I'm playing through Zelda: Skyward Sword at the moment – I finally got a long-awaited new TV recently, and Faron Woods looked so pretty when I tested the game out on it that I was moved to restart my long-abandoned save file and venture once again into that dappled, impressionistic world. It's a beautiful game, characterful and sweetly well-written, one of my genuine favourites in the series. Soaring through its skies with the Wii remote, I'm finding it impossible not to enjoy myself.
Not so for my housemate, though, who was briefly watching me play the other day when he asked "Don't you get tired of Nintendo endlessly milking their franchises instead of ever doing anything new?" It's not an accurate presumption to make about the series, or about Nintendo, but I can see why he thinks so – eight total home-console games in 25 years is not a lot, but once you start adding in all the portable entries and remakes things start to look a little more exploitative. And although Zelda games have consistently revolutionised not just themselves but often video games as an art form over their quarter-century history, from the outside the pattern looks predictable: sword, shield, hookshot, bow and arrow, magical artefacts to be recovered from bosses lolling supine in the dark recesses of dungeons until you unlock their arena-like lairs.
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