MM is my second favorite Zelda after LA exactly because it is so unique.
Song of soaring. talk to owl statue. Save. Was that so hard?
Exactly. When you're outside a dungeon, you can save anytime without losing much progress.
Look, even if it's just temporary saves anywhere instead of just at owl statues, it'll be good enough for me.
But then you could save in dungeons. I could see it be added to a portable version because that's the playstyle on portables but it would be an undesirable impact on difficulty. It would impact the design in a negative way.
Yep, and this is why I loved it as a save system. Every moment mattered in that game, and the sense of tension and pressure was continually palpable. Pikmin was similar, but to a lesser degree. I love having that pressure placed on me in a game.
True. Nintendo (or Miyamoto in particular) have this problem that they need to make games anyone can and will play but also keep some sense of difficulty intact. MM and Pikmin offer a great compromise between time limit and savable progress. Just don't make everything you won permanent.
You're just twisting it to make the statu quo seem more appealing than it is. Tedium is not the developers' vision, the themes are not shattered from the added option of saving. The themes are perfectly intact, the oppressing atmosphere of having to hurry is still there. You'd still have to replay events multiple time.
But the game is not tedious at all. The way it is designed there is always a direct way to your goal that is blocked so you have to sidetrack, obtain an item or ability and then be returned to where you started. Next time you pass this point you can just take the direct way.
When you restart a cycle you need to return to the location you were at last but the way there is much shorter than the first time you took it. There is a sense of maintained progress like in an RPG, taking on a location the second time is always much easier than the last time.
Giving the player that sense of growth and accomplishment is an achievement in itself. It is a good thing you have to go there again, you will notice how you get better and more efficient.
I feel like if some of you had been raised on the japanese version, you'd be arguing that suspended save was twisting the developers' vision of "having to play through the 3 day cycles in one sitting" and that the western version was crap.
Some might argue that way but it would be wrong. The owl statues don't give you any advantage, the time limit stays intact. They're an addition that doesn't negatively impact what the game set out to do.
Can you not go down the slippery slope? It gets old to have your arguments twisted into something clearly unwinnable. Saving permanently at owls isn't anything crazy like that, not even close. Don't be obtuse, the game's mechanics do not lie on the lack of saving options at the owls.
But they do. The urgency depends on the time limit not being reversible. You go all the way back or forward. It is only Link who gets better at the things he needs to do.
Again, were you guys against casual mode in Fire Emblem? The game survived just fine to its addition and I now have a lot more friends who play it. Are you guys boycotting Virtual Console games on the 3DS because they have savestates too?
The saving mechanics in MM are not external to the game plot like in FE. FE is a much more harder game to begin with and the easy modes for the Wii game already let you keep your suspend saves on a retry. Giving players different options for difficulty makes sense but in MM saving is also integrated into the world view and story.
Save states in VC are hidden in a menu, if you don't seek them out you will at first use the ingame saving features as originally intended. Save states are also dangerous because as some have already stated in this thread you can lose progress by accidentally loading instead of saving.
They're a nice feature to adjust difficulty but you will rob yourself of the accomplishment. It's your choice but it is a cheating feature after all.
The reason I play FE on classic mode is because the game is about your tactics and skill. MM, on the other hand, is really not so challenging that the lack of permanent save adds anything besides tedium for me. Usually, you end up having to replay something simply because you lacked the necessary information, nothing more. Dungeons, though, are always really easy to clear on first try, owl saves won't exactly make it much easier.
A remake should absolutely try to win back some of the people who hated the game because of the limited saving options. Hero Mode would be the perfect compromise, imo. Give the option of permanent saving in the normal quest, but Hero Mode is x2 damage + suspended saves only. There is no problem with this set up.
The difficulty in MM lies in time management, not in dying all the time. What you describe is much more frustrating (edit: and tedious, actually) than MM really is. The hardest bits in MM were making some of the NPCs happy. Which wasn't about battles.
And you greatly overstate the supposed tediousness. Edit: Three days are reasonably long, whatever you repeat will be far enough in the past that it will feel fresh again. It also gives you time to let your experience sink in.
Mix up your approaches and do different things, there will be not much repetition at all. Edit: Instead there will be variation and more complex plans.
Also, there were plenty of Zeldas after MM that used different saving mechanics. MM doesn't need to win back people (if at all that would have been the job of the Zelda games that came after MM). It needs to appeal to new gamers that would also have liked MM back when it came out.
I feel it's better to not remake MM at all than to make it like every other game.
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