EVERGREEN WANDERLUST
Also for: Game Boy Advance, New Nintendo 3DS, Snes, Wii, Wii U
I wish I had played The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past when it
was fresh out of Nintendo's factories in 1991. Back then this sense of
wide-eyed wonder - of exploring a big open fantasy world full of adventures and
secrets - was pretty rare. I got an appetizer in Interplay's
adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I for
the Amiga (also 1991), where you controlled every step of the fellowship's way
towards its dissolution at the end of the first book.
Even at the time Lord of the Rings was far from a flawless game. It had a
most unintuitive interface, with technical performance at a snail's pace (on
a standard Amiga 500) and featured very dull turn-based combat. But I overlooked all that just for the chance of experiencing Middle-Earth on
my own terms, exploring every nook and cranny of the world, finding
characters and quests not even mentioned in the books. The world-building
alone made me play it through all the way to completion, in spite of not
owning the game manual, which contained a lot of story paragraphs and lore.
Thinking back upon my taste in games, the early Zelda games would have been
right up my alley and clear contenders for personal favorites. They combine
that sense of wanderlust with great gameplay mechanics and some exciting
combat challenges. The only concern is a lack of compelling writing. But I
had such a vivid imagination, I believe I could've interpreted the visuals
and tidbits of storytelling to conjure up some lore of my own.
Of course, nowadays we're spoiled rotten by an endless amount of open-world games. It's hard to grasp what a breakthrough of untethered fascination Zelda
must've been at the time. At first glance, it is deceptively simple,
luring anyone into its fold. The opening dungeon is so straightforward it's almost
self-explanatory. The combat is laughably easy. But give A Link to the Past a few
hours and it becomes a deeply challenging and complex game.
By trying out your character's hard-earned powers on different objects or enemies, you discover a
fountain of valuable tricks the game doesn't explicity reveal (or maybe the
manual does, but the Nintendo Online service doesn't provide one). All from
basic concepts like jumping off ledges to reach lower areas fast, to experimenting with useless spells on hidden objects to improve your powers. If you see a weird monolith on an unreachable
mountaintop, or some weird altar at the bottom of a well, don't assume it's just there for show. Everything odd-looking
is worth investigating.
Like in all Zelda entries, the playing field is strictly divided into overworld and dungeons. Although the overworld is widely regarded as a masterclass in level design, to me it feels a little too restrictive at times. Parts of it feels almost like a dungeon. Heavy boulders bar the way to the next section, or a
bridge is broken, denying you passage across a river. A mountain range often forces you to take a long detour to reach the desert.
This is, of course, a
decision partly made to incentivize backtracking. A Link to the Past was one of the
games that figured out how to make it fun. Once you gain the
power to swim or lift heavy objects, you're meant to return and open up new
avenues. But until you do, the overworld map doesn't clearly display these obstacles,
and you often find yourself back at the same dead end you've visited
countless times before, looking for the quickest route.
However, the task of actually going back and forth is aided by the power of
fast-travel - or "teleportation" as we liked to call it back then - obtained around the halfway point. This game was originally
released in 1991 but clearly, all the ingredients for a modern-day open
world were already in place. Apart from fast-traveling, we've got additional weapons, we've got armor and health upgrades, we've got rudimentary crafting and we've got a slew of different approaches to combat, albeit not in the refined sense we
get in current releases.
And thanks to its simplicity, the presentation still holds up. The catchy soundtrack never fails to bring my mindset back into the spirit of adventuring. The visuals
are charming and colorful, yet clear and helpful with very few distracting features. It's also minimalistic enough to help with puzzles. If you're
completely stuck, looking for things out of the ordinary - small cracks in
the wall, out-of-place statues and the like - often helps out.
Fighting enemies is initially so basic it feels like a kid's game, but
before long you start to choke on your arrogance. As you gain powers and
items, combat becomes a layer cake of challenges. You find new weaponry,
like a bow, a boomerang, bombs, a grappling hook and a few offensive spells. For instance, some enemies are completely immune to sword attacks and some are only hurt by fire - pretty basic restrictions - but the dungeon bosses summarize
all these lessons into one hulking obstacle. Their
visual designs are great, pointing out possible weaknesses, and their attack patterns are a fair challenge to
crack.
Most of these twelve dungeons, including their climaxing boss fights, are
the highlights of my time with A Link to the Past. I took a certain pride in decoding
the game's visual cues to figure out some puzzles, or beating the toughest
enemies. If the overworld is a source of unending curiosity, the dungeons
bombard you with difficult challenges pertaining to the answers you find up there.
Unfortunately, the game shows its age in the cumbersome menu system,
especially when switching between active spells and items. It's like a degrading curse throughout the game, since you start depending on the menu more and more, and the items keep coming in (to a maximum of 24 items). Bringing up the menu,
sometimes in the middle of combat, and switching back and forth becomes an
intrusive mini-game towards the end.
The story is also not one of the game's selling points. It's the classic
cyclical tale of a damsel in distress, princess Zelda, held in captivity in
her own palace by the evil wizard Agahnim, who magically controls all the
palace guards. You, in the role of the green-clad, sword-swinging hero, must
rescue her and save the kingdom of Hyrule. The writing itself is
minimalistic and forgettable - laughable, almost - and quite possibly made
worse by lacklustre translation. But that also means you can disregard it completely, and weave the titular legend the way you want.
Instead of writing, the world is full of visual imagination; short tales of
woodland creatures caught in fairytale fates (and sometimes fairytales
within fairytales), whether they like it or not. They give you quests and reward you with vague directions of what to do next. The overland map points you to all the hotspots you need to clear before you're finished. The inhabitants and
monsters are memorable enough, and I recognize their design as 2D-renditions
of the creatures from the subsequent Breath of the Wild, the only
Zelda-game I finished before this one.
My one major issue with the game comes with the last fifth, or so, of my
playthrough. This is where the puzzles becomes too esoteric for their own
good. The game starts throwing you poorly announced - or even unnanounced -
item or weapon requirements to beat bosses, or to reach dungeon entrances. If an item
is required to beat the game, you'd think the designers made sure you come
across them by putting them in the critical path. But no - some of them are sealed off behind far-off cracked walls, with hardly any
hints of even what general area to search. Getting one essential item required me to dig through every square inch of a forest area, without reassuring me I was in the correct spot.
I also had to back out of one of the last dungeons because I was missing one
of the two required weapons to harm the boss. And without pointers,
scouring the entire world for said items was such a timesink - in spite of the
limited scope of the map - I decided to check a guide for the whereabouts.
I can only guess how much time that saved me. With my modern-day mindset, setbacks like this reduce the game from great to very good.
Like any emulator, the Switch-version I played comes with suspend points, which I recommend for any newcomer. I
used them liberally (I don't care if it's cheating), and it saved me a lot
of time. Upon dying in a dungeon, you always return to the entrance with reduced health. In some of the more gauntlet-like dungeons, this is too harsh and tedious. One section in particular, involving invisible floor tiles over
a deadly pit, could have made me abandon my playthrough, had I not
save-scummed my way across. Call me a fraud, I don't care.
Whenever I return to the 8- and 16-bit eras, I run into the same concern; no
matter how well-polished the game mechanics are, the developers has a
problematic view on difficulty. Some publishers simply wanted you to pay
extra for their hint books. Others just seemed incapable of grasping how
insanely illogical their puzzles were; I guess designer-independent
playtesting was pretty much non-existent at the time.
But A Link to the Past is far from the worst transgressor - the lion's share
of the game makes perfect sense. With diligence, I'm sure I would
have figured out the rest. It's just that patience comes in short supply as
I grow older and other games in my backlog start begging for my attention. A
shame, for up until the final few dungeons, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the
Past earned itself a perfect score from me. It's easy to get into, and its frustrations are difficult to hate, thanks to a holy
triforce of combat, puzzles and exploration.
It's also an inspiring, uplifting experience that I returned to explore through
other people's YouTube-playthroughs. I was astounded to learn that you
could actually catch and store those little fairies in bottles. How
barbaric, but also... how very useful. Why didn't I think of that? Or how
about actually speaking to those living trees in the dark world that drop
bombs as you bump into them? How many other secrets did I miss?
It's a visually driven game about exploring a lush fantasy world, culminating in some expertly crafted dungeon challenges. This sounds awfully familiar; looking at the gaming landscape of today, I doubt we've fully left A Link to the Past behind. I understand the reverence it still garners, and anyone
interested in game design evolution, and the tricks to grabbing the player's
attention and imagination, should play and study it.
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