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The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past. What can be said about it that hasn't been said over the last 3 decades and change?
Let me try in this sort-of sequel to this thread:
LTTP: The Legend Of Zelda (not that LTTP)
Although I consider myself a Zelda fan (albeit rather inconsistently until recently), I had never played the NES games for more than a few minutes each, writing them off as too hard and tedious to deal with. With the anticipation for TOTK, I thought I should really go back and gives Zelda 1 a...
famiboards.com
Link To The Past was my very first Zelda game and one of my very first video games in general. It triggers intense nostalgia in me. I spent hours on it with my brother. Every sound effect, visual, and track reminds me strongly of years passed.
But I've never beat it. Not on my own. I always "played" it with my brother, but a lot of that involved watching him do the hard parts. I made several attempts to play it on my own, but I always got sidetracked once I hit the Dark World. My last attempt was more than 15 years ago. With TOTK looming, and wanting to work on my Zelda backlog this year, I thought I should give this an honest go. As silly as it sounds, I felt a little like I couldn't be a "true" Zelda fan until I beat this with my own two hands. I've beaten many other Zelda games since then, but not this for myself.
It is done. I am the hero of Hyrule once again. So what is left?
Turns out, a pretty damn great game.
A lot has been said over the years regarding two aspects regarding Link To The Past - it signaled the Zelda series moving closer to a linear, more guided structure (with a formula that would be repeated ad nauseam), and that compared to later games, it story and presentation is still rather barebones. I have thoughts on both of those that I'll try to get into.
Having played TLOZ for the first time recently to compare, LTTP is definitely a different beast in many ways even if it evolves that formula. You still have a dense overworld to explore (even denser), and the player is rewarded for searching and finding things that might not seem obvious at first. You still have lots of enemies trying to kill you. But the focus has shifted. You're not just on a journey, but a quest, with various points to stop at and trigger events. There are dungeons with puzzles to solve. You start the game storming a rainy castle and saving Zelda. There's a cinematic flair to it that really makes it stand out compared to other early SNES games. While it's not as challenging as TLOZ, this is in line with the SNES era of Nintendo moving away from more arcade-y gameplay and something that invokes an experience. It's less about the challenge and trial and error and more about the sense of adventure and overcoming evil. And for that, LTTP captures that very well.
On the other hand, it's definitely all in all, a pretty straightforward game story-wise. NPCs have very simplistic, often expository dialogue, and outside of a couple of plot twists there are no real surprises in store for the player. Go to the dungeons, get the macguffins. That's the game. But in an era where 3D Zelda games overtime became more bogged down with longwinded cinematics, forced minigames, and stifling gimmicks, LTTP's straightforwardness is downright refreshing. Go clear this dungeon. Great! Now the next. Then the next. Now travel to the waterfall to get your flippers. Keep going. Whereas BOTW built on the openness and freedom of TLOZ, I would love a 3D Zelda with a dense overworld full of monsters and secrets as well as dungeons punctuating it throughout. LTTP handles that very well. The gameplay loop is satisfying and you feel like you're constantly making progress, and there are quite a few secrets to discover beyond just getting more Heart Pieces that reeward your exploration.
That said, one area where it falters a bit on this is visuals and music. While LTTP's music is iconic and memorable, no doubt, only having two unique dungeon themes, along with a lot of reused tiles and assets, can make them feel like they blur together. There's some standout exceptions like the Ice Palace and Turtle Rock, but you can see a clear improvement on this aspect with Link's Awakening, among other things. Interestingly, this might also be part of my ambivalence regarding the Dark World overall. The concept is brilliant, and it flips everything the player expects on its head once they get there (I particularly love the lore that the Dark World is the Sacred Realm fallen to Ganon). But as it goes on, I found that its core tenet - it's the Light World but twisted - to lose its novelty when you realize it's quite literally the same map geometry with some tweaks. This was an understandable concession for making an early SNES game, and for its time it's obviously extremely impressive. But for as much as OOT gets flack for repeating LTTP's gimmick of "three dungeons, twist, now more dungeons in an altered map" to perhaps less impressive results, I think OOT understands the player won't be "tricked" into thinking it's a new map, and that along with the story changes due to the time passing makes the differences stand out much more. Whereas the Dark World, while very cool and engaging, feels a bit too abstract and isolated from the Light World (with the exception of making water flood to open up the Swamp Palace). Though I do like that Misery Mire is blocked off in the Dark World and can only be accessed through the Light World; I wish the game had more of that.
I generally really enjoyed the dungeons, as I felt the mix of combat + exploration mixed with light puzzle solving made for an engaging playthrough compared to a lot of 3D dungeons that focus on spatial puzzles that don't always feel as intuitive or enjoyable. They don't take too long either, usually about 15-20 minutes tops, so you rarely feel like you're slogging it out. There's been a lot said about the Ice Palace being difficult and tedious, but I kinda loved that they force the player to traverse through a good 50-60% of this dungeon before you get the Dungeon Map. I felt myself nervous and apprehensive the further I went in, trusting my gut, but wondering if I somehow missed the map, only to be elated once I found it and pressed on. Feelings like that really capture the sense of adventure and questing in such a distilled form. I will say though I wasn't a big fan of how often dungeons relied on dark rooms and limiting the player's vision to instill difficulty. I tend to think of limiting the player's standard gameplay options to be too simplistic and unsatisfying of a way to escalate difficulty, but it generally wasn't anything too arduous or taxing.
While Link's Awakening addresses quite a few of these points, I can't help but wonder what another 2D Zelda would have looked like later in the SNES's life after the developers knew the system better and could make more complex games, both mechnically and visually. I would have loved to see what they come up with and how they build on LTTP. Regardless, while LA is still my favorite 2D Zelda, this is a comfortable second and a game that still carries a deep sense of nostalgia despite only properly giving it a playthrough now. I'm very glad I did, and straightforward as it may be now, sometimes that is its own virtue.
As a final note, here's my brother's response after I beat the game, being a person who has barely played video games himself in the last 20 years:
