The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds – Review
The Legend of Zelda is one of the more famous titles in Gameland. This franchise has more games than a woman has shoes (well, more than me at least). Nintendo tries to innovate every title, adding new items, characters and a fabulous dashing storyline. With The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, they combined an old game with some new additions. Let us see how good this combination is.
Story
You start the game with a nightmare. You’re fighting against a dark and evil creature, when you suddenly hear a scream. If you’ve played the Zelda franchise, you will find some similarities with the start from The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past.
Continuing after the nightmare, there you are, snoring in your bed when you are harshly woken up by Gulley. This cheerful and lively boy is the son of your employer, the town’s local blacksmith. It seems you’re too late again and you’re expecting quite a scolding when you arrive at work. Entering the house, it seems your boss has a visitor (thank God, no scolding!). It’s the Captain from Hyrule Castle, fetching his new equipment. Not long after the client leaves, it seems that our good Captain forgot his sword. Link gets the assignment to deliver the sword and there you go into the wide world of Hyrule.
The Captain went to the Sanctuary and on our arrival, things are going bad. The doors are closed and you can hear someone screaming inside. As a good but reckless adventurer, you infiltrate the Sanctuary. This is the first time you meet Yuga. This evil wizard turned the daughter of the priest into a living painting and there is no sight of the Captain. You try to stop this dark monster, but you’re defeated and left for dead.
You wake up in your house and your rescuer is … a rabbit? Ravio is a wandering merchant and looks like, well, a rabbit. He runs a renting shop and kindly takes your house as his workplace. This turn of events might be a lot to deal with, but you need to inform Princess Zelda of these recent mysteries. After this, Link’s adventure really starts. Be ready for some surprises while playing the game.
Graphics
This game is both a remake and follow-up of The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, which you can really see when you look at the graphics. The quality of the graphics is significantly better than the original game and Nintendo really tried to use the 3D-graphics to maximize the usage of the 3D function. You can play the game in 2D of course, but 3D is amazing too. Although the graphics are better, the developers kept the original elements, for example the annoying cactuar, Zora and the Hyrule Castle. The new elements are implemented very nicely and give the die-hard fans quite some “ooh” and “aaah” moments.
Sound
The music and sound effects were updated but are mostly the old songs from A Link To The Past. One thing worth mentioning is that the music changes when you’re on a wall or when you have your special goggles on. This might be a small addition but it takes the game to a higher level.
Gameplay
The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds has quite some additions and the combination with the old elements from A Link To The Past gives a special and fun gameplay. There are some old elements as well, like the other world you can discover.
First of all, the most spectacular addition is the ability to merge into walls. You’ll notice that this skill is necessary on several occasions or during certain events. How this is possible is fairly simple. You merge into a wall for a small amount of time. How long you can stay in a wall depends on your energy meter.
Secondly, you can’t save anymore whenever you want but you will have to find Weather Vanes. These lovely birds can save your game and they have another function as well, but I’ll tell you more about this in the next paragraph. It is a cool and nice idea but it can be a pain when you don’t have enough time. Quickly saving and stopping isn’t a possibility anymore.
Another addition is the usage of your own taxi service when you venture the game for a while. Irene, a quite jolly witch will give you a bell. If you ring this bell, you can get a ride with her broom. The thing is, you can only fly to Weather Vanes that you’ve already discovered. A Link To The Past had something similar as well, but you can get this bell a lot sooner.
Something else is that you can get all of the items when you want, whenever you want. Want the Ice Rod quite early in-game? Not a problem. Don’t want to wait for your Hammer? No worries! The only thing you need is your good friend Ravio and some rupees of course. This game offers you the option to rent the items from your rabbitlike friend. For a small fee, you can keep the items as long as you want! Really! But… there is a catch of course. If you die, you lose the rented items and you have to rent them again. This might be a pain for gamers that tend to die quite a lot, but don’t fear! Next to renting, you can also buy the items, although this costs you a lot more.
There are some new items added to the game as well. The most spectacular will be the Goggles and the Tornado Rod. The Goggles or Hint Goggles can be used to find hint ghosts that can help you to solve puzzles. They help you only with a small fee, namely the 3DS Gold Coins. The Tornado Rod can swirl away enemies and send you flying!
Nintendo tweaked the dungeons as well. Some might be a lot alike, but the most are changed and altered so you can use you merge-ability. This addition also gives diehard Zelda-fans some new elements, because they might think they know what to do, but HAH think again!
Last but not least is the new concept of the ‘Shadow World’ or Lorule with Princess Hilda. This new idea is quite nice because you have to fight for a new cause and it makes you bond with this other world quite faster. How do I get into this world, you ask? Well, going into cracks with you wall-merging will do the trick.
Conclusion
The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is a real nice remake and follow-up of A Link To The Past. The graphics and sound got an upgrade and the storyline got tweaked as well. The gameplay was altered by the several new items and abilities, which make you play the game quite often. May the Triforce be with you!
The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds - Review,
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