Zelda Club - A Postmortem
friday 07th, february 2025
In September 2022, I decided I would play every "main line" Zelda game in order. One a month. Start to finish. Between October 2022 and February 2024.
This was ill-advised and impossible for a number of reasons. Allow me to enumarate them.
- That's too much work, dude!
- Streaming each game, as much as possible. Occasionally MULTIPLE times
- Tracking my play-time, segemented by activity. Main story, side quests, etc
- Journaling and scrapbooking my playthroughs with screenshots and notes
- Doing a writeup after finishing each game, analysing all the above data
- Square peg
- Do you even like Zelda games?
Look, obviously that's too much work. That was sort of the point. I wanted to feel this weird stress and pressure and frantic energy of having to cram bigger and bigger games into just a single month. And if I hadn't had such grand plans about documenting basically the whole process, that might have been possible and fun, but I bit off way more than I could chew.
My plan included
Readers may note that that final task would need to happen while doing all of the others for the next game.
This was arguably too much to expect from a man who had a full time job, a girlfriend, and frankly more important things to attend to. The sheer discipline this would require was so far beyond me, it was ridiculous, and I should have known this from the start.
A big problem was that it was all so active, I had to keep all these plates spinning. Making notes, taking screenshots, timing different activities. I frontloaded the project with all this methodology that simply wasn't feasible, and each month I would come to write about the experience and have nothing but a few scraps of data and stray thoughts to pull from. Ah, I also found writing very difficult at the time. I cannot believe I convinced myself I could do all this.
My favourite games to stream were puzzle games. I spent a LOT of time with crosswords, sokobans, RPGs, and other slow, talky games I could kind of noodle on in the background. What I never really got into my head is that I just wasn't good at streaming action games (outside of speedruns, which are their own kind of puzzle). I just wasn't that good at keeping the conversation flowing while doing the low-stimulus work of fighting monsters in a field. I can yap over a puzzle all day but going "Ah! I almost got hit!" was about all I could manage on a bad day with an action game.
I learned this much too late in my streaming career, but it is one I learned BEFORE deciding to do Zelda Club. Why did I commit to playing like sixteen action games in a row!? Because the idea of the project was intoxicating, probably. I thought the project would naturally give rise to observations and comparisons that would offset any struggle to comment on the minute-to-minute gameplay. But, it didn't. The games simply never felt good to play on stream, which is weird, because I love Zelda gam-
Yeah? I think? I mean I did as a kid. My tastes have changed a lot since then, sure, but c'mon! it's Zelda! I love Zelda don't I!?
Shit, not really.
After playing and LOVING Zelda 1 and 2 for the first time in the project, I was riding high! Wow, those games gave me a totally new perspective on the series! Wow, Zelda 1 is a totally different beast an has morein common with BOTW than any other Zelda game! Wow, Zelda 2 isn't the dark horse I've been told it is, and is actually just as foundational to the future of the series as the first game! Wow, A Link To The Past is... well, it's every Zelda game. Link's Awakening is strange, kind of. But it's not novel. Ocarina is a big step forward but structurally identical. And so, we march forward, variations on a theme, forever.
There are some games I still love. Oracle of Seasons is such a comfort game for me. I got hooked on Ocarina randomizers for a long while. But ultimately I don't think the Zelda series is all that interesting for a project like this. At least not for someone that has skewed towards smaller, stranger games in the past decade.
And I don't think any Zelda games are bad, either. Just thinking about Wind Waker fills my heart with something, but theres just not that much sauce when they're put in such direct comparison with each other. They're all kind of the same! I can't say much more than that! They're fun when there's a new one every six years, not every 30 days.
And look, it wasn't a waste of time. I made it through six games, about a third of the project. Not bad. I wish I had been able to write more, but I was so out of the habit at the time, and I was trying too hard to do real analysis instead of just sharing my impressions. I'm happy with the pieces I wrote and I'd like to write a couple more covering Link's Awakening and Ocarina of Time. I'd like to reflect on how I've never been able to stick with Majora's Mask despite years of trying.
The project wasn't a success, obviously, but I'm glad I tried, if just for the experience of playing Zelda 1 and 2 for the first time. Those games are good as hell. But it was never something that was going to be able to force myself to do on such an insane timescale.
The ultimate truth is that life and relationships became more important than playing video games online.
Rest in peace, Zelda club. You were dumb as hell.