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On one of the linked pages here, one of the editors compares the Zelda series to the Final Fantasy series. (From a pro-Zelda footing).

In one of the paragraphs he says (speaking of zelda) "but when a videogame manages to hit both the mark of delivering a fantastic experience and spring up the nostalgia factor at the same time, by maintaining that great charm and story we know so well, with past, rejuvenated characters".

I think he just hit upon the main appeal of Zelda- while you have several different stories, it's almost like playing in a series of linked (no pun intended) universes. Personally, the SNES was as good as it gets for me. When I was playing WindWaker on my roommate's game cube and [spoiler alert!] The ship decended into the underwater castle I immediately started jumping up and down saying "Holy Shit! It's the Palace from A Link to the Past" and then I started looking at the topography of the world, and noticed subtle similarities between it's geography and that of the SNES game that only someone who had played both in great depth would notice, and had such respect for the game's designer.

It doesn't just happen once. I was playing Four Swords recently (which also takes place in a world very similar to the SNES version) and, after being locked in a jail cell, thought "Great, 8 years of video games and I'm back in the same @$(%*&$#(*%'ing jail cell again." It was awesome.

Later though, he remarks about Final Fantasy: "Chances are more people from way back when would recognize Link in a heart-beat, whereas Square simply hasn't given any of their FF characters the opportunity to really be remembered oh so many years later--much less decades.".

On that point I disagree. I never had a sense that Link had a real personality, or had real emotions. Yes, he was gasping when Zelda was captured, and got mean faced when looking at Ganon, but he never seemed to have any dimension to him. Contrast that to Final Fantasy 3 (VI in Japan). Even now, 8 years or so after the game first came out and I beat it, I still remember the emotional response the game provoked as it described the story of Terra (the half magical Esper/half human) and her quest to feel love. Remarkably, that's not the only complete story in the game. Almost every playable character has a back story and you get emotionally linked to each. How many of you were soo goddamn pissed you couldn't keep General Leo from dying, no matter how hard you tried. The man was the only sane and compassionate person in the entire empire- it was just injust for him to be slain! Or what about the story of Shadow, the mysterious Ninja who you never know much about. I remember being so curious who he was and what in his life made him so solitary- he was the most callous yet most self-sacrificing of any of the characters.

I don't know- It's interesting to see just how much a video game- a virtual world - can affect you,even so many years later.

Just a few thoughts from this wandering mind...

Numbering scheme aside, it's nice to see these games being (re)released so that fans can relive the good times and new RPGers can experience what all the fuss was about. And if Square Enix and Nintendo can make a few bucks, great. Everybody wins.

Look out for La Pucelle to come out in early May. It's by the same developers of Disgaea (Nipon Ichii) and looks pretty damn cool. There hasn't been much information yet, but here are some sites.

The degree of hand-holding by the brand owner varies, in some cases a developer is allowed to run and get quite creative with a character-based license (like the earlier mentioned Goldeneye with James Bond) while in the case of Enter the Matrix the game was apparently co-directed by the Wachowski brothers themselves. And truly, it is a fitting story in the Matrix universe.

One of the major differences in games vs. movies is the ownership of the experience; games try to give you some illusion of free will to allow you feel like it is you choosing to fight the bad guys and you on the screen kicking ass.

Enter the Matrix was built to tell the Wachowski story, and while an interesting one in the multi-threaded Matrix universe (like the great Animatrix shorts) and tied to the rest of the legacy, it does not leave many open-ended choices to the player. While not the basis for very deep or varied gameplay, this ironically fits with the Matrix universe and the question of free will in human life. You are ultimately on rails, and you will either ride to the finish, or you will perish along the way. That has not stopped the game from selling more than 2.5 million copies, which means they must have done something right.

Chris Crawford and many others have debated the depth of the story tree and mechanisms to create interesting and playable content inside multi-threaded story trees. I have yet to find a massively multiplayer game that was able to carry a coherent story (except about the story of the player himself exploiting a strange world full of rats and squirrels to get "exp" and "eq") and have grown too jaded to enjoy pseudo-random generator worlds like Morrowind. However, I find a lot of pleasure in visiting the grandfathers of 16- and 32-bit roleplaying, Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, with a dozen or more possible endings each.

An ideal game gives you a strong illusion of ownership over the evolution and direction of the story while filling all the possible branches of gameplay with interesting content. Spector's Deus Ex 2 is very ambitious in this aspect, and everyone is hoping it turns out as good or better as the first one. However, like The Sims have shown you can also create enjoyable environments with no story at all besides the one you create in your head. Even the Sim-speak is an abstraction that allows you to fill in your own words.

Interestingly for those of us in the business of making games, the financial details of Larry Wachowski's involvement in The Matrix are detailed on The Smoking Gun archives because of his divorce battle with his ex-wife. Fair? I don't know, but educational to the rest of us. Life is a game too, the ultimate license property... :-)

Jouni