As the series progresses to take in new audiences, long-time Zelda fans find themselves presented with a problem. The games start off almost stupidly easy to those familiar to the Zelda format, the first temple has amazingly no-brainer puzzles and a two-minute boss fight, but it doesn’t actually get much harder from there on in. It’s all too easy. For those used to the controls and tactics, enemies take downwards of five seconds. The puzzles, once you know how, seem amazingly easy. The enemies take off a quarter of a heart out of your thirteen-heart health gauge. And people are screaming out for something to make their games harder, something to bring back the difficulty of past Zelda titles.

We could make big, drastic changes. Just making the game harder to start off with. Shutting up the little helper guys, to start with. But this would only make the game harder the first time around unless we made some real challenges. I, personally, love those bits in games that are so hard you have to persevere for days, maybe weeks to get past them. But what matters to Nintendo is what appeals to the mainstream market (Who, incidentally, make Nintendo far more money than I do) — who like pretty, moderately easy games. People don’t like being stuck these days. They don’t like being made to think. So that’s a no-go. While we want difficulty, we can’t impost it on everyone who plays the game.

One of the most common idea is a difficulty setting. Let the kids have their pretty, easy games and give the seasoned gamers something to dig their teeth into. Maybe play the game once on an easier setting, then have a second quest which is a good deal harder.

But, maybe, they should be careful what they wish for.

A frequently-suggested idea is the dungeon layout and difficulty. To have randomly-generated puzzles in rooms, which are also randomly generated to create a dungeon you cannot use a guide for. So you’ll come back on your second run through the game, and be faced with an entirely different dungeon than you were the first time. I’m not sure if anyone here has ever played Daggerfall (1996) — it boasted hundreds of unique quests, and did this by generating random dungeons and placing a random item somewhere inside to be retrieved. I don’t know about you — but I don’t want to do that a hundred times. The format is not one that has ever been well implemented.

Have a look at Twilight Princess’ Lakebed Temple. The layout is immensely important for the difficulty of the dungeon. The way one water channel connects to another, opening this area and letting you get further here so you can get to that chest you could always see but never reach. Or in the City in the Sky, where you looped around in one wing of the city and ended back up in the rafters of the main hall, with the item you need to open one the path to the boss. Imagine if we got rid of the layout and made the dungeon one straight line of rooms, each one presenting you with a new puzzle. How much of the ingenuity and challenge and eventual revelation of those dungeon would be lost?

The original Legend of Zelda game was amazingly difficult. I found myself dodging enemies, which were far scarier than any Lakebed tektite, and desperately clawing onto my health. I found it amazingly frustrating and stopped playing on level four. And then I was thinking: Hey, what if it wasn’t so difficult? It would be a breeze, over in a couple of hours — and essentially boring. Without the dangerous swarms of enemies it would be a case of: ‘Enter room, hit each enemy three times with sword, do puzzle if there is one, next room’. But with the NES engine, it couldn’t barrage us with these new sights, sounds and amazing spaces that TP does. It made the game spectacular using difficulty, because it physically couldn’t use anything else. It could get away with shifting dungeons and locations due to lack of a linear storyline and the fact every room is, essentially, a square.

So if we took that back to Twilight Princess, got rid of those spectacular three-story rooms in the Lakebed temple, dropped of things like the cannons in the ice mansion, cut all storyline and just left you with a setting (The children have been captured — here’s a sword, go fetch) and placed the dungeons under random rocks around Hyrule field, we could have randomly generated dungeons. No two need be the same, and I bet people would be angry, upset and disappointed.

So maybe I’m going over the top with that idea. Let’s tone it down to something simpler — like the health meter. The meager enemies in the first temple may pose a threat to he with three hearts, but by the time the game’s stepped up some and given you more dangerous or frequent enemies, you might have ten. That’s forty hits you can withstand and still be walking. Unless you pick up a heart, which gives you an extra four apiece. And if I bring bottled healing items into the mix, yes — it does seem far too easy.

But Nintendo allows you to put your own restrictions on this. In recent games, having cottoned onto things like the three heart challenge, Ninty had made it so you don’t have to pick up the heart containers. Play the game with three hearts. Hell, reset the console every time you fall into the lava. Have a field day causing Link pain. That’ll make you take care when fighting a Dodongo, and really regret that misjudged leap.

Or, perhaps, we could up the health of enemies. I’m sure those of you who have played Oracle games will remember the recolored versions of enemies that appeared in and around the last few temples which took maybe seven blows to kill rather than three. And yes, these were a good deal more dangerous than their weaker counterparts, especially things like Ropes and Lionels which are hard to dodge. If you also double the health of each boss (and mini-boss) you meet — you have yourself a difficulty level. Which I’m sure fans will call naff and insubstantial, the enemies being so easy to beat anyway.

The only other idea for a difficulty setting (that is implementable without massively changing the format of the games) to reach my ears is to restrict item renewal pickups — like spare arrows and bombs hidden in bits of grass and under rocks and so on. Because if we need arrows, you can bet that there’s an arrow or two hidden in a nearby shrub. Unfortunately, if there isn’t, it means walking back out of the dungeon and to the nearest town to buy some — a round trip of fifteen minutes or more. If people actually want to do that for some level of realism, they could just not chop grass, or even deliberately miss the upgrades for quiver and bomb bag. I don’t see why Nintendo would bother adding in something we can do, and have been doing, for years. It would be pointless — Nintendo left these doors open so they didn’t have to bother implementing a difficulty setting. And, besides, it’s a great feeling knowing you’ve somehow defied the game and beaten it with only three hearts.

So if you choose to miss picking up hearts, you have a difficulty level. And if you’re playing on a game where you can skip upgrading the power of your sword (Like the original LoZ, the Oracles and Majora’s mask where sword upgrades are optional) — you are effectively making yourself weaker later in the game.

And so we have our answer. The random dungeon idea is a good one at first glance, but to implement it would be to lost the depth and temple-ness of the temples, and the health and ammo restrictions you can easily do yourself. Don’t use bottles. Don’t cut grass. Buy all your health from shops in town using rupees you obtain only from killing monsters. Nintendo doesn’t really have to do anything to make our games harder. People have been applying their own difficulty levels for ages. It just takes a little imagination.