A Whole Lotta Words About A Link Between Worlds

Alright, I'm going to be writing and editing and moving things in different spots as I try to organize all of this, so if it's a mess I apologize but not really. So over the past couple months I've been playing Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds on my own time. Aardee lent me his 3DS (kind of on a joke, I didn't expect him to send it to me) and my friend from high school lent me his copy, so it was a mishmash to actually get it happening, but I'm very glad it did. The game really puts a completely different spin on the Zelda formula, and the whole game really takes on a different feel, for better or worse. I did end up getting 100% of the items, heart pieces, etc. The only thing I didn't do was a sort of optional thing that I'll get into later. But I think what I'm going to try and do is list out the good, the bad, and the otherwise of this game. In case you've never had a chance to play this game, or maybe you're just interested in reading my blabber for a few hundred(thousand) words, grab a drink because I got a lot to blabber about.

Renting equipment:
I have no idea how the development cycle of this game went, but I have to believe this was possibly the first major design decision made, or at least a very early one, because this concept fundamentally changes everything about the game, in both good and bad ways. If you don't know, instead of the normal formula of entering a dungeon, poking around for a little bit, finding a major item, then finishing the dungeon with it, the game has a shop set up by a funny little character named Ravio. Ravio sets up his shop in your house shortly after the game starts, and you can rent (or buy) nearly every major item from him. Renting is quite a bit cheaper, but if you die, you lose anything you're only renting. Rupees are plentiful in LBW; I think I ended up collecting 26 thousand throughout my playthrough without ever once just swiping around for them to farm, so acquiring all the items permanently wasn't too much of a hassle, I struggled a couple of times to figure out what I wanted to buy next, but this was most likely due to my immense analysis paralysis. At any rate, this entire system changes the whole structure of the game, in a number of ways, which I'll talk about in the next few paragraphs. Overall, I think this was a really interesting and fun spin on the classic formula by itself, and it was really fun to use.

Merging:
The main new mechanic introduced in this game is Merging, in which Link can flatten himself into a little fun painting and walk across walls, allowing him to traverse certain obstacles that would otherwise be impossible to navigate. I thought this mechanic was cool, and fit the story well, but honestly it felt very underutilized. There were a handful of times where I'd be sitting in a room, completely unsure of what to do, and then remember, "Oh yeah, I can merge to go across this gap." I did take a couple of breaks from the game here and there, but I think the main mechanic should have really been utilized more, especially in the dungeons. Other than a couple of cool sequences in the "Light World" dungeons, and a couple of cool boss fights, you're only ever using it to traverse different spots on the overworld, and even then there's not a ton of things you need it for. A really cool idea, but maybe they just ran out of uses for it, so it felt a little half-baked.

Overworld:
Speaking of the overworld, this game takes HEAVY influence from LttP, from dungeon names to enemies and bosses used, but most notably, the overworld. If Nintendo didn't make this game, it'd be suing the pants off of whoever did with how close Hyrule was between both games, the only difference being instead of there being a Light and Dark World, it was Hyrule and Lorule. (more on that later?) Original idea, didn't stole. Again, I don't have any real idea on how the process of designing this game happened, but it seems like pretty early on they decided to make a love letter to LttP, much like Oracle of Season started as a remake of Zelda 1? Idk, just conjecture. Anyways, if you've played your share of LttP, navigating the overworld will feel a little familiar, but there's enough of a difference to not feel stale. The overworld is also where the majority of the usage of merging will occur, whether it's just traversing across things, or using the numerous portals between Hyrule and Lorule. The other unique aspect is that, other than a couple of times, you're free to do dungeons in just about any order you want. The first time I stepped foot in Lorule, I tried to move around and figure out where I could go before realizing I could go pretty much anywhere. I still ended up tackling the Lorule dungeons in the mostly "conventional" order if you go by their names, but it never felt like I was really confined to any particular areas, which really made the overworld much more enjoyable to explore and traverse.  It's comfy, but still unique and open enough to feel new.

Lorule (and story I guess):
As mentioned earlier, Lorule is the Dark World equivalent in LBW, and it serves a bit of a deeper function in the story than just "Hyrule but bad". All in all, the story of the game, usually an afterthought in most Zelda games for me, is actually pretty decent. Yuga, the main antagonist, wants to revive Ganon because... reasons (ok, not all of it is decent). He turns all the seven sages into paintings to kidnap them, and revive Ganon in Lorule to take over both kingdoms. In an early fight against him, he tries to turn Link into a painting, but instead of being trapped like all of Yuga's other victims, Link is able to survive and move around because of a bracelet Ravio gave him as thanks for using Link's house for his shop. (the story gets decent soon, I promise) Link goes through the rest of the Hyrule dungeons, gets the Master Sword, but after facing Yuga a second time, you find out it's too late, and you'll have to travel to Lorule to save the sages. (As I'm typing out, I'm realizing how less decent this story is, lol) In Lorule, you meet Hilda, the Lorule equivalent of Zelda, who holds back the newly formed Yuganon, or whatever the fused Yuga and Ganon is called, while you rescue the sages. Yadda yadda yadda, rescue the sages, they give you the Triforce of Courage, then you show up (and this is where it gets decent) and Hilda has been using you the whole time! Lorule's Triforce was destroyed by all the fighting caused over control of it, so Hilda learns of Hyrule, and decides to essentially steal Hyrule's Triforce in order to fix it. Ravio jumps in, revealing himself to be the Lorule version of Link (whoa) and convinces her that this is a bad idea. You kill Yuganon, and Hilda helps both you and Zelda get back home, where you use the Triforce to fix Lorule anyways. Ok, so maybe it's not the GREATEST story ever written, but the two twists at the end were actually surprising for me, and again, I usually hardly pay attention to the main story. Overall, not gonna win any awards, but they put a little more effort into it, which was nice.

THE DUNGEONS:
Ok, I thought this was gonna be one of the first things I talked about, but I started talking about other stuff first, but we're finally here. If you know me, you know I put a LOT on the dungeon design in Zelda games when it comes to my enjoyment of them. Unique areas and interesting puzzles that culminate in a memorable boss fight is when a Legend of Zelda game is at its absolute finest and let me tell you, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds for the Nintendo 3DS really... doesn't deliver at all in this :( This is where the rental equipment and open overworld combine to actually weaken a very crucial element of the game. Since you're allowed to tackle the Lorule dungeons in almost any order, and rent and purchase equipment whenever you want, the game can't really expect you to have a full inventory of cool items, or even a ton of health, and the dungeons all end up neutered because of it. Game Maker's Toolkit did a really good video as a part of the Boss Keys series talking about this, (highly recommend that channel even if you're only partially interested in game design) and it didn't really click with me until watching it, but I really only noticed how meh the dungeons were until after I had completed a couple of the Lorule ones. I kept expecting the game to naturally scale up the challenge, but it couldn't, lest another player stumbled into this dungeon first and be supremely unfit to handle it. The other thing that really threw me was that most dungeons were still focused on a singular item, and required you to have it before you could enter. Tower of Hera required you to have the Hammer to smack down some pegs before entering, Ice Palace needed you to melt a giant block of ice with the Fire Rod, etc. But once you entered the dungeon, you already knew what item was going to be used, and since the game couldn't count on you having anything else, that was the whole thing. Since there's not a lot of space to explore with just one item in every dungeon, I very often found myself thinking, "Ok, now things are gonna start to get spicy, oh wait, here's the boss." And speaking of the boss fights, the first couple were pretty fun and challenging, but again, with them all having to be set up as though it was the first Lorule Dungeon, it very quickly became a matter of tanking any damage and slicing and dicing to victory. There was a handful of equipment still stored in the dungeons, such as the Titan's Mitts, the Hylian Shield, and the Blue Tunic, but nearly every time I opened the "Big" chest in a dungeon, it was met with, "Oh, it's that. Fine." This was especially frustrating when I spent nearly the entire game without the Pegasus Boots, thinking they must be in one of these dang dungeons, getting to Ice Palace, the last Lorule dungeon on my list, and opening up... a Stamina Bar booster :| (oh, I haven't even talked about the Stamina Bar, I'll get to that next) Overall, the dungeons were fairly bland, most lacked a distinct feel and challenge to them, but I guess that's the downside of how open everything was.

Stamina Bar:
Nearly forgot about this until I mentioned it in the last section, so I'll just quickly mention it before going on. The Stamina Bar basically serves two functions, it serves as your timer for how long you can merge into walls, and instead of using bombs, arrows, or magic meter to use your equipment, it used a portion of your Stamina Bar instead. For the most part, this wasn't really anything that hindered what you wanted to do, the only times I really noticed it was when I was using the Merge ability along with an item like the Bow or Bombs, otherwise, if you wanted to do a thing, you probably had the Stamina to do the thing. The nice thing that the Stamina Bar allowed for was making those bomb, arrow, and magic pot drops that are so common completely unneeded, so enemies only ever dropped hearts and rupees. This makes farming the latter really unnecessary since you were getting so much from just your natural exploring and fighting. I don't know if this same mechanic would work other Zeldas, but it was good in this one, for sure.

Sidequests and Minigames:
This game has an INSANE amount of side content, way more than I would have expected from a portable Zelda. I initially wasn't sure whether or not I wanted to 100% this game, but I'm very glad I did, because having to search through every nook and cranny of this game led me to some fun stuff I wouldn't have found otherwise. This game has the Maiamai, basically the Golden Skulltulas of LBW, 100 little pink crabs that got lost or something all over Hyrule and Lorule. Unfortunately for me, I didn't find the cave to start this sidequest until I was through 4 or 5 of the Lorule dungeons, so there was a LOT of backtracking involved. However, as I said, searching around for all of these things helped me find some areas and minigames I'd previously missed. Not going to go into all of them, but I'll mention the worst one, a baseball minigame that felt like it was more difficult due to my previous experience with baseball video games, and the best one, the Treacherous Tower, a gauntlet of up to 50 floors of combat, combat, and more combat. The one thing I didn't complete was a Cucco dodging course, in which surviving for 999 seconds on the hardest difficulty gives you a big Cucco in your house. Thankfully that doesn't show up on the inventory screen at all, so I don't count it for 100% :P Like I said though, this was WAY more extra content than I initially expected, and if you're a completionist like me, there's a lot to do in this game, so I really enjoyed it.

Combat:
I guess I never really talked about the combat, but it's pretty standard-fare for a 2D Zelda. You swing your sword and a lot of the times things go dead. Sometimes you gotta do something different. The only real change comes if you get all 100 Maiamai and get the beefed up spin attack, otherwise it's just hack and slash. This game ended up being pretty dang easy. I've played a lot of Zelda, but I almost always struggle with something (or multiple somethings) along the way. I was pretty shocked to find out that I didn't die a single time throughout my playthrough, and I think I only needed a bottle fairy once or twice, but I guess that's maybe again due to the setup of the open overworld and equipment system. Thinking back, that's probably why I enjoyed the Treacherous Tower so much. For the first time, there was a real challenge in getting through all 50 floors. Going back through the second time with the beefy spin attack made a few things easier, but it was still pretty fun. All in all, not gonna blow your mind, but it's not gonna frustrate you either.

Alright, I think I've said my piece. Not sure if anyone's still gonna be reading this far down, but if you are, hope you enjoyed it. If anything, writing this all while it's fresh in my mind was helpful. I try to talk a lot about things that I think are well or poorly designed while I'm playing a game on stream, and not being able to do that with this game since it's about impossible to stream meant that all of this was circling around for a while, so it's nice to finally get it all out. Like I said, it's a really good game overall, there's a few design decisions that really shape the game for better and for worse, but I really loved playing it. Gonna do that thing I always do where I watch a speedrun or two after finishing my casual playthrough just to see what they're like, and I'm hoping there's some people out there doing 100%, because that seems like a really fun time. Ok that's it, 8/10.

TY read,
Glib