Link-ing My Worlds

Hello, my name is Alex. I am actually the younger brother of Adam and long time friend of everyone on the Basement Gamer. A little bit about me: I've been playing games from a very young age, as long as I can remember, really. The NES we had was hooked up in my parents' bedroom, so my brother and I couldn't play it 100% of the time. Then we got a SNES and I was only a 5 year old little kid or so, without the dexterity to complete any game on my own.

2 Years later when N64 was made available, I remember the day we got that from our local store, I think we bought it from Blockbuster at the time. I couldn't even tell you honestly. But oh! It was a glorious day when we went home and popped in Super Smash Brothers. Holy hell did we pump hours upon hours into that console, much like everybody else in the late '90s. Not to mention Mario Kart and then... The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and 007 Goldeneye. Fast forward over 15 years of gaming and here we are today.

But I'm not here to talk about the good ol' days. No no! Not today. Today I'm here to talk to you about The Legend of Zelda, but not Ocarina...sadly. On this day I'll talk about the most recent addition to the franchise. Nintendo originally started developing it as a remake for one of the most iconic Super NES games of all time, A Link to the Past, which was later decided to be made into a completely new game, with fresh mechanics never before seen in the franchise, labeled "A Link Between Worlds".

My first thoughts while playing this game were, "Alright, so they're mixing A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time". That is to say they took the best aspects of the bird's eye view Zelda games and the Third Person Zelda games, both of which have been blended absolutely amazingly. Where the other DS Zelda titles had you doing these gimmicky touch screen commands—such as drawing the path of the boomerang, etc—the developers instead made the touch screen your User Interface, where you change your items, look at your map, so on and so forth. All of which can be done in real time or by pausing the game as is customary in Zelda games. Then we come to the actual gameplay which is executed as you'd expect: everything is smooth and fantastic.

A couple of things I welcomed with open arms, much to my eventual dismay. Firstly, being that they added the possibility to play on a harder difficulty. This is where my frustration began. The first 8 hours of playtime was just me dying over and over again in every single situation. Previously, I very rarely died playing any Zelda game. Most of my deaths in previous titles were attributed to not paying any attention to my health or simply dying strictly during boss fights. This is no longer the case on the harder difficulty, and it's not because of smarter enemies, more difficult enemies, or even just more enemies. No; the harder difficulty was simply Link taking more damage. But not just more damage, no, that would be too simple. It is a ridiculous amount of damage. Simply put, a basic octorok deals about 4 hearts of damage, something a little bit stronger like a Crab would do about 8 hearts of damage. So any dungeon monster deals about 8 hearts of damage give or take 4. The only time you can ever take less than 4 hearts of damage is when you accidentally hurt yourself. So until you're 4 or 5 dungeons in, when you get 9 hearts, everything kills you in one hit. This wouldn't be such an awful and frustrating thing if the other new mechanic introduced didn't exist.

The other mechanic is the fact that you no longer get important items in the dungeon and therefore keep your items after you acquire them. No, this installment introduces a merchant who basically steals your home and turns it into his store, then allows you to rent any item of your choosing. You choose whichever items are your favorite and run with those until you die and the merchant takes them back. So couple that with dying at every corner, and you get the time consuming and annoying lap race that is: Rent your items at your house, walk to a dungeon trying not to die along the way, enter the dungeon and try to progress to the boss, try to defeat the boss, but probably die along the way, respawn at your house and repeat.

Luckily this isn't actually as bad as I'm making it out to be for one reason. That being said, you meet a witch early on in the game who allows you to fast travel to certain statues that you can activate, which also act as save points. These statues are excellently placed directly in front of almost every single dungeon as well as all over the world map. This made my trips back to the dungeons much faster after dying. However, once you unlock the ability to purchase and keep items even beyond death, the entire problem dissipates and the game becomes even more amazing.

All in all, A Link Between Worlds is fantastic and I am enjoying every minute of it . I'm finding myself unable to put down my 3DS, even as I write this I have my trusty Link Between Worlds box in my pocket ready to be taken out and continue my quest. Like a good book, it is always at my side.