"The Legend of Zelda 2021" is a set of modifications to the original Zelda game on the Nintendo Entertainment System.
I first played The Legend of Zelda in the early 1990's. I ... was not hooked. I didn't sink any real time into the game for another ten years, when it started to appear again on newer consoles. By that time I had played several newer Zelda games and had decided that this was the best video game series ever.
My experience was that this game was pretty good, especially considering how many longstanding traditions were implemented right from the beginning. It's definitely a classic game that many of today's gamers would enjoy. But the game definitely has some elements that feel really dated, and not in a good "retro games" way.
I recently started playing my NES Classic console with my son, and before I passed the controller to him to fire up Zelda, I thought about how I could make his experience better. I realized that while there are several flaws that break immersion and alienate the player, with a little work the game could be made to fit right alongside newer Zelda games. Since none of my ideas required gameplay changes, I thought I'd learn some romhacking and make the improvements myself.
There are a number of wonderful things you can do once you start changing the underlying code (the ROM) in a game like Zelda. The ROM itself is just a sequence of unreadable numbers, but many brilliant people have spent huge amounts of time mapping out what each section of the ROM is and how it works. Some of these people have made some substantial changes to the way the game works, and many of them make the game objectively better. I'm of the opinion that the game already works pretty well, so I've limited my work to a few textual and cosmetic changes.
In the sections below, I will walk through each of the changes I've made, share the reasons behind them, and explain how they were done.
The original title screen for the Legend of Zelda is a masterpiece. Until Zelda, the norm for first-party NES game title screens was a static title with no music. Here we have a waterfall flowing over a mountainside at sunset while a somber rendition of the main Zelda theme plays in the background. It's beautiful. It also has some really weird stuff.
Let's talk about that sword. That type of sword is called a "rapier" and it is the first example of what I would call Medieval Cultural Mishmash in this game. A rapier was a sidearm carried by military officers and citizens and did not exist until long after there were no more knights carrying shields around. It is all wrong for the type of game we are about to play. Link's actual swords have never looked like that and certainly don't in this game.
I've replaced it with the modern interpretation of this game's White Sword found in the 2014 game Hyrule Warriors. (See the artwork in the Gallery section here.) In general, that game was a very helpful resource, as many items from older Zelda games appear with updated artwork that matches modern Zelda's look and feel.
Changing the sword involves the simplest and easiest romhacking technique - tile editing. Most of the sword is displayed using background tiles, which are a set of 8-pixel-square tiles that are placed next to each other in rows to fill the entire screen. You have 4 colors to work with in each tile; in the case of the sword, we have white, blue, aqua, and the background. The original sword only needs six different tiles; I needed a few more, but luckily my remake of the title logo left me with some extra slots.
Speaking of the logo ... oy. One thing that is obvious looking at Zelda 1 is that Nintendo really hadn't nailed down the branding yet. Starting with 1991's A Link to the Past, the Zelda series has used the same logotype with an instantly recognizable typeface. In this game though, we have ... some 3D letters. I've replaced them with a pixel-for-pixel recreation of the modern Zelda logo. Well, the "Z" isn't pixel-for-pixel. Since we're only working with 3 colors, we're stuck with visibly stairstepped diagonal lines. If we were to copy the Z exactly, the angle of the diagonal lines means our stairsteps would be all wobbly, which looks really terrible. So the Z is actually narrower than it is in the current logo.
The fact that the bottom of the "Z" extends lower than the rest of the logo completely broke this title screen. Remember how background tiles only have access to 4 colors? We can switch between a handful of color sets, called "palettes." There are four in use: The red and flashing gold logo, the white and blue sword, the green vines, and the grey stones. The problem is that palettes are set for the background tiles 4 at a time, in a 2x2 square. When I created the "Z" to extend lower, it crossed a boundary to where it has to have the same palette as the sword tiles below it.
The solution was to use "sprites," which are also 8x8 pixel tiles, but they can be placed anywhere you want on top of the background and use their own palettes. Some of the leaves that stick out of the vines are defined as sprites, so I converted those to new background tiles, and changed the sprites into the 3 tiles on the bottom left of the Z.
I'm really pleased with how it turned out. At several points, I didn't think it would be possible to do what I wanted. But I just needed to learn a few things.
This is a common modification to Zelda 1. When the game was first released in Japan, it used a font that, as far as I know, has only been used in this game. The United States release changed the font to the one used on just about every first-party Nintendo game, from Duck Hunt to Balloon Fight to Baseball.
I think I understand what happened. The Japanese version has a mix of text written in English and Japanese katakana. Because the most important text used katakana text with thin strokes, it made sense to use an English font that matched it. When it came time to prepare the game for English speakers, someone realized that the unique font isn't as readable as the one Nintendo had been using in other games. On the CRT screens of the day, the thicker "Nintendo font" would have been much easier to read. And indeed, it's still a little harder to read even on modern displays. But even before I knew about the Japanese original, I felt it was a little strange that Zelda used the same font as, say, Pro Wrestling. So I like this change.
If you let the game sit on the title screen, it eventually fades to a short intro sequence. It has three parts and all of them needed work.
The game gives you a quick background on why Link must embark on his adventure. The English text here is a mess. At this point I will call out a resource that I made heavy use of in this project: Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin's Legends of Localization. Clyde's writeup remains the definitive resource on this game's English localization. He provides a literal translation of the original Japanese for just about every piece of text in the game, along with some explanation on what worked and what didn't. I'd highly recommend checking out his website, and purchasing his book on Zelda 1 if this subject interests you.
For the opening story scroll, it should be easy to fix, right? We just use Tomato's updated English translation. Not so fast - this poorly-written English story is all we have. There is no Japanese version. At this point I decided that having a perfect literal translation wasn't all that important anyway. In most cases we are not limited by how close we can come to the Japanese, but by how well we can convey anything in the very limited space we have. By far the most important factor in whether I've used a word is whether it can fit on a line.
For the story I've rewritten the text to hit the same story points in the most elegant and natural English I can. I did reference Nintendo's own update that has appeared in later ports of this game, but I think I've improved it even further.
Original:
MANY YEARS AGO PRINCE
DARKNESS " GANNON" STOLE
ONE OF THE TRIFORCE WITH
POWER. PRINCESS ZELDA
HAD ONE OF THE TRIFORCE
WITH WISDOM. SHE DIVIDED
IT INTO" 8"UNITS TO HIDE
IT FROM " GANNON" BEFORE
SHE WAS CAPTURED.
GO FIND THE" 8"UNITS
" LINK" TO SAVE HER.
New:
LONG AGO, THE DEMON KING
GANON STOLE THE SACRED
TRIFORCE OF POWER.
TO PROTECT HYRULE,
PRINCESS ZELDA SHATTERED
THE TRIFORCE OF WISDOM
INTO EIGHT PIECES AND
HID THEM BEFORE GANON'S
MINIONS CAPTURED HER.
LINK, YOU MUST FIND THE
PIECES AND RESCUE ZELDA!
This is fairly straightforward. A "container heart" should be called a Heart Container, Rubies should be Rupees, and everything should be centered correctly. It's a little unclear, between Flute, Recorder, or Whistle, what Link's instrument should be called, so I closed my eyes and picked Flute. And finally, I feel that calling the meat "Bait" instead of "Food" helps the player understand that it's not for Link, it's for Moblins.
Below the list of treasures, Link holds up a piece of paper that says "Please look up the manual for details." This is very good advice considering that there's a massive learning curve if you jump into the game with no idea what to do (I should know). The problem is that absolutely no one will be playing this game with a manual anymore. So how can we help new players get started? The number one thing that would have helped me, would have been to know that I needed to go into the dungeons to find the good stuff, instead of wandering around the overworld aimlessly. So now Link says "Look for treasures in the dungeons!" (They are actually called Labyrinths in the manual, but screw the manual.)
I expect this one to be a little controversial (I've broken out the changes into separate patches if some of them bother you). But I truly felt like seeing a bunch of Christian crosses in this game was more Medieval Cultural Mishmash that broke the fantasy setting a little bit. As Tomato explains, Japanese entertainment tends to pull in religious symbols more for their decorative value than for their actual meaning. So it makes sense from one angle that Link is carrying a crusader shield around. But in the English-speaking world, it's jarring to see a Christian cross and wonder whether churches are a thing in Hyrule, or if it means something else here.
I'm pretty confident that Nintendo would have done something other than crosses if they were making this game today. Why? Because they removed religious references in three of the next four Zelda games to be released. Probably the most high-profile was the Gerudo moon-and-star symbol that actually survived through the first U.S. release of Ocarina of Time. Someone eventually realized "hey, we shouldn't be essentially saying that these desert-dwelling thieves are literal Muslims" and changed the symbol to the completely new one that's been used ever since.
So although you could make the argument that Link's Christian shield is an iconic part of his design, I truly believe the game is more cohesive without the crosses.
Link's original shield is just a "shield," no special name. I've patterned the new sprite after the Wooden Shield from Skyward Sword.
The Magical Shield appears again in Hyrule Warriors, and I really like what they did with the artwork. It has four kite-shaped elements surrounding a central triangle. It still makes a cross shape, so it's connected to the original artwork, but it also looks like something that would exist in the Zelda setting. I love it. Unfortunately I couldn't come anywhere close to realizing this with 8 horizontal pixels, so it looks a little like I just erased parts of the original cross. But I still feel it's an improvement, and I especially like the new highlight on the right edge to match the smaller shield.
Darknuts (the tough knights in dungeons that carry swords and shields) also have cross designs on their shields. With two colors and just three horizontal pixels to work with, the biggest challenge was drawing something that doesn't look like a letter of the alphabet. Many of the designs of Darknuts in later Zelda games have snake motifs, so my design shot for two snakes wrapped around each other. But seriously ... three pixels.
The original Magic Book sprite feels upside-down, so I've flipped it and replaced the cross on the front with a Triforce. Likewise, I'm relieved that a full three-piece Triforce fits on the gravestone sprite to replace the cross from the original.
As any Zelda veteran knows, 1-rupee pickups are supposed to be green. 5-rupee pieces are blue. In Zelda 1, 5-rupees are blue, and 1-rupees are ... flashing blue and yellow. I can live with the inconsistency, but it's genuinely annoying to not be sure which is which until you can tell whether or not it's flashing. Making the 1-rupee green would be a great place to start.
Unfortunately, making them green is impossible without breaking the game. You see, at any given time there can only be 4 sprite palettes active at once. In the overwold, you may have a screen that has blue Octoroks, Red Octoroks, a Zora, and Link. These are the 4 palettes. The 5-rupee uses the blue enemy palette, and the 1-rupee flashes between the blue and the red (which contains orange). The only palette that has green is Link's, and only when he's still wearing the green tunic. The Zora palette has a dark teal in it, but nothing that could be used for the highlighted and darker areas of the rupee.
The next-best solution, as discovered by the members of the Zelda Redux thread on romhacking.net, is to turn off the flashing so that the rupee stays yellow. Thanks to "Trax" for finding the code that handles this. It's a massive improvement, even if it's not green. This is the only change in my hack that actually changes any in-game behavior. The small amount of ASM (the code in ROMs that determines behavior) I had to touch to make this change made it clear that I'm out of my element.
And now we come to the most massive and time-consuming change: the in-game text.
There are 38 different things said by characters in the game, and I've changed most of them. There were a couple of iconic phrases that were already perfect ("It's dangerous to go alone" and "It's a secret to everybody."), but most of the others needed some work. The problems range from poor grammar, to strange styling, to utterly confusing hints.
I don't feel that Tomato's goal was to provide a new localization for The Legend of Zelda, so I've used his writeup for guidance but almost never copied his translations. It would be more accurate to say that I've paraphrased his translations for maximum benefit to the player, sometimes in spite of what the original actually said.
I'll walk through each entry at a later date, but for now I'll explain some of my guiding principles.
In all cases the primary goal was to assist the player. To that end, some of the hints have reverted the changes fromthe Japanese originals, and some hints are very different. In all cases, I've taken the intent of the hint in the original game, and done my best to convey it in 3 lines of 24 characters. So "Secret is in tree at the dead-end" becomes "A fire in the southeast forest will reveal what you seek," because this hint has to point players to where hidden dungeons are IN BOTH QUESTS. "10th enemy has the bomb" becomes "Search for new arrows in Death Mountain" because the Japanese original hint is much more useful than what it was changed to for the U.S.
The other major change relates to character voice. The Japanese text contains some nuance for certain characters - shopkeepers speak in more informal language, and old characters sound like old people. This is apparently much easier to do in Japanese than it is in English. The old people stuff is lost in the original localization, but the informal stuff uses a technique that I cannot stand: shortened words. "Buy somethin' will ya!" "This ain't enough to talk." Sorry, that doesn't sound "informal" to a U.S. English speaker; it sounds "Southern." This is how twangy Texas talk is rendered in English entertainment.
I've taken a different approach - actual informal speaking, with no Southern accent. Shopkeepers now say "Want to try your luck?", "You want it? I got it!", and "Now that's a great deal!"
Likewise, instead of throwing "Sonny" around to make an old person sound old, I've gone with more formal and archaic word choice. Now we have "Only the powerful may wield this," "Don't be such a miser," and "My, you're rich!"
There is one other change that I'd include in my ultimate version of Zelda 1: Snarfblam's Automap Plus. This colors in a map of Hyrule in the top left as you explore. I don't care for the changes to heart refills though (1/8 of a heart? Why?).
And that's it. What about other Zelda games? From A Link to the Past on, no changes are necessary; they are perfect as-is. That leaves Zelda 2. That game, in my opinion, needs massive changes to become fun to play. A hacker called ShadowOne333 has really extensive hacks for both NES Zelda games that fix a lot of common gameplay complaints, and while I feel the Zelda 1 version overthinks quite a few things, the Zelda 2 Redux hack looks to be a great improvement to that game.