3D Dot Game Heroes was an interesting game and a definite Zelda knock-off, but did it capture something that Zelda games have been missing for a while now?

I picked up this game primarily because, well, it looked like a hilarious parody of Zelda. And if a game is able to make fun of itself well enough to extract laughter out of me, well, that’s just icing on the cake. (And from the advertisements of the game, I pretty much figured that the humor content would be through the roof. If you haven’t seen them yet, you really should.) And so, I figured I would this game would be a shoo-in for me to love.

So imagine my surprise when I wake up to find 3D Dot Game Heroes failing to captivate my interest. I quickly grew frustrated by the sheer difficulty of the game—not quite as difficult as the original game or perhaps Mega Man 9, but still up there! (Some of the bosses take more than forty hits to kill!) I quickly got bored tracking down the extremely flimsy plot while trekking from one dungeon to another. I quickly grew to dislike the shallow, one-sentence NPCs who populated the games various towns. In fact, I almost talked myself into ejecting the Blu-ray disc out of the PS3, putting it back in its case, and then leaving it on the shelf forever.

But then I discovered something that I had missed the entire time.

DragoonCody via zeldauniverse.net »