pubs
Let’s look at the items in the original Zelda.
Armory
- Wooden Sword -> White Sword -> Magical Sword
- Shield -> Magical Shield
You don’t even need a sword, yet if you want to you can keep trading up for better stuff. You can buy a better shield anywhere; the trick is finding the cheapest price. All posturing aside, it is helpful to have some kind of a sword, and you can claim a weak one right in the first screen. It is interesting that the key word is “helpful”, though, not “necessary”. If you want to avoid it, there’s nothing stopping you.
Collectibles
- Heart Containers
- Triforce
There are only so many heart containers, and every time you find one you get an automatic and immediate benefit: another whole heart on the life meter. And the triforce pieces are really just there to check off the dungeons as complete, to give you a reason to delve all the way and beat the boss rather than just rummage around until you find a treasure then skedaddle.
Secondary Inventory
- Raft
- Ladder
- Blue Ring -> Red Ring
- Power Bracelet
- Magic Book
- Magic Key
All “automatic” items, which you don’t need to explicitly use. Only three of them (ladder, raft, power bracelet) really increase the player’s range or abilities, and I don’t think the power bracelet is ever necessary; it’s mostly just useful for opening the warp tunnels. As with the swords and shield, you never need to upgrade your armor, though hey, you’ve got the option. There are enough keys in the game that the magic key is never necessary; it’s just a convenience. And the magic book is an accessory that enhances another item that you don’t even need.
Furthermore, you buy the blue ring in a store and you randomly find the power bracelet in the overworld. You only need to use the raft once. That leaves the ladder as the only really significant upgrade here, and you get it really early on.
Primary Inventory
- Blue Candle-> Red Candle
- Bombs
- Food
- Letter -> Blue Potion -> Red Potion
- Boomerang -> Magical Boomerang
- Bow/Arrow -> Silver Arrow
- Recorder
- Magic Wand
So more important stuff here. You need candles to light the way and burn stuff. Bombs are maybe the most vital item in the game. You need a bow and (some kind of) arrow to beat two bosses. The recorder has its uses. That’s about it, though: candles, bombs, bow and arrow, and recorder. A blue candle, you can buy in almost any shop; the only advantage to the upgrade is that, like the magic key, you can use it indiscriminately. Enemies drop bombs all over, and you can buy them in stores as soon as you’ve the rupees. There are bomb bag upgrades, though once more they’re just an issue of convenience. You find the bow in the first dungeon, and can buy arrows anywhere. I think you need the silver arrow to beat Ganon, but it’s also hidden in Death Mountain, right before the final battle, so.
That only really leaves the recorder as a special and unique item that takes a while to find and is critical to finishing the game. You can buy the food anywhere, and only really need it once. You find the letter for the old women in the overworld, then buy all the potion you want — yet it, like so many other items, is just there for convenience. Enemies drop both boomerangs, and they’re only there to make life easier for the player. The magic wand only exists to be awesome.
The Bare Minimum
So going back through, what do we really need?
- Bombs
- Blue Candle
- Bow/Arrow -> Silver Arrow
- Raft
- Ladder
- Recorder
You can buy half of these in any store. You will have half of them by the time you finish the first dungeon. You find the raft in the third dungeon (which you can enter and complete at any time), and all that really does is grant you access to the fourth dungeon. There you find the ladder, and that opens up almost the entire game. We’ll ignore the silver arrow for the above reasons. That just leaves the recorder; you need it both to beat a boss and to enter another dungeon, and you need to go through a few steps before you can find it. So it’s the only really inaccessible and significant tool in the entire game.
Otherwise, to have all the basic tools, all you need to do is run into level three and grab the raft; use it to enter level four and get the ladder; then buy bombs, a blue candle, and an arrow, and grab the bow from level one. Once you work your way through and find the recorder, you are completely equipped to finish the game.
That’s kind of amazing, really.
As for access:
The entire overworld (save two screens) is accessible from the start. The first three dungeons are immediately and fully accessible. You can enter the fifth and sixth, though without a ladder can’t go far. You enter the eighth by burning a pretty obvious bush, that, should you go exploring, you’ll probably try to burn the first time you see it. If you want, you can beat it right up front — though it’ll be hard.
Burning and bombing are the player’s two main overworld activities. You burn your way into dungeon eight, so you bomb your way (again from a blatantly obvious location) into dungeon nine. You just can’t enter until you have all the triforce pieces, and fair enough.
Four, you need the raft to enter. Which you can claim immediately. Seven, you need the recorder to enter.
So basically, once you have the ladder the only thing aside from the final level that you’re missing out on is duneon seven — again, the recorder.
So again: almost total access within two steps. The only things hindering your progress are danger and a lack of knowledge. There’s practically nothing scripted to hold the player back.
To Put It Numerically:
Collectibles aside and including the armory, there are 26 total inventory items
of those, 8 are required
of those, 5 are freely available from the start
of those, 3 are in shops
of the items that are not freely available:
1 requires only two steps to claim
1 is not necessary until the final battle, and is located near that battle
Again, that only leaves the recorder.
Counting another way:
You start with 1 item
8 items are available in shops
7 items are just lying around to find
10 items are buried in dungeons
Of the items buried in dungeons:
5 are merely upgrades to other items
Of the remaining, distinctive items that are buried in dungeons:
4 are necessary to finish the game
Of those necessary items buried in dungeons:
2 are primary inventory items (that you can use)
2 are secondary (automatic) items
2 (one primary and one secondary) are freely available from the start of the game
Of the remaining necessary items buried in dungeons which are not freely available:
1 can be claimed quickly
1 takes several steps to acquire
This reads like it should have some nice big graphs and flow charts and web diagrams to go with it.
ALSO: A comparison with the first Metroid is probably in order. I’d say the first two, but … what Metroid II asks for is too linear for a comparison to make sense.
Under Primary Inventory, the comment that enemies drop both boomerangs is misleading. They are still found in a specific dungeon room. You don’t get them randomly from enemies the way you can find bombs.
One thing that doesn’t seem to come through as much as it should is that most of the upgrade items do not require the prior versions to obtain. The idea is present, but it just doesn’t seem to be as obvious as it could to anyone who might read this and never have played the first Zelda (or only vaguely recalls it).
Not really that misleading. You find them randomly, and suddenly, in the same way you find the bracelet. I believe it’s the first appearance of each kind of Goriya. They’re not classed as a dungeon treasure; they’re just an incidental pickup.
That’s a point, I suppose, though, with the upgrades.
Though… actually, wait, what? The only two items you need, which have upgraded forms, are the arrow and candle. And in each case you can’t even get to the point of finding the upgrades unless you have the original. So I’m not sure the point of mentioning that you could, in theory, just use the red candle… were it possible to get that far without a candle of any sort.
I guess, technically, that’s true. You can still pass through darkened rooms, even if you can’t see what you’re doing. I can’t think of anything that needs burning before the level eight bush.
All the same, the blue candle is easily and immediately accessible and the red one isn’t. So, uh. I don’t know what you’re getting at.
Sorry, my own poor writing. I didn’t mean items you need, but rather just items in general. The swords, the shields, the candles, the boomerangs, and whatever else.
Maybe it is partly the word “upgrade”. Or maybe it is just the nature of games. Often enough in games you have to have a base item to get an “upgrade.” Your existing sword becomes infused with magic, for example. Getting to that event without your sword either causes nothing to happen, or you get a weird event where the game assumes you have it anyway (particularly in games linear enough where you may have to use a glitch to get in such a situation).
I remember when I first played Zelda, I was even surprised that you could get the Magical Boomerang before the Wooden Boomerang. I assume that is why the Wooden Boomerang isn’t technically a dungeon treasure, as doing the dungeons out of order could render it a non-treasure.
For anyone who hasn’t played Zelda, they may not realize how independent the items really are. Particularly since later Zelda games became a bit more dependent.
As for the candles, could you get the magic wand? That also made fire, and I believe burned trees? Though that may be more impractical than just skipping the blue for the red, if even possible. I know this is beside the point, but it is a curiosity and a possible interesting duplication. Just as the wand and the book become a really impractical (due to difficulty getting them both) alternative combat method. Mind, I used both the Blue and Red Candle for combat as well way back in my youth, before I realized it was honestly easier to just learn to stab nearly everything, like a room of Darknuts.
jog my memory, but how do you kill enemies in the first place – without a sword – in order to get the money required to buy bombs or a candle? i know it’s possible, i just never tried it.
am i a bad person because i don’t really like the original zelda? people think it very base of me that i prefer LttP.
There are places where you can just walk in and pick up money. The upper-right corner, for instance. It helps to know where they are, of course…
There are some metaphors for life in here that I don’t know if I want to explore right now.
You need the magic book to make fire with the wand, and that’s in level eight (behind the bush). Otherwise, yeah, in theory that might be possible.
That’s a good point about the random order and “treasure” status. (I just typed “satans”, inadvertently.)
On the subject of (un)restricted progression, I was just thinking of Metroid and Katamari Damacy — where the barriers are either totally “natural” (these things are simply here because they are here — the fact that they impede you is just a side-effect) or above and beyond blunt (Metroid’s color-coded doors, Katamari’s “50m” traffic cones). Even when something is in place obviously just to impede you, it can at least be a unique, scannable (with info on its cultural significance and/or how it came to lie in your path) statue or an interesting arrangement of crabs dancing on bear carvings, depending.
So — lock-and-key barriers can be done well. Or not.
Not that it’s necessary. Each game that uses the “wandering” model just needs to make a decision about whether or not it will give the player tools for refinding a focus, if necessary — something that says, “hey, you know you walked right by this interesting forest over here, maybe you want to poke around a bit more?”.