When I was eight years old in 1992, my parents bought my brother and I a Super Nintendo, and one game each. The game I received was A Link to the Past, a game that went on to become not only one of the most well-regarded games of all time, but obviously has a lot of nostalgic significance for me as well. Like many kids who only owned a small number of games, I devoured A Link to the Past. I found every heart piece, found every last secret, and kept hunting for other secrets that could have been there. I faked illness to stay home from school to play it. I loved the music so much that I recorded the music coming out of my TV with a cassette recorder so I could listen to it later. In short, I loved that game; it's my favorite Zelda game, and easily in my all-time top 10.
Now, I normally don't like most straightforward appeals to nostalgia in media. They usually come across to me as a soulless, cynical money-making opportunity. Nintendo in particular has been pretty bad about doing that lately; Super Mario 3D Land's big advertising bullet point was seemingly just "hey, it's got raccoon tails! Like Mario 3! Remember? Mario 3? That one game you liked as a kid?" SM3DL was a damn good game in its own right, of course, but Nintendo was solely playing up the nostalgia angle pretty hard in its marketing. (The raccoon tail's even in the logo!)
As such, when A Link Between Worlds was first announced, I was pretty skeptical about it, because it seemed like just another one of those nostalgic cash-ins. Not only did it seem to be yet another cynical low-risk play by Nintendo by appealing to nostalgia for one of its classic titles, but it was particularly annoying to me because it was advertised as "a direct sequel" -- in theme as well as story -- to the original game, a game that came out more than 20 years ago! Imagine, for example, if modern-day Square-Enix decided to produce a direct sequel to Final Fantasy IV--Oh, wait. Bad example. In any case, coming out 20 years after the fact to announce a direct continuation of one of your most venerated titles is almost always going to come across as a quick cash-in on fans of the original, and at the same time, your new game automatically sets up some very lofty expectations for itself; a game that invokes such a name can't come out and be merely competent; it needs to be outstanding. (In Japan, ALBW was titled "A Link to the Past 2." At least the West was spared that extra bit of on-the-nose marketing.)
Having played the final product now, though, I think that A Link Between Worlds does a fantastic job of standing up as a great game in its own right, despite the laser-focused blast of nostalgia that it openly sets out to deliver. First and foremost, the game manages to play up its nostalgia without seeming cynical about it. While the world geography, monster designs, items, and music are all largely the same, all of the actual content has been changed. All of the dungeons -- though they take place in familiar locales -- play out completely differently, although they may contain small elements here and there that fans of the original may crack a smile at. All of this adds up to an experience that feels supremely nostalgic -- at times, I can almost remember feeling exactly what it was like to sit in front of my old TV as a nine-year-old, playing the original for the very first time -- while at the same time feeling distinctly new. When you're going to many of the same locations as in the original game, fighting the same enemies, listening to the same music, and using the same items, it's easy to get sucked into memories of the past, but you're just as quickly jolted right back into the present, because for as many things are superficially identical to the original game, there are even more things that are different. Using your knowledge of the original game can be at alternating times both a help and a hindrance, as the game seems to purposely subvert your expectations from time to time about what lies within a certain cave, or how you might go about maneuvering around a particular obstacle.
I'm not going to digress into an exposition of all of the things that the game does differently here -- there are enough ways to find all of that out if you aren't familiar with it yet -- but the one new mechanic that I'll actually touch on is the most significant one: Link's ability to turn into a painting and travel along walls. I will say that the fact that "paintings" are a central theme of the game has always seemed awfully arbitrary to me, and even after playing the game, it still does. As a gameplay mechanic, though, it works pretty well, despite the silliness of the concept itself. Being able to traverse the walls of any room forces you to think about puzzle-solving in a different way than the traditional Zelda formula, and it allows for more creative puzzle design as well.
In short, though I was highly skeptical of the design intent behind its conception, A Link Between Worlds is, in my opinion, a damn good game that not only manages to appeal to my nostalgia without feeling insincere, but also shakes up the series formula in some much-needed ways and provides an excellent Zelda experience from beginning to end. I'm glad I decided to put my shiny new PS4 on hold for a few days to play it, and I'm sure I'll be revisiting it again; it's one of my favorite games of the last few years.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll probably be listening to this on loop for the next week...
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