@Facet "trigger soup"?
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@Felthry Unclear direction, weird plot triggers forming a knot of unintuitive required events.

@Facet @Felthry I've never heard that term before now, but wow, thanks for exposing me to it

the game I would have used this on most recently is Terranigma, wow that one gets bad in spite of being an otherwise cool game

@sharkNserg @Facet I suppose the only reason we don't see how unclear zelda 2 is would be because we played it as a kid, and know the general progression of things

I can see how it'd be hard for someone with no knowledge of the game, yeah
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@Felthry yeah, that can happen a lot - it's actually surprising how much I can watch someone get totally lost and unsure how to progress in, say, Ocarina of Time when they're new to it. I played it so much when I was little that I kind of just take a lot for granted!

@sharkNserg We encountered this a couple weeks ago when a friend wanted to try the igavania castlevanias and asked our advice on whether sotn would be a good one to start with... we said yes, because it's a pretty easy game and lets you start at the beginning

they promptly ended up taking a wrong turn and getting frustrated enough to give up on the game, and after looking into the game again i can see how that happened
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@sharkNserg sotn gives you way too much freedom way too early, you can wander off the beaten path and end up extremely far out of your depth very easily if you don't know where you're going
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@Felthry @sharkNserg I gave up somewhere in the "after surviving the impossible heck called Death Mountain, go to the next town, where a kid tells you about the water of life out in, some swamp you probably already had access to. Take it to some old lady who doesn't actually say she needs the water of life directly, so you can enter her house, go in the fireplace to get the fairy spell, then find the one tile of graveyard that's a hole where you need fairy to proceed" part of things.

@sharkNserg @Felthry Definitely. I'd say Illusion of Gaia is up there too, just less pronounced since it's still a linear progression.

@Facet @sharkNserg I think that this was a lot more common in the 90s than it is today, fortunately. Most games today it's not too easy to get lost in
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@Facet I spent *such* a long time trying to get a specific city to burn down; I had a whole stream chat on Twitch looking at different guides saying that by the point in progression I was at, it was supposed to have been attacked and destroyed and a surviving NPC would give me an item, and for many hours none of us could figure out what quest flag I hadn't raised somewhere earlier in the game to make it happen

@sharkNserg I had to stop and read guides so many times in chapters 3 and 4. The first one that got me was in the desert zombie city, there's a spot where a guy is emoting at the back of a house and saying "I'm trying to make a door here" or something. I forgot he said that, cut stream for the weekend, and when I came back ended up spending hours not remembering that there's actually an opening there in the undead version, and that it's required to proceed.

@Felthry The main thing is that while all of these elements are serviceable and blend together okay, they weren't as refined as their genre-specific counterparts.

So you have this loose bag of gameplay elements that remind you of other games, with constant context switching (from overworld to underworld, from gameplay to menuing, and from the start of the game or dungeon every game over) instead of the smooth transition Z1 provided. Plus manually running back to town or resetting to heal.

@Felthry What it did offer is a more cinematic and immersive experience, which felt amazing at the time and still plays well now. But it definitely wasn't the same game as Z1, and was definitely more rough of an experience than its predecessor or games that followed it due to having so many moving parts.