In the ancient past, three Goddesses created the land of Hyrule and the Sacred Realm. As a sign of their pact with the people of Hyrule, they left behind a fragment of their powers in the form of the Triforce and left them in the Sacred Realm to bathe Hyrule in their light. Yet many coveted the power of the Triforce and soon conflicts arose due to its power. A long time before the game started, a desert bandit named Ganondorf fought his way into the Sacred Realm and obtained the Triforce. His evil heart twisted the Sacred Realm into a dark world. To stop the new godlike Ganon from conquering Hyrule as well, the Seven Sages and the Hylian Knights fought Ganon's forces and succeeded in sealing him and his minions into the Sacred Realm, to be forgotten in all but Legend. Yet ages later Hyrule finds itself in terrible peril from the elements, only to be saved by the mysterious priest Agahnim. This miracle gave the priest easy access to the royalty of Hyrule and soon murmurs begin that he had usurped the throne and taken over the kingdom. He used the royal guard to hunt down the descendants of the Seven Sages, and he performed dark rituals that people were afraid to speak aloud. One fateful stormy night, Link is awakened by a voice from a woman, calling him to the castle. He sees his uncle arm himself with his old shield and armor preparing to leave. Link questions him of his actions, but the uncle assures him everything is fine and asks him to stay home. Still bothered by his dream and his uncle's strange behavior, Link sneaks into Hyrule Castle only to find his uncle mortally wounded. The voice had been calling both of them and belonged to Princess Zelda. Tasked with her rescue, Link battles his way to the dungeon and frees her. They escape to a local sanctuary where Zelda informs Link that Agahnim is a servant of darkness trying to break the seal of the Seven Sages. With Zelda as the last sage left, Link must seek out three artifacts that represent the three goddesses as proof of his worthiness to obtain the legendary Master Sword, which is said to be the only weapon capable of defeating evil. From here, Link's journey begins...
It is difficult to really know where to begin discussing Link to the Past, we've reached another iconic title by Nintendo, and the one that ultimately laid down the groundwork for every entry that came afterwards until Breath of the Wild finally changed the formula again. That shows how important this game was and how well-recieved its design was that if was left unchanged for over twenty five years by Nintendo. After the success of the original Legend of Zelda, the design team went to work on its sequel. Miyamoto and the team chose to keep some of the original's key elements of exploration, engaging dungeons, and myriad of secrets to uncover throughout the game like the original. Yet the team decided to move the game into a new direction by creating a game more focused on combat, a more traditional RPG elements likely inspired by Dragon Quests success, and giving better direction by implementing RPG standards like towns full of NPCs to give hints and context to the player.Anyone who has played Zelda II: Link's Adventure will tell you how successful that was for them, but for those who haven't played it, even Miyamoto himself discusses the game with a sense of regret as he felt the game came out half-baked at best. The radical change from a top down open world to a more traditional RPG with an Action-RPG battle system didn't exactly fly well with fans of the original. The game was still successful, but for reasons never stated (or I simply never bothered to research) Miyamoto and Nintendo chose to close out the NES era with only two Zelda titles. The franchise would stay dormant until the very early 90s when Nintendo would launch their new console, the Super Nintendo.
The success and accolades thrown at Super Mario World may have helped Nintendo with the idea of dusting off their most popular IPs from their first console to help launch their new system straight into the stratosphere of success, and with that Miyamoto finally came back to The Legend of Zelda. What I find interesting about this game in hindsight is how much of a marriage it is of the previous two entries. From just looking at the game in action or casual play, it would seem like the Zelda team simply back peddled away from Zelda II and basically decided to update the winning formula of the original, but that's not completely true. In stead I'd argue that LttP inherited a lot of the positive elements from Zelda II and married them to the core gameplay of the original. It only takes playing the first ten minutes of all three games to really understand what I'm talking about here.The opening I described at the beginning of this game is really the opening twenty minutes of LttP, which is a powerful narrative force to guide the player towards a direction, which is not too different from Zelda II where your first task is to find the first town from Hyrule Castle and talk to all the NPCs to finally get an idea of what's actually going on and what you should be doing. LttP is far more RPG in its structure than the first game. Likewise, despite most of its context being relegated to the manual as well, Zelda II has a more robust narrative than the first Zelda title did, and LttP continues that trend as well which can both be seen within the game and in its manual as well. What's even more interesting here is realizing from these sources that LttP is a prequel to the original games, and serves to finally establish a mythology for the franchise. While causal Zelda fans may believe that Ganon's backstory was told in Ocarina of Time, the truth is that LttP established his backstory originally, even the fact he was a desert bandit and originally named Ganondorf. LttP finally breathed a real sense of scale and mystique to the Zelda series, establishing an origin for the Triforce and Ganon, as well as introducing the concept of the Goddesses and the Master Sword. LttP is less of aimlessly exploring a large world desperately destroying everything in the landscape in the hopes of finding an item or clue to your next task, but instead is a hero's journey to explore the past of a land finally given life.
Now mechanically speaking, LttP brings us back to the original game's design with a top down view and simple combat that can be augmented by the various tools and items discovered over the course of your journey, but oddly enough, the game kept Zelda II's idea of giving Link magic. Its been retooled to work with the classic formula in mind, but its nice that Link has far more combat options than the first game did. Even weapons like the hammer made it back to the game as well. I also appreciate the splitting of differences about sword upgrades. Link only really changes weapons once in the game, but the Master Sword can be further upgraded twice by undergoing important quests or discovering the right people to further upgrade. This gives a nice upgrade feeling to Link's arsenal without diminishing the story significance of the Master Sword. In fact, the very idea that Link can undergo quests in this game is actually pretty interesting and feels closer to the rudimentary idea of it used in Zelda II. Likewise, LttP drops the idea of pure exploration items like the Ladder and Raft from the first game, and generally makes sure that most of their items serve multiple functions. Items like the Hookshot and the Dash Boots can be both used to expand Link's mobility while also adding to his arsenal of moves to deal with all the monsters he has to fight. This ends up making items feel more important than previous installments as well and adds a better sense of progression for the player than the original.
So now that I've bored you to death with all the old ideas LttP revamped, let's finally discuss the elements LttP brought to the series. It primarily comes down to game/story structure as well as the idea of themed dungeons and bosses based around a gimmick. Finally, the game introduces a major gimmick that becomes crucial to completing the game.Let's get the easy one out of the way first. LttP introduces the idea of themed dungeons based around using the item treasure to explore it thoroughly. The concept isn't terribly new as the previous two games did it to much lesser extent, but here its front and center. Since Hyrule has finally been given more of a concept of landscape than its predecessors, it made sense to really play around with it here. The structure of these dungeons are really fun and interesting because you basically have to push your way around to find every possible path without the dungeon's key item, before you finally find it and it completely unlocks the rest of the dungeon, making the second half of the dungeon a fun breeze as you finally have the means to reach those hard to get to places. Some bosses even require the token dungeon item to be used to win, but that element didn't completely come into play until Link's Awakening. LttP is cool in the fact that the bosses still have a variety of ways to be beaten, my personal favorite being the Moth boss from the Swamp Dungeon that can be easily taken down by launching captured bees at it. Turtle Rock's boss even has the distinction of requiring an optional overworld item to take them down easier which you almost never see in the series anymore. This new format ends up making the dungeons not only feel more distinct from each other visually, but also more interesting as they become more of a puzzle now for the player to overcome. I feel a big difference between the dungeons in LttP vs. ones from the first two entries is that the first two game's dungeons are often more memorable for personal experiences like getting rubbed out quickly the first time Wizzrobes pop up, or the player banging their head on trying to find the Hidden Temple as opposed to the dungeon layout itself or some interesting facet of it like the Blind Dungeon in Dark World.
The other two distinct elements go hand in hand. The introduction of a two part quest structure and the major gimmick that ties it all together. In the case of the quest structure, we're introduced to Zelda's main narrative which is always Link discovering and getting embroiled with the problems of Hyrule at the beginning, and then being tasked with tracking down the means to save it, usually culminating in the acquisition of the Master Sword itself. From here, Link now has a means to fight back against the evil, but discovers he'll need to collect another major artifact in order to finally have his real showdown with Ganon. For LttP, Link's initial quest is to find the items to show his worthiness to wield the Master Sword and obtain it. His second quest involves him plunging into the Dark World to rescue the Seven Sages to prevent Ganon's return. With few exceptions, every major Zelda title follows a formula similar to this. Framing all of this together is the game's core gimmick, in the case of LttP, the shifting between the Light and Dark Realms which takes advantage of geographical differences between the similar worlds to progress. What's truly unique about this gimmick, and likely why later installments like to re-use variations of it, is the fact that this essentially doubled the scope of the game by having Link traverse two different maps. When you really think about it, the limited graphics of the NES entries allowed for larger maps, I feel its safe to say the map to Zelda 1 is easily larger than the map for the standard Hyrule in LttP, but this Light/Dark gimmick ended up allowing the SNES incarnation to have just as much room to explore. It's also helped that the game is just more dense in terms of secrets and content like mini-games and engaging NPCs to deal with like the Zoras or the Magic Potion Witch. Not to mention that this adds a new layer of puzzle to the game as you try to figure out how to get around geographical hiccups by switching back and forth between the worlds. It was an incredibly novel concept in 1991 for Zelda. The smaller maps also made it easier to remember between the two and the map themselves have a bit more visual markers to help players distinguish between them to make this gimmick puzzle work really well, so the smaller world actually works better overall.
In my original write-up, I felt I mostly tried my best to convey how important this game was to the Zelda franchise despite being overlooked by its N64 successors. For this new one, I hope I was able to convey how much LttP is really the Zelda team taking the best elements of its predecessors and building something truly fun and innovative for a new generation, which is really how I feel sequels should work. For me, it's no real surprise that this game held such a major impact on the rest of the franchise, and my mic dropping moment for all of this is simply the fact that it has the best Zelda Commercial ever.
Coming Up Next: In the year 20XX...
Original Write Up
I've been having issues writing this entry. I mean where do you begin? Like other major Nintendo games on this list, I feel like it's hard coming up with why this game is so awesome because it's pretty obvious. A Link to the Past made Zelda. I know there were two entries before it and they were pretty damn good games in their own right, but everything people know and expect from a Zelda title appeared in this game first. Nintendo has effectively been remaking this game with a different gimmick for the last 26 years, that's how smurfing good it is. So I find myself a bit besides myself needing to justify this entry being here.
One thing I can say is that one of the things that really drew me into this entry was a manga adaption of the story written and drawn by Shotaro Ishinomori, the author of Cyborg 009 and it was published in Nintendo Power magazine back in the day. To this day, that version of the story partly plays in my head when I play through this game. From the fairy companion to Link conversing with Zelda to the bittersweet ending. The manga left quite an impression on me and was one of the many things that endeared this game to me. I will also say that Nintendo seems to have been influenced by it as well since several elements show up in later installments like Link transforming into a wolf like creature in the Dark World, a heavier emphasis on a deeper bond between Link and Zelda, the DW has a moon with a face on it, even the climatic battle was partially re-used in Wind Waker for the match against Ganondorf, and it kind of started the trend of bittersweet endings in the series. If you haven't had a chance to read it, you should check it out.
In truth, A Link to the Past was a game that crossed over from the bare bones plots of the NES era that simply had you wandering all across Hyrule until you found something, into a story that made you feel like you were embarking on an adventure. What makes it unique from the games that came after it is that ALttP still retains several of the most open elements that had defines the earlier installments. It feels like a marriage between the original and the new RPG like elements that Zelda II introduced. You're not just given a simple task, you start the quest answering a call from Zelda, get caught up in an evil scheme that makes you a criminal. traverse the world for the three artifacts to prove your worth, lose Zelda, gain the Master Sword, storm Hyrule castle, lose Zelda again but slay the villain, only to find out he's not the real enemy and you must explore a new dark version of the world with more dungeons and dangers to rescue seven sages before fighting Ganon for the Triforce. It doesn't take rocket science to see how that feels so damn epic compared to "travel Hyrule to find the Shrine/Palaces to gain the Triforce so you can save Zelda" which had been the plot of the earlier installments. ALttP made Zelda, Link, and Ganon feel like real people, I mean you get to meet Zelda right off the bat for once and she actually speaks with you throughout the game. ALttP also transformed Hyrule into a real place and not just some fantasy land nonsense. It was given a history which you explore and it makes your actions feel like it has some more weight to it. Finding a creepy guy who wants to hand you a sword if you have enough hearts can certainly stir your imagination, but it felt so cool actually undertaking a quest to retrieve THE sword. You can even power the damn thing up which was pretty epic. This might be my main love for this game, it gave narrative purpose to the franchise.
Even the dungeons have largely become legacy elements such as a Water Temple involving the hookshot and hitting switches to change the water elevation. The Ice Dungeon was the first dungeon to pull the whole multi-story dungeon where you have to climb to the top so you can drop down to the basement levels to fight the boss. It even has cool story type dungeons like the Thieves Hideout and Blind the Thief who turned out to be a really clever boss fight. The Hookshot, Mirror Shield, Bottles, swimming gear, and the damn Master Sword all made their debut in this game. We witness the transition from the Silver/Light arrows being Ganon's weakness to the Master Sword itself. The gameplay was expanded to incorporate better NPCs with more personality, better sidequests, mini-games, and the pieces of heart became the ultimate finders keeper quest. The brilliant way the game utilized the transition from the Light World and Dark World for puzzle solving has frankly never been matched by any future mechanic in the series. It was a key element to actually beating the game and mastery was the only way to achieve pure completion.
Last edited by Wolf Kanno; 01-27-2020 at 09:09 PM.
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