Nostalgia
is a funny thing. It can either
transport you back to o a time and place and enhance your experience with
whatever media is doing the transporting, or it can transport you back in time
and make you think “why the hell was I so enamored with that?” Recently I have played two video games on
either side of that coin. A Link Between Worlds falls so far on
the positive side of that spectrum that I cannot recommend it with any more
vigor if I was being paid by Nintendo themselves. (The second game will be getting its own
“Late to the Party Video Game Review” in the upcoming months when I finish it).
I have
long enjoyed the Legend of Zelda games, my favorite being the original Game Boy
offering Link’s Awakening. All of my favorite Zelda games though
followed the same formula: a top-down camera angle, multiple dungeons and tons
of items to enhance my experience. The
stories have always been good, if not relatively formulaic, but they were just
a vehicle to get me to the dungeons.
Hell, at least Zelda tried to have a different story each time, unlike
Mario games which are still doing the whole “Koopa steals the princess, go
rescue her by beating up all his kids” thing.
I loved Hyrule, how it was an open world game, but not really. You had a direction and if you wanted to
follow it you absolutely could, but if you wanted to explore on your own,
that’s cool too. Side-quests were not a
part of the game (they were more like mini-games that had no real bearing on
your completion of the game aside from maybe giving you a piece of a
heart). You could find all of the heart
containers and be well equipped to fight Ganon at the end, or you could get the
bare minimum and still complete the game, no biggie. Many games have tried to replicate this feel,
but Zelda has always done it best.
This
brings us to A Link Between Worlds,
the most recent offering in the Legend of Zelda franchise and the first game to
utilize the classic top-down camera angle since 2005’s Game Boy Advance
offering The Minish Cap. I fell out of touch with the Zelda series for
quite some time as I didn’t really play a lot of Nintendo games for much of my
late high school and college years. When
I got back into Nintendo games, the Zelda series had morphed into the
over-the-shoulder camera view that I couldn’t really attribute to the series,
it never felt the same (though two people who’s video game opinions I trust
implicitly, my brother Nik, and good friend from high school Ian, have both
implored me to give them a shot). When I
heard that there would be a new Zelda game that utilized the mechanic that I
assumed was long since forgotten I was overjoyed. When I heard that it was going to be set in
the same world as A Link to the Past
(the lone Super Nintendo Zelda game) my excitement grew even more.
I
picked up the game many months after its release (unfortunately in the real
world, a mortgage trumps a return to Hyrule every time) and was blown away from
the opening screen. It took me back to
1992, providing that same sense of excitement and wonder that I felt seeing A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening for the first
time. The best part was that I was a
more seasoned gamer this time around so I wasn’t as frustrated by the
difficulty of the Legend of Zelda series.
The game played just as I expected and just as I hoped it would. It had everything that I was looking for in a
Zelda game, from the multiple dungeons, items and characters that I remembered
from earlier games. I found the fact
that you could only rent items at first to be kind of strange, I was used to
finding them in the dungeons and keeping them, but this mechanic did put more
of an onus on doing everything possible to avoid dying (when you die all of
your rented items go back to the shop) and forced you to strategize a bit. Do you rent all of the items you can and then
try and go as far as you can or do you rent them piecemeal and do a little bit
at a time (a lot of it has to do with how confident you are in not dying).
The
fact that you can eventually buy the items is a welcome sight, and it makes
sense because the rupees in this game are plentiful. Of course it also helps that your bombs and
arrows are supplied by magic powder and not their own inventory like those
previous Zelda games. That way, you
don’t have to hope you find the item refills, you just wait until your
magic-meter replenishes itself. This
does take a bit of strategy out of the game in terms of conserving said items
as you’ll never run out, but I actually didn’t mind it. The graphics are similar to A Link to the Past but updated for the
3DS. The only problem I have is that
aside from Link and Zelda, most of the human characters look like someone took
the WiiU’s Mii-Maker and just threw a bunch of random characters together. The generic-ness of those secondary and
tertiary characters takes away from how well everything else was realized in
this game.
The
dungeons are not as frustrating as I remember A Link to the Past’s dungeons to be, but again, that may be because
it has been many years and many video game hours since I last played that
game. Regardless, there is some thought
that needs to go into the puzzles here, it’s not always flip a switch and
you’re done (with the tornado rod cave being the one that gave both me and my
girlfriend the most difficulty).
Regardless, the difficulty is not insurmountable and it actually adds to
the fun of the game. If I was able to
breeze through the game in a manner of hours, I would feel cheated (especially
since a Zelda game will never be sold for much less than its initial sale
price). Because the game provides a
challenge, and hours of entertainment on top of that, it is well worth the
price of admission.
The new mechanic is that Link can
travel between “worlds” (Hyrule and Lorule) through cracks in walls by turning
himself to a two-dimensional painting of himself. I was curious as to how this would work when
I first heard about it, but the mechanic is basically the same as A Link to the Past’s magic mirror, you
can only use it in certain areas that have the cracks, that’s all. The ability does come in handy for boss
fights as well as to complete some of the puzzles in the dungeons, so it’s nice
to see that the game designers really tried to utilize the 2D aspect for more
than just travelling between worlds.
While
this game is phenomenal in its own right, it is equally as frustrating because
of what it is. This is return to form
for the Zelda series, one that could, and should, be capitalized on by Nintendo
as their own titles for their systems (especially the WiiU) are few and far
between. Just picture A Link Between Worlds on your television
at home. Instead of looking at a tiny
screen on your 3DS, you could be controlling Link on the big screen, enjoying
all the care and detail that the designers put into this game at an enhanced
size. The 3D function on the DS does not
need to be used for this game (and I didn’t use it more than a few times just
to test it) so that would not be a huge deal.
Hell, make a brand new top-down Zelda game. Even if you want to release a regular
over-the-shoulder Zelda game every two years or so, release a top-down
nostalgic game in the interim years.
People will buy it, people will buy it the day it comes out and play the
shit out of it. Instead of releasing another
Mario game with the same tired premise and gameplay, let’s release something
everyone really wants. If Nintendo
really wants to reinvigorate its brand and become a player in the video game
wars then they should start to think about their brands, the ones they won’t
let anyone else touch, and really crank up production on those titles.
In
short, A Link Between Worlds is one
of the best games I have played in a long time and uses the nostalgia factor in
the best way possible. If you like old
Nintendo games, hell, if you like good video games in general, this is the game
for you. I could not give it a higher
recommendation.
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