What a masterpiece.
I first played A Link to the Past as a young child and was obsessed with it, but it was playing the NES Zelda later in life that really made me appreciate ALTTP all the more. It is where the series really hit its stride, the power of the Super Nintendo having allowed developers to incorporate ambitious design ideas that were impossible before. This was also when the series began to have more of an established identity, with many of its staples being born here, like the Master Sword, the Spin Attack, the hookshot, bottled faeries, those text boxes that end in a "did you understand?" prompt... though in that latter case, the cruel practice of defaulting the cursor to "no" would only begin with Ocarina of Time.
It sounds like a minor thing, but the fact that the game started worrying about information conveyed to the player is in itself a sign of a major shift in the series. The original Zelda rarely expressed itself in words, and when it did, it was immensely cryptic. In A Link to the Past, information gathering is paramount: it's important to talk to NPCs wherever you find them, as they'll give key information that will aid in your quest. They'll also give important hints about the overworld in general, like the location of optional items and upgrades. If someone says "toss a stone into the river up north", you'd better start practicing those throws.
The game strikes a nice balance where it doesn't hold your hand, but also rarely has you making logic leaps about what to do next. On my latest playthrough, I put that to the test, pretending I didn't know where to go or what to do, and it made me appreciate why some people call Zelda an RPG: ALTTP punishes players who play it as an action game and ignore the world around them. It's a game where exploration and note-taking are as important to your quest as completing the dungeons.
Speaking of dungeons, it's another area in which ALTTP is a massive step forward for the franchise. The original LoZ may have had some sprawling dungeons to navigate, but each room was relatively simple: it had enemies to kill and/or blocks to push, and had up to four exits. They also only spanned one floor, with stairs leading to secret passages that connected two faraway rooms. LoZ's levels were groundbreaking for their time, but nowadays feel simplistic and, by the end of the game, repetitive.
A Link to the Past features a whopping eleven dungeons, each of which has a defined identity and hides an important piece of equipment for Link to use, and their design has been massively overhauled. On the room level, rooms come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and can be entered and left from multiple directions. Often, it's important not just to reach a room, but to enter it from the right place. The dungeons' structure in itself has been greatly overhauled, with levels now spaning multiple floors that offer multiple ways to move between them.
Despite being a 2D game, ALTTP expects its player to think of a maze as an object in 3D space, carefully minding which rooms are above or below others, as well as what paths around the level are possible. It's impossible to overstate just how devious the level design is: so many times, the thing you need is right in front of you, unreachable, making you scratch your head over how to get it. The game calls for plenty of observation as well as out-of-the-box thinking, with places like the Tower of Hera hiding the Moon Pearl behind a combination of stage contraptions, the Swamp Palace and its very first room exploring the relationship between worlds, and Skull Woods having multiple entrances, turning the surrounding overworld area into a part of the dungeon.
The overworld is almost a dungeon in itself now, its paths gradually opening themselves as Link's inventory fills up. The map has tons of nooks and crannies ready to reveal themselves the avid explorer, but also features notable landmarks and locations that make it feel like a world instead of just a grid of screens. The experience is further enhanced once the Dark World enters the mix, a twisted version of the real world that becomes accessible after the first few dungeons.
The Dark World changes how the player thinks about overworld navigation by opening up impossible paths in the Light World, and the duality between worlds is explored by a handful of puzzles throughout the game. Plus, the Dark World's atmosphere, enveloped in eternal twilight, filled with far more dangerous monsters than what you'd faced to that point in your adventure, reinforces the feelings of desolation that are central to A Link to the Past's narrative.
A Link to the Past is a true marvel. If anything, replaying it makes me slightly melancholic that the game gets pushed aside so often, along with the rest of the top-down Zeldas, as being outdated and obtuse. I've heard so many complaints that the puzzles are too hard, or that the enemies are too strong, or that it has too many dungeons. If that wasn't bad enough, I've watched a streamer ragequit over a puzzle that can easily be solved by looking at the in-game map, which he refused to do.
And the saddest part is that the Zelda series in itself evolved in order to accommodate these complaints, with some of the later games not respecting the player's intelligence and preventing them from navigating the levels on their own -- heck, the industry itself followed suit, with so many modern AAA games going as far as spoiling puzzles before you even touch them. ALttP is a throwback to earlier times, not too early that games gave you no information, not too late that they held you by the hand. A true Link to the Past.
...I cannot possibly end on that pun, can I? Uh... So, ALttP is really good and... uh... Hey, did you know there was this Japan-exclusive SNES Zelda game that was essentially a remix of A Link to the Past?! It's called Inishie no Sekiban, or Ancient Stone Tablets, and was released on an obscure SNES addon called the Satellaview. It has four parts to it, and plays basically like an official romhack of ALttP, which is a treat for all of us who love the game. If you're interested, you can find more info on the game and how to play it over on the BS Zelda (that's "Broadcast Satellite") section of the Zelda Legends website.
I first played A Link to the Past as a young child and was obsessed with it, but it was playing the NES Zelda later in life that really made me appreciate ALTTP all the more. It is where the series really hit its stride, the power of the Super Nintendo having allowed developers to incorporate ambitious design ideas that were impossible before. This was also when the series began to have more of an established identity, with many of its staples being born here, like the Master Sword, the Spin Attack, the hookshot, bottled faeries, those text boxes that end in a "did you understand?" prompt... though in that latter case, the cruel practice of defaulting the cursor to "no" would only begin with Ocarina of Time.
It sounds like a minor thing, but the fact that the game started worrying about information conveyed to the player is in itself a sign of a major shift in the series. The original Zelda rarely expressed itself in words, and when it did, it was immensely cryptic. In A Link to the Past, information gathering is paramount: it's important to talk to NPCs wherever you find them, as they'll give key information that will aid in your quest. They'll also give important hints about the overworld in general, like the location of optional items and upgrades. If someone says "toss a stone into the river up north", you'd better start practicing those throws.
The game strikes a nice balance where it doesn't hold your hand, but also rarely has you making logic leaps about what to do next. On my latest playthrough, I put that to the test, pretending I didn't know where to go or what to do, and it made me appreciate why some people call Zelda an RPG: ALTTP punishes players who play it as an action game and ignore the world around them. It's a game where exploration and note-taking are as important to your quest as completing the dungeons.
Speaking of dungeons, it's another area in which ALTTP is a massive step forward for the franchise. The original LoZ may have had some sprawling dungeons to navigate, but each room was relatively simple: it had enemies to kill and/or blocks to push, and had up to four exits. They also only spanned one floor, with stairs leading to secret passages that connected two faraway rooms. LoZ's levels were groundbreaking for their time, but nowadays feel simplistic and, by the end of the game, repetitive.
A Link to the Past features a whopping eleven dungeons, each of which has a defined identity and hides an important piece of equipment for Link to use, and their design has been massively overhauled. On the room level, rooms come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and can be entered and left from multiple directions. Often, it's important not just to reach a room, but to enter it from the right place. The dungeons' structure in itself has been greatly overhauled, with levels now spaning multiple floors that offer multiple ways to move between them.
Despite being a 2D game, ALTTP expects its player to think of a maze as an object in 3D space, carefully minding which rooms are above or below others, as well as what paths around the level are possible. It's impossible to overstate just how devious the level design is: so many times, the thing you need is right in front of you, unreachable, making you scratch your head over how to get it. The game calls for plenty of observation as well as out-of-the-box thinking, with places like the Tower of Hera hiding the Moon Pearl behind a combination of stage contraptions, the Swamp Palace and its very first room exploring the relationship between worlds, and Skull Woods having multiple entrances, turning the surrounding overworld area into a part of the dungeon.
The overworld is almost a dungeon in itself now, its paths gradually opening themselves as Link's inventory fills up. The map has tons of nooks and crannies ready to reveal themselves the avid explorer, but also features notable landmarks and locations that make it feel like a world instead of just a grid of screens. The experience is further enhanced once the Dark World enters the mix, a twisted version of the real world that becomes accessible after the first few dungeons.
The Dark World changes how the player thinks about overworld navigation by opening up impossible paths in the Light World, and the duality between worlds is explored by a handful of puzzles throughout the game. Plus, the Dark World's atmosphere, enveloped in eternal twilight, filled with far more dangerous monsters than what you'd faced to that point in your adventure, reinforces the feelings of desolation that are central to A Link to the Past's narrative.
A Link to the Past is a true marvel. If anything, replaying it makes me slightly melancholic that the game gets pushed aside so often, along with the rest of the top-down Zeldas, as being outdated and obtuse. I've heard so many complaints that the puzzles are too hard, or that the enemies are too strong, or that it has too many dungeons. If that wasn't bad enough, I've watched a streamer ragequit over a puzzle that can easily be solved by looking at the in-game map, which he refused to do.
And the saddest part is that the Zelda series in itself evolved in order to accommodate these complaints, with some of the later games not respecting the player's intelligence and preventing them from navigating the levels on their own -- heck, the industry itself followed suit, with so many modern AAA games going as far as spoiling puzzles before you even touch them. ALttP is a throwback to earlier times, not too early that games gave you no information, not too late that they held you by the hand. A true Link to the Past.
...I cannot possibly end on that pun, can I? Uh... So, ALttP is really good and... uh... Hey, did you know there was this Japan-exclusive SNES Zelda game that was essentially a remix of A Link to the Past?! It's called Inishie no Sekiban, or Ancient Stone Tablets, and was released on an obscure SNES addon called the Satellaview. It has four parts to it, and plays basically like an official romhack of ALttP, which is a treat for all of us who love the game. If you're interested, you can find more info on the game and how to play it over on the BS Zelda (that's "Broadcast Satellite") section of the Zelda Legends website.