The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is one of the most critically acclaimed games in the series. It sold over 4.5 million copies for the SNES and received overwhelmingly positive reviews. It is also, compared to a modern Zelda game, incredibly challenging to play. It comes from a time where more open-world games were still in their early stages of development, and suffers greatly from its extreme open-endedness and lack of direction.
The first time I played A Link to the Past, I was barely past the first level when I needed to reach for a walkthrough. Throughout that playthrough and my second, I relied heavily on a walkthrough to help me, and not because the game’s puzzles are particularly challenging. It was only playing now for this review, my third playthrough of the game, that I’ve been able to make any real progress without some kind of guide.
Again, the actual mechanics of the game and the puzzles that are intentionally designed to be puzzles are not as complicated as their equivalents in later installments in the series. The primary difficulty when playing A Link to the Past comes instead from the lack of direction. The only reason I am now able to make progress now is because I remember what to do in many of the situations.
The instructions are decent to start. You’re led to the castle fairly well in the prologue, and Zelda tells you where to go after that. Once you’ve finished the first dungeon, however, things become more obscure by far. You have access to pretty much the entire map to start, save for areas blocked off that require items you don’t yet have. Once you’ve finished the first dungeon, no one tells you where to go next. You’re told you need the other two pendants, but not where those are or how to get there. They are marked on your map, but no one tells you this either. Again, no one specifies the order for the dungeons. You could, in theory tackle them in any order.
Except, of course, that you can’t. You can walk most of the way to the third level only to discover that you need the item from the second dungeon to get there. Of course, you wouldn’t know yet that the only reason you can’t get there is because you lack an item, as far as you can tell you’re permanently blocked. This was the point in my first playthrough where I first reached for a walkthrough, because I spent about an hour trying to get to the third level because I thought it should be next. Nothing in the game suggests that you have to play the levels in a specific order, but having now played through it multiple times, you absolutely do.
This kind of issue is rampant in the game. To get into the first two dungeons, you need a specific item (a different one for each, of course). For the second dungeon, I finally on my third playthrough stumbled into the room where you’re told what item you need to get into the dungeon after I’d already acquired it. I can say with a fair amount of confidence, based on the sheer number of hours that I’ve sunk into this game, that nowhere does the game tell you how to get the flippers, the item required to get to the third dungeon. Not only does it not tell you how to get them, it doesn’t tell you that you need them, that you will need to pay 500 rupees for them when you eventually find the character who sells them, or even that they exist. The game relies heavily on your willingness to spend an inane amount of time scouring the map for hidden secrets, some of which are incredibly difficult to find and also completely necessary to advance.
In fairness, on its original release A Link to the Past was accompanied by an instructional booklet, which to a degree helps with this issue. Having read the booklet, you would at least know of the existence of the flippers, which is a very small step up from where you’re at otherwise, but it would be wrong of me to leave that out.
Since the game’s release, much has been refined about open-world gaming. Designers have learned how to signal where players are intended to go, and how well they can hide required items. This is in no way to say that A Link to the Past isn’t as excellent of a game as everyone thinks. It is thoroughly enjoyable, and one of my favorite games in the series. It is just a huge adjustment from the games I am used to, which hold your hand and guide you throughout. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the freedom A Link to the Past gives the player, it just makes the game hard to play from a modern perspective looking back.
Lastly, no review of this game would be complete without a discussion of the boss of the third dungeon. To be perfectly clear, this in no way relates to any other part of my review; the issue here has nothing to do with the difference between modern and early approaches to open-world games. The issue with this boss is that it’s horrible., just astoundingly atrocious to play.
Moldorm, as he is called, is a giant worm with completely randomized movement who knocks you very far back if you run into him. In order to win, you must slash his tail six times. However, as you can see from the image below, you fight him on an open-edged platform that is very easy to fall off of. If you fall, you end up on the floor below, having taken however much damage you took, and Moldorm’s health resets. To add insult to injury, if you fall through the hole in the middle, you fall down two stories and have to work your way back up. Of course, some of the enemies below you respawn. The level is overall incredibly frustrating and not at all rewarding. Without a movement pattern to speak of, Moldorm’s next move can’t be guessed, and you can lose your advantage over him in an instant for absolutely no reason. Again, this has nothing to do with the rest of this review, but I would feel derelict not mentioning what I firmly believe to be the worst Zelda boss.
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