PepsimanVsJoe said:
I'm not seeing it. At the most you're looking at a couple extra seconds of moving around. Furthermore even though Link can only move in four directions he still has the speed and maneuverability advantage over his foes. Most enemies(at least the threatening ones) have to move at least one square before they can change directions. Link is not limited to this and can move a half/square. Couple this with his obvious speed advantage and he can quickly out-maneuver even his toughest enemies. This is why the game has no qualms about throwing Link into a room full of enemies and locking the door because it's well aware the player can handle them. If the enemies attacked from an angle it would be different but since that's not the case(okay make an exception for the blue wizrobes). Oh and yes fireballs do come in from angles but they're easily dodged since the point where they're coming from is usually stationary.
Take away his speed and agility and you have an argument for artificial difficulty. Till then four-way movement was exactly how the game was designed. Why not make a case for the older Castlevanias then? There were platformers released around the same time that allowed for mid-air controllable jumps. Mikey from Startropics 1 could only move in four directions. Heck unless he was moving from platform to platform he could only jump straight up. Despite that he didn't need diagonal movement as he was more than capable of handling everything thrown at him.
Besides isn't artificial difficulty usually created by the player as a means to challenge themselves further? That's always how I saw it.
All those moments of being restricted to straight moment do add up though in terms of monotony. And even though Link can move half-squares, anything short of that gets "rounded upward" when he changes directions from there, meaning Link automatically moves forward the rest of that half-square between changing. There's no in-between there. That's another sense how decidedly rigid the movement scheme is, even though, granted, it isn't as bad as the way various enemies have it. And I say various, because that doesn't account for the enemies that
can travel diagonally, not to mention the beams that many of them shoot out.
The old-school Castlevanias a bit of a different case, in that it's a side-scroller, and the way it's designed, you don't have to be concerned with enemies coming at you from both axial directions, as opposed the top-down Zeldas where you do. (Not to mention that in the Castlevanias, as side-scrollers, you have more concurrent axial freedom of movement via jumping.)
