played in preparation for arzette. remaster, but with the remastered mode quality of life improvements disabled. the biggest revelation genuinely is that theres a perfectly useable template for a 2d action game here...a mostly nonlinear world explored in little action segments, populated with memorably bizaare and colorful characters, with a managably small take on the interlocking quests and item progression of a typical zelda game. in its best moments it feels less like a bootleg zelda and more like a Condensed zelda, with many expected beats and experiences hit in a couple hours. obviously there are many well documented rough edges in the moment to moment play (which i again, intentionally aggravated for myself by playing without the qol improvements) but theres plenty of oozing charm to more then cover for it...not just in the cutscenes where every word no matter how insignificant is paired with a big expressive gesture, but the general fantasy vhs aesthetic (the backgrounds can be surprisingly lush, if problematic for platforming). theres a wonderfully likable heart to both the play and presentation that reveals why someone would earnestly want to make a spiritual successor, far more then any callous mocking appreciation for silly cutscenes

10 Reasons Link: The Faces of Evil is better than botw/totk
1. First Zelda game with (superior) voice acting
2. Characters experience real emotions and growth (boredom, hunger, etc)
3. Animated anime quality cutscenes and excellent fully voice acted tutorial segments
4. Epic soundtrack (real)
5. Best portrayal of the King of Hyrule
6. Best shopkeeper in gaming also Rubies > Rupees
7. Smartsword that lets you attack enemies but also talk to friendlies > master sword
8. The guy on the flying carpet is kinda cool I guess? I like his beard.
9. There's a boss named Omfuk I mean dang that's edgy
10. You defeat Ganon by throwing a book at him idk maybe that's representative of the power of knowledge or something? C'mon give me credit I made it this far.

Somewhat worse than its predecessor, somehow.

Link: The Faces of Evil is a sequel to Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and it's pretty much the same game but with Link this time and different characters, the gameplay is the same, the poor level design is still here and the clunky controls are here as well.
There's no real reason to play this game other than playing all Zelda games like I'm doing just for the sake of completion. You can read my review of Wand of Gamelon here since it's exact same game.




Thinking about it, isn't The Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon like Oracle of Seasons and Ages? Nah...

É... Faz jus à sua fama.

Inicialmente é até que um game inofensivo. Ruim, e facilmente o pior Zelda de todos, mas ainda interessante. É basicamente um Adventure of Link bem mais simplificado e com decisões estéticas extremamente duvidosas que tornam o jogo um desastre fascinante. Mas a medida que você vai jogando o game começa a tentar sugar toda a sua paciência com seu platforming e ação projetados para fazer você perder seu tempo. Os momentos finais do game quase me enlouqueceram com tanta bullshit.

Bem, os outros Zeldas de CDi não devem ser tão ruins... Certo?

A rather enjoyable time, feeling more like a condensed Zelda experience in a lot of respects as opposed to the shoddy knockoff it's always touted as. Link: The Faces of Evil certainly is quite rough around the edges, with a couple of odd puzzles and controls that regularly work against you being the most prominent issues, but I feel like this is far from enough to entirely detract from the game's good qualities. Despite the infamous nature of the cutscenes here, I'm quite fond of the two sides of the art direction for this game overall, albeit for different reasons. The background art is frequently really pretty in particular, often being very colourful and packed with detail, and while it makes actual platform visibility less intuitive than it should be, you'll naturally hit a point while playing where the visual language clicks and makes this a small inconvenience at worst. To build on this, the game covers a wide range of location themes within its tiny runtime as well, further contributing to providing the world with a sense of scale and stopping things from ever feeling too repetitive, since you'll always be thrown into something new within a couple of minutes, with the quest structure feeding into this sense of loose interconnectivity thanks to the backtracking. The cutscenes are really funny as well to me with the way that there's this constant need to make the smallest thing be expressed in the most exaggerated manner possible, with everyone strangely distorting with each word accompanied by voice acting equally ridiculous. People already harp on the cutscenes being incredibly funny, but as someone who'd never seen any of the YTPs that so heavily used these, it was all new and surprising to me and felt like a reward in itself whenever I was able to see a new one. A bite-sized, largely painless game that made me smile whenever it played a cutscene or made me feel smart when I was able to figure out the vaguely obtusely presented puzzle hints, looking forward to playing Wand of Gamelon soon.

(Bottom 5) You know... When I first played this I had high hopes. "It looks like it plays like Zelda 2 and I like that game". "The Internet says it's bad, but they hate Zelda 2. It can't be that bad". Man, oh man, was I ever wrong. It is absolutely that bad. Everything fun about Zelda 2 is stripped away. You can't tell what is background and what is floor you can walk on, the puzzles are nearly unsolvable, the control scheme is a nightmare, and the cutscenes, while incredibly memorable (not in a good way) and meme worthy, are utterly horrendous. If this is why Nintendo hadn't licensed their characters until Mario + Rabbits, I would completely understand.

In the early 90s, there were two lonesome souls who, amongst all the odds, managed to find each other, fell in love, and started a relationship. These two lovebirds were known as Nintendo and Sony. They cherished the time they spent with each other, and together, they were working to bring a brand new piece of revolutionary tech to the world known as the Nintendo PlayStation. However, it was then that tragedy struck, as Sony had then found out that Nintendo had cheated on them with another company known as Phillips, and from that day, Sony and Nintendo would be the biggest of enemies. This would ultimately benefit Sony, as they would go onto then create the Sony PlayStation, a revolutionary piece of tech that would be praised, and would lead to many other successes for years to come. As for Nintendo, however, they would not be so fortunate with their decisions. From this new love affair came another piece of tech known as the Phillips CDI, a console that many have loathed and despised for generations, as well as a set of brand new games that were made thanks to Nintendo giving them permission to. These games would then go on to also be loathed for many years to come, even more so then the console itself, and one of these games would be known as Link: The Faces of Evil.

If you are familiar with the Zelda franchise, then I am sure you have heard about this game at some point in your life. It is widely regarded to be one of the absolute WORST games of all time, let alone from the Zelda franchise, and while it may have initially had a positive reception, it has gone on to be reviled and made fun of all the way to this very day. I myself have known about this game, along with the other Zelda CDI games, for a long time, thanks to the videos made by PeanutButterGamer, and while they did indeed look awful, I had wanted to try them out SO BADLY, just to see how bad they really were. I was never able to figure out how to run a proper CDI emulator, which meant I thought I would never get the chance. However, then I heard about a little fan remaster of these games by a guy named Dopply, and of course, I jumped on it as soon as possible.

I decided to play The Faces of Evil first, because that was the first of the bunch I had heard about, and after beating the whole thing, I think that I may actually be crazy… because I actually found the game to be somewhat good? Don’t get me wrong, there is PLENTY about this game that is terrible, and in terms of the original version of the game, there was plenty there as well that amplified how bad it was even more. But, based on what I had played, I actually didn’t think it was all that bad. Of course, a lot of this is thanks to the remaster of the game making a lot of changes to make the game better, but even on its own, I still managed to have a good time with it, both genuinely and ironically.

The story is extremely simple for a Zelda game, with Link going off to Koradai to stop the “Faces of Evil”, but then UH OH, Zelda has been kidnapped, so now he has to go save her as well, which is pretty straightforward for the series this is, but honestly, if we got anything more complicated than that, then the universe might actually explode, so this is fine, the graphics… certainly vary in quality, with the main game itself looking fine, even if there is a lot of problems with the environments that I will bring up later, and as for the cutscenes… we’ll hold off on those for now, the music is actually pretty good, with there being plenty of tracks I fondly remembered from the game, and I enjoyed quite a bit, but of course, they don’t compare to the tracks from other Zelda games, the control was originally, from what I have seen and heard, complete dogshit, but thankfully, the remaster makes things MUCH more simple and easy to control, so thank god I never had to deal with any of that, and the gameplay is somewhat familiar with the Zelda series, but made much more simple and tedious as a result.

The game is a 2D action-adventure game, where you take control of Link, go through many different locations through the land of Koradai, defeat many different monsters along the way (and I do mean many), gather plenty of helpful items that will either increase your stats or help with completing certain quests, talk to many different colorful characters that you will find throughout the land for useful information, and take on plenty of bosses that would be challenging, except most of them go down with a single hit most of the time. For the most part, it sounds pretty straightforward, and since it takes on the style of Zelda II rather than a traditional Zelda, there are a lot of interesting elements to be found here that do make for a unique experience. However, there is a LOT holding it back, so we may as well go through all of the negatives before saying why the game actually isn’t all that bad.

First off, we may as well address the elephant in the room: the cutscenes. If you know anything about this game, or any of the other Nintendo CDI games, chances are it is related to these cutscenes, with there being plenty of them that show up throughout the entire game. If you don’t know about them, let me be the first to tell you then… these cutscenes are AWFUL. Their animation is some of the worst I have ever seen in a game, the characters move around very unnaturally, the voice acting is really bad, the line delivery is extremely goofy and amateur, the dialogue is repetitive and generic, and they have gone down as some of the worst cutscenes in video game history. However, with all that being said… I can’t help but love them. These cutscenes fall in the same category as The Room, where they are so bad that you can’t help but adore every second of them, and I am sure that for anyone who knows this game, they can quote plenty of lines from this almost exactly. That’s how iconic they are.

As for the game itself though, it also has its fair share of problems. Just to go through them really quickly, there are way too many enemies that can be on screen at once, a lot of items you need to grind money for, even very early on in the game, the control in order to do anything can be pretty wonky, even when doing something as simple as opening a menu, the bosses completely suck, you have to refight a good number of them multiple times, some of the NPCs don’t help you out whatsoever, and what is quite possibly the worst problem this game suffers from, the background and foreground. Everything in the areas you go to look the exact same when compared to each other, so there will be plenty of times where you can’t determine what you can and can’t interact with, leading to a lot of unneeded frustration. Granted, while a good amount of these problems are tweaked with in the remaster of the game, a lot of the problems are still there, making it still a pretty bad game at the end of the day.

With all that in mind though, I still managed to have a good time with the game. Yes, a lot of it is still pretty bad, and the game is repetitive enough to where it can get boring at times, but it did feel satisfying getting through a lot of these levels, and I did manage to have a fun time with slashing through these enemies and getting these items. Not to mention, a lot of the worse elements of the game, such as the cutscenes and the pathetic bosses, do add a lot of charm to the game in a way, and make it much more enjoyable. I always wanted to keep moving forward, because even if what I faced would be annoying, I would be given a garbage cutscene at the end of it, which makes up for everything at the end of the day. Seriously, when you hear Ganon say “Join me Link, and I will make your face the GREATEST in Koradai… or else you will DIE”, you simply just cannot completely hate this game. It is impossible.

Overall, despite the many, MANY problems that hold this game down, and the infamous reputation that it has gotten over the years, I surprisingly ended up really liking my time with Link: The Faces of Evil. Of course, a lot of that is thanks to the remaster, but even then, a lot of it I just can’t help but really like, and while I definitely probably won’t be playing it ever again, I am glad to say that I finally got to witness it in all of its glory. I would definitely recommend that any Zelda fan, or anyone in general, play or witness the game at least once in their lives, but for your own sake, DO NOT play the original version. Play the fan made remaster, because it manages to make the game a lot more bearable, while still keeping a lot of that awful charm perfectly intact. And hey, while we may all shit on these games for the dumpster fire that they are, we have to give them credit at the end of the day for inspiring many other works, such as this one game called Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore, which is being made to be a direct spiritual successor to this game, along with the other Nintendo CDI games. If you somehow aren’t excited for that game, then you my friend don’t know what true art is.

Game #438

...really?

This is supposed to be the "worst" zelda game? The game so infamously awful that it spawned the reactionary absurdist art for that is the YTP??? The game so irredeemably terrible that Nintendo themselves would rather bleach it entirely out of the canon, out of the official release timeline, and out of the public conciousness??? Perhaps I have high kusoge pain tolerance, but I actually found this game quite impressive.

The game is entirely side-scrolling, with areas segmented into these little 2-4 screen mini levels that usually have an item or a boss fight at the end. The game uses scanned images of hand-drawn pictures to form the level backgrounds, and it works surprisingly well. The collision detection functions rather solidly. The controls take a little bit of time to get used to, as theres the typical zelda item-based gameplay at play when the CD-i controller only has 2 functional buttons, so the pause/inventory screen is done by pushing the item button while crouching. It does mean you unfortunately can't pause the game or switch/use items in front of any door, as the second button becomes a context-sensitive door use button. Juggling between the lamp and other items to keep dark rooms visible is also a bit of a pain. Outside of that, the control feels rather solid. While I initially thought it would play more like zelda 2 given the side-scrolling perspective, this game actually feels like a bit of a mix between castlevania and ghosts n goblins. It has the slow, methodical pace and movement as castlevania yet the more lateral level design and "throw shit at the wall" enemy placement that loves to be just too high or too low to hit def reminded me of ghosts n goblins. The only part in the game that's actual horseshit is the final level, ganon's lair. There are too many got damn snakes that do too much got damn damage and sometimes the high enemy count lags the CD-i to a crawl.

The game def has some design problems but its nowhere near as absolutely garbage as I was led to believe all this time on the internet. If anything, the fact that they made a game like this work so decently on what is essentially a beefed-up photo CD player is really lowkey impressive. The OST also bumps way harder than it has any right to, even with tracks that dynamically change depending on whether you are indoors or outdoors. I honestly had more fun playing this than I did with some actual Nintendo-ass zelda games. Would definitely suggest giving the game an earnest play-through instead of just brushing it off as "the funny bad meme zelda game". You might be surprised.