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March 1, 2023

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The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Walkthrough (because you're gonna need one)

This is the Zelda game that set the series formula into motion. I played this a while back as a kid and i thought i beat it but apparently i was misremembering. At any rate, I wanted to see how the game held up.

To start with what i like about the game, the opening is really damn good. Excellent. The rest? Well........i don't think it's that good tbh. Visually it holds up, the soundtrack is good, albeit repetitive. But the title to this review is not an exaggeration. So much shit is hidden from you for no reason. There are dungeons that require you to get something on the other end of the map just so you can enter it. Some dungeons like Skull Woods and Misery Mire quite literally have filler rooms, used to make the dungeons go on longer than they are. You can only use one item at a time which i'm not sure how much of that can be blamed on the SNES. Because there's four face buttons, i'm sure there's room. This leads to a lot of menuing that's kind of annoying. The dungeons themselves aren't anything special but like the series was taking it's first solid steps here so i won't hold it against it.

The breaking point is the last stretch of the game. This game's incarnation of Turtle Rock is a hot sack of dogshit. At the start, Zelda tells you "maybe you should get some magic potion" but with how the dungeon is designed, that feels more like a suggestion, because there's magic pick ups a lot. Turns out the boss of the dungeon will outlast your magic meter and there are no drops in the dungeon. So basically the devs told the player that after that long-ass trek to get to Turtle Rock, they should backtrack to get magic potion if they don't have it. But the final nail in the coffin is Ganon. Ganon, unlike the rest of the game, is actually hard. Not for good reasons though. The Golden Sword makes the fight easier but you need the Silver Arrows to actually kill him in the end. Does the game at any point tell you this? No. Maybe in the manual. Are the Silver Arrows in a spot that the player would come across naturally if they are that important? No. Not really. And i think this is why i never actually beat the game all those years ago. Cause of shit like this. So i just looked up the ending.

Like fellow classic SNES title Super Metroid, this game is very much a certified "walkthrough game", given it's a 90s game. But whereas Super Metroid still had a very good core gameplay, A Link to the Past is......honestly i'd put like half the series above it. A Link Between Worlds is just this game but way, way better and between me calling Ocarina of Time mid and now saying A Link to the Past is not that good, i fully expect to be executed at dawn tomorrow. It's been fun.