The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past & Four Swords (2002)

Randomly replayed all of A Link to the Past's GBA port. Not much to add to what I've said before about ALTTP, for a nearly 35-year old game it holds up splendidly. The GBA port is a slight downgrade to the SNES version in a couple of respects. The sound quality is a little worse and adding the OOT Link voice clip when you attack is a little annoying even though it's easy to ignore in the grand scheme of things. You are more limited in what you can see in the world due to the GBA's smaller resolution when compared to the SNES, but it never becomes a gameplay issue. And the GBA's aspect ratio is slightly more widescreen friendly so it looks magnificent when blown up. There is a bonus dungeon, but it's a non-factor since you have to beat Four Swords to access it and that's basically impossible to do casually nowadays.

Overall I slightly prefer the SNES version, but you can't go wrong with this, either. A Link to the Past still ranks very highly for me as one of the very best Zelda games.

This is a review for A Link to the Past (GBA) specifically, I haven't played Four Swords yet.

This Zelda game has finally hit the era of my personal nostalgia. I haven't played this one before (except in 10 minute chunks playing a friend's copy on the school bus every now and then) but I played so many games in this era of GBA titles.

The sound quality of that generation of gaming isn't great but the sprites and tiles are colorful and, although still good looking as well, I feel like its a huge improvement over the SNES visuals.

This is the 3rd Zelda game I've gone through this year and it now looks much more like what I associate with modern Zelda and had a great time playing through it and finding everything the game has to offer. If I had to come up with any criticism I'd say that the pacing suffers a little after getting the Master Sword. I think the Dark World was suppose to be a big surprise like "you thought you were about to beat the game, surprise you're less than halfway through it!" and that is really cool but it also slowed down the great pacing the game had up to that point. Again its just a minor criticism though, I liked the game a lot in general and look forward to the next Zelda game (Link's Awakening).

4 / 5 Stars

3/20 Zelda games played

OVERVIEW

• Rating: 8/10
• Hours played: 15
• Pros: music, art style, dungeons, freedom to approach the content
• Cons: combat and navigation through the main map

The Legend of Zelda was not a series that I engaged with back in the day, not even when I had a Nintendo console myself. For years I felt that it was probably not my thing and mostly ignored its existance. During 2020, I decided to prioritize playing new games vs replaying my favourites, given the size of my backlog and how much this kind of approach helps bringing a fresh purpose to my hobby, and it has been great. In this proccess, I’m trying to balance recente titles with some older classics, in an attempt to expand my horizons, and one of the series that I decided to approach was, well, The Legend of Zelda.

Playing A Link to the Past is a bit scary given the immense amount of praise dedicated to it for decades. I’m obviously not an expert on this series and I don’t know everything about this particular title, but I think it will be fun to write down some of my thoughts on my experience with it.

REVIEW

As it is usual for Nintendo games, this is a piece of art. The music is phenomenal and memorable, the graphics are amazing for that era of gaming and the art style is simply beautiful. I also loved the attention to detail on the environments and how that is often used to improve on the narrative or gameplay departments. The story was quite simple and I honestly didn’t engage much with it, but I can’t say that I missed having a more envolving narrative during my playthrough.

Most of my issues with gameplay are probably associated with artifact designs from the 90’s. Though I think incentivizing exploration is a great feature here, there were times where it felt like the game wanted me to a) play with a guide on my lap, b) accidently stumble into progress or c) do a complete journey over every bit on screen in order to have everything I needed. I generally didn’t enjoy navigating the overworld and the combat was just... awful.

Now, when coming into TLoZ, I obviously was curious about my thoughts on the dungeons, as that seems to be the biggest element of most games in the series. The best I can say about the dungeons of A Link to the Past is that the hype is absolutely real! There wasn’t a single dungeon that I felt was bad and everytime I completed one, I was starving for the next. The puzzles were extremely engaging and being confused about how to proceed in some of them was actually fun because of the contrived environment, as opposed to the issues I had with the overworld. Also, though I’m not a fun of the combat, many bosses were pretty cool and well designed encounters that gave the dungeons a nice closing moment. It’s also pretty cool that a lot of them can be done in different orders, which adds to replayability.

CONCLUSION

I’m happy to have finally given a chance to Zelda. It didn’t match my favourite games, not even from that era, but it was a vastly entertaining and informative experience about why the series is as popular as it is. I’ll definitely play other games on the franchise in the future, but I won't be making it a priority.