GamesAdventureHow Arzette turned Zelda’s biggest joke into something to laugh with, not atWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesAdventureHow Arzette turned Zelda’s biggest joke into something to laugh with, not atWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Limited Run Games)
The softening of the years, of course, can make it easier to see the good stuff in perceivably “bad” games – and even pay their inspirations forward in refreshing new titles. If you can believe it, Limited Run Games' first self-published new game, out today, can trace its lineage, and its most fun and endearing aspects, to what is surely one of the worst Nintendo-branded video games of all time: The Legend of Zelda duology for the failed Philips CD-I console.
Living joke
(Image credit: Seedy Eye Software)
A JOKE INSIDE A JOKE
(Image credit: Limited Run Games)
The creator of Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore, Seth “Dopply” Fulkerson, admits that his latest game began life as an “in-joke with friends.” In 2015, Fulkerson, then an aspiring 23-year-old game designer, watched Nintendo announce yet another HD remaster of a Zelda game, at which point his online chat room with fellow young devs collectively joked: imagine if Nintendo poured remaster resources into the CD-I’s Link: Faces of Evil and Zelda: Wand of Gamelon instead! The cheaply animated cut-scenes, the over-the-top dialogue, and the absolutely bizarre cast of never-seen-again monsters, all touched up with a massive Nintendo budget? How funny wouldthatbe?
During this chat, Fulkerson was in a classic schoolyard mode: giggling to fit in with the crowd, while secretly managing his unironic appreciation for the source CD-I material. “I was thinking, ‘maybe there’s more to these games than meets the eye,'” Fulkerson says. He began devouring interviews and source material about the original games’ wild development period – crunched into an unimaginably brief window, and relying on atypical outsourcing to maximize a pesky budget – and after studying game dev in college and “having trouble finishing [game design] things,” he empathized with the CD-I games' results much more than his teen self might have. “There was something to these games,” he concluded.
(Image credit: Limited Run)
The project’s release led to a rash of downloads and press (along with Fulkerson’s choice to take the project offline after only a couple of days; you can probably guess why), but it also led Fulkerson to two important realizations. The first was a new appreciation for the CD-I Zelda games, which Fulkerson began to see as an early example of the “search action” genre (aka Metroidvania) with a healthy dash of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and even, in his opinion, a pinch of the Monster Hunter formula. “These games were nothing revolutionary, but for 1993, for non-Nintendo games, it wasn’t something people saw often!”
The second was a series of new, major collaborative connections. Some had already been fostered before Arzette became a formal new-game idea: “The idea of a Zelda CD-I spiritual successor predates the fan remasters,” Fulkerson admits. “I’m lucky to be friends with a lot of animators, and we all have the same weird shared love for these games, both ironic and unironic.” But their CD-I chatter, and shared dream of one day making such a game from scratch, bubbled over when they realized they weren’t alone.
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“I made a habit of watching Twitch streams of the remakes in the months after they came out,” Fulkerson says. “The initial reaction was usually, ‘this is gonna be terrible, I can’t wait to riff on this.’ After an hour, or less, they’d say: ‘oh, this isn’t too bad!'”
I’m playing a CD-I-like
(Image credit: Limited Run)
“It was really important to let our animators have creative freedom”
“It was really important to let our animators have creative freedom”
Many of Arzette’s design rules were fluid, particularly the instructions given to cut scene animators: “It was really important to let our animators have creative freedom,” Fulkerson says. Color palettes, frame rates, and resolutions were restricted to match the original Zelda CD-I games, but otherwise, Fulkerson was determined to have the game feel “artist-driven” – which, based on my time playing the final game, was achieved and then some. Cut scenes, all drawn in flat, pixelated style like something out of MS Paint, alternate between flat, expressive silliness and surprisingly impressive rotoscoping, and each matches whichever character Arzette is talking to.
(Image credit: Limited Run)
To top off the new game’s CD-I throughline, Fulkerson and co. cold-called contributors from the original CD-I games to enlist their Arzette services, including artist Ron Dunleavy and several original voice actors. “The basic [art] workflow – this is shocking – is extremely similar to how they did it [on the CD-I],” Fulkerson says. In the ’90s, Dunleavy “used a digital tablet, Corel painter, and Photoshop, and he did it again basically with updated technology 30 years later.”
Fulkerson says he emphasized that “this is a love letter, not a mockery game” in his cold-call appeals, which he was surprised did the trick. “They were a little… not shocked, but far more cooperative than you might expect from someone asking, like, ‘I’m approaching you after 30 years, I may sound like a crazy person.’ But when I explained it, they said, ‘That’s really special! We don’t get much appreciation for what we did back then.'”
The final game strikes a satisfying balance between the CD-I’s aesthetics, particularly its low-res, hand-painted environments, and enough modern tuning to resemble what a Nintendo-developed sequel to Zelda II might feel like. All the while, the game’s cast gets into genuinely funny, weird, sweet, and endearing antics while its lead character figures out her own purpose – helping strangers, making friends, and contending with an annoying, Link-like prince – amidst her kingdom-saving quest. Its uncompromising alignment with the CD-I games’ mentality will likely be its sticking point for detractors; only so many quality-of-life tweaks can make up for some of the new game’s antiquated design principles. (Youwillbacktrack quite a bit in this game.) Yet it’s Arzette’s dedication to honoring its legacy that makes it so sweet, unique, and memorable – and thus a real stand-out compared to a modern glut of Metroidvania games.
This, for Fulkerson, is the point. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to do this,” he says. “Arzette’s philosophy revolved around core pillars: rudimentary, simple search-action, with a combat action loop, and take it all the way to its logical conclusions. Like, these previous games had a little bit of item-locked backtracking, but they were mostly key-locked. Let’s do that more. Make it more engaging. Let’s take the foundation of what these games were and make them the best they can be, while staying faithful.”
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