Bizarre & Forgotten Zelda Games

For as important and influential as Zelda has been over the past four decades, not every game could have the same impact as Ocarina of Time, and there are quite a few Zelda games that have been forgotten to time, or were just too weird to begin with.

 

Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland/Ripened Tingle’s Balloon Trip of Love

If you’ve played Majora’s Mask, then beyond the many strange, awesome ways the game shakes up the Zelda formula, you likely also remember one other thing: this game first unleashed Tingle upon the world. It was the video game version of that scene in Cabin in the Woods.

This 35 year old cartographer with an “unflattering” design and obsession with fairies was immediately off-putting to western players with eyes and ears, especially after his return in Wind Waker pushed him into the spotlight. Even if you aren’t aware of his origins, you’re probably aware of his reputation as the western fanbase’s most hated character. My most hated character is whoever designed the Yiga Hideout in Breath of the Wild. Crap!

That didn’t stop Nintendo, however, especially since Tingle is more popular in Japan. In 2006, they and developer Vanpool released one of the stranger spin-offs of the Zelda franchise.

Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland is a DS adventure game that’s all about money, to a comical degree. Its lead is an unremarkable thirtysomething man, no, not me, transformed into Tingle and given a mission to reach Rupeeland by Uncle Rupee. The subsequent adventure is all about gathering as many rupees as possible from exploring, selling items, or even haggling with NPCs. Even information costs money in this game, and bargaining with people can be unforgiving — pay too little and you’ll get nothing; pay too much and you’ve wasted money.

In 2009, Nintendo and Vanpool followed up with Ripened Tingle’s Balloon Trip of Love, where, this time, another ageing dude is sucked into a fantasy book world. Accompanied by characters inspired by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, this new Tingle has to find a way home — and part of that also happens to involve romance this time, as he’ll have to win the hearts of five maidens in the only way he can — by showering them with presents. Tingle: master love bomber.

While Rupeeland made it to Europe, Balloon Trip never left Japan. And, of course, neither game made it to the U.S. All eight western Tingle fans can only hope that Nintendo one day gives Kensuke Tanabe another chance to turn this fairy-man’s reputation around, be it with an official release of these DS titles, or a new game altogether. Just watch.

 

Zelda Game & Watch

Alright, this’ll be a quick one: as important Game & Watch was, it’s hard to find much to say about it. I mean, look at that framerate.

Before Nintendo really hit it big with the NES, they’d already dipped their toes into gaming with the 1977 Color TV-Game. The Game & Watch followed three years later, having been brought to life after Gunpei Yokoi — the man who later created the Game Boy — saw a businessman fiddling with a calculator while riding on a bullet train, and was struck with inspiration.

The idea turned out to be a hit, and while Nintendo eventually moved on to bigger, better things, they didn’t forget about Game & Watch. Case in point, in 1989 — the year of the Game Boy’s release — they put out a Zelda themed Game & Watch model.

As with other Game & Watch games, the gameplay is simple: on the bottom screen, Link must fight off a mini-boss enemy while dodging attacks from other enemies. Taking down the mini-boss opens the way to the next room, and at the end of the labyrinth, Link will face down a dragon on the top screen for a piece of the Triforce.

 

 

BS The Legend of Zelda/Ancient Stone Tablets

Decades before cloud streaming and Game Pass, Nintendo first experimented with broadcast technology for gaming with the Satellaview. Released as an add-on for the Super Famicom, users needed an active subscription to St. GIGA station, and could only access the service between 4 P.M and 7 P.M.

Among the titles released for the service were BS The Legend of Zelda and its sequel, Ancient Stone Tablets. BS Zelda was something like a 16-bit reimagining of the original Legend of Zelda. Though the game certainly looked like its source material, there were several major differences. For one, the overworld was chopped in half for a more compact experience. Dungeons were also completely rearranged, and instead of exploring this iteration of Hyrule as Link, you played as a player-created avatar instead.

But the most unusual element was the time limit. These games were playable for only one real-life hour per week, and were split into episodes that each altered the world map to open and close different areas. And during your limited session each week, various events, like buffs and item discounts, would occur for a limited time.

Several months after BS Zelda’s broadcast, a second version of the game was released, which further remixed the game’s dungeon designs.

Ancient Stone Tablets was broadcast over a year later, and was a pseudo-sequel to A Link to the Past. While the fundamentals of BS Zelda, like the time limit, were still present, Ancient Stone Tablets added some features of its own, including an item rental system over 16 years before A Link Between Worlds.

Owing to the ephemeral nature of broadcast games, both BS Zelda titles have long since been shut down, but thanks to the efforts of the community, the games have been preserved, and are playable on emulators.

Nintendo may have forgotten about these titles, and it’s a shame when they can just wave their magic wand and make it work.

 

Link: The Faces of Evil/Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon

We’ve covered the story of the CD-i already, as a footnote in the part of Nintendo’s history where they were “a bit cheeky” and helped the creation of the PlayStation brand we all know and love today. But what about the games themselves?

Well, despite publicly jilting Sony in favor of Philips, Nintendo eventually gave up on the idea of a CD-based add-on entirely after witnessing the Sega CD’s failure. This time, Nintendo at least had the courtesy to give Philips the right to use several of their characters and IPs to make their own CD-i games.

The Faces of Evil stars Link as he adventures through the island of Koridai to stop Ganon, while The Wand of Gamelon puts Zelda in the spotlight as she investigates the disappearances of her father and Link in the land of Gamelon.

But beyond some basic input regarding character designs, Nintendo provided no support for these game and yes, it shows. Developer Animation Magic were on their own, and with a budget of only $600,000, the results speak for themselves.

Both games are 2D action-adventure titles that play like the NES’s Zelda II, though with worse controls, and an art direction that makes it difficult to parse where you can move. They’re pretty awful as games. Of course, what everyone actually remembers about these games is the absolutely atrocious cutscene animation that spawned an era of meme videos.

At least someone liked these games, though, enough to make a spiritual successor with none other than the members of Digital Foundry on board for production, writing, and level design. By all accounts, Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore stuck the landing and turned out as a much better game than its inspirations.

 

Tingle’s Balloon Fight DS

Like the video game equivalent of staring into the sun, let’s not overexpose you to too much Tingle with this one. We don’t want a Bird Box thing going on.

Released in the gap between Rupeeland and Balloon Trip of Love, Tingle’s Balloon Fight DS is a remake of the NES’s Balloon Fight. As with the original release, Tingle’s Balloon Fight features a few key modes: a single-player mode focused around defeating enemies in arcade-esque stages and a co-op mode.

This release also added a new Balloon Trip mode, which featured 99 stages of obstacle courses for Tingle to navigate, all while collecting Rupees. And um, it’s got graphics and sound.

There’s not much to say about this game, but we’ll at least say this: Tingle’s Balloon Fight DS was released exclusively for Club Nintendo members in Japan. As simple as the game may be, getting a full physical release as part of a customer loyalty program is absolutely mind-boggling, even by the standards of that era. It’s too bad that Club Nintendo was never that interesting in the U.S, and that customer loyalty programs these days aren’t as worthwhile anyways. I’d be pretty cross about it if I wasn’t in the UK and never got anything anyway.

 

Link’s Crossbow Training

Following the massive success and universal acclaim of Twilight Princess, Shigeru Miyamoto wanted a side story follow-up that could be developed and released quickly, to help tide fans over until the next mainline entry. But after shooting down ideas from staff for being “epic tales” instead of the side story he wanted, Miyamoto arrived at the idea of the Wii Zapper.

Conceived by a member of the Twilight Princess development team, the peripheral came about after an initially-skeptical Miyamoto, who has since relaxed his stance on gun control, held a prototype in his hands. From there, the project would ultimately become Link’s Crossbow Training, a showpiece for the Wii accessory.

While Miyamoto initially wanted to exclude boss battles from the game, pushback from staff eventually caused him to compromise, and Stallord from Twilight Princess would make it in as the game’s final and only boss.

Owing to Miyamoto’s restrictions, Link’s Crossbow Training is a simple arcade shooter. There are three types of levels: Target Shooting levels on-rails stages where you shoot at clearly marked targets, Defender levels have a stationary Link hold   off waves of enemies from all angles, and Ranger stages give Link free movement, and you try not to gently fall asleep.

Yeah, it’s pretty dull, and Link’s Crossbow Training may be more of a tech demo and hardware showpiece than a full game, but the story behind its development is fascinating regardless. I will be pretty Picross if it never gets ported. That’s a lie, and I already used that joke.

 

My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Released as a digital reward exclusively on My Nintendo, Twilight Princess Picross for the 3DS is just that — a game of Picross with a Twilight Princess coat of paint.

After a brief tutorial courtesy of Midna, you’re set loose on a slate of nonogram puzzles, which, for the uninitiated, has players fill in spaces on a grid in accordance with the numbers that label each line. It’s simple, but brain-stimulating stuff, and Twilight Princess Picross’s puzzles all draw from various Zelda items and objects.

Released in March 2016, this My Nintendo reward was there mainly to promote the Twilight Princess HD remaster, which had made its debut on the Wii U that same month. Oh, and remember when Miiverse was still a thing? You could use completed puzzles as stamps for posts there too, if you bothered to engage with the walled garden social media platform.

We know you’re ready for the more substantial stuff, though, so let’s move on to something with a bit more rhythm.

 

Cadence of Hyrule

While the whole CD-i thing did scare Nintendo off collaborations, they do still do some roughly once a decade. Nobody could’ve predicted this one.

Sometimes, when a third-party game makes the jump to a new platform, it gets a bit of promotional DLC to tie-in with the respective console. Developer Brace Yourself Games intended to do this with Crypt of the NecroDancer, only for negotiations with Nintendo to end up with them getting the honor of using the Zelda IP to make a new, full-fledged installment for the Nintendo Switch.

Released in 2019, Cadence of Hyrule is a rhythm game where everything — from moving to attacking — is done to the beat of the music. This spin-off also brilliantly mixes in elements from the Zelda franchise, such as the series’s iconic items and music. Combat is simple, with Link, Zelda, or Crypt of the NecroDancer protagonist Cadence attacking enemies when you move towards adjacent enemies.

Of course, it’s also a roguelike, and we all know what that means: dungeons are randomly generated, and you lose items and rupees when you die. Any diamonds you get for clearing the screen of all enemies are kept, and you can spend them at a shop to buy equipment for your next run.

Though there’s definitely an adjustment period for beginners, Cadence of Hyrule has a way of drawing you in with its remixes, gorgeous sprite work, and quality of life features like a fixed-beat mode that eliminates the need to play in time with the music.

While Brace Yourself Games is still going strong, having released Rift of the NecroDancer earlier this year, a sequel or spiritual successor to Cadence of Hyrule would be very welcome, because sometimes, a spin-off can hit that mix of nostalgia and innovative magic in ways that a main series entry can’t.

 

 

Tri Force Heroes

At a Metacritic score of 73, the 3DS’s Tri Force Heroes stands out as one of the few “proper” Zelda titles that didn’t launch to unanimous acclaim. And well, yeah. It’s not brilliant.

Several years after the events of A Link Between Worlds, Link (yes, the same Link from that game, despite now looking like Toon Link), shows up in the kingdom of Hytopia, where — bear with us — fashion is incredibly serious business. The local princess, Styla, has been cursed, and trapped in a brown jumpsuit by a fashionista witch. Link is, as ever, ready to answer the call to action, but this time, he’s accompanied by two other people claiming to be the hero of Hytopia’s prophecy.

Tri Force Heroes is a multiplayer co-op title like Four Swords and Four Swords Adventures — just with one less Link. You’ll team up with two other players to fight your way through dungeons, all while solving the puzzles that have made the franchise so iconic. There’s a few new twists here: all Links share health, and can stack on top of each other as a totem pole for a variety of functions, and there are a wealth of costumes, each of which features different special abilities.

It all sounds like solid stuff, but not everyone has friends (and even then they may not be Zelda nuts), and that’s one of the places where the game falls short. Single-player feels tacked on here, as instead of AI companions, a solo player has to constantly switch control between the three Links, making for a clunky experience. Even multiplayer has its problems, such as online communication being limited to a series of emote panels.

Though Tri Force Heroes falls short of the quality people expect from a Zelda game, it’s still better than a few games in today’s episode.

 

Zelda’s Adventure

While Animation Magic were busy wrangling with their two assigned titles for the CD-i, developer Viridis was taking a different approach. Released exclusively in Europe almost three years after The Faces of Evil and The Wand of Gamelon, Zelda’s Adventure opted for a live action approach. The sprites and FMVs were both done in live action, with characters being played by office staff.

And unlike the other two Zelda CD-i titles, Zelda’s Adventure returns to the traditional top-down gameplay the main series became acclaimed for. Unfortunately, due to a combination of control issues, the CD-i controller itself, trial and error level design, and a needlessly large world, Zelda’s Adventure ended up being a far worse experience than its older siblings.

Despite the development team having been explicitly told to observe and recapture the magic of A Link to the Past, a troubled development cycle (during which testing lasted longer than actual development) on hardware that was never meant to be a games console meant that the result would never match up to the lofty heights of the game’s inspiration.

By 1996, the market for the CD-i had all but dried up in the U.S, and the American release of Zelda’s Adventure simply went down with the sinking ship, meaning that Europe was the only region that ever saw the game. Thanks to this and the use of live action instead of memorable animation for all the wrong reasons, Zelda’s Adventure has been relegated to obscurity as one of the most forgotten Zelda games ever released.

READ NEXT:  Dark SNES Games Not Made For Kids