LogFAQs > #933120999

#17





Years of release: 2013 (3DS)
Beaten?: Three times!

Phew. I was worried for a second there that this wouldn't have enough Zelda games on it. Crisis averted, guys. I found all the Zelda games. I have proudly retained my status as a Nintendo shill. If this were my real top 100 games of all time list, you wouldn't be able to wade through it without tripping over a Zelda game every five games or so. It's probably my favorite series of video games, even if that's not a particularly exciting or unique opinion to hold - they have the status they do for a good reason.

One of the best days of my life was the day that I received my SNES, way back in 1994. I got Donkey Kong Country with it, and just having that game on its own, I was absolutely thrilled - but when I looked in the box a few days later, I realized that there was something else that I had completely missed - the SNES was packaged with a copy of A Link to the Past. Wow, cool! I had already played Link's Awakening for the GB, so I was really excited to play this new Zelda game I hadn't heard of. The great thing is that, at the time, I thought that Zelda cartridge was a demo. It made sense to me, right? There were demo CDs for PC games all the time to try to entice you to buy the full game, so I assume that the SNES just came with this neat demo for a game you could go out and buy later. I didn't realize that at this time, the consoles were usually bundled with a free game, so imagine my shock when it slowly dawned on me that this game was not a demo, but the full, real thing. It was like Christmas came early, twice. I couldn't believe my good fortune.

LTTP is a game that doesn't really quite hold up for me nowadays - I think the game is kind of ugly and plays a little slow and it doesn't hold the same magic for me that it once did. But that said, it was an incredibly formative experience of my childhood, and it's very near and dear to my heart. When I was a kid, the world just seemed so BIG, and I couldn't take any of the game's challenges for granted. Discovering any secret, any bombable wall or hidden item, seemed like a huge bit of progress, figuring out any of the game's puzzles like solving a grand mystery, and can you even imagine how awestruck I was that beating Agahnim wasn't the end of the game, but just the beginning? I seriously didn't know I was less than halfway through the game at that point, I thought it was about to be over! LTTP was such a great adventure for its time.

A Link Between Worlds is a perfectly crafted sequel and revisiting of LTTP. I love how well it effectively blends old elements with completely new ones. I love how it tries to get you with nostalgia, by having the world map be exactly the same, and all the dungeons and enemies are familiar, all the music arranged from the original game - but then it turns everything on its head, planting new secrets in the world, completely changing dungeons, adding new music. It has the appearance of something old, but the guts are totally new.

The biggest new mechanic is the ability to merge into the walls as a painting and walk along them, which is about as mindblown as I've been since... well probably since Portal gave me the portal gun. It doesn't seem like much, but suddenly the fact that the walls are an available movement space in rooms opens up the possibility for puzzles a lot and forces you to think about how to get around in ways that I've never considered in a video game before. This game, above all other Zelda games, has the best puzzles I've seen in any of them; the dungeons are really well designed to take full advantage of the painting mechanics, as well as creating puzzles of their own, eschewing the more standard Zelda layouts for dungeons that offer multiple paths and surprisingly open-ended, emergent puzzle designs that really ask for creativity, as well as using themes that the original LTTP didn't touch (such as the brilliant darkness mechanics in the palace of darkness, which is actually dark now).

I love the music in this game - the old tracks from LTTP are lovingly rearranged and remastered here and sound a lot better than the originals, and the new dungeon tracks added are really interesting and moody, bordering on experimental, creating interesting soundscapes. The artstyle's great here too - I love how they ported over like, all of the "weird looking faces on the walls" aesthetics of the original and recreated them completely faithfully here, giving the trees weird faces and all that stuff. And it's cool how they took the elements of LTTP but reimagined them into this brand new story, where the "dark world" is a completely different concept and the villain all new.

The only bad thing I could say about it is that, while I love Ravio, the item renting mechanic doesn't quite do the job for me here. I do love that it means this is one of the few Zelda games were acquiring a lot of money really does matter, since you have something to spend in on, and I like how powerful all the items are, but it did leave me longing for a more linear adventure where I get items and can use them in new places and stuff. It's not so bad being able to get almost everywhere and choosing which dungeon to go to, but there was something strangely unsatisfying about being able to buy nearly every item in the standard Zelda lineup at the start of the game (with a couple of exceptions that you don't open until later). It's a minor complaint though, it has its upsides, and I appreciate that they tried something new. It's otherwise a nearly perfect reimagining over a game close to my heart, and I daresay probably an improvement.