I had to resist some kind of inner urge to start off this review with some kind of clarification that I don't really like Zelda, but just making such a statement is giving in to the legions of drooling fanboys who are content to isolate the franchise from all other videogames as a passive-aggressive attempt to deflect any and all criticism. Zelda is not a genre, it is a registered trademark that happens to belong to Nintendo, and it often lends its name to action-adventure based videogames, so let's review a gosh darn action-adventure videogame.
It's hard to think of any other videogame franchise that quite matches up to the level of polish that Zelda instalments have. A lot of people like to scoff at videogame franchises that release updates every year, but in all honesty there's no reason why Nintendo couldn't do the same thing with Zelda.Okay, sure they which up the art style and get a new idea every now and then, but the basic formula for these things has basically gone untouched for around 20 years. There's no reason why they couldn't churn out a new Zelda game every year, but they spend months if not years polishing and perfecting and tweaking every aspect of every dungeon, fine tuning the experience and grinding it into a fine powder easily consumable to the masses.
A lot of people confuse this layer of polish for perfection. However, this is exactly the kind of thing that has kept me away from most Zelda games. The worlds are a bit too perfect, and not perfect in the sense that they're wonderful player experiences, perfect in the sense that everything just naturally fits together, it's a constant subliminal message that you're not exploring a world at all but playing a videogame. That would be fine, but most modern Zelda games hold this pretense that they're "adventure" games and fill themselves with a lot of boring fetch quests and dumb puzzles and general "lock and key" game design (short explanation: collecting a bomb to use for a clearly defined explosion vulnerable rock is as exciting and interesting as finding a key for a door, it just pretends to be something different so you don't notice that. and Zelda games rely on a lot of pseudo-complexity (suplexity) by having a lot of different "keys").
In short, A Link Between Worlds is the best Zelda game that has come out in years because it is not an "adventurey-puzzly-suplexity" kind of game, it's a straight up action-adventure game, with emphasis on the action part. Truth be told, a lot of the things that the series gets flak for are still present, the story is completely pointless and an afterthought, and Princess Zelda probably breaks her own record for uselessness by spending the majority of the game stuck in a wall. The world map and a lot of the enemies are obviously all throwbacks to A Link to the Past, so the game isn't bursting with originality or bold attempts at storytelling, but we're going to go ahead and wrap this paragraph up quickly because none of this matters.
I say this with absolutely no authority as someone who hasn't beaten (but played about half of) any Zelda games, but A Link Between Worlds has the best Zelda dungeons I've ever played. They are perfectly designed almost to a fault, as discussed earlier, all the dungeons unravel so wondrously that you can basically feel the level designers breathing down the back of your neck making sure you don't stop advancing or having fun for a second. That Nintendo polish is present as ever, if you use up a bunch of your magic metre walking along the side of a wall to get a dungeon critical item and need to backtrack you can bet your boomerang that there will be an item sitting there to fill your magic metre up again so you don't have to wait the extra couple of seconds for it to recharge. Completely unnecessary, but the game would be 0.00004% more boring if it wasn't there and this was clearly deemed unacceptable.
What's especially neat is the game has a sort of artsy sort of game mechanic thing going on by giving Link (or Les if you're cool) the ability to transform as a wall painting a slide along it. It seem gimmicky at first, but this has the side effect of making you think about rooms within dungeons in both a more circular and more vertical manner. You can't move up or down just left to right while in a wall, so being aware of your vertical positioning is vital and makes A Link Between Worlds more of a 3D game than some of the actual 3D Zelda games. Most dungeons are basically linear paths (or multiple sets of linear paths that can be done in a different order) but the fact that the walls themselves are part of that path mask the fact that your route is essentially a straight line. Keeping the player on a straight line is great for structuring the action and pace, but forcing the player to be constantly spatially aware in both the horizontal and vertical makes for an engaging experience that forces you to think as often as it forces you to react.
Boss battles are surprisingly great too, I say surprisingly in reference to most videogames having rubbish boss battles and not specifically Zelda. They get down the great formula for boss battles which is to give them a tiny puzzle element and also make them kind of sort of an actual fight. For example, most bosses allow you to hit them basically whenever, and it's a case of ducking and moving and picking your spots as opposed to waiting for the boss to just randomly fall over or something and just wail on them. Don't be mistaken, some of them are still totally like that but the ones that aren't are among the games highlights.
Boss battles are surprisingly great too, I say surprisingly in reference to most videogames having rubbish boss battles and not specifically Zelda. They get down the great formula for boss battles which is to give them a tiny puzzle element and also make them kind of sort of an actual fight. For example, most bosses allow you to hit them basically whenever, and it's a case of ducking and moving and picking your spots as opposed to waiting for the boss to just randomly fall over or something and just wail on them. Don't be mistaken, some of them are still totally like that but the ones that aren't are among the games highlights.
Unfortunately, two dungeons do let the side down. There's a pretty rubbish dungeon that gives off warning signs by forcing you to do a stealth section just to get to it (a disturbingly short one, which I take as an acknowledgement that the designers knew it was rubbish). Inside the dungeon it's a mixture of puzzles that have to done in the dark and using bombs, this is a pain because this is the only dungeon where you regularly have to swap between two items. There is a quick select option, but it is neither quick or selecty enough to make this not feel like work. All the other dungeons are based around one item, giving them all distinct and unique puzzles and vibes, this particular dungeon falls back on the whole "lock and key" principle of more rubbish Zeldas. Some rooms will need you to press a button to use the lantern, some rooms will need you to press a button to throw a bomb, some will need a bit of both. It's always immediately obvious which is which and it's just boring and rubbish.
Oh, and the other one is just a boring ice dungeon where you slip around a lot and have to do a lot of awkward running on narrow platforms which the 3DS analog nub doesn't respond well to. It's not as bad, it just wasn't any fun either. These two dungeons are the only two points in the game where I was failing to have any fun whatsoever.
The overworlds are pretty fun to explore I guess, it doesn't help that it's pretty gosh darn similar/exactly the same to A Link to the Past though. There's a free fast travel system that's basically in place from the start (although you can only fast travel to places you've already been) but I didn't find myself using it that often apart from when I needed to hop back to Links house and straight back to a dungeon. Which is a good sign because I was enjoying all the casual adventuring in between dungeons too, gathering up rupees and looking for little bonuses to find and simply skipping this part out entirely seemed a shame.
There's little niggles I have with it, I don't like how just like A Link to the Past there's a scrolling screen transition between areas. This could possibly be due to some sort of 3DS limitations but since its Nintendo I'm going to just assume the much more likely option that they just did it because that was a thing in A Link to the Past and nostalgia baiting is just part of the routine for them now. It just breaks the map up into tiny areas and makes this "world" feel like it's laid out in a grid. It's fine inside dungeons because you want the separates areas to feel like separate areas, I don't understand doing that on the overworld at all though. Also, when you enter an area that has different music the current music just stops and the new music starts playing, no channel fading, no transition, no nothing. It's a tiny issue but with buckets of Mr Sheen on standby that Nintendo slosh over all their games it's surprising something like that fell through the cracks.
A Link Between Worlds is possibly the best Zelda game that's come out in recent memory, possibly also not-so-recent memory, but I don't care about this franchise enough to commit to that. Basically, it filters out a lot of the boring rubbish parts of Zelda to focus on sweet sweet action which made the series so engaging during its earlier days. It uses compelling action to make the player want to explore its world, and doesn't apologise for it by overcompensation with lots and lots of open fields or "puzzles" or whatever. I had a good time with it and I don't like Zelda, if you like Zelda you probably already have the game and I'm not sure why you're reading this, if you don't like Zelda I'm equally unsure why you're reading this but there's something for you to think about.
There's little niggles I have with it, I don't like how just like A Link to the Past there's a scrolling screen transition between areas. This could possibly be due to some sort of 3DS limitations but since its Nintendo I'm going to just assume the much more likely option that they just did it because that was a thing in A Link to the Past and nostalgia baiting is just part of the routine for them now. It just breaks the map up into tiny areas and makes this "world" feel like it's laid out in a grid. It's fine inside dungeons because you want the separates areas to feel like separate areas, I don't understand doing that on the overworld at all though. Also, when you enter an area that has different music the current music just stops and the new music starts playing, no channel fading, no transition, no nothing. It's a tiny issue but with buckets of Mr Sheen on standby that Nintendo slosh over all their games it's surprising something like that fell through the cracks.
A Link Between Worlds is possibly the best Zelda game that's come out in recent memory, possibly also not-so-recent memory, but I don't care about this franchise enough to commit to that. Basically, it filters out a lot of the boring rubbish parts of Zelda to focus on sweet sweet action which made the series so engaging during its earlier days. It uses compelling action to make the player want to explore its world, and doesn't apologise for it by overcompensation with lots and lots of open fields or "puzzles" or whatever. I had a good time with it and I don't like Zelda, if you like Zelda you probably already have the game and I'm not sure why you're reading this, if you don't like Zelda I'm equally unsure why you're reading this but there's something for you to think about.
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