The greatest Zelda game you've never played... and I'm here to guide you through it

Today I'm talking about BS Zelda: Kodai no Sekiban, a Zelda game even the most dedicated of fans often haven't heard of. What is it? Well, simply put, it's a Second Quest for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The reason you've never heard of it is that it was only available in Japan. It seems those lucky people get all the best games!

First, a quick look at the game itself.



The title screen... it looks pretty forboding, and the game hasn't even even finished downloading yet. You can see the progress bar. It apparently took six minutes to download a week's episode (talk about load times!) but after this point the game was completely load-free just like any other cartridge game was.



This is clearly not the A Link to the Past we all know and love... but in some ways it's better.

As you can see, there are a lot of changes here, most notably the clock. The clock controls various elements of gameplay. At certain points things will happen such as fog descending on the overworld (pictured), a rainstorm taking place and extinguishing any lit bombs outside thus constricting exploration, and sometimes enemies will start leaving large quantities of rupees when killed.

But since it's a download, how then did players get this game to the console? Well, they had to buy an addon called a Satellaview, or BS-X, that sat underneath the Super Famicom (Japanese SNES); this functioned much like the Genesis' SEGA Channel system, although content was provided via a satellite radio subscription rather than a modem. The games were downloaded in daily doses; they usually came in four parts (one for each day) and were only playable during one fixed hour of a particular day, much like your favourite TV show, and there were also later reruns of these downloadable episodes.

It was possible to begin the game after it had already started and race to finish during what was left of the hour hour, but the game, even if you'd already downloaded it, ceased to function outside of that hour. This was because the games had live voice acting and streaming CD-quality music, data which could not fit on the flash-cart and was therefore thrown away just like a radio signal.

This means that even if a player removed the flash-cart after playing and never erased it, the data on it was completely useless to them! It is only with the advent of emulation that these games were able to be extracted from the cartridges and could be made playable once more, although making the BS-X code work without the live satellite has been a long and difficultpath.

Yes, that's right, even the original Japanese players who still own the base unit and flash-carts cannot play more than a small handful of BS-X games (the ones that did not feature streaming audio) outside of emulation, yes, the dreaded realm of... ROMs.

But is emulation such a bad thing in this case? The abandonware movement has already used some relatively convincing arguments to explain their legal stance, and are ROMs really any different from old DOS games? Indeed, a game that even legal owners can no longer play is surely the strongest abandonware argument of them all.

I long for the day when Nintendo includes this game in a collection of old Zelda titles. With the Revolution's upcoming downloadable content having it as a download once more is a possibility. However this hope was basically smashed when cent208 from the forums got the chance to meet the great Shigeru Miyamoto at a signing event. When he finally made his way down the queue he showed Miyamoto some screenshots and asked, through the interpreter, about the likelihood of a US release. Shiggy was absolutely mystified for a few moments, but finally managed to give a definite "no".

However cent's wording revolved around the US (and thus Shiggy's reply may have only been pertaining to that region); it may well be the Japanese will once again get to experience this game (what, I can dream, right?), but it's still a terrible blow for the fandom as a whole, although, unlike Twilight Princess' delay, it's one most aren't even aware of.

And so it is that the only way to enjoy this game remains the inaccurate emulated version. Work has been done to make the game less buggy, and in recent weeks a complete translation has even been completed, but the biggest loss is the dungeons. When you begin the game this is the sort of scene that will greet you:



As you can see, all the dungeon walls except for doors and bombable openings are currently lost, and floor and mezzanine tiles have also vanished. Reports from hackers vary as to whether they think this is merely some mixed up pointers due to BS-X design differences or that in fact the dungeon data is not in this dump, but regardless of what actually happened to them the fact remains that they are both invisible and intangible to the player.

Despite these grave flaws the game is still fully playable from beginning to end and is still an enjoyable experience. Despite the one-hour limitation of each of the four parts it is still a fully-fledged Zelda game, with many interesting secrets throughout the game world. All the heart pieces and other such goodies are now in different locations so a veteran can't blaze through this game's secrets.

Anyway, on to the latter part of this post. It has taken me a long time and a lot of backtracking, but my guide to the elusive BS Zelda: Kodai no Sekiban is finally converted and is now available for both reading and editing(!). I have laboriously mapped out all the game's secrets as well as ways to work around the glitches so that you don't have to.

This is not GameFAQs, although I have an old copy up there too; no, this one is HTML-based and has guiding illustrations at virtually every step along the way as it follows the Hero of Light's epic journey to vanquish the ancient evil. It is also a wiki, meaning that anyone can jump in and edit, and I do encourage all readers out there to help improve and expand as you see fit, just because it's complete doesn't mean it's finished or perfect (and it is neither).

It's still taking me a while to exorcise the last of GameFAQs' demons—that being what was originally a total lack of illustrations and a large amount of ASCII-centered formatting—but the majority of the work is now done and the guide is now better than ever before.

In closing, thanks to Euclid's excellent work on the translation this game is now more accessible than ever. I'm content with its current level of playability, but I'm still not completely satisfied; between the lack of a hacker actively working on fixing this game and Miyamoto's answer regarding their official localisation, there's a lot that could be being done for this game that simply isn't. But I guess that day will come eventually, and I will be there waiting for it.

—Garrett out.

For more about these games and the BS-X in general, I've collected some useful links:
Satellaview - from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The BS Zelda HomePage - THE place to find everything about BS Zelda games
BS Zelda: Kodai no Sekiban - from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BS Zelda: Kodai no Sekiban complete wiki guide on Gameinfo