I have a lot of bias towards this game: I love it and I hate it. By the early 2000s, it was already established that the Zeldas were masterpieces, notably thanks to Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. Not having a Nintendo 64, I didn’t have the chance to play them on their release day. The only Zelda I had played was Link’s Awakening on GameBoy Color in 1998, which I particularly loved. In 1999, I managed to find a copy of Link to the Past at a garage sale for a relatively high price (I believe it was 40€). Unfortunately, the game was in German, but I still tried to play it. I never managed to find the third medallion and remained stuck for a long time, excessively frustrated because I loved everything about the game. But the language barrier made the experience difficult. It was also impossible for me to use the manual (I only bought the cartridge), and I couldn't get my hands on a guide (this was in 1999, I remind you, I didn't have internet at home yet, and printed guides were unavailable at that time).

I think we forget that this kind of game can be particularly opaque and cryptic, even though LTTP is more accessible than the first installment of the saga. The impatient player then has two options to bypass the secrets of this game: the complete guide (and spoil the experience) or the hint for a boost. In this sense, the integration of the NPC who guides you for 30 rupees is a stroke of genius that I would have loved to discover as a child instead of raging on my own, cutting all the bushes in the game (I could have also learned German, what a noob)... Are there still players who will have a similar experience to mine nowadays? I posit here as a hypothesis that the lost player who does not have access to any form of "guidance" has practically disappeared.

Many critics rightly emphasized that LTTP has an absolutely gigantic semi-open world with the particular twist of the change thanks to the mirror. This part is especially remembered because it foreshadows the games to come. But when you really play this game, you forget that LTTP has a half of games close to the dungeon crawling genre, a genre immensely more popular at that time. Japan in particular was marked by the legacy of Wizardry. It's really fascinating to imagine that LTTP (and perhaps a major part of the Zelda series? I'm not an expert, so I'll remain cautious) was at the crossroads between open-world adventure and dungeon crawling. It raises the theoretical question: if the critics hadn't praised the open world of Zelda so much, would the series have become a series of dungeon games? In a parallel Bizarro world, would BOTW have looked like a Lunacid-type game and would Lunacid have been a game that pays homage to the open world? I'm totally digressing.

The game is truly a revolutionary masterpiece. The evolution between LTTP and The Legend of Zelda released 6 years earlier is staggering, even from a technical point of view. Although we live in completely different eras where graphics evolved extremely rapidly, it's amusing to think about this in perspective of a comparison between BOTW and TOTK, which also have almost 6 years apart and are, for all intents and purposes, identical.

Yet despite all the "objective" and qualitative data of this game, well ... I got a little bored in the middle of the game. The alternation between open-world and dungeons becomes a bit repetitive, but fortunately the end is amazing (since the ice dungeon, I would say).

A little annoyance on my part: trying to use online guides only as a last resort (for example, if I'm stuck for more than an hour), I managed relatively well until I got to Trinexx. Impossible for me to figure out how to defeat him on my own. Searching online, I discover that I need the "ice wand." I go to get it and I realize that I can never kill the dragon heads, even with 3 magic bars. I finally realize that my sword is only level 2. I realize that I completely missed the upgrades. Overall, it annoyed me because none of these items are necessary before. This kind of "dead end" is really annoying and discouraging. Without recourse to a guide, I would probably have given up at this point.

Another important point, in terms of narration, LTTP is in line with its predecessors: few dialogues, few memorable secondary characters. The game is more focused on its gameplay and level design while remaining relatively quiet. You either like it or you don't. Even though I struggle with games that are too talkative, I think I might have liked to be more involved in the world of Hyrule. LTTP remains very "gamey": I finished dungeon 5, let's go to dungeon 6. We generally don't care about the story, which is not a bad thing in itself. Add to that the fact that the game is generally very serious. It seems to me that the subsequent games often have more "dorky" moments.

Anyway, I'm glad to have turned this frustrating page of my existence.

It's the best 2D Zelda that you can play, bar none. It has an exciting and colorful overworld with dungeons that can be a bit tricky and an amazing second half that can test you!
The story at the time was amazing, going back to it now it's your standard fair for storytelling, but it doesn't make it any less cool to see it play out. There are some interesting characters on your journey that give you side quests for either extra hearts or a neat item, and most of is not tedious to go through. The game is split into two separate worlds, the light world and the dark world, with the latter being quite difficult to get though if you're not prepared for it.
The bosses are also pretty entertaining as well, especially in the dark world. And the music is amazing for this, and a lot of the music that is still being used comes directly from this game!
If you love Zelda, and the top down variety, you'll need to play this one, it's a clear example on how it should be done!

I haven't played Link to the Past in quite a long time so I was scared that I wouldn't be having as much fun as my last (and first) playthrough, but I loved it just as much, maybe more. I used a guide to find the specific secrets but I was able to remember where most of the important collectibles where, and I traversed the dungeons on my own, cause those were just a lot of fun to figure out.

I really like that most items are used at some point in the game. I feel like the only critique I have about the first title is that sometimes you collect items you don't really need or ever really use (at least for someone like me who's super familiar with the game. I'm sure newer players gets good use out of every item).

Absolutely spectacular game that everybody with a Super Nintendo must play.

9/10

Beating every Zelda in timeline order 11/20:

I've tried beating A Link to the Past 5 or 6 times now, and never really got into it before, even going as far as saying it hadn't aged well and it wasn't for me. I was super wrong, this game fucking rules. If there's one thing that I have absolutely no patience for in games, it's boss runbacks. It's why I can't get into soulslike games (Elden Ring not included) and why I couldn't get into A Link to the Past. Using save states to bypass the horrible slog of going through the same rooms over and over again finally made this game incredibly fun instead of frustrating. I felt, even though I did this, the game was overall quite challenging, which was great. The overworld is small and simple. I never felt overwhelmed and the whole thing felt intuitive to explore. The process of exploring the overworld and finding useful upgrades in places you don't expect is magic, and this game rewards you for being curious about its world more than any other Zelda I've played. There are TWELVE dungeons in A Link to the Past, and they're ALL good. They all feel so free-form in how you approach them and after playing Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, it's a breath of fresh air. It doesn't do anything too unique in the face of every other Zelda game except accomplishing being arguably the definitive Zelda experience.

I finally understand why this is many people's favorite Zelda game and I'm proud to have finally completed it in a way that was fun for me.

Watching a Twitch streamer poke around in this last week, I really got itching to play LTTP again. Once I remembered that I could just DO that because I brought my SNES Classic to me from America, I hopped right in over the weekend and played through it over just under 7 hours on Sunday morning. It was a lovely nostalgic romp through a game I haven't played the SNES version of in MANY years (it was a game I lost as a child, though still have no idea how).

I played the GBA version a LOT more than the SNES version growing up, and I was surprised at just how many things I had assumed were quality of life additions in the port were in the original all along (keep in mind I had that game from the ages of like, 3 to 5, so my memory of it from then is very rough). Fantastic bits of signposting like the village boy actually marking on your map where the elder is, or the dark world dungeons being listed in order on your map are there in all their glory (and apparently always had been XD). Early Zelda games have always had shaky relationships with good signposting of where next to go and how to do it (especially Link's Awakening) in my experience, so it was a really cool realization of just how well this game had been put together back then. That said, my 7 hour completion time is very largely due to how good my memory is of this game up to about the second to last dungeon, so the real benefits of the signposting were something I couldn't really enjoy organically as if it were my first time playing.

This game is also so much harder than I remember it being. Maybe they made the GBA ports easier or something, but there are SO many enemies, especially early bosses (and MOST especially the one you fight in the first dark world dungeon) deal SO much damage, like two hearts in one hit, that you can die in like 3 or 4 hits if you haven't been tracking down every heart piece you can get your hands on. Certainly not the the extent of something like Zelda 2, which is a game I find so hard that it's very difficult to enjoy playing it, but it was still a surprising entry for me of back when Nintendo made HARD games that did not hold your hand.

Going back to the short completion time, it was weird to see JUST how small and short so many of the dungeons are. Some of the quickest can be done in like 10 or 15 minutes barely trying if you're just following where they point you to go and don't get stuck on some logic puzzle or lost inside them. They always seemed SO huge and sprawling to me as a kid, it's weird to go back like, 10 years since I last beat this and see just what a relatively tiny experience this game is (granted it has like a dozen freaking dungeons, so it's not that bad that they're small. If anything I prefer them this way).

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Still not my favorite 2D Zelda game, but I do certainly appreciate it more this time around than my memory had treated it before. Not really enough NPC interaction for my tastes, as this is still very much an exploration-based action/adventure game more in the style of the games that came before it, but it's still easily and obviously one of the best action adventure games on the system (shocking news to you all, I'm sure)

Fazia MUITO tempo que eu não zerava esse jogo e como eu consegui concertar minha TV CRT decidi aproveitar pra jogar de novo.

Eu amo como esse jogo criou e definiu muito das coisas que a franquia iria usar dali pra frente, não só como a progressão da lore e dos itens, como também das músicas (não lembrava que a Zelda's Lullaby é desse jogo fiquei incrédulo quando ouvi)

Só fiquei meio triste que na minha cabeça esse jogo era gigantesco, e quando fui rejogar eu fazia cada dungeon em 10-15 minutos e o mundo não era tão grande como eu lembrava, mas mesmo assim amei zerar esse jogo de novo pra matar a saudade.