This comic might make more sense to me if I knew what was going on. Or had played Faria.

Despite that I'm still laughing.

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I was reading an old Iwata Asks article about the Handheld Zeldas and the conversation steered into how the original Zelda got created. It had a number of documents from the game's planning in it, with images of the documents too:



This is the very first preliminary document about Zelda, which at the time was just called Adventure. A very basic game flow can be seen here. If anyone can translate the text that would be great too. Following pages talked about items and enemies but those pages aren't shown unfortunately. It's dated from February 1, 1985.



From a few weeks later, dated February 13, 1985, these are sketches of enemies and items placed on a graphics grid. Not everything here was used in the final game but it's mentioned that they were drawing from this sketch for subsequent games for years. Of interest, (coordinates going down then over) the lamp at 2,6, the bull at C,6, and the mountain lion at C,4 and on the bottom border. I think the enemy at 8,3 later became that enemy in the Dream Shrine from Link's Awakening that mirrored Link's movements.



This is the Dungeon Select screen for Adventure. Originally, Zelda/Adventure only had dungeons, so this was how you would select where you wanted to go.



This was the first overworld drawn for Zelda. Note the desert is lower on the map than in the final game.



These are the dungeon layout documents for both quests. We already know that the dungeons were designed as a puzzle to fit the memory limitations of the hardware. What I didn't know was that according to the interview, the Second Quest was a completely accidental happening, in which the dungeons for the first quest were accidentally designed to use half the available memory. Instead of redoing the designs to fit the whole memory, Miyamoto had the idea to just make a second quest with new dungeons.



Unrelated to Zelda but from the same interview, this document about the original Super Mario Bros. surfaced:



The original Mario was planned to be 5 worlds but Miyamoto was sneaky. He folded an A3 sheet of paper instead of an A4 sheet and drew the 5 planned worlds on the front of the fold and 3 more on the back. When presenting it for agreement, after getting the go-ahead, he unfolded it to show that there were really 3 more worlds. The extra 3 worlds were possible because of the reuse of level layouts with more sprites added.

I don't know if we chronicle this sort of thing on the wiki but it seemed too interesting for me to forget about mentioning. The original interview is located here:
http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/news/iwata/iwata_asks_-_zelda_handheld_history_15603_15604.html#top

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At least it's not this:



^ Up on SMWCentral right now.

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I feel like if I had a PS3 I'd give FF13 a rent because frankly there are times when I play games where I enjoy just sitting back and listening to a story unfold. Knowing nothing about FF13 I'm assuming it falls smack in the middle of JRPG everything territory but whatever, sometimes that's what I feel like getting.

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I'll probably be waiting for a few more big names to get released or a price drop/updated version. I wish they had a 3DSXL.

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