I hear everyone say this is THE zelda game to play and quite possibly a flawless game. I've finally started playing it and while I really enjoy the dungeons and enemies I've been finding exploring pretty frustrating and tiresome when I'm trying find my way to whatever the next objective is. Especially when the dark world gets involved. It feels like a headache trying to make progress. Is there anything I should keep in mind while playing? I love doing the world building side stuff, but at a certain point I need more items and such to continue.

As long as you're not spoiling puzzles for yourself, I don't really see the problem with looking up a walkthrough to point you in which direction you're supposed to be going.

Yeah, puzzles that are hard to solve do tend to get quite frustrating.

That's why we have guides! I try to do most of the stuff without a guide but using a guide makes it easier to enjoy the game.

A Link to The Past is certainly a great game, definitely not a favorite of mine, my heart is with Twilight Princess.

Im not of the type to say that reading a walkthrough to get to the next part is a bad idea. You dont need to spoil puzzles or fights, but the game gets "Dark Souls Level" obscure at one point if you specifically don't know where to go.

Yeah, it's not even really difficult puzzles so much as super obscure things you have to do sometimes to get to where you need to be. I'd try looking up one of those spoiler free guides online, and just using it to figure out how to get from one dungeon to the next. The design inside the dungeons is fucking great, it can just be really frustrating wandering around the overworld looking for the right thing to do to get to the next temple. Don't feel bad about looking it up, back in the day we all read Nintendo Power or just bashed our heads against the wall until we figured it out, which isn't exactly fun.

Well... stuff like this just makes me sad. I was, what, 8 when the game was new? I had no problem at all figuring it out and having the time of my life. I honestly can't figure out how you could be having problems progressing. Have games really gotten THAT brain dead? I always get frustrated with modern games that expressly tell you EXACTLY what to do every minute, but I guess that's just normal now.

I know I'm being rude, but it's just really something I think about quite a bit. I get frustrated with most game releases these days and get frustrated that everything is so hand hold-y, but then there are apparently gamers who can't function without that.

As for where to go in the game, if you've made it to the dark world, you have passed the more difficult parts of the game. Agahnim being one of the hardest battles and that worm who knocks you off the platforms being the other.

My only hot tip would be to (spoiler) Play the Ocarina inf front of the weather vain in town to gain a friend who teleports you around the map. This will make traveling easier.

I've found that people who complain about the difficulty of NES games frequently never read the game manuals. I mean, I understand that many people rented or borrowed NES games, and that a lot of those games didn't come with manuals, but Zelda and metered, specifically, came with maps nd guides that basically spelled out how to proceed through most of the game. Today, everything you need to play the game is expected to be contained within the game, but 30 years ago that was not the case.

I won't make the case that video games aren't being dumbed down, but I do appreciate it when a game respects my time. I'm an adult - not a very old adult, really, but I've got a job and other things to do. I can't spend hours doing obscure things to see if something happens. When you're 8 years old, you can - and will - do that, partly because humans are super curious at that age, partly because you've got all the time in the world to do whatever you want at that age, and partly because you get like four games a year at that age. I've got tons of games and not enough time to play them all, if a game expects me to go to some place in the middle of a large map and do something that I haven't been given any hints about, I'm probably going to lose interest real fast. I just don't have that in me these days, I've got games that seem to care more about my time to play. I don't want to be told exactly what to do, but I'd like it if games kept some solid goal in mind as well as some pretty good hints as to how to accomplish that goal.

Besides, as 8-year olds, we didn't so much figure things out as we stumbled into them, and that's the only way some things could be found. That's not necessarily bad game design, but having a clear objective and directions doesn't make a game "dumb"

But all of that said, I never have made it very far into this game either. I thought A Link Between Worlds was pretty damn great, but I just never found myself all that interested in play ALttP anymore. I've also only ever played the game with an emulator and it feels like Link swings his sword half a second too long after I press the button - not the game's or my fault, probably the fault of playing this game on an HDTV and filtered through an emulator.

I guess I just feel differently about the concept of "Respecting time". I'm also an adult and I also don't have much time for games. But that, to me, means I wind up playing older games more than new games. THey respect my time by allowing me to get into the action fast, traverse the map quickly, not have long boring tutorial sections, and have fun gameplay throughout as opposed to playing a boring game just to get to the next tent-pole of content (be that a cut scene, level-up, etc.).

If I find myself with 3 hours on a friday night, if I can play an old game for 3 hours an dhave fun, or fire up a modern game and spend 3 hours just getting ot hte point where fun is able to be had... I'm picking the old game.

YOU HAVE NO SOUL!

Ahem.

I mean, different strokes for different folks...

Well, I'm not gonna wander in here to criticize you. All I'll say without knowing what part specifically is sticking you up, is that you don't need to feel bad about checking a guide or asking questions about what to do next. We did that stuff when we were kids too. The OG Zelda came with a map, we all asked our friends what they did to get wherever, it's fine.

@bananasfoster: Man, I read the manual, and Adventure of Link is still fucked hard.

@bananasfoster: I think I was 12 or 13 when Link to the Past came out, and I don't remember having any trouble beating it. Maybe the GIANT GLOWING YELLOW AURAS in every game along with FLASHING BREAD CRUMBS and NPCs that constantly yell "GET TO THE DOOR" have broken new gamers abilities to play older games that were designed for players to hit walls so that a 2 hour game lasted a long time.

Or... we just don't remember talking to the kids on the bus about video games. Or watching Game Pro TV or Video Power or reading Nintendo Power front to back and back to front. Or reading manuals. Or the Nintendo hotline. Or Kevin Savage.

I think us older folk did play these games differently, but we weren't game wizards knowing exactly which bush to stand under in Super Mario 3 to get the warp whistle. We were just exposed to those sorts of gameplay tips differently than gamers are today. Think of the first time you played Street Fighter 2.

We weren't throwing mad fireballs until you saw some other kid do it, and you freaked out, wide eyed, and went "How'd you do that!?" followed by 90 seconds of hadokens going back and forth. Now, a game would show you how to do it in a 30 second, unskippable cutscene that looped until you successfully perform that trick move.

@bananasfoster: Honestly... It's not that I can't figure it out, it's that the process has not been fun. I'm also not an 8 year old with endless time. Enjoy your high horse though.

You are right that we did have the "kid internet" for tips on how to beat Simon's Quest or The Legend of Zelda. But I think you are over-playing the amount of help those games required. I certainly never used guides as a kid growing up. The only guide I ever looked at was the NES Final Fantasy guide, which I read before I got to play the game because I wanted it before i had access to play it.

The biggest change in gaming, in my opinion, doesn't come from actual games, it comes from expectations. Being stuck in a game didn't used to be as big a deal as it is now because gamers weren't trained to play from tentpole to tentpole. A perfect example of this is Bioshock, Halo and almost any narrative-driven modern game. The third act in these games suck because they are broken. In a traditional gaming setup, the third act should be the hardest part of the game. It's where you use all the skills you have learned in order to fight the last bad guy who should be the hardest boss in the game. Traditional storytelling structure, though, puts the heroes rising and falling struggles squarely in the second act. As as a result, as you are barrelling toward the conclusion of the story, increased difficultly just becomes frustrating, because it's keeping you from the resolution of the story. When you are 2 minutes away from a major plot reveal, the last thing you want to be doing is fighting a super-hard boss that keeps you from advancing the plot.

So in short, games used to have to focus on moment to moment fun instead of relying on story payoffs to drive interest. This trained players not to be as frustrated when the game isn't advancing a story, because there was no story to advance. Or, rather, the game WAS the story.

I'm not frustrated with the game not advancing the story quickly nor am I trying to rush. It's simply that the world has not been fun to navigate or make progress in, it feels like you have a huge nostalgia lens on...

@lackluster: You are literally the first person I have heard complain that the overworld was difficult to navigate in 20 years. It's also one of the best selling games Nintendo has produced and one of the highest rated.

Maybe it's me having nostalgia... or maybe it's not me with the issue...

@bananasfoster: Over 20 years how many people have you discussed without that same nostalgic view? I'm well aware how well recieved this game is and I want to stress again that it's not difficult to navigate the overworld... it's not fun. Going through the same boards over and over again while searching for whatever your next objective may be while going through the same basic encounters can often feel frustrating and at times unavoidable. It's at the point where I don't find traversing the world to be an enjoyable exploration, but a repetitive chore once I've run out of interesting or new things to find. You previous comments stressed on how much you enjoy older games because they are simply about instant fun, but have you considered that it may because, in this case, that you already know every nook and cranny about the overworld so it doesn't take much to get around. Meanwhile for me, and my first time playing it, it feels again like a chore with the occasional glimpse of personality and easter eggs.

@bananasfoster: This is also coming from someone who has played through the original and Zelda II with little difficulty.

That is possible, but I tend not to believe it is the case. For instance, I just played Oracle of Ages for the first time a few weeks ago via emulation, because I had never had the opportunity previously. I didn't find myself struggling with it at all.Granted, the games play differently. But they don't play THAT differently.

Maybe you don't like the game?

That's totally cool. Time to move on?

A couple years I tried to play through this game since I had never played it. I used a walkthrough because in every Zelda game I get stuck at some point. I made it to the second to last dungeon in the game and realized I was just not enjoying the game so I stopped playing. I don't really understand how people think it's one of the best games of all time. I've enjoyed every other Zelda I've played a lot more.

@bananasfoster: Never struggled with the Oracles games either.

@cubidog1: @ekami: The thing is that I do like some aspects. I guess I was looking more to see if people could tell me the appeal of the overworld area because the appeal of the dungeons and enemies is pretty obvious.

I definitely found myself getting frustrated with the game too when I played it earlier this year, but that was more at the combat than anything else. I was very bad at it. I did end up using a guide a couple times when I got stuck, and to find some hidden upgrade type things too. If it helps you enjoy this (great) game, then I think it's okay to use a guide. Just don't use it too much, and spoil the good parts!

I totally agree about using a guide for the overworld parts of the game, I think you can get through most dungeons without a guide. There are some items in the overworld that you will need later on in the game that can be very hard to find if you dont have lots of time to explore. As far as the combat is concerned my advice would be patience. For example charge your sword up for a spin attack and wait for some enemies to come to you. The boomerang is also really really helpful for stunning enemies. Also, you dont need to kill every enemy you come across you can run past them or stun them and move on especially in the overworld.

I just beat this game for the first time. I havent played ocarina in a while but as of now i would rank LTTP as the better game. The ending was great as it showed Hyrule and all the characters you met along the way. Like most Zelda games I have played I felt it dragging towards the end, but the ending showed that its the journey that makes this game memorable.

You are not alone. I have tried playing that game a few times but always got bored and quit. Use a guide if you feel for it but dont get stuck in the habit of reading a guide more than you play and enjoy the game.