It's the original Zelda's 36th anniversary in Japan, so I thought I'd put in a good word that was a bit too long in coming. I picked up Philip Summers' The Legend of Zelda Hand-Drawn Game Guide on video game news editor Shaun Musgrave's Twitter recommendation, back when the PDF was a cool dollar.
The creators set their sights on producing a physical edition of this as well as guides to Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, and Contra. Then Nintendo showed up with a DMCA, which took the wind out of the sails of the entire project, physical or digital. The digital incarnation of the Zelda guide now lives, like much else, on archive.org.
It is as its says on the cover: a hand-drawn guide to The Legend of Zelda (first quest only) using illustrations only - no screenshots. It looks like you picked up someone's Moleskine. The style is, quite effectively and deliberately, evocative of the iconic Nintendo Power art of Katsuya Terada.
There's so much love put into this - not only illustration-wise, but also in functionality. The clues you get in the dungeons are scribbled on the appropriate square in the dungeon diagram. It even comes with a full-size pull-out map.
Look at that Darknut! Surely worthy of a call to Vermont!
EYELASH GOHMA.
EYELASH GOHMA.
So forgive the lack of images besides this sloppily-padded one:
- With all the games it's inspired and would-be spiritual successors from Bloodstained on down, playing this proved to me that there's just no substitute for Castlevania. It feels great to be back in its take on haunted-house horror, seeing new incarnations of old favorites. It's like catching up with old friends. Frankenstein? I haven't seen you in ages! Oh, you got a rocket launcher now?? Good for you! No other franchise does humor and references as deftly, I think. (Bloodstained handles this department with particular thudding "GEDDIT, GEDDIT?!" gracelessness.)
- That said: this is one of the lesser Metroidvanias. For one, the "switch between partners" gimmick falls by the wayside as the game goes on, as it becomes less and less feasible to have an AI-controlled character eating up MP with the damage they take. Unfortunately, this means Charlotte becomes an afterthought, as she's markedly more fragile, has far fewer melee options, and requires constant menu futzing given that she can equip only one highly-situational spell at a time. Most of her spells are oddly directional in a way that's fine for a bonus attack but not for a main, making them more suited to spamming R and using them and her like an Option from Gradius than Jonathan's subweapons - and even that is less-desirable than saving your MP for Jon's better-directed arsenal in the final stages. By the end, I was using Charlotte only for morphing and poison cures, which is absolutely not what I wanted to happen.
It is the Year of the Tiger today, as celebrated by pandorkful in this piece, and may we all be as buoyant, in good spirits, and well-haberdashered as these two gentlemen. It does my heart good to see them like this, in their manga incarnations again, genuinely happy in their individual miens. Pandorkful has a Patreon, and it's a joy to get art like this, with the characters I love, for being a member.
Things have been hectic in my life as of late, and not a good hectic, not the getting-stuff-done hectic. I've been dealing with a local situation that I was considering sharing in detail here to seek advice, but it's too involved, and too depressing, to detail sufficiently to catch everyone up - and I think I already have a way forward, though it's just going to be a pain. But that's the new year, Chinese or Occidental: new beginnings, and resolutions.
In looking for who-knows-what on the internet recently, I stumbled across, from Hudson Valley (NY) radio station 101.5 WPDH and host Andrew Boris, a collection of vintage photos of the Poughkeepsie Galleria:
This was my mall. I so loved going there in the mid-'80s to early '90s, the great heyday of malls. Seeing this collection of photos was like revisiting one of my favorite childhood places - not even visiting what was left of the place last year could rival it. I now have to tell you about the stores in my mall.
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