Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon



Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon is a video game developed by Animation Magic and released for the Philips CD-i in 1993, on the same day as Link: The Faces of Evil. A follow-up to both games, Zelda's Adventure, arrived in 1994. All three CD-i Zelda games were the product of a compromise between Philips and Nintendo after the two companies failed to released a CD-based add-on for the SNES.

Gameplay


The Wand of Gamelon was the first Zelda game where the player plays as the eponymous Princess. It is played using the side-scrolling view introduced in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. For a variety of reasons, it is generally accepted that this game does not play as tightly as Zelda II. These range from the quality of the CD-i controller, to the speed of the gameplay and the jerkiness of the character animations.

Plot
The King of Hyrule has embarked on a journey to make a treaty with Duke Onkled, but somehow has disappeared en route. Link, in true hero fashion, sets out to rescue him. He also vanishes, and so it is left up to Princess Zelda to save the duo, and to find out why they went missing in the first place.

The story is largely told through animated FMVs, in an attempt to make best use of the CD-ROM format.

Criticism


These FMVs, however, are frowned upon by the Zelda community for containing what they consider to be some of the worst scripting, drawing, animation, and voice acting yet seen in a video game. And as mentioned, the gameplay was not up to series standards, to the point that the majority of the Zelda community outright rejects the CD-i trilogy as canon, something made easier by the fact that these games had nothing to do with Nintendo outside of the licence which it was all but forced to give.

The game is known throughout the industry as one of the worst ever; Electronic Gaming Monthly once heralded the game as the sixth worst, and on a January 2005 episode of G4's Filter, it claimed the number one spot.