Shattering Your Heart All to Pieces
November 5th, 2005 at 12:07 pm

Were Link a pirate (which is quite arguably the case in Wind Waker), Link’s eyes would alight with fire whenever he were to find pieces-of-eight. Be that as it may, Link is not, and so Link is forced to content himself with pieces of heart instead. It’s a shame really; pieces-of-eight are so much more valuable!

Now, all silliness aside (for now), the pieces of heart were a really interesting introduction back in A Link to the Past. The pieces of heart revolutionised the heart container; back in Legend of Zelda, all you ever got were heart containers, and with good reason too. The ways to find heart containers were to enter caves inhabited by ubiquitous old men (found primarily by being a pyromaniac or by becoming the Hulk and trying to move every boulder in sight) or occasionally by finding a place in the overworld where the only puzzle you need to solve to get one is have some item that you find later in the game. Link to the Past could afford complicated puzzles (and how!), most notably those annoying ones where you use the Magic Mirror in just the right spot to warp into the Light World, then solve an insane puzzle, all of this just to get ¼ of a heart that you don’t even get to use until you find four of them. The game had the memory and the hardware to support such a versatility of puzzles, and so no longer need we simply visit the ubiquitous old men who say, “TAKE ANY ONE YOU WANT.” Gaining hearts becomes… a much more involving task.

Upon finding your first piece of heart, instantly you realise that there is a lot of power to be had out in the world for those waiting to find it. Most of the pieces were very well hidden, making it seem that if only you looked a little closer, explored every inch of every cave, got through that annoying one-way door, you could have that absolutely full heart meter of 20 hearts. Sure, you can ignore this and still have your 14, but to me the heart pieces really came out as a challenge. They said to me, “TML, you know you want to find all of us. We’re out here. C’mon, it’ll be a challenge!” (Yes, I exaggerate. No, I’m not insane.) You have to earn them one by one, and it’s always a major accomplishment when you happen to find them. (Okay, so I have yet to find anyone who’s thrown all of their clothes off, pranced around outside while yelling, “Eureka! I have found a piece of heart!” But you get the idea.) And let’s face it, in the beginning of the game, especially on your first playthrough, they’re insanely helpful for keeping Link alive through the dungeons.

In a complaint similar to a previous one, pieces of heart have become less and less a rarity in Zelda. Looking at sheer numbers alone, Link to the Past had only 24 heart pieces for 6 hearts, Ocarina of Time had 36, Wind Waker had 44, and Majora’s Mask went into the Guinness Book of World Records for shattering all records with 52 for a whopping 13 hearts. Now before I get ahead of myself, I will confess; Majora’s Mask was an very short game dungeon-wise with only four real dungeons to it. Getting out your pencils and pads of paper to do the math, with only 3 hearts to start with and 4 heart containers from the temples, the last 13 of the full load of 20 have to be fulfilled somehow. That falls into the category of pieces of heart. (Farore forbid that we actually, you know, give away heart containers for quasi-major accomplishments that aren’t temples, like the Goron Baby! I think we definitely deserved a reward for shutting the kid up!)

This would be okay, really, if they didn’t just slap you with heart pieces left and right. A good number of the heart pieces are in plain sight and are just shy of plot points to actually receive them. Many of the quests in the Bomber’s Notebook (just how do they know who needs help and when they need help three days from now anyways!?) instantly award you with a piece of heart once you complete them. Worst yet, the one sitting there right before the gate where you meet the Skull Kid at the end of the third day you can see from the very beginning of the game. The challenge element is drastically decreased here; heart pieces now have entered the world of being a gimmick rather than being a badge of pride. Saying I’ve found 24 of the heart pieces isn’t much because nearly everyone will find 24 on their playthrough. Because of this, I found collecting heart pieces to be a little… tedious. I think that I beat Majora’s Mask with 10 hearts at best because I stopped really looking for them. I knew that “enough” would eventually find my their way to me on their own accord, and there was also the fact that the Great Fairy would come around one day and grant me double hearts, double defence, or whatever you like to call it. Perhaps that was the original intent given the low heart count you would obtain without collecting any of the pieces of heart, yet intent or not, there really wasn’t an overwhelming need to get them (except when facing off the Evil Fish of Doom™, mind you).

The only real reason to get all the heart pieces was really to fulfill that obsessive need (for those who have it) to have 100% completion of the game, and that’s not something everyone will do. (The last game in which I collected all the heart pieces was Link’s Awakening. Neither have I ever collected the 100 golden skulltulas of Ocarina, nor did I ever collect a single figurine in Wind Waker. Scandalous, I know!) The need to be OMG 1337 by constantly pursuing 100% is, thankfully, not a global epidemic. (I don’t know what that means. But it happens all the time.)

I definitely think that this will be fixed for Twilight Princess. The push back of the release date promises that we will have a full continuum of dungeons (and heart containers) to occupy ourselves, and this will drastically decrease the number of temples we have to go through. However, I doubt we’ll see the day (although I could be wrong) once again where we have 11 dungeons (meaning just 24 pieces of heart) to go through. The hope then is that Twilight will be a game that is both easy enough to appeal to the masses but also with that distinct hue of challenge to appeal to the more… obsessive… gamers in the crowd. If you ramp up the difficulty enough that having those extra heart containers is infinitely useful, by removing those road maps (or should we say Wind Waker treasure maps?) to the heart pieces, I think Twilight will provide the little bit of challenge that is needed to bring back my obsessive need to go for 100%.

Written by The Missing Link

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