I grew up with Link’s Awakening, which had really awesome jumping.
When I played LTTP I literally anticipated getting the ability to jump for the entire game.
So LTTP never got good for me, 0/10 worst game ever.
Auto jump in Ocarina of Time was also a disappointment. It removes some of the focus on jumping, which could have been interesting, but there already aren’t that many things to focus on during 3D Zelda exploration anyway?
For a fairly similar example, Dragon’s Dogma had a mostly unecessary jump that could have been replaced by an auto jump, but that jump did make exploration vastly more enjoyable. I just stayed in that fisherman village for like half an hour jumping on rooftops.
it seemed like a context-sensitive thing that would happen when you jumped through certain areas - not just the prologue part - though that’s disguised pretty well. i’ve always thought it was curious.
Here’s a good place to note that the 3DS remakes redo the jump animations and increase the framerate which makes it feel a whole lot better. I made a bunch of shakycam gifs to compare that I can dig up.
In the N64 game you only get about 4 frames before he’s back on the ground again and it’s kind of rough.
Auto-jump felt like a weird and idiosyncratic thing that made sense for the design of the 64 Zeldas, but feels like one of the many unnecessary chains that have been strapped to the other 3D sequels.
Jumping in Link’s Awakening accounts for a major part of what I like about Link’s Awakening.
This is madness to me, “Jumping” in LA is an item you have to equip to one of two item slots in a pause menu, which gives you the ability to get past certain lazy lock/key type barriers. It’s rarely useful outside of situations where it is necessary, because the time you would save is wasted going into the menu and equipping it.
You’re not totally wrong, but I really like the way it feels. It’s a good jump, and I probably play LA with Roc’s Feather equipped about 40%-60% of the time, with the sword or some other weapon assigned to the B button.
The feather is a rare additional movement option that doesn’t significantly interrupt normal navigation and maintains the player’s own pacing by having them circumvent obstacles rather than destroy them. It has marginal(?) fighting utility, but the combat of the game is designed around breadth, not depth, and the rest of the tools reflect this. I personally don’t like when such actions take up active equipment slots either, but I enjoyed using it and can see how others would enjoy it even more.
I’ve been wondering how much mileage you could get out of the side-scrolling gimmick sections if you used utilities and hacking skills to make a Metroid-ish sideview dungeon. Unlikely to rival Zelda 2 or The Legend of Princess, but a fun thought. The necessity of the Roc Feather for proper platforming is the biggest hurdle such a project would have, aside from the minor issue of actually making the hack. You could, I suppose, free up Select for item rotation if you made the map a function of the Start button somehow, perhaps appearing before or after the item selection. Or assign the map call to an item activation. Or just took out the map altogether…
If you don’t need or want to switch back and forth between that and other stuff. I mean, I guess a strength of LA’s items in general is that they are more like ways of creating different play styles than tools with specific uses that you constantly have to cycle between.
It’s weird with the feather though, because on one hand it seems like maybe it is just so useful that you want to have it on all the time and never use that slot for anything else, but on the other it’s… jumping… there are other more exciting items to use. I guess beyond speedruns it’s good if you want to just get from one place to another quickly, maybe it makes backtracking more painless.
I also haven’t played LA in a long time, so I don’t really remember how I used it exactly. But my impression of it in my mind is it is as a thing that sort of exemplifies the worst parts of the game, i.e. it is a precursor to the 3D entries’ gradual cruft accumulation (fetch quests, death by dialogue box swarm, increasing narrative self-seriousness/cut scenes, etc) crashing into the limitations of a monochrome, 2 button handheld.
Considering that though it’s still a really great and atmospheric game, and probably the coolest, most complete-feeling gameboy game, so who knows I guess.
Jumping in the Zelda series is definitely one of the more interesting additions to the 3D games, but in both Link’s Awakening and the 3D games it’s clear why Nintendo didn’t encourage it and generally made jumping difficult to use. It caused a ton of glitches. So many that speedrunners use jumping and clipping all the time to break the game in very extreme ways. And many of these bugs will be found casually. Even I was aware of how to clip into walls as a kid in the N64 Zeldas or how to jump on the invisible “platforms” you land on while using the Roc’s Feather to navigate pits in Link’s Awakening.
One of my favorite things about Dragon’s Dogma is how much you can dick around in the game world with the jump and it’s always been one of the things I enjoyed a lot about Link’s Awakening. In the N64 Zeldas jumping was less useful unless you knew what you were doing and was more likely to cause problems. At the same time, it’s also one of those buttons that breaks the game (in Dogma it’s combat, in LA it’s traversal of areas you aren’t supposed to be able to get to). So yeah, navigating that reality probably sucks from a development standpoint and is likely why jumping has only rarely been a thing, and typically with lots of rules associated with it.
Rolling has negative vibes / handfeel, jumping has positive vibes / handfeel imo. Heavy like rubbing my chest in hard dirt.
Also I guess I never posted this draft:
So i think the best thing about this Zelda game is that you seem to be able to climb up anything. I think my least favourite things are how the dungeon entrances all look the same / are obvious.
It would be an amazing dichotomy if Zelda were about the feel of the land and Mario were about finding things in the sky. But rolling in Zelda doesn’t do anything while jumping in Mario does everything. Pushing jump is an affirmation that jump does great things sometimes so we might as well jump a lot. Pushing roll in Zelda is an affirmation that you’re bored.
You could possibly add cool weird things to the game when you roll. Maybe one out of every 50 rolls would rumble to show you a thing you could dig into and then get. But, no, that’s not how it works.
All three of the transformation masks in Majora replace the roll with an essential action. It’s tiresome to switch back and forth constantly, but the game improves on OoT by expanding your action set. Contrast with Twilight Princess where Wolf Link feels exactly like Link but with limited movement. Wind Waker gives Link the Deku glider but not much else.
BotW looks to have more new movement options - shieldboarding, launching.
