The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Mecanicamente, é o melhor jogo de visão top-down da série. Hiperinventivo, consegue a façanha de surpreender um jogador que já conhece a franquia de trás pra frente, de cima a baixo.

E é excelente enquanto sequência de A Link to The Past: resgata a estrutura mais aberta do jogo de 1991, enquanto conserta vários de seus desequilíbrios com um design de mundo elegante e as mecânicas de exploração. No entanto, senti falta de uma estrutura mais arrojada e dungeons menos óbvias ou curtas.

Em suma, minha sensação final é que A Link Between Worlds poderia ter feito mais com suas ótimas ideias, que são bem executadas, mas não se somam para um resultado tão diferente do que se tem em outros Zeldas.

One of the more playful Zelda handhelds, especially after the more traditional The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap [ゼルダの伝説 ふしぎのぼうし] whose gimmick of shrinking doesn't really change gameplay or thematic too much outside some cute graphical gimmicks. It is your choice if that's better than a "Dark World" from Link to the Past or Twilight Princess which mostly re-uses assets and gives them different colour palettes.

The more open-world elements are definitely fresher but also come at the cost that the narrative seems a bit more haphazard. Once you can explore everywhere there, there is less of an urgency to really get to said places as the story will just drop in casually, with Anti-Zelda coming in just to give a pinch of expository text.

I've played Link to the Past to death, so having nearly the same map might charm old school players or it might give you deja-vu in all the worst ways.

That being said, the gimmick of creeping into walls and along the walls lets you solve puzzles in a variety of different ways and really makes some dungeons shine. I never died enough or didn't have to worry about my items being taken away from me., so I eventually just stocked up on everything and flat out bought out Ravio.

Zelda games are triple-A and push their respective systems to their brink, so if you can handle the above, this is still one of the must-plays on a 3DS.

A Zelda that combines a lot of what made the 2D games great with a lot of features from the 3D games. I love the open-endedness and while initially I didn't like how close the game sticks to A Link to the Past's world and progression, those issues had fizzled out by the time I was deep into the second act. It was a game that was exciting to explore despite the familiarity I had with this version of Hyrule. I liked the difficulty most of the time but it was also a little easy and I think dungeons could have been more menacing, even if they were designed well.

I didn't like a lot of the updated music. Some instruments were mixed well and take away from the original music's oomph, but the new themes were very good!

While I was very loyal to Nintendo in the 1990s (I only owned Nintendo consoles from the NES to N64), I really dropped them after that period and never bothered with any of their platforms. Aside from some GBA emulation, I literally have no idea how their games feel in the past 20 years or so. What better way to remedy that with an entry in one of their classic franchises? After all, A Link to the Past was a game I loved way back in my early teens when it first dropped. I wasn't quite aware that this game meant to be a tribute to it, I mostly came into blind to it aside from looking at the positive review scores.

Instantly the game felt very familiar with its 2D over the top view, it really is the "classic" Zelda style, prior to Ocarina of Time anyway. The feel of the attacks and the movement, and even to the sound effects, all is extremely into A Link to the Past territory. At first the game didn't really bring nothing new into it, but once you get the merge into wall ability that's really when things start to get interesting adding a 3D aspect into a 2D world. Kinda of like Fez, but without none of that stupid shit that game did with unrealistic things just because you were moving the camera. It's definitely a nice addition, but aside from that the core of the gameplay is mostly like the original. Even when fighting the bosses, a lot of them are reprises from the original and I remembered how to defeat most of them (which I think shows how memorable these games are, 25 years later and it still rings a bell). I have to say that I'm kind of happy that the shield eating monster isn't back in this one, that one was just pure annoyance.

A Link Between Worlds is like comfort food. Your mind isn't going to get blown with many new innovative concepts, but it revisits some tried and true elements that worked wonders in the past and they still do now. With a good portion of the decade being defined by indie games that are trying to bring back the 90s gameplay, well Nintendo showed to everyone how well they can still design a game in their classic style. The game overall is very well balanced, never too long, never too difficult, good mixture of exploration, upgrading and dungeons with just the right amount of puzzles. Mostly all the same strengths as a A Link to the Past when you look at it, except that one felt new and this one feels like reconnecting with an old friend. Thoroughly excellent, I can't really pick my favorite between both games as they both are great. Now looking forward to checking out more Zelda entries that I missed!

It would be more accurate to call Link Between Worlds a drastically improved remake of Link To The Past than a direct sequel. Nintendo took one of the most influential titles in video game history and provided new improvements from an additional 20 years of game development experience: much-improved graphics, more engaging combat, additional freedom through the item rental system, and an improved story. Link To The Past deserves it's historic achievement but, when it comes down to pure experience, Link Between Worlds is the better game.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is, paradoxically, both the least original Zelda game ever made and a breath of fresh air for the series. As a direct sequel to 1992’s classic Link to the Past, this game is more than content to tread in its predecessors footsteps for the first hour or so. In fact, during that first hour it is so familiar that it seems more remake than sequel.

But what initially seems like purely an exercise in nostalgia soon reveals itself to be more of an exercise in subversion, deconstructing and rearranging the things you thought you knew about Link to the Past, or about Zelda as a whole.

The game’s central wall merge mechanic adds a wonderful element of surprise to a very familiar incarnation of Hyrule, forcing you literally and figuratively to look at the world from another perspective. It is employed in delightfully clever ways across the game’s overworld and many dungeons, where it forms the backbone of the game’s puzzles.

Then there is the item rental system, which is a refreshing change (if not a revolution) to the typical structure of a Zelda game. Rather than building your inventory up one dungeon at a time, here you are given access to almost all of the game’s items within the first hour, courtesy of the pink-bunny-hooded-magician and home-invader Ravio, who will rent items to you for a sum of rupees.

In practice, this means that the player is given a huge amount of freedom to explore the world in whatever order they choose. After the initial three dungeons, the game drops you into Lorule, a rather cheesily-named equivalent of the Dark World, and just says “We know you know what you’re doing, now here’s seven dungeons. Have fun”. It’s a huge contrast to a game like Skyward Sword, whose handholding introductory sequence was so excessively long I’ve still not gotten past it to this day.

If at any point you ran out of hearts and die, Ravio will take all rented items back from you and you’ll have to purchase them again. This small but brilliant design choice adds real consequence to death within the game, and has the upshot of incentivising the player even further to explore the world and track down its many pieces of heart and other secrets.

In my own playthrough of the game, however, I only died a single time. That was within the first couple of hours, and after that first death I found myself exploring everywhere for pieces of heart and bottles, always making sure I was stocked up on red potions and fairies. Perhaps my familiarity with Link to the Past (being one of my favourite games of all time) was partly to blame, but it has to be said that A Link Between Worlds never felt particularly difficult, and could have pushed its ideas about death and fail states a bit further than it did.

One aspect of A Link Between Worlds that proved a pleasant surprise was its pacing. This is a game that moves along at a very fast clip, with Link’s movement and attack speed being much quicker than in most Zelda games. Its world loads smoothly at a high framerate, and content-wise there is nothing but meat on the bones. No lengthy intro, no pointless side quests, just great dungeons and a densely packed overworld.

My playthrough, collecting every piece of heart and almost every other optional item/secret, clocked in at a modest 15 hours. In some respects, I think this is great. Zelda games don’t all have to be epic 40-hour plus sagas that take weeks and months to finish, and I’m happy to see the series template can accommodate a leaner, more focused kind of game.

But it proves more of an issue alongside what is, in my opinion, the game’s Achilles heel: its narrative. All elements of the world, the quest and the characters in A Link Between Worlds feel quite lazy and by-the-books for the series when compared to the imaginative mechanical and structural ideas within the game.

A shorter length (while not in itself a problem) combined with a rather predictable and dull story, gives A Link Between Worlds a considerably less palpable sense of adventure and wonder. And this, in my opinion, is the one unchangeable element of the Zelda formula, and the thing that just barely holds A Link Between Worlds back from being a truly classic Zelda game.

And yet it comes so close. This is a game as daring as it is derivative, as inventive as it is referential. Like its title suggests, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is simultaneously a bridge to the series’ past, and a glimpse into its potential future. And it’s a bright future indeed.

8.9/10

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