Retrospective: Zelda Clones

Nintendo’s Zelda no Densetsu: The Hyrule Fantasy (for the Famicom Disk System, later released in cartridge format on the NES under the simplified moniker of “The Legend of Zelda”) was met with critical acclaim and brought the Action RPG genre into the limelight at the beginning of 1986. After seeing this, many developers tried to exploit its popularity by producing similar titles featuring exploration with an overhead view and dungeons full of puzzles, in hopes of generating their own cash cow. Interestingly, while some were more blatant clones than others, many of these games had unique strengths of their own, in some cases even being (arguably) better than Nintendo’s title. A few of Zelda’s imitators developed on their individual qualities and created their own series by branching off from the original formula, to varying degrees of success.

Neutopia (PCE)

This game hit the PC Engine in November 1989, courtesy of Hudson Soft (and as a side note, the composer for this game, Tomotsune Maeno, also worked on the cult classic NES game Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom), also gaining a release on the American Turbografx-16 at around the same time. From the second you start to play, it’s highly evident where this game drew its inspiration from. Consider this – after the opening sequence in which a shadowy figure appears to steal a princess from a temple, the first playable section of Neutopia has an elderly woman explaining about the “terrible tragedy” that has befallen the nation. She tells the hero that he must recover 8 medallions containing their ancestor’s “wisdom, power and virtue”, which the villain has sealed away in labyrinths, and then rescue the princess from the bad guy’s lair. I wonder how they came up with that plot?

Neutopia does away with forced exploration.

Anyway, you step out of this lady’s shrine and venture out onto the world map, and… well, it’s Zelda. You can only walk in 4 directions, and a small table across the top of the screen displays which items you have assigned to the two action buttons, along with the player’s current amounts of gold, bombs, and “life”, respectively. The enemies in this starting area are slimes and scorpions, with very slow and basic movement. The main character, “Jazeta”, will actually jump backwards if he gets hit, which is a nice touch that we didn’t see in The Legend of Zelda. If you go slightly West and enter the first cave there, you get some “boom bombs” (no prizes for guessing where to use those) and “medicine of life” (ugh), which Jazeta will hold above his head upon obtaining, in a very familiar pose. After that, there are many choices of destination, but this game does something that the first Zelda really ought to have done – it has a compass on the menu screen that will point out the location of the next dungeon, thus eliminating the annoyance of aimless wandering. You still have the option of exploration if you wish, and can find plenty of bonus goodies by doing so, but the use of the compass alone was how Neutopia raised the stakes against Nintendo.

StarTropics (NES)

Well, at least this one was actually made by Nintendo. StarTropics was produced, directed and written by Genyo Takeda, the same person that created Nintendo’s first video game (EVR Race) and invented the battery back-up, which was first used in – yes – The Legend of Zelda! The first thing we notice about StarTropics after the title screen is the same irksome, fiddly “name registration” screen from The Legend of Zelda. Upon starting the game, you’re presented with a world map screen. The only accessible place is a nearby town, so you’ll inevitably venture there, and probably wonder how this is supposed to resemble Zelda, since it seems to be like any 8-bit RPG. It all becomes clear once the village elder has bestowed a weapon upon you, and you go down a set of steps and suddenly it’s like you’re playing a different game! You can still only move in 4 directions, but the graphics are totally different for these sections, and instead of the scrolling centering on the main character, you now have to touch the edge of the screen to switch the focus over to the next room. It’s obvious what you have to do at this point – kill all of the monsters (which are what you might expect – bats, slimes, etc) in a room to unlock doors to progress. Some screens have other rules, such as having you hit a switch to make the door open… obviously.

Bats are never very friendly, are they?

StarTropics isn’t really a bad game. It has some catchy music, and the difficulty level makes the game challenging without being too unreasonable, but there’s not much here that fans of a certain elf boy won’t have seen before, save for maybe some puzzles that involve hopping around on blocks to trigger invisible switches. Despite never being released in Japan, StarTropics did get a sequel called Zoda’s Revenge towards the end of the NES’ lifespan.

Golden Axe Warrior (SMS)

One of the most unmitigated rip-offs of Nintendo’s masterpiece actually turned out to be one of the best, and some would argue that its quality even surpasses The Legend of Zelda’s. Golden Axe Warrior hit stores in 1991, a time when programmers had tapped the Master System’s full potential, and the Mega Drive/Genesis was picking up steam. A far cry from the side-scrolling brawler series it came from, in this game the hero must light a menorah (a type of candleholder used during the Jewish holiday of Hannukah), with each dungeon cleared illuminating a new candle. Graphically, it looks a lot like Nintendo’s game, albeit slightly better. There are pig men with pitchforks, fish that momentarily poke their heads out of the water to shoot fireballs at you, and I swear that one of the forest screens in this game is identical to one in Zelda.

Does this look familiar to you?

In terms of gameplay, Golden Axe Warrior is sound. Sega did away with the arduousness of labyrinth-hunting by placing small villages around the world which contained NPCs that would provide hints to the player about where to head next, effectively streamlining the game without removing the aspect of exploration that many people loved in The Legend of Zelda. The fighting is exactly the same as in the title on which this is so obviously based, but there are plenty of save points and inns for those who aren’t very good at it. This was a great effort, but perhaps it’s a good thing that this game never got much recognition because it really is a “clone”. Sega pushed some legal boundaries with this one, I think.

Final Fantasy Adventure AKA Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden AKA Mystic Quest (GB)

Final Fantasy (Famicom) was suggested by Squaresoft’s PR department to tide over Japanese fans that were anticipating this title when its release was delayed from 1987 to 1991, and development shifted from the Famicom Disk System to the Game Boy (more information here). While the reasons for the cancellation of the original project weren’t announced to the public, it enabled the finished version of Seiken Densetsu to feature the popular chocobo and moogle mascots that debuted in Final Fantasies II and III respectively.

Seiken Densetsu had a relatively dark storyline for handheld gaming the time, about a slave’s uprising against his oppressors that forced him and his friends to fight wild animals for their sick entertainment. Seiken Densetsu always seemed to be targeted towards an older audience than Zelda did, by being much more story-driven (even covering the topic of euthanasia at one point) and having a large amount of menus to manage. This actually led to some game-breaking glitches; for example there is a switch late in the game which requires the player to equip a certain item (which only appears one time) while they stand on it. The item in question can be sold to an NPC – it should have been a key item – rendering the game unfinishable. Luckily for some, this mistake was corrected in the butchered GBA remake of the game known as Sword of Mana.

There is also an infamous puzzle in Seiken Densetsu, where the only hint you get is “Palm trees and eight”. The obtuse solution to this is to track down a screen with two palm trees on it, then walk around the two trees in a horizontal figure of eight until the entrance to the next dungeon appears. Bear in mind that this was back in the pre-Internet days, meaning most players were forced to temporarily quit and wait for a magazine to cover this section of the game.

Palm trees and eight... (source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGiHHxsZxkQ)

Overall, Seiken Densetsu was an excellent game, and remains one of the best the Game Boy has to offer. The music, as seems to be a running theme with these Zelda clones, is outstanding and worthy of a special mention.

Neutopia II (PCE)

OK, what happened here? The graphics were improved over the first game and the main character can now walk in 8 directions as opposed to just 4, but everything else in this sequel pales in comparison to Neutopia. Everything is slow, so slow that you’d be forgiven for thinking the land is covered in 3 feet of treacle; one of the NPCs at the start of the game says “What a great sequel!” as if trying extra hard to convince you that this game is actually above average, and the music isn’t very catchy or memorable at all. The worst offence, though, is that the compass that made the first Neutopia so good now just spins around aimlessly unless you’re in one of the labyrinths! The monsters also now include pitchfork-wielding pigs that are the spitting image of Zelda’s Moblins! For shame, Hudson, for shame.

It’s difficult to write about this game, because it’s just so unabashedly average. While it doesn’t do anything particularly well, and has a number of flaws stretching beyond what was just mentioned, it’s also by no means terrible. I can say this, however – Neutopia II is not a patch on the original game.

So there we have it. Love them or loathe them, The Legend of Zelda had its fair share of imitators. There are many that I haven’t mentioned here because I feel they managed to distance themselves from Nintendo’s title, so if you’re wondering where Crystalis, Crusader of Centy, Alundra and others are, there’s your explanation. It’s always been a fact of the entertainment industry that when a production is a smash hit, many mimics will follow and attempt to capitalise on its success. While the original is the one that takes a place in history as a classic, the emulators are often doomed to obscurity. Occasionally, they develop on their individual features and blossom into a respected franchise in their own right. While it can be vexing to see a deluge of titles that appear to be trying to sponge off one company’s recent prosperity without putting any effort of their own into it, don’t let the notion of something being an imitation stop you from enjoying what might be a great game.