A Large Open World
From the very beginning, Zelda was about exploring your world, finding treasures and helpful items. The games never truly forced you to go one way. You chose YOUR way, you could explore whatever damn level you want. Though, in recent years, as much as I loved games like Skyward Sword, Zelda has been less open to exploration than before. See, the joy of Zelda was that you would be rewarded for wandering around and finding new areas. It also gave a deeper feeling of immersion since, much like in real life, you don't have set path to follow, you have the one you choose for yourself. Add to that my thirst for exploring every little area in a game and you have almost all the reasons I want Zelda to be open world. We never asked for Zelda to be linear but surely want it to be open world so why not give the fans what they want. With Eiji Aonuma saying Skyrim is inspiring him, this might actually happen.
A challenging gameplay
Oh challenge, how much I love thee. Why do developers not realize anymore how important you are. Yeah, if you didn't know this, challenge in a video game is very important. It keeps the player on his toes making the whole experience much less boring than it would if it were easy, making even the smallest achievement much more rewarding not to mention that if you keep dying over and over chances are that you'll take some time to practice your skills to actually overcome the challenge which means you'll take more time into beating the game than you would if the game was easy. Look at the NES games for reference. For some reason Nintendo doesn't understand that and think making the game easier makes it more fun. Well, guess what, a game can be just as fun if not better if it were challenging for the aforementioned reasons. Since a lot games have taken ideas from The Legend of Zelda it's time for Zelda to take ideas from other games. Let's take Dark Souls for example. Part of the challenge in Dark Souls has to do with your stamina management (Skyward Sword did that and should build upon this mechanic) and having to face ruthless enemies that will not hesitated killing you. They don't take 3 whole seconds to charge a damn strike, they'll often keep striking you and drain your stamina down by doing so. They also do tons of damage not just taking away half a heart of a full heart with one strike. Of course, it doesn't need to be the most punishing thing ever but a good challenge is always welcome.
Bring back stamina
To continue what I said in the last point, I'll go deeper in explaining why bringing back the stamina mechanic from Skyward Sword is a good thing for the next The Legend of Zelda game. The Stamina mechanic introduced in Skyward Sword may have been an inconvenience but when you actually think about it, it brought a new layer of challenge to the game. For instance, horizontal and vertical spin attacks, some of the most power slashes in the game, couldn't be spammed. Also, you could hang on to a ledge or climb grass forever, meaning you actually had something to worry about. Thanks to this mechanic, we also had the chance of bringing the ability to run. Of course, you couldn't run forever which since it will just make it too easy to get to places faster. That's all thanks to the stamina mechanic. Let's not stop on Skyward Sword, there another game that did this too, even better if I may say so: Dark Souls. One of the factors that made Dark Souls challenging was the fact that you had to manage your stamina, as I said in my previous point. Almost eerything consummed your stamina from sword slashed, to running, to blocking an enemy's attack or even dodging, you needed to make good use of your stamina. That made the player think about how he should handle the adversary rather than mindlessly attacking his foes. Zelda Wii U has the potential of taking this mechanic and make it better, to make the game's combat and even exploration a little deeper than your normal Zelda.
No more hand holding!
Skyward Sword did a lot of things right, a lot of ideas introduced in this game were, I thought, great, like the previously discussed stamina mechanic.But Skyward Sword has also done some things wrong. For instance, the hand holding. Whoever thought it would be fun to be interrupted every so often just to make sure everything is fine was a great idea probably didn't understand what the fans wanted. Hand holding is almost insulting since it treats you like a kid with no brains and therefore, cannot take on the challenge alone. It's also annoying in the way that it repeats the same information over and over again as if we had Alzheimer or something. Fi kept interrupting the gameplay for things I knew already. Low on health? That's what the hearts on the top left and beeping noise are for. Battery is low? I can see the damned icon on the bottom of the screen. Considering the fact that the Wii U now has the wonderful thing known as MiiVerse, there is almost no need to have a damned character like Fi telling us what to do and holding our hand. Just go to MiiVerse and tell the people that you are stuck and they are going to help you.
