Foolish players complained about WINDWAKER's high seas treasure hunt! Now they must hunt treasure FOR NO REASON AT ALL! HA! HA! HA!

Never forget that even some of the best teams in the industry can just plain screw up balancing a particular element. I'm guessing they got late into development and hadn't done much tuning on the economy - drops, wallet sizes and when/where you can upgrade, etc - and made a few changes to try and fix it (the Magic Armor using money constantly) but they didn't quite pan out.

It's tough stuff to get right, but looking at the other flaws in the game you can see they were spinning many plates.

Definitely one of my least liked parts of Zelda. I'm more of a fan of exploration and stabbing.

I remember in Link's Awakening there were 50 seashells to collect. If all of them are collected you receive a sword that shoots a beam like in the old games. Totally useless.

Money generally is another lock & key system, or it is in place simply because developers think the game needs such a thing. And then they feel the need to throw in items that take a large chunk of the maximum amount of money you can carry.

Zelda 1 treated the Blue Ring that way, but the maximum amount of money was still low in those days. It was worse by the time of Wind Waker, where you needed large sums of money to decode the Tri-Force maps. The rate of money gain hadn't increased much, but the amount required and the number of times it was required were both greatly inflated.

For an arbitrary lock & key offender, you can look at Star Fox Adventures by Rare. There money is truly freely available. You can even get it by picking up a rock in the safe hub area, and those spots reset when you leave and return to the area. It isn't even a time issue.

So in Star Fox Adventures, the only restriction on what you can buy is your wallet size, of which there are several. You get new wallets at arbitrary story points, at which point you can clean out the shop of the next available items. Because the objects are priced near each wallet size, meaning you often have to make a separate trip for each object you want.

Worse, for SFA, the shop doesn't even make sense on even the most base levels. The dinos want you to save them, and then charge you for any items. You have a map system, a star fighter, and a space ship in orbit, but you can only get maps for your map system from the dino shop? Heck, the shop serves dinosaurs that cannot even enter it, as it for no reason pretty much has an obstacle course that you have to pass just to enter and exit it. (Which seems to be there mainly to discourage you from making the repeated trips into it to buy its stock one item at a time.)

Sounds definitely like the magic armour was just a Bragging Rights Reward :)

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BraggingRightsReward

I've played a bit of the game, it is quite fun and while this might be a flawed mechanic, at least it is a entirely optional one!

And quite a few games do this to pad, or to allow players to really, really, if they want to, do a ton more repetetive stuff. Playing Psychonauts now, and the money is required so is a minigame for some items, but at least you don't need to spend countless hours doing it, heh.

"

Never forget that even some of the best teams in the industry can just plain screw up balancing a particular element. I'm guessing they got late into development and hadn't done much tuning on the economy - drops, wallet sizes and when/where you can upgrade, etc - and made a few changes to try and fix it (the Magic Armor using money constantly) but they didn't quite pan out.

It's tough stuff to get right, but looking at the other flaws in the game you can see they were spinning many plates."

I don't buy this because this has been a problem in every Zelda game since Link to the Past -- very early in the game you just have way more money than you'll ever need, making it pointless to money to began with... I believe it's a deliberate design decision for the purpose of making the game more accessible or something... but so much of current Zelda games don't seem to be well thought out, anyway, so this is just another bullet point on the list.

It's interesting that this post has been made near the release of Fresh Tingle's Rose Colored Rupee Land (or whatever it's called), as that game seems to directly address the absurd economy of the Zelda universe to hilarious results. Dessgeega's got a pretty great write-up of it here:

http://blog.dessgeega.com/?p=117

I recommend reading it!

I really like the Zelda games, but I don't consider most of them flawless, and the money system has become increasingly more broken since Link to the Past.

EVERY Zelda game since that one has made it easy to max out your wallet, even at its largest size. Twilight Princess even recognizes this fact by, amazingly, for the first time in any Zelda, allowing Link to PUT THE MONEY BACK IN THE CHEST FOR LATER IF HE'S MAXED OUT.

The reason this happens is that every Zelda since LttP has had a relative lack of stuff to spend cash on. Later games use find quests (like exploring dungeons) or mini-games to award most stuff. This is actually relatively poor design: if you have to complete a maddening archery mini-game to get the largest quiver, then players who aren't skillful enough to complete it will have to do without. Money, on the other hand, can be earned in lots of ways, and basically allows the player to choose his own reward... if there's enough rewards to choose from.

The original game, still the best by a number of measures, didn't have that problem so much. There was no shortage of things to buy there at all, between potions, arrows, bombs, keys, shields, bait, candles and the Blue Ring, and there were also two expensive bomb upgrades to buy. Not to mention Door Repair Charge guys and, in the second quest, some notorious old men who will take off a Heart Container of not paid off with 50 Rs.

Wind Waker's money collection was only a hassle because there was really only one thing that could be done with all that loot, pay off Tingle to decipher Triforce maps, yet the player HAD to do it to win the game. If there were lots of things to spend money on then collecting money would be a lot more generally useful, and thus a lot more enjoyable.

All RPGs suffer this late-game currency inflation, to some degree. Remember the Diablo series? By the midgame you've got so much gold that you are leaving it in huge piles around your current spawn point and using it only to buy out every item from the local merchant so that the store will refresh its item stock and MAYBE have something interesting. It seems as if the entire game economy is designed to cause that lean-and-hungry feeling for the first few adventures (buying health potions one at a time and gazing sadly at the one item in the store which is 10,000 times more gold than you can make with the average monster kill). Once you get past that hump and are able to dump rares and uniques in the store for thousands, money ceases to exist, and every darn thing in the game world drops mana or health in any case.

John hit it pretty squarely when he said the real problem here isn't money, but nothing to buy. Just more stuff to get and better shop mechanics would make this so much more enjoyable for many RPGs. Everyone hates that a shop owner pays you 1/6th or less of what they will sell you the item for -- why not fix it? Everyone hates that they have a limited wallet size, no bank, piles of gold to the sky that can't be converted for other currency (gems? Something more compact!!) and in the endgame nothing to spend it on.

Doh, meant to say currency DEFLATION. Let me edit my posts, Simon!

:-)