Nice King Tetiro. It would be kinda cool for achievements within a Nintendo game. I don't believe I've ever seen any.
Aren't sidequest already a bit of achievements. I would say the Boomerang in Link's Awakening was an achievement for the trading game. And the Mirror Shield in MC you could only get by completing the game and do Kinstone fusions to get the Bigggoron. Then there are the extra's you can get in the Oracle games through the linking mechanism. Second quest for TWW and LoZ
I think achievements always have been in Zelda games. We just don't recognize them anymore as such, because we take them for granted. And other games had them as well. In SMG2 you got an entire Galaxy for just completing the game.
I think of achievements as lil rewards that would otherwise go unnoticed. Beat the Queen Ghoma in a short amount of time without damage? Your a badass gamer, and with achievements you get the props for it. Find all the hidden rupees in Kokiri Forest? Sweet, achievement! Most games have quests and such, but achievements take it to another level.
I was thinking along the exact same lines as Niek was, but I guess having an officially set excuse to spend loads of time going nuts and doing insane things in the game, no matter how small (yet hard no doubt) a thing it is such as the stuff described here's good too
I'd definitely prefer both though. A well thought out extra with a reward that lets you experience something cool for spending the time discovering and doing it would be way better than just a ton of basic "do X in under Y time with taking less than Z damage (to get a badge confirming you've done it)" without the former.
Actually, reading this makes me realise that while nintendo may be being told to add in "achievements" to their stuff, that they already have been doing such extras from way back, just that they're not called "achievements" and that they don't appear in some huge list of them for you to count and brag about like penis size, but are of the more thought out kind with interesting rewards.
I guess the "cheats" in goldeneye were extremely like today's "achievements", but at least they made all sorts of things more fun too. I now have a feeling that today's "achievements" are just some fad and not many people are realising how long they've been around and lately how boring they've got, in a sense of quantity over quality.
Sure, have tons of random and difficult challenges to beat just for the hell of it, but put those in after the good stuff, imo.