No spoilers discussed from a narrative perspective; however, I do speak extensively on the gameplay and dungeons, which may be seen as spoilerish for people who wish to go into things completely carte blanche. As such, for those of you who do, avoid reading: the tl;dr is I don’t recommend playing ALTTP without a guide
Beaten on the SNES Classic
I did not want to give this game a mixed review. In fact, when I first booted up A Link to the Past, it genuinely enthralled me, the pixel art and 4:3 display bringing back memories of a childhood long forgotten; where the stresses of adulthood were as far away as the skies of Hyrule and fields of Arcadia. There’s always been something about the Super Nintendo that’s rung a deep chord within me, and I was consequently eager to re-indulge in nostalgia for the next 15 hours or so.
Alas, that was not to be. ALTTP starts off on a great note, yet a severe flaw of the era rears its ugly head again-and-again, degrading the experience no matter how often you try and address it: deliberate vagueness for the sake of artificial elongation. Picture this -- you’ve tolled extensively through a dungeon, dodging hazardous obstacles, slaying countless enemies, even dying a few times, but all that doesn’t matter as you’ve finally made it to the end boss, only….something’s off. Your attacks aren’t working, and you’re confident you’re employing every trick in the book….
Or, let’s not even go that far- say you’ve spent almost an hour meandering towards one of the new dungeons on your map, stressing about finding the right entrance, the right pathway, all whilst evading your usual hodgepodge of critters and traps, only….you can’t get in. Or you can get in, and you can’t progress past the first room for reasons you’re unsure of.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we call obsolete game design: when a game expects you to have meandered aimlessly in its world for the sake of finding that ONE hint or ONE item placed elsewhere that can circumvent a major hindrance of a dungeon down-the-line. While Fourth Generation titles were significantly better in this department than their forebears, you still had a number of releases, particularly in the RPG genre, that indulged in such hapless tactics for the sake of offsetting early-return losses.
Of course, ALTTP is not a pure RPG; however, it borrows enough here to the point where it shares those same criticisms as a Lufia I or a Castlevania 2: where you NEED to talk to a number of random villagers or scour the far reaches of the map(s) for the sake of progression. Fail to do that, and you’ll stumble into the same pitfalls I encountered above.
And look, I get it. Games back in the day, particularly Nintendo titles, were built on in-person cooperation and guide book procurement: heck, Nintendo Power explicitly published hints in its monthly catalog as a way of enticing more young’uns to subscribe. But in this day-and-age, such capitalistic feedback loops are nonexistent, and games are expected to be solvable without extensive manuals, a minimum standard ALTTP simply fails to live up to. And what makes this particularly irksome is that it literally doesn’t start off like this. For the first section, you can cruise along and complete the trifecta of introductory strongholds at your own pace in whatever order you want without worrying if you missed X trinket at Y location. Then the Dark World springs up and you’re granted access to 8 additional dungeons that can seemingly be completed in any order; a revolutionary feat for the time that probably inspired similar “open door” moments in later games.
EXCEPT, it’s a partial lie. The final four dungeons (Ice Palace, Misery Mire, Turtle Rock, Ganon’s Tower) all require you to have acquired a certain tool beforehand lest you get stuck either at the entryway or, worse case scenario, boss fight following an extended period of drudging.
You may be thinking, well Red, given that the dungeons are numbered on-screen sequentially, wouldn’t it make sense for the closing four’s secrets to be locked behind keys gleaned anteriorly? To which I would say yes if said keys were provided to you in a linear fashion. The problem is, all but one of those items (ranging from medallions to weapons), are not dungeon drops- they’re literally random loot hidden in specialized locations you have to go out of your way to find, and the only way you’re going to find them is through either talking to every random joe you see for a clue, shelling out rupees to the town fortune teller, or good old-fashioned hapless exploring. Andhey listen, I definitely understand how all of this forced reconnaissance could’ve been enjoyable to a young person growing up in the 90s without similar console titles for comparison; but nowadays, it feels restrictive and tedious to have to meander elsewhere when you just want to complete the next fortress.
The pseudo-free roam nature of ALTTP also bothered me in a couple of respects. One, much like the Tomb Raider reboot and Metro 2033, it gets under my skin whenever a game lies about being wanderable: launching the Dark World map for the first time, you’re left with the impression that you can tackle any of these objectives in whatever order you wish, yet that’s immediately unveiled as a lie blatantly intended to waste your time running to locales you’re unable to enter. And two, there were so many small ways the developers could’ve alleviated said time-wasting: make the fast-travel bird system mandatorily accessible from the get-go; have an option to purchase charts or info to mark out secrets on the map (or prerender them entirely ala Metroid Prime); allow Link to transport between worlds without having to recharge the Magic Mirror; or incorporate better interconnection from area to area (seriously, it angers me how your sole option for traversal are these narrow roadways tucked inside each dimension -- I get they maybe wanted to limit how far players could travel initially, but considering they either way softlock places, it felt annoyingly redundant).
It’s a shame you run into these qualms because the vast majority of the dungeons are superb and really fun; the only ones I would say I was not a big fan of were Skull Woods, Gargoyle's Domain, and Ice Palace due to either an influx of unbeatable enemies/obstacles (more on that later) or extensive backtracking. This same praise extends to the bosses as well -- yes, like most SNES games, their brawls come down to a Phase 1 and slightly stronger Phase 2, but the bulk of them necessitate some level of strategy and, above all else, they’re grotesquely fascinating to stare at. If there’s one thing we can all agree on about ALTTP, it’s that its graphical design is top notch.
I know there’s been some controversy regarding Link’s pink hair, but putting that aside, the mute boy and his world have never looked better in 2D. As I mentioned before, the SNES capitalized on pixel art craftsmanship, and ALTTP is certainly one of the best depictions of this visual philosophy. Unique NPC figures have been developed for the two worlds, and thanks to some extraordinarily-talented artisans, they never feel like reskins of the other. Whereas the Light World is a plane dominated by humans, in the Dark World you get a sense it’s the opposite, with humans explicitly a minority amongst the roaming monstrosities everywhere: cyclopean bomb throwers, carnivorous vegetation, chimeric bodyguards, clawed wraiths etc… Yeah you get some uninspired variants like discolored turtles, mummies, and literal globs, but they don’t take away from their more-fascinating compatriots (a noteworthy trait given the SNES’s aptitude for creature feature extravaganza). I was also intrigued by the use of 3D geometry (the Princess capsules and TriForce assemblage), which never felt at odds with the in-game engine. The only critique I have is the lack of vivid differentials between the two realms: swapping from one to the other feels less like a dimensional rift and more like a seasonal change, the Dark World cloaked in muddied tints.
SFX was never elaborate in the SNES days, but ALTTP is pretty bare bones even by those standards. Compared to Donkey Kong Country, for example, there are only two wound cries (if you can call them that) for EVERY breed of enemy, with bosses somehow having it even worse. This lack of diversity extends to the OST, which inexcusably features 45 minutes(+) worth of music for the 10+ hours you’ll be playing. Because of this, you’ll be hearing A LOT of repetition, and while I like the Zelda theme as much as anybody, it, in particular, becomes GRATING to listen to given its usage as the Light World motif (as soon as those trumpets started to restate Michael Jackson Smooth Criminal-style, I wanted to shut off the TV). The Dark World’s version fares a lot better on the ears, but even still most locales simply don’t have anything unique: towns are nonexistent, there are only two dungeon tracks in the entire record, bosses (save Ganon) share a single leitmotif, and even the unique tunes tend to be a single chorus looped twice/thrice. Nintendo and Koji Kondo really dropped the ball here.
That said, there is some unique sound editing in the game that deserves to be highlighted. For starters, whenever you enter interiors, the overworld medley goes soft; secondly, inside of cave-like locations, Link’s dins gain an echoey effect; and thirdly, each of Link’s tools are granted a nice distinct rattle (a wise decision considering the amount of times you’ll be utilizing them during your journey).
There isn’t too much to say about the gameplay other than that there’s a ton of sword swiping and puzzle-solving, the latter usually simple and never falling into nonsense territory. Combat, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired, namely because of two big reasons: one, this game desperately needed a joystick as turning to reorient Link for a new slash can get vexing, due to the absence of diagonal movement and the jumpiness of later thugs; and two, I felt there were issues with the hit detection, particularly when an enemy was getting out of the recovery phase of an initial strike -- it’s not Secret of Mana-level bad, but it does prop up every now and then.
Worse, still, are the sheer number of unbeatable enemies Nintendo programmed for the sake of concocting barriers, a game design aspect that’s never made sense to me from a lore perspective: if bosses are meant to be the strongest foes, why can they be hurt whilst their underlings remain scratchless? But, putting that aside, ALTTP has one too many of these entities, and they become particularly irritating when placed alongside stationary threats like spiked columns or rebounding shields. I’m talking: bouncing diamondheads, firestreams, rotating laser eye projectors, wall-mounted laser eye projectors, little charmander things, water bubbles, etc….I could go on. While I understand they were just trying to craft unique challenges, it got to a point where it became ridiculous to encounter all these entities that not only served the same purpose, but were somehow stronger than Ganon.
In the end, ALTTP lives and dies by its dungeons, which would’ve been perfectly fine had they not been affected by the game’s other flaws. It does a lot right, and I’m happy it made a large impression on so many people back in the day, but by contemporary standards it’s frustrating- I didn’t even go into the difficulty and poor save spots, which send you back to the very beginning of a Dungeon (thank the Lord for the SNES Classic’s Suspend Points).
If you do play it, I implore you to utilize a guide; otherwise, you’ll be wasting a lot of time (like I did).
NOTES
+The 45 minute total is being generous as a chunk of those tracks, like the main menu and fairy pools themes, have the same copy/pasted harmony. Not to mention the official release comes with an ugly unused ting that was luckily removed in the final product.
-There is a story with a surprising amount of text dedicated to it, but it essentially comes down to the standard good/evil plot of yesteryear (in fact, there are times where it gets silly, like the beginning with Link’s Uncle - you’ll know it when you see it).
-Didn't even get around to talking about the respawning enemies, which get annoying, and the inane control scheme (I will never understand why Nintendo made the select button your weapon menu instead of the map- it's something I never got used to).
-Turtle Rock is full of homages to the Super Mario games: you’ve got lava pits, warp pipe-esque tubes, discount Pokeys, and even two freakin chain chomps!
-Don’t know why it’s called A Link to the Past when you’re traveling between alternate realities. A better title would’ve been A Link Between Worlds….
Beaten on the SNES Classic
I did not want to give this game a mixed review. In fact, when I first booted up A Link to the Past, it genuinely enthralled me, the pixel art and 4:3 display bringing back memories of a childhood long forgotten; where the stresses of adulthood were as far away as the skies of Hyrule and fields of Arcadia. There’s always been something about the Super Nintendo that’s rung a deep chord within me, and I was consequently eager to re-indulge in nostalgia for the next 15 hours or so.
Alas, that was not to be. ALTTP starts off on a great note, yet a severe flaw of the era rears its ugly head again-and-again, degrading the experience no matter how often you try and address it: deliberate vagueness for the sake of artificial elongation. Picture this -- you’ve tolled extensively through a dungeon, dodging hazardous obstacles, slaying countless enemies, even dying a few times, but all that doesn’t matter as you’ve finally made it to the end boss, only….something’s off. Your attacks aren’t working, and you’re confident you’re employing every trick in the book….
Or, let’s not even go that far- say you’ve spent almost an hour meandering towards one of the new dungeons on your map, stressing about finding the right entrance, the right pathway, all whilst evading your usual hodgepodge of critters and traps, only….you can’t get in. Or you can get in, and you can’t progress past the first room for reasons you’re unsure of.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we call obsolete game design: when a game expects you to have meandered aimlessly in its world for the sake of finding that ONE hint or ONE item placed elsewhere that can circumvent a major hindrance of a dungeon down-the-line. While Fourth Generation titles were significantly better in this department than their forebears, you still had a number of releases, particularly in the RPG genre, that indulged in such hapless tactics for the sake of offsetting early-return losses.
Of course, ALTTP is not a pure RPG; however, it borrows enough here to the point where it shares those same criticisms as a Lufia I or a Castlevania 2: where you NEED to talk to a number of random villagers or scour the far reaches of the map(s) for the sake of progression. Fail to do that, and you’ll stumble into the same pitfalls I encountered above.
And look, I get it. Games back in the day, particularly Nintendo titles, were built on in-person cooperation and guide book procurement: heck, Nintendo Power explicitly published hints in its monthly catalog as a way of enticing more young’uns to subscribe. But in this day-and-age, such capitalistic feedback loops are nonexistent, and games are expected to be solvable without extensive manuals, a minimum standard ALTTP simply fails to live up to. And what makes this particularly irksome is that it literally doesn’t start off like this. For the first section, you can cruise along and complete the trifecta of introductory strongholds at your own pace in whatever order you want without worrying if you missed X trinket at Y location. Then the Dark World springs up and you’re granted access to 8 additional dungeons that can seemingly be completed in any order; a revolutionary feat for the time that probably inspired similar “open door” moments in later games.
EXCEPT, it’s a partial lie. The final four dungeons (Ice Palace, Misery Mire, Turtle Rock, Ganon’s Tower) all require you to have acquired a certain tool beforehand lest you get stuck either at the entryway or, worse case scenario, boss fight following an extended period of drudging.
You may be thinking, well Red, given that the dungeons are numbered on-screen sequentially, wouldn’t it make sense for the closing four’s secrets to be locked behind keys gleaned anteriorly? To which I would say yes if said keys were provided to you in a linear fashion. The problem is, all but one of those items (ranging from medallions to weapons), are not dungeon drops- they’re literally random loot hidden in specialized locations you have to go out of your way to find, and the only way you’re going to find them is through either talking to every random joe you see for a clue, shelling out rupees to the town fortune teller, or good old-fashioned hapless exploring. And
The pseudo-free roam nature of ALTTP also bothered me in a couple of respects. One, much like the Tomb Raider reboot and Metro 2033, it gets under my skin whenever a game lies about being wanderable: launching the Dark World map for the first time, you’re left with the impression that you can tackle any of these objectives in whatever order you wish, yet that’s immediately unveiled as a lie blatantly intended to waste your time running to locales you’re unable to enter. And two, there were so many small ways the developers could’ve alleviated said time-wasting: make the fast-travel bird system mandatorily accessible from the get-go; have an option to purchase charts or info to mark out secrets on the map (or prerender them entirely ala Metroid Prime); allow Link to transport between worlds without having to recharge the Magic Mirror; or incorporate better interconnection from area to area (seriously, it angers me how your sole option for traversal are these narrow roadways tucked inside each dimension -- I get they maybe wanted to limit how far players could travel initially, but considering they either way softlock places, it felt annoyingly redundant).
It’s a shame you run into these qualms because the vast majority of the dungeons are superb and really fun; the only ones I would say I was not a big fan of were Skull Woods, Gargoyle's Domain, and Ice Palace due to either an influx of unbeatable enemies/obstacles (more on that later) or extensive backtracking. This same praise extends to the bosses as well -- yes, like most SNES games, their brawls come down to a Phase 1 and slightly stronger Phase 2, but the bulk of them necessitate some level of strategy and, above all else, they’re grotesquely fascinating to stare at. If there’s one thing we can all agree on about ALTTP, it’s that its graphical design is top notch.
I know there’s been some controversy regarding Link’s pink hair, but putting that aside, the mute boy and his world have never looked better in 2D. As I mentioned before, the SNES capitalized on pixel art craftsmanship, and ALTTP is certainly one of the best depictions of this visual philosophy. Unique NPC figures have been developed for the two worlds, and thanks to some extraordinarily-talented artisans, they never feel like reskins of the other. Whereas the Light World is a plane dominated by humans, in the Dark World you get a sense it’s the opposite, with humans explicitly a minority amongst the roaming monstrosities everywhere: cyclopean bomb throwers, carnivorous vegetation, chimeric bodyguards, clawed wraiths etc… Yeah you get some uninspired variants like discolored turtles, mummies, and literal globs, but they don’t take away from their more-fascinating compatriots (a noteworthy trait given the SNES’s aptitude for creature feature extravaganza). I was also intrigued by the use of 3D geometry (the Princess capsules and TriForce assemblage), which never felt at odds with the in-game engine. The only critique I have is the lack of vivid differentials between the two realms: swapping from one to the other feels less like a dimensional rift and more like a seasonal change, the Dark World cloaked in muddied tints.
SFX was never elaborate in the SNES days, but ALTTP is pretty bare bones even by those standards. Compared to Donkey Kong Country, for example, there are only two wound cries (if you can call them that) for EVERY breed of enemy, with bosses somehow having it even worse. This lack of diversity extends to the OST, which inexcusably features 45 minutes(+) worth of music for the 10+ hours you’ll be playing. Because of this, you’ll be hearing A LOT of repetition, and while I like the Zelda theme as much as anybody, it, in particular, becomes GRATING to listen to given its usage as the Light World motif (as soon as those trumpets started to restate Michael Jackson Smooth Criminal-style, I wanted to shut off the TV). The Dark World’s version fares a lot better on the ears, but even still most locales simply don’t have anything unique: towns are nonexistent, there are only two dungeon tracks in the entire record, bosses (save Ganon) share a single leitmotif, and even the unique tunes tend to be a single chorus looped twice/thrice. Nintendo and Koji Kondo really dropped the ball here.
That said, there is some unique sound editing in the game that deserves to be highlighted. For starters, whenever you enter interiors, the overworld medley goes soft; secondly, inside of cave-like locations, Link’s dins gain an echoey effect; and thirdly, each of Link’s tools are granted a nice distinct rattle (a wise decision considering the amount of times you’ll be utilizing them during your journey).
There isn’t too much to say about the gameplay other than that there’s a ton of sword swiping and puzzle-solving, the latter usually simple and never falling into nonsense territory. Combat, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired, namely because of two big reasons: one, this game desperately needed a joystick as turning to reorient Link for a new slash can get vexing, due to the absence of diagonal movement and the jumpiness of later thugs; and two, I felt there were issues with the hit detection, particularly when an enemy was getting out of the recovery phase of an initial strike -- it’s not Secret of Mana-level bad, but it does prop up every now and then.
Worse, still, are the sheer number of unbeatable enemies Nintendo programmed for the sake of concocting barriers, a game design aspect that’s never made sense to me from a lore perspective: if bosses are meant to be the strongest foes, why can they be hurt whilst their underlings remain scratchless? But, putting that aside, ALTTP has one too many of these entities, and they become particularly irritating when placed alongside stationary threats like spiked columns or rebounding shields. I’m talking: bouncing diamondheads, firestreams, rotating laser eye projectors, wall-mounted laser eye projectors, little charmander things, water bubbles, etc….I could go on. While I understand they were just trying to craft unique challenges, it got to a point where it became ridiculous to encounter all these entities that not only served the same purpose, but were somehow stronger than Ganon.
In the end, ALTTP lives and dies by its dungeons, which would’ve been perfectly fine had they not been affected by the game’s other flaws. It does a lot right, and I’m happy it made a large impression on so many people back in the day, but by contemporary standards it’s frustrating- I didn’t even go into the difficulty and poor save spots, which send you back to the very beginning of a Dungeon (thank the Lord for the SNES Classic’s Suspend Points).
If you do play it, I implore you to utilize a guide; otherwise, you’ll be wasting a lot of time (like I did).
NOTES
+The 45 minute total is being generous as a chunk of those tracks, like the main menu and fairy pools themes, have the same copy/pasted harmony. Not to mention the official release comes with an ugly unused ting that was luckily removed in the final product.
-There is a story with a surprising amount of text dedicated to it, but it essentially comes down to the standard good/evil plot of yesteryear (in fact, there are times where it gets silly, like the beginning with Link’s Uncle - you’ll know it when you see it).
-Didn't even get around to talking about the respawning enemies, which get annoying, and the inane control scheme (I will never understand why Nintendo made the select button your weapon menu instead of the map- it's something I never got used to).
-Turtle Rock is full of homages to the Super Mario games: you’ve got lava pits, warp pipe-esque tubes, discount Pokeys, and even two freakin chain chomps!
-Don’t know why it’s called A Link to the Past when you’re traveling between alternate realities. A better title would’ve been A Link Between Worlds….