Anouleth

Oh yeah. But it's true that Zelda games generally avoid jumping. And Link's Awakening wasn't an Aonuma game anyway (it was Tezuka directing). And the only time we got jumping back, in the Minish Cap, was also not directed by Aonuma. So my overall point, that we don't get jumping in Zelda because Aonuma personally dislikes it, is unchanged.

You don't think that chronic medical conditions are hilarious?

It's not really fair to compare a Paladin and a Falcoknight to a Falcoknight and a Dancer. Dancers have always worn skimpy clothes.

Actually he said it himself. "When I played A Link to the Past on the Super Famicom, I really enjoyed that game. I thought it was great. The reason I enjoyed that game was that there were so many things to do other than fighting enemies. You could lift rocks and chop grass, and the more you did this, the larger the world that you could travel through grew." And he admits that he hated the first Legend of Zelda. He doesn't even like Mario! "To be honest with you, I just don't like action games that require you to jump. They're scary. The jumping factor kind of freaks me out." No wonder that jumping was only introduced with the Capcom games. Because Aonuma is scared by jumping (this is also why in Ocarina of Time, you jump automatically when you reach a ledge). It's not really surprising. Marvelous was a puzzle game where you talked to NPCs, with no combat.

this question again

Ah but what's in between that matter? Nothing. Empty vacuum. Even in the atoms of your body, the volume of empty space far exceeds the volume of nuclei. I think it's you that can't grasp the concept of nothing. There is nothing everywhere, even in the hearts of stars, it's just got a little bit of matter in it. Nowhere in the entire universe can you fail to find nothing. And given that there is so much more space that is empty than space that contains anything, doesn't it make more sense that the universe came from nothing than it came from something? After all, if the universe came from something, you would expect there to be more stuff in it.

Could there be maybe a... flowchart?

foolish SMT characters will have to be carried everywhere by the Fire Emblem characters smart enough to bring horses

It rather makes sense, if you think about it, when you consider how much more "nothing" there is than "everything". The ratio of "nothing" to "everything", even on our own planet, is extremely skewed in favour of "nothing", even before you consider the vast emptiness of solar space, even before you consider the vaster emptiness of interstellar space, even before you consider the even vasterer emptiness of intergalactic space.

Carbon dating has nothing to do with evolution. Carbon dating is only usable for remains within 60,000 years: if you go back further, it becomes extremely inaccurate. So I don't know why you brought it up. Evaluating the age of a fossil is actually more art than science, more based on an educated guess of when exactly the fossil was laid down based on where it was dug up, what condition it was in, and what other things can be found near it. It's more geology than chemistry. For example, one key way of dating fossils is by their proximity to index fossils in the same layer. If we know when trilobites existed, and we find a fossil in the same geologic layer as a trilobite fossil, we can extrapolate that they existed in the same era.

I don't really know what you're talking about with symbolic elements. Nor do I think that symbolism is really a good thing, or something to base a video game on. Or something to buy a game for. I did enjoy Wind Waker. It's a well-made game, like virtually everything that Nintendo makes. But I would not pay to play it again. I would certainly not buy a console to play it again. Given the direction the game series has gone in, I'll believe that they've changed direction when I see it. I cannot imagine anything worse. What, are Link and Zelda going to sing about their feelings? Maybe Zelda will tell us about her maternal emotions. Maybe Link will angst about having to save the world. Maybe we'll hear about Ganon's bad childhood. Maybe we'll learn about Tingle's dreams for the future.

What do Edward and Zihark have to do with Mia? Why is Gatrie "not worth using"? How is it that Boyd is overshadowed by Nolan (who isn't even in the same chapters), but Soren isn't overshadowed by, like, everyone in the GMs? What does Titania being almost third tier have to do with giving her BEXP? What does Oscar being a weaker version of Titania have to do with giving him BEXP?

Uh, why? Early Zelda didn't have a story, or much of a story. The story of Link to the Past is pretty bare bones and generally consists of the village elder or various elders providing exposition after each dungeon. There's very little narrative, and the plot never progresses beyond "go defeat Ganon". It's only with Ocarina of Time that we started getting "character development". Minecraft and Zelda are really not that dissimilar. At their heart, they're about exploring and fighting monsters (Minecraft only exploded in popularity after monsters were added to the game). Minecraft even has dungeons! So I don't really see the justification in saying that they're "very different".

My original point was that sales of Zelda have been stagnating or declining in recent years, and that Nintendo has failed to recapture the success of the early days of Zelda, by which I mean Legend of Zelda, Adventure of Link, Ocarina of Time, and Link to the Past. Cinderskye disagreed, pointing to sales figures that demonstrate that those Zeldas were not among the best-selling in the series, and I pointed out how those sales figures were actually unhealthy and demonstrated decline. My argument is that that isn't going to be corrected with the re-release of one of the more mediocre titles in the series. Even the re-release of Ocarina of Time wasn't anything to write home about. At best, this is just Nintendo being lazy and porting an old game in order to fill out the Wii U's library while they work on a real Zelda U title. Supposedly, dungeons were cut out of the original and replaced with the Triforce hunt because of deadline issues, so it may be that we'll get more dungeons for the second half of the game.

Really? That's only true if you compare apples to oranges. If we look at Japanese sales purely, the only Zelda games that broke 1 million copies were OoT, LttP, AoL, and the original. Japan also has almost no change in population over the past 30 years, unlike America. Now, it's true that AoL did not sell as well in America (so American gamers often dismiss it), but AoL came out in 1988, at the same time as the NES cartridge shortage. So it's not exactly fair to compare Adventure of Link to other titles that were not constrained by the supply of cartridges at the time. In addition, 15 years of population growth separate the NES Zeldas from the modern GC and Wii Zeldas. So the slightly higher sales of Wind Waker are only because the population of the USA increased by about 17%. Americans were also in general, wealthier in 2002 than in 1988, so they would have had more money to spend on consumer electronics. Indeed, growth has been observed in practically every area of video games over the 15 years from 1988 to 2002. That doesn't reflect that the games made in 2002 are better, but because people in the West are wealthier and more numerous. If sales for Zelda were healthy, they would have increased in the 1990s and 2000s along with population growth, rather than stagnating. In Japan, where there was no population growth, sales declined. When there was economic trouble in the US, sales declined. Europe is a bit of a different case. The NES did not sell nearly as well in Western Europe as in America, for whatever reason. It faced fiercer competition from the Master System. If you ignore European sales, the sales in America and Japan do not look very healthy. I don't understand completely what happened with European sales, but I doubt that it was because Wind Waker was anything special. Yeah: the most recent five, pretty much. Wind Waker, Minish Cap, Phantom Hourglass, a break for Twilight Princess, then back to Spirit Tracks and Skyward Sword. While it's true that technically only Wind Waker and Skyward Sword are cel-shaded, they all use a cartoony style, rather than the grittier style shown in earlier games. I don't think Nintendo are capable of doing narrative. When they do, it's the corniest fucking shit. I saw the cutscenes in Other M. And from what I heard, Skyward Sword wasn't much better. Really, Link getting bullied in high school for being different? What the fuck is this shit? No, Nintendo shouldn't try it again.

Legend of Zelda isn't meant to be a comedy, or about "character development". Nor is it very dark. In Link to the Past, you see the Dark World, which is the world destroyed by Ganon. In Ocarina of Time, it is the future which is destroyed by Ganon. Hyrule Town is turned into a destroyed town infested with undead. The villages you saw when you were a child are all abandoned. When you return to Kokiri Forest, there are now monsters and everyone hides indoors. Goron Mountain is abandoned. And Zora's Domain is completely frozen. And then there's the Spirit Temple and the Bottom of the Well. Why does Link have to have wacky facial expressions? Why not put in a fucking laugh track while we're at it. Zelda 1 had genuine secrets. What do you want, Navi to follow you around, hold your hand and point out everything? Isn't the whole point of secrets is that they're not supposed to be obvious?

Except that lots of people do talk about the Zelda "formula", while forgetting that many elements of the "formula" were not in the original. It's true for Link's Awakening, but not for Link to the Past. It is less linear. In fact, I rather wish pokemon would be less linear in terms of going to new areas. Part of pokemon's success is that it is extremely non-linear in other respects. In fact, at the very start of the game, you are already faced with a choice, between three different pokemon! And there are many different ways to play the game, depending on what pokemon you want to use. Even with the same pokemon, there are many choices wrt what moves to give them. Could you imagine that kind of choice in Zelda? Nowadays, Zelda does not even let you walk where you like. And that's why there should be less narrative in Zelda. The original Zelda had no narrative. A revolt of people trying to buy it, perhaps. Nintendo has failed to reproduce the success of the early Zelda titles, even with remakes. Maybe it's because things changed? Maybe it's because Zelda now focuses on puzzles rather than fighting monsters? Maybe because every Zelda title is cutesy cel-shaded Wind Waker style? Maybe because there are more bullshit NPCs like Tingle? Maybe it's because Zelda went from being nonlinear to being aggressively linear?

I was disappointed when it was announced. I enjoyed Wind Waker. But it's definitely one of the weakest Zelda titles, and embodies a lot that is wrong about Zelda. In comparison to the potential that a remake of Majora's Mask, LTTP, or hell, even Legend of Zelda 1 and 2 would have, a remake of Wind Waker is just a waste of everyone's time. But then again, Aonuma is never going to approve a remake of LoZ 1 and 2 because he didn't work on them (or even enjoy playing them). I'm disappointed that we're going to see the return of sailing. It sucked in Wind Waker. It sucked in Phantom Hourglass. It sucked in Spirit Tracks. Fuck vehicles. I'm disappointed we're going to get the cutesy cel-shaded anime style instead of the cool style we saw in the Wii U trailer. I like Kirby, but not every game has to be "cutesy" and "quirky" and "japanese-y". I'm disappointed that we're going to see the return of fucking stealth sections. I'm disappointed that Nintendo are trying to "make it work" again. It didn't work the first time on the Gamecube. It's not going to work now on the Wii U. The Wii U is not going to turn out better than the Gamecube if you give it the same game library, only with HD graphics. It's funny because Aonuma says “It is time to change the Zelda formula because what we have doesn’t work.” One might wonder why he's going to remake Wind Waker then. And it's clear what direction Aonuma wants to take this in. Ocarina of Time remake was just a sop to the fans. We are never going to see another Zelda in the style of Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, or Zelda 1 and 2. It is always going to be cel-shaded and cutesy from now on. These are the children of Aonuma-style Zelda. What you forget is that once upon a time, treasures weren't required to beat dungeons. Link to the Past had a large number of optional treasures, such as the Ice Rod, the Red and Blue Mail, the Magic Boomerang and the Golden Sword. It's only since Aonuma started working on Zelda that items you found in dungeons turned into items that were necessary to solve "puzzles". As for linearity, both Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time had elements of non-linearity. Link to the Past was non-linear in the Dark World, and Ocarina of Time was also non-linear in some respects after you got the Master Sword. So let's not pretend like this is anything "new" from Zelda, it only seems new because you're used to modern, Aonuma-designed Zeldas, which are all perfectly linear, even when there's no reason for them to be linear (is there any reason why you have to do the Temple of Time, City in the Sky, or Snowpeak Ruins in order? Or for that matter, Earth Temple and Wind Temple in Wind Waker?)

Except they're not a mercenary group. They don't work for money, perhaps because they don't think that video game players would sufficiently empathise with someone who works for money (just as Samus is not really a bounty hunter as she was originally imagined - since she spends most of her time responding to distress calls, I guess she's more like the Galactic Coastguard). They're more like a well-organised group of vigilantes.

I don't know about that. I've seen Homestuck shipping wars, and the hatred seems to be pretty proportionate between men (Karkat and Jake) and women (Terezi and Jane). If anything, the fanbase seems to like the female characters more, perhaps because they get more opportunities to shine (consider that Vriska, Aradia, Kanaya, and Terezi are all major characters in Act 5, while the only major male characters are Karkat and later Gamzee). The only serious shipping argument I know of in FE is Ike/Elincia versus Ike/Geoffrey, but I've never seen it from the angle that "Ike is too good for Elincia" or whatever, it's more "Elincia shouldn't have to settle for Geoffrey just because things didn't work out with Ike". I guess there is quite a lot of hate for Micaiah while Ike doesn't get nearly as much scrutiny, though.

way to be facetious and nitpicking I think that mages would be a bit worse. While it's true that mages don't really want to get hit anyway, getting hit isn't that bad, because even when they're on low HP they can still have a player phase. So often it's okay for mages to get hit occasionally if it means they can deal a bit more damage. It depends a lot on the mage in question. Pent would be a lot worse, for instance, as would Etzel (since Etzel likes being able to enemy phase against flying dragons). Others, such as Lucius, would be practically unchanged, however.

Well, yeah, it's just a crush. You might have a crush on someone, but if you then meet someone you like more, you'll forget about them pretty quickly. But that's much worse! At least by my standards, since TC's friend obviously seems to have no problem with Aversa having killed lots of people, but has a problem with the idea that (le gasp) she might have had sex before marriage! Plus, MU isn't exactly picky. He's happy to marry anyone in the game. It's ridiculous to suggest that Aversa should be the one person who he turns his nose up because, what, she's not a virgin? So marrying a 10 year old girl, marrying people from the future, marrying the insane Tharja, marrying rabbit-people, that all passes TC's smell-test, but marrying a non-virgin is completely out of the question?

If all they're going to be used for is looking pretty, why do they need to be able to fight at all?

Fuck higher taxes on my group.

I don't really like it, or other "umbrella" terms such as "trans*" or "PoC".