When I was younger, I used to dream of the Ultimate Game. Whenever I was playing a game, I’d imagine what would have made it cooler. When I’d read a book, I’d daydream about being able to do some of the cool stuff the main character is doing, only in a game.
I also dreamed of killing thousands of innocent people and shoving them into jars to serve to sickly people for fun. Most of this spawned from my friend and I sitting around playing the Legend of Zelda for the Super Nintendo. Since it was a single player game, one of us had to sit around watching. Normally, that’d be me, since it was his game. And he was a bastard. But that’s beside the point, and I’m hardly one to hold a grudge against the bastard. Since I was usually watching him play the game, sitting there being a bastard and hogging all the fun, I had to find something to keep myself from being horribly bored.
So I started imagining hysterically horrific things happening to the inhabitants.
Take for example the little boy who’s sick in bed. He’s so sick that he can’t go out hunting for bugs, so he gives you his net so you can catch one. Aw, poor little guy. Wouldn’t it be funny if you could catch HIM in the net and shove him in a jar and carry him around and show him to people?
I thought it would. My bastard friend did too. We’d laugh about it and build up on that from there. That game probably wouldn’t have been half as fun as it was if we hadn’t kept adding things to make jokes about. What if we took the lumberjacks and threw them into their pot of boiling whatevers over in the corner. And then crushed their house by chopping down the big tree outside so it fell on them. Then go to the witch who sells bombs, buy her whole stock, and then BLOW HER HOUSE TO BITS! Don’t want anyone else to get ahold of those bombs, afterall! Oh!! And the tree that shot out bombs when you hit it? Try hitting it with a HUGE HAMMER in the back of its head, and it shoots bombs like a cannon out of its mouth and screams BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!
Basically, we wanted a Legend of Zelda that played more like a Horrific Journeys of Madman Link. I wanted to make Gannondorf look like some petty thug. Gain control of the Triforce?? HA! I’ve got a sick boy jammed inside of a JAR!! THAT’S evil!
Play a flute to travel to the Dark World? Screw that noise. I’ll just kill people and slaughter their chickens and chop down their trees until THIS world becomes the Dark World! Then the Dark World will seem like a magical candy land filled with happy bunnies and that bitching stompy boot from Mario! Gannon will be jealous and want to come to MY Dark World. But to gain access, he’d have to play a stupid little flute, which I’m pretty sure would get him beaten to death by all his own minions. That, or he’d explode from… something. I mean, the guy’s supposed to be truly evil. What the hell is he doing playing that song??
Remember that scene where Link goes to get that magical sword, and there’s bunnies and deer and crap? Man, talk about a great place to practice our archery skills! I wouldn’t even NEED a sword! I’d think it would be probably TWICE as hard to kill them all. Did you see how fast they ran around? Holy cow, Link’s legs would be dead tired from trying to catch them all. Although, the sword might come in handy when I’m trying to skin them all. Just fill up my health and swing my sword! Skin them all at once!
Sometimes the game seemed more evil than us from time to time. Like when Link is trying to find a way into the castle, so he blows a hole in the side of it. I mean, what the hell kind of hero does that? Actually, what am I saying… This is a hero in a land where everyone builds their castles as death traps. Getting summoned to meet the King wouldn’t be something I’D want to do anytime ever. Zelda could blow it our of her ass. If she wants someone to save her, she probably should have thought of removing the acid pits, the disappearing floors, and the walls that shoot bricks around the room.
Come to think of it… who the hell would bother to get through all that just to kidnap a princess? Gannon must have a LOT of spare time on his hands.
So anyway, we’ve established that the world of Hyrule would make a great place to play the Ultime Game, so long as you can do lots of cool things like kill townspeople and shoot cuddly animals. It should also have a great storyline as well. Not that Zelda didn’t, but frankly, if I’m playing a game where I’m trying to kill people and be an all around bastard, I could care less that some Gannon guy is kidnapping princesses and holding them in crystals for absolutely no reason at all. I think they said it was to drain their strength or something, but after you saved like 4 of them, they kept saying the same thing. Sorry, but I saved 4 already. How much strength could the other princesses have? They’re GIRLS!!
This, however, would be a damned cool thing to be able to do. Shove people in crystals and drain their strength. It’d be like Mega Man, only instead of travelling to far off dimensions to beat up evil villains in their garages, you could go next door, capture the lumberjack, stick him in a jar, them encase him in crystal, and gain some sort of power! Like… I don’t know… lumberjacking? That might come in handy somehow. Evil beings need firewood, right? Usually they just burn down the whole forest and absorb the warmth from that, but it might be handy to know how to use an axe or something. Or I could throw the crystal in his vat of boiling lava stuff and absorb the heat! There! See? Now I can chuck flaming axes of death! Now THAT’S power!
So back to my point. Hyrule would be a cool place to kill people. But its nowhere near big enough. And no, a Dark Hyrule isn’t making it bigger. Its the same thing, only cooler. There should be Hyrule, an evil land to the north of Hyrule, then a lava volcano kind of place to the south, and then a whole lot of other crap to the west and east. Like a LOT of crap. I mean, come on, Zelda was on the Super Nintendo. I think a CD for the PS2/X-Box can hold a little bit more than 6,000 Hyrules combined. I expect a HUGE world, damnit.
Rulers from all over the area could keep trying to stop you, but it wouldn’t matter, because you’re Evil Link. And as we’ve all seen from games like Street Fighter, the evil version is just like the good version, only evil. And since Link is the greatest warrior in all of Hyrule, well… that means we win. Unless the real Link shows up. But then, Link never had flaming axes of death!! PWNED!!
So now that we have the general world layed out, we should probably take a look at the graphics. Zelda was pretty snazzy for its day and age, but lets be realistic. It wouldn’t sell very well nowaday, unless it was released on the gameboy. However, the graphics of newer RPGs such as Ultima Online and Everquest make me… queasy. Characters look stupid. And frankly, characters should NOT look stupid in the Ultimate RPG. The only games that have consistantly shown that they can have cool looking graphics without almost any flaws are those games that are hand drawn, not computerized. Although the new Zelda game has some interesting possibilities.
Now, the Ultimate Game would be a 3/4 view anime style. Cartoonish enough to enable the startled looks on your characters that this game would need, without it looking stupid (could you imagine Ultima Online where your characters get hit in the stomach and huge eyes pop from their head?), and also look pretty cool in all other aspects as well. My characters will enter a constantly evolving world with DARK forests, creepy swamps, and brilliantly colored waterfalls waiting to be corrupted by my incalculatable evil. I don’t want a ton of brightly colored sceneries. The few areas of the game that look like that should be startlingly different from all the dark gloominess that follows my character around.
Since running around killing people might be fun for maybe about 30 minutes, max, there needs to be more. A point for you to keep killing people. For starters, let’s add in magical spells.
So how do you gain these magical spells? Personally, I absolutely HATE leveling. Even in Diablo, where it was insanely easy to level, I hated it. So how can you gain more powerful spells without levelling?
How about collecting them? Put within the game thousands of magical gems that give you a power, from magical destructive spells, a spell that summons godlike monsters on a whim, healing powers.. Sure, you gain extra abilites by capturing helpless lumberjacks and throwing their crystal prisons into boiling lava, but you can ALSO gain skills via collecting! Cause there’s never too many things that you can have. Why stop there? Lets make it more than just spells… lets add in the ability to steal whatever you like whenever you want… new ways to trap people… The possibilities are endless! Some of the skills could even be combined! Like a skill to control people’s mind’s and a skill to raise the dead! You could convince someone to kill themselves so you can now have a dead body to raise!
But don’t make them quests. Quests are boring and annoying. If there’s going to be a quest, make it for something REALLY special, like the sword of flaming dragons or something. No, these gems should drop at random from monsters. And when you fight bosses, you should get three gems. Some might be duplicates, some would be really rare… just one more reason to keep killing people.
And as long as we’re talking about things you can do, you can also take control of a bridge, and then destroy every other bridge in the entire game. Then use your Control Monsters ability to put werewolves in the river so nobody will cross it. Cause everyone hates werewolves. Plus, it’d be funnier than sea monsters. If anyone wants to cross that bridge, they have to pay you. But the price would be high. They’d have to pay you with their souls, or their women. Women in Hyrule gotta be worth SOMETHING if Gannon keeps drawings power from them. So when they give you their women or souls, you let them cross the bridge. Only the bridge is really a catapult that shoots them into a huge spiked wall.
I mean, come on… you’re EVIL. You don’t want to help people get what they want, even if they DO pay you with their souls.
Now, naturally, there’s going to be hero types trying to attack you to gain control and stop Gannon from combining the Triforce. Since you’re an evil person, they automatically suspect that you’re helping him. It makes sense, right? When you were playing Zelda, how many other monsters did you attack before you finally went after Gannon? How many of THEM do you think were actually helping Gannon?
So since there are tons of heroes trying to kill you, you need protection. I’m not sure why, since you’re the most powerful being alive, but it seems to be in the evil handbook somewhere that if you want to be evil, you need a castle so full of booby traps that the hero won’t want to stop you anymore.
So you can build your castle however you like. Let them get halfway through it by only attacking them with bats, and them shut off all the lights and set free the Manticore. Then fill the castle with lava, and slam the floor into the ceiling every 30 seconds. If he survives that, then he’ll deserve an audience with you. Except it won’t be you, it’ll be Frankenstein and Igor from Castlevania. And since NPC heroes don’t have infinate lives like Simon did, I bet they won’t last very long in there!
Ok, so now you have ultimate powers, and impenetrable castle, and hundreds of women and lumberjacks trapping in boilding hot crystals. Now what?
Well, now we need a storyline. We already have another villain… I guess we could go destroy him. Or we could just conquer all the good in the world and bring about the Dark Hyrule… Or we could assemble all the pieces of the magical Quadforce and go back in time to conquer the past! My point is… in the Ultimate RPG, there will always be a storyline, but it’ll be purely at the descression of the player whether or not they wish to take part in it. The Ultimate RPG will need a great storyline, one where your character has something insanely tragic befall them or someone they love, and the person who did it is now preparing to conquer the whole of the universe… and you could stop them if you wish, or you could create your own storyline by growing in power and killing the Gods themselves!! Or you could just stick people in jars all day long. Whatever.
There’s one last thing which would make The Ultimate RPG complete: Multiplayer. If someone could figure out how to make it work in an MOG, great. But as far as I can figure, this is more of a console game where two people can team up to destroy the world together, or they can compete to gain power over the other.
Or just try to make the other player cross your bridge by forcing them to sell you their crystalized women. And then launch them into a spiked wall.
That’ll teach the bastard to make you watch as he plays all the games.