron.

The original N64 Goht is such a strange fight for a Zelda game. A high-speed car chase, essentially, complete with bombs, electric gunfire, falling debris, the works. The ability to strike Goht from any angle with the goron wheel adds such an intense dynamism. Thankfully, that’s more or less maintained throughout all versions. The 3DS version of Goht managed to feel mostly reminiscent of the original, which for a remake I think is usually a good thing. Making the ramps for pulling off aerial jumps in the 3DS version more consistent and easier to use may lower the skill floor a bit, but it also lets you do cool fun things more often, so it’s a fair trade. I mean this is only the second boss, after all. The need to pull out the fire arrows occasionally felt like an unnecessary road-bump, and made me roll my eyes a bit (as well as Goht’s, hardy har), but it’s a very minor thing and ultimately the two fights are nearly equally fun.

So it seems the Majora’s Mask 3D remake is going for a lot more environment-direction for its boss fights as opposed to player-direction. In presentation, at least, it gives the impression that the fights are more rigidly defined, with less room for exploratory play. The advantages of such an approach can be a more quantifiable end experience that the developer has more control over, but there are also drawbacks such as the loss of that sense of exploration, experimentation, and realism in the experience. Drawbacks that I’d argue Majora’s Mask wasn’t entirely in need of. I don’t want to give the impression that Majora’s Mask 3D didn’t improve upon the old in some ways. Some accessibility considerations like making the jumps in Goht’s fight easier to pull off will probably make it more fun for most. The heavier involvement of dungeon items in the boss fights make them feel more congruent with the dungeons they’re in, if not necessarily the greater atmosphere of the world. And still, these are only two of Majora’s Masks‘s bosses, but this is running pretty long. I think next week we’ll take a look at the remaining two bosses of the Majora’s Mask superfecta (that’s a trifecta, but four, I just learned). There are definitely some positive changes there that I’m excited to talk about, including ones that exploit the advantages of environment-directed boss design. Hope to see you there.

Certainly, he had far too many weaknesses to use my power…