[KillerGremlin]

It's a conflicting article for me, because I enjoyed A Link to the Past, I enjoyed Ocarina of Time, I enjoyed Majora's Mask, and I enjoyed Wind Waker. I kind of jumped ship with Twilight Princess...maybe my threshold for "going through the motions" was reached.

It's easy to see how each new Zelda title is basically a rehash of the A Link to the Past formula, with maybe the exception of Majora's Mask.

I don't know how you remedy this. In Metroid Prime, the game alerts you and tells you where you need to go next after you unlock an item. I have to imagine that the author who wrote this article would feel like Metroid Prime suffers from similar issues?

At any rate, Metroid Prime has a cool feature where you can turn off the guide that tells you where to go. So in that sense the world is completely in your hands to explore. Of course, the world is not completely open, you still need new items to explore new parts of the world. Honestly, I don't have an issue with that. In the original Zelda, you needed to unlock new items to fully have access to the overworld. So items are kind of an integral part of the game. I was a bit confused by that part of the article.

I think the author's main point is that Zelda shouldn't be Metroid or Castlevania. Zelda is not a game where you have to get bombs in Dungeon 3 to unlock the next section of the overworld. The game should have epic continuity, and a huge flowing overworld. But you still need to have some non-accessible parts....right?