Link: The Faces of Evil (1993)

The CD-i is a fascinating bit of video game trivia. Developed by Philips in the late 1980s, this disk format's large storage capacity had huge potential for the world of video games. The infamous CD-i Zelda games that were released in 1993 were memed to death in the YouTube age due to their bizarre animations and hilarious dialogue. But if you transport yourself back to the early '90s, you should realize how darn impressive it must have been to see video games with fully animated, voice acted cutscenes. That was simply not something that was possible with the cartridge-based consoles of the era!

While CD-i was ahead of its time, it unfortunately also did not commit fully to video games. Philips saw the CD-i as a multimedia format for education and entertainment as well as games. As such, the various players that supported the format were not equipped with the horsepower to actually compete with the likes of the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis. It wouldn't be until the advent of Sony's PlayStation that CD-based physical media for games would really take off.

After Nintendo prematurely pulled out of their partnership, Philips found themselves in an incredibly unique position. They suddenly had the rights to create their own games using Nintendo's biggest intellectual properties, which had incredible potential to draw people to the CD-i. The job of creating new Zelda games ended up with Russian-American studio Animation Magic, who were unfortunately not set up for success with a measly budget of $600,000 that had to be split between two games that were developed simultaneously.

Considering the circumstances, they did a remarkable job with what they had. Sure, the cutscenes in these games are weird as hell, but I think this is a "so bad it's good" situation. The cheesy dialogue and jerky movement create a variety of unintentionally hilarious moments, and they remain the main highlight. It's like a ridiculous fever dream that constantly surprises you with its very existence. But you can clearly see that the dialogue between Link and Zelda takes inspiration from the 1989 Zelda TV series, showing that Animation Magic must have done some homework. For what it's worth, it all still feels very Zelda, at least for that era of the series.

However, once you enter the actual game, things completely fall apart. Link: The Faces of Evil is a complete disaster, with unintuitive and unresponsive controls to go along with its generally terrible performance. At least that is true of its original form, played using the Same CDi Retroarch core. There is a remastered version of the Animation Magic Zelda titles for the PC, which I understand help with a lot of the frustrations that were present in the original release. So, due to the close link between Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, consider this my review of the Zelda CD-i experience in its original, unenhanced state. Then, my review of The Wand of Gamelon will evaluate how the "remastered" experience stacks up.

Faces of Evil takes a side-view perspective, similar to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. In terms of its core design, this is actually pretty standard Zelda fare. You explore various locations in the island of Koridai, finding items, interacting with NPCs and defeating enemies in order to proceed. Unlike Zelda II, Faces of Evil does not feature an explorable world map that you traverse. You instead simply select locations from a world map menu, which I kind of prefer here.

But this game fails in almost every facet of its execution. Link moves painfully slow, and enemies are difficult to predict, with a penchant for spawning from thin air to surprise you. The CD-i only had a directional pad and two buttons, which caused the control scheme to suffer as well. You have to press up to jump, which makes certain platforming segments into a nuisance. You swing your sword by pressing Button 1, and use your currently equipped item by pressing Button 2. This leaves no button for opening the menu, so you have to crouch and press Button 2 to open it. This led to me repeatedly opening the menu by accident, or inversely, accidentally using items when I didn't intend to.

The sprites and backgrounds are actually pretty beautiful in their own right, and I really liked the surreal design of a lot of the environments. However, the complete lack of any parallax effects make it highly difficult to discern what actually constitutes a place that you can stand on, leading to a constant, frustrating guessing game. The difficulty as a whole is completely inconsistent. There's a few terribly designed boss fights that feel straight up unfair, such as Militron, while others are ridiculously simple, like the final fight against Ganon.

I played Faces of Evil desperately trying to find a silver lining. Anything that I could hold on to as a positive. But there's just not much there for me. I've even read people praising the music as a consolation, but after suffering through hellscapes like the Fortress Centrum Outer music, I just can't agree that the soundtrack is any good. I suppose the game is mercifully short, and I completed it in 5 or so hours.

I can certainly see how Animation Magic did their best, despite Philips' failure to set these titles up for success. But ultimately, if you've watched a compilation of this game's cutscenes on YouTube, there's pretty much no need to check out this miserable experience for yourself. It's certainly not worth making the effort to set up Same CD-i, unless you're like me and you're a Zelda fan looking for any and every curiosity in the series to experience.