EVERGREEN WANDERLUST
I wish I had played The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past back when it rolled straight out of Nintendo’s factories in 1991. That wide-eyed wonder—of stepping into a sprawling fantasy world packed with secrets—was rarer then. I got a taste of it the same year in Interplay’s The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I for the Amiga, where you could roam Middle-earth and bump into quests and characters the books barely had room for.
That Lord of the Rings game was clumsy. The interface was unintuitive, the performance on a standard Amiga 500 crawled, and the turn-based combat was dull. I still played it to completion anyway, simply because the world-building carried me—even without the manual, which apparently contained heaps of lore and story text.
Looking back, early Zelda would have been right up my alley: wanderlust plus satisfying mechanics, combat that escalates into real challenge, and a world that constantly nudges you to experiment. The only potential drawback is the thin writing—but as a kid I had enough imagination to supply my own mythology from crumbs of dialogue and evocative visuals.
Today, we’re spoiled by open worlds that shout their ambition from every loading screen. It’s hard to feel what a breakthrough A Link to the Past must have been. At first glance it looks deceptively simple. The opening dungeon is nearly self-explanatory. Combat feels almost childish. And then, a few hours in, the game quietly tightens the screws and reveals itself as complex, demanding, and deeply clever.
A huge part of that cleverness lies in what the game doesn’t tell you. You learn by testing your tools on the world: small tricks like dropping from ledges to reach lower areas quickly, or stranger experiments—using “pointless” magic on suspicious objects, probing unreachable monoliths and odd altars for hidden interactions. If something looks weird, it probably isn’t decoration. In A Link to the Past, curiosity is not a personality trait—it’s a survival skill.
Like every Zelda, the game splits its design into overworld and dungeons. The overworld is famously praised as a level-design masterclass, and I can see why, but it also feels restrictive at times—almost dungeon-like. Boulders block routes. Bridges are broken. Mountain ranges force detours that feel less like adventure and more like logistics.
Of course, this is partly the point. The map is built around backtracking: you gain the ability to swim, lift heavy objects, or traverse new terrain, and then you’re meant to return and pry open old dead ends. A Link to the Past was among the early games that made this loop genuinely fun. But there’s a modern snag: the overworld doesn’t clearly telegraph many of its blockades, so you can find yourself revisiting the same dead end repeatedly, trying to remember which obstacle was “real” and which was just a wrong turn.
Fast travel—what we used to call “teleportation”—helps a lot once you earn it around the halfway mark. And that’s when the game’s modern DNA becomes obvious. Despite being released in 1991, it already has the core ingredients we now associate with big adventure sandboxes: fast travel, health upgrades, gear progression, multiple combat approaches, even a faint whiff of crafting. It’s not refined like today’s systems, but the blueprint is unmistakable.
Presentation holds up beautifully. The music is catchy in that timeless way that instantly re-frames your brain into adventure mode. The visuals are colorful but clean, readable, and puzzle-friendly—minimalistic enough that the smallest oddities pop. If you’re stuck, looking for what’s slightly wrong—a crack in a wall, a statue out of place—often gets you unstuck.
Combat starts basic, then becomes a layer cake. You accumulate tools—bow, boomerang, bombs, hookshot, spells—and enemies gradually demand that you understand them. Some foes are immune to your sword. Some require fire. And the bosses distill those lessons into proper tests: visually legible designs, learnable patterns, and weaknesses you can deduce if you’re paying attention. The dungeons—twelve of them, plus their climactic fights—were easily the highlights of my playthrough. They’re where the game’s design feels most concentrated and confident.
Where the age shows most is the menu system. As your arsenal grows, so does your dependence on pausing to shuffle items and spells. By the end, switching tools—sometimes mid-combat—feels like an intrusive mini-game layered over an otherwise elegant adventure.
The story isn’t the selling point either. It’s the familiar loop: princess Zelda captured, evil wizard Agahnim, Hyrule in peril, Link must do Link things. The writing is minimal, sometimes laughably so, and the translation may not help. But the upside is that the story is easy to ignore. The game gives you enough atmosphere and fairytale logic to let you invent your own legend in your head.
The world is rich in visual imagination: woodland creatures caught in strange fates, little micro-fables, NPCs offering vague guidance and quests with just enough direction to keep you moving. The map points you toward the hotspots you must clear. The creatures are memorable enough that I recognized many of them as 2D ancestors of designs I’ve seen in Breath of the Wild—the only Zelda I’d finished before this one.
My biggest issue arrives in the final stretch. That’s when the puzzles tip from “clever” into “esoteric.” The game starts requiring specific items for bosses or dungeon access with weak—or outright nonexistent—signposting. If an item is truly essential, you’d think it would be placed on the critical path. Sometimes it isn’t. One required upgrade had me combing a forest tile by tile with no reassurance I was even searching in the right place.
At one point I had to abandon a late dungeon because I was missing one of two required tools to damage the boss. Hunting that missing item across the whole world—despite the map’s modest scope—felt like punishment, not adventure. I eventually checked a guide, and I don’t regret it. With a modern mindset and a modern backlog, setbacks like that nudge the game down from great to very good.
I also recommend using suspend points on the Switch version. I used them liberally and I’m not apologizing. Dying in a dungeon returns you to the entrance with reduced health, which can be brutally tedious in the more gauntlet-like sections. One notorious segment—invisible floor tiles over a deadly pit—might have ended my run without strategic save-scumming. Call it cheating if you like; I call it respecting my own time.
Whenever I revisit the 8- and 16-bit eras, I run into the same issue: even when mechanics are polished, designers often had a… questionable relationship with difficulty and clarity. Sometimes it was about selling hint books. Sometimes it was the absence of serious external playtesting. But A Link to the Past is far from the worst offender. Most of it is remarkably logical, and with enough patience I’d probably have solved everything the “proper” way.
Even after finishing, it kept nagging at me—in a good way. Watching other people’s playthroughs, I learned you can catch and store fairies in bottles. Barbaric, hilarious, and wildly useful. Why didn’t it occur to me? And apparently those trees in the Dark World that drop bombs when you bump into them… you can talk to them. How many other secrets did I walk past?
This is a visually driven adventure about exploring a lush fantasy world and earning your way through expertly designed dungeons. That sounds familiar for a reason. Looking at modern game design, I don’t think we’ve ever really left A Link to the Past behind. I understand why it still commands reverence. Anyone curious about how games learned to capture a player’s curiosity—and keep it—should play it, and study it.
Comments
Post a Comment