A Link To The Past Has Never Been Beaten
[Retro Review] Replaying one of the greatest games on the SNES and the best entry in the 2D Zelda series.
What makes a video game truly classic?
Is it timeless gameplay? Design philosophy evolves and shifts over time and standard control layouts are in flux but a sense of fun is a universal concept and marker of quality; we can’t expect old games to play like modern ones but just maybe, some games remain fun forever.
Is it aesthetic brilliance and immersion? Atari games are still fun to play but the spartan aesthetics are not conducive to a rich atmosphere or pleasant on the eyes; graphics, sound and presentation do matter. A fantastic soundtrack, stellar art-direction and distinct visuals can ensnare you in an experience and make those lines of 1’s and 0’s feel like a second home.
Is it the story and lore? Having something important to say? The first duty of art and entertainment isn’t necessarily to entertain, some prefer to ask deeper questions of the audience and to weave a yarn that goes above and beyond the usual video game; I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday but I can still remember the deep lore of certain digital worlds I’ve travelled and how the themes made me feel.
Is it technical achievement? Every console has its very own Tears of the Kingdom, Shenmue 2, Halo 4 or God Of War 2: video games that pushed the technology to the absolute limit and delivered the most ambitious game possible on the hardware available.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to wax poetic on you. I bring up these questions because in my opinion, by every conceivable metric, The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past is a true classic… no, it’s a masterpiece. I know what some of you are thinking “A Link to the Past is great? Wow Scanlines, that’s cutting edge.”
But it’s remarkable that after more than 30 years and with other masterpieces like Ocarina Of Time and Breath Of The Wild coming out of the Zelda franchise that the humble A Link To The Past: a game smaller than a JPEG and released on a console weaker than a Nintendo DS, is still firmly in contention for the very best this series has to offer. Some will chalk this assessment up to nostalgia and A Link To The Past won’t be high on everyone’s personal list of favourites but I didn’t grow up with it: my first time playing this game was at the age of 19 and with no nostalgic fondness or longing for decades gone I would still place A Link To The Past in my personal top 3 in the Zelda franchise.
Sometimes you play a classic and it truly lives up to that word.
A Fork In The Road
Once again, let’s take a trip back to the Hyrule Historia and to the official The Legend Of Zelda timeline.
A Link To The Past takes place after Ocarina Of Time making it a sequel to a game that wouldn’t release for another 7 years yet. This game is the first entry in the Downfall Timeline: a dark, alternate turn of events where the Hero of Time is slain by Ganon and he collects all 3 golden triangles of the Triforce, what follows is a brutal conflict called the Imprisoning War where the villain is tossed into the Sacred Realm which is then sealed up tight leaving Ganon very much alive and well to scheme and to gestate with the whole Golden Power in his possession. The 7 Wise Men (retconned to be the Sages in later Zelda games) effectively kicked the ball down the road for later generations.
The entire Downfall Timeline has been criticised as an inelegant attempt by Nintendo to canonise the original trilogy of Zelda games when they had left little room for them with the writing of subsequent Zelda titles but I don’t mind it. One thing I do find ironic, however, is that the timeline where Ganondorf is defeated and the supposed good ending: the Adult Timeline which leads to The Wind Waker is the only one in which Hyrule is utterly wiped from the face of the Earth, I’d like to think it suggests a kind of divine balance of good and evil necessary in the Zelda universe but much more likely is Nintendo needing to contrive a way for an Ocarina Of Time sequel to be set entirely on the high seas with a cartoon aesthetic.
Getting back on track, there isn’t really anything in A Link To The Past that contradicts the lore of Ocarina Of Time or vice-versa, this speaks both to the expertise of 1990’s Nintendo and serves as a reminder that despite the protestations of some, these are two games that were always connected; Ocarina began life as a 3D retelling of that Imprisoning War.
Palace Coup
A Link To The Past begins generations after the Imprisoning War where the Kingdom of Hyrule has entered something of a moral decay culminating in the overthrow of its king by a dark wizard named Agahnim.
Agahnim has seized control of Hyrule Castle and its army through dark magic and seeks to reopen the now corrupted Sacred Realm. Instead of the Wise Men and Knights of Hyrule that should have been maintaining the seal rising to repel the wizard, he instead manages to kidnap the Maidens: the Wise Men’s descendants virtually unopposed and but two ‘knights’ remain to stop him: the swordsman Link and his Uncle who live in a hut just south of the castle.
One foreboding night, rain lashing at the windows and lightning slicing the dark sky, Link’s Uncle wakes him on his way out the door, sword and shield in hand he forbids the young boy from following before stepping out across the threshold.
Naturally, you disobey Link’s Uncle, taking the Lamp from the chest across the room and following him out into the downpour, making your way up the path past guards, a wide moat and finally into the secret passage leading into the castle. It’s there that Link finds his Uncle mortally wounded, either from the fall above or some unseen evil, he hands Link the sword and shield, teaches him the spin attack and instructs the boy to save Princess Zelda before succumbing to his wounds on the spot.
Once Zelda has been spirited away from the castle, Link finds himself in a Sanctuary, wanted for kidnapping the Princess and with an army of brainwashed soldiers at his heels, Link must acquire the Master Sword, defeat Agahnim and rescue the vanished Maidens.
A Link To The Past isn’t far off 35 years old but even with the limited technology and ability to tell complex narratives on the SNES its plot and lore prove to be a much more enriching experience than that of its two 8-Bit predecessors on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Today, the Zelda franchise is almost impenetrably vast for those looking to play entries further back than the Nintendo Switch with sequels to other entries lacking a coherent naming structure, multiplayer-only titles and spin-offs that still contribute to the wider franchise storyline but A Link To The Past was only the third The Legend Of Zelda game when it launched, the burden was on it alone to bring Zelda into the 16-Bit era and to improve upon everything that came before and I think it sticks the landing as smoothly as possible.
A Link To The Past represents a perfect middle ground for me in regards to its open-endedness and player guidance.
Later Zelda games: particularly the 3D ones of the Wii-era were completely excessive with their hand-holding and railroading of the player, on the other hand the NES games were absurdly cryptic and are virtually unplayable on a first go without outside assistance such as a map; A Link To The Past can be completed easily without any external help. This isn’t a criticism of those first 2 Zelda games because up until the 16-Bit era (and a while after it) the assumption was that every player had read the manual before playing, it’s just one of those things that makes A Link To The Past timeless among its dated contemporaries.
Tonally I would say that A Link To The Past skews a bit lighter than Zelda 2: The Adventure Of Link and returns to the feel of the original game.
A Tale Of 2 Dimensions
The improved sprites, parallax scrolling and rich colours of the 16-bit era tend to give games on the SNES and Mega Drive a timeless appearance and A Link To The Past is no exception.
Hyrule’s overworld bursts with lush greens, is accented with cotton clouds and dotted with roaring waterfalls, magic spells look devastating with arcs of fire and lightning shaking the screen, sprites are well-detailed and the power of the Super Nintendo allows A Link To The Past to even have some 3D effects sprinkled in like the maidens’ crystals and the floating triangles of the Triforce in the intro. It’s an impressive showing and undoubtedly helped Nintendo get one over Sega who had beaten them to market with their own 16-bit console: the Mega Drive, which was marketed as the more powerful option.
I chose to play the SNES original so I couldn’t capture my own screenshots but if you have a Switch with an online subscription you can experience A Link To The Past yourself and its excellent presentation, even if the inferior LCD/OLED technology doesn’t always do it justice.
I mentioned in last week’s review of Twilight Princess that older Zelda games took on a more high-fantasy, Arthurian look and A Link To The Past is really the height of that, with a dash of Alice In Wonderland too. In the Dark World (which we’ll discuss later) every NPC is some kind of goblin or anthropomorphic animal with Link himself becoming a pink bunny until you get a specific item, the grass is a toxic green and the water looks like a kind of slime, it’s all so full of whimsy and visually enthralling; some of those trees lining the woodland paths of the Dark World are not trees at all but Giant Octoroks who will ambush Link by spitting out bombs.
The Dark World feels like the area where the developers were truly able to let their artistic skills go wild and to play around with the new graphics technology. Hyrule had to be green and mountainous with some areas of desert but this second dimension is chaotic and hostile, full of weird creatures, giant skeletal remains, twisted architecture and even an enormous ziggurat replacing Hyrule Castle. I love it.
On the Arthurian side of things, A Link To The Past introduced the Master Sword which is essentially Excalibur and includes a lot of Christian imagery with some official art even depicting Link praying at a cross.
Obviously, this is about as on the nose as you can get and not something I want in the games due to it clashing with Hyrule’s in-universe deities, that being said, Nintendo’s excision of all Abrahamic imagery from its games since the 1990’s has always bothered me a little. Nintendo claim to avoid religious depictions of any kind but Zelda is filled with very obvious Buddhist imagery and items specifically of Japanese Shinto and Buddhist faith, so it just reads to me as Nintendo specifically targeting Christianity, Islam and Judaism.
They are a Japanese company, Nintendo are well-within their rights to portray only their own national faith but I don’t have to like it and I think they shouldn’t insult our intelligence in regards to the matter.
One thing that isn’t insulting is A Link To The Past’s soundtrack, before playing this game a few years ago I had no idea how many iconic songs I knew from Ocarina Of Time actually originated here on the SNES.
The Hyrule Castle theme (which would later come to be used for Ganon’s Castle) is a wonderfully foreboding song laced with danger that motivates the player onwards while setting a regal tone with its grand opening.
Entering the Dark World is the point at which A Link To The Past truly begins: no more one-shot enemies, no more baby dungeons, no more training wheels, now you’ve got the Master Sword, you’re in enemy territory and you’re there to save the day, this song makes the player feel all that wonderfully. It’s moody, heroic and motivating.
When Link first arrives in the Sanctuary he has been awoken late at night for a mad dash to the Castle, trudged his way through the rain, witnessed the death of his Uncle and had to slay guards on his way out with the Princess. Alone, hunted and with scant few allies, this theme kays the burden of the long road ahead on the player.
I could link a whole page of great songs from this game, A Link To The Past is a treat for the ears.
The Sword Of Courage
A Link To The Past is the originator of the classic Zelda formula so it should be a familiar experience for all those who have played games in the franchise prior to the Nintendo Switch.
You start off with 3 simplistic dungeons where Link acquires his basic abilities, the story is established and you get a chance to learn how to play the game, after completing these Link earns the Master Sword and then you begin the second half of the game; you storm Hyrule Castle a second time and defeat Agahnim who then creates a rift to the Dark World at Hyrule Castle. The Dark World is where the remaining 2/3’s of the game take place, similar to the Adult Link part of Ocarina Of Time.
Usually, when a template for the rest of the series’ design is established like this, the first entry tends to feel like a crude implementation before future sequels iron out the rough edges and improve the flow.. but A Link To The Past is the exception. I’ll be honest: Ocarina Of Time is my favourite game in this series but I can tip my hat to that game’s forebear and acknowledge its shortcomings and in my opinion, ALttP’s Dark World is implemented much better than Future Hyrule is in Ocarina, or any of the other Dark World-likes Nintendo put in future games.
Unlike Ocarina’s Future Hyrule and Metroid Prime 2’s Dark Aether, the Dark World can be exited at any time instead of from fixed locations and the entire game doesn’t just shift to the alternate world like it does in Ocarina, instead you hit a really satisfying rhythm in A Link To The Past where each new dungeon item unlocks a new set of objectives or collectibles to pick up back in Hyrule.
![ALTTP] Looking for a screen capture of the in-game Dark World Map WITH the sequential numbers : r/zelda](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RafN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa96caf3e-8882-4a4d-9c82-206077c0966b_1734x1347.jpeg "ALTTP] Looking for a screen capture of the in-game Dark World Map WITH the sequential numbers : r/zelda")
The whole campaign feels like such an adventure from start to finish, virtually every screen in the world has something hidden or a little secret to unravel. Why does the boy with the flute vanish when I get near him? Where is the second Dwarven Blacksmith? What happens if I come back here in the Dark World? What’s behind that wall on the ziggurat that my bombs can’t blow up? I almost recommend a notepad for playing this game your first time because you stumble across so much that demands to be explored that can’t always be uncovered right away.
Of course, in a game of this age, in an entry this early in the series, there are flaws that were corrected later and with A Link To The Past I feel its dungeons and combat are its weakest links.
The Legend Of Zelda on the NES included an impressive 9 dungeons, with alternate layouts for each of them in the second quest and Zelda 2 shaved off one of those dungeons for a total of 8; A Link To The Past shipped with a grand total of 12 dungeons: 3 in Hyrule and 9 in the Dark World. With quantity almost always comes a decline in quality and unfortunately, I’d say only 4-5 of ALttP’s dungeons are particularly memorable or fun. I love dungeon 7: Turtle Rock in the Dark World for its lava pits and pipes, Ganon’s Tower is an absolute gauntlet and the Skull Woods are memorable even if they are a colossal pain in the ass but I’m struggling to remember any more than that and I finished replaying this game less than a week ago.
The developers armed with their new technology and a red-hot IP were clearly determined to make A Link To The Past the biggest, boldest, best Zelda game yet and they absolutely succeeded but there comes a point where adding more content doesn’t add anything to the experience of a game and ALttP hits that point.
The combat too hasn’t exactly stood the test of time. Link controls well, almost every weapon/item you acquire is useful and there is a wide variety of enemies but most of them seem to exist just to get on your nerves rather than to provide an engaging challenge, like the crows that are a nightmare to hit or the damn Stalfos skeletons that jump over your sword. Furthermore, enemies that chase you down can get caught inside your sprite while you have invincibility and just keep dealing damage continuously, that caused at least 3 of my deaths and prompted some bush slashing for more hearts.
The worst part of A Link To The Past though is its save system: you cannot save your game without dying or exiting. This is a big issue because reloading the game has you pick between 3 static spawn points or dumped atop the Dark World ziggurat without full-health, this means you’re forced to memorise fairy locations or go mowing the lawn with your sword.
A Game Of Legend
This retrospective review is getting to be gargantuan so I’d best wrap it up here.
The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past is a difficult game to criticise because its faults and blemish are all so incredibly minor and largely amount to “It’s an old game.” And I don’t like to criticise video games for not measuring up to the standards of what came later unless they are practically unplayable today. A Link To The Past is the gaming equivalent of Salma Hayek or Halle Berry… it’s still an absolute treat to behold after all these years.
The Zelda franchise is home to many masterpieces but A Link To The Past stands tall even among those. Ocarina Of Time, Twilight Princess and Breath Of The Wild all compete for the title of best 3D Zelda but in the 2D space there is no such conflict. A Link To The Past has never been beaten and if what I’ve played of Echoes Of Wisdom so far is anything to go by, then it never will.
Thank you very much for reading to the end, I hope you enjoyed today’s post, as always I’ll be happy to chat in the comments below and please like and subscribe to the Journal for more.
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It's refreshing to hear good things about this game that AREN'T nostalgia... Thanks for the rightful praise!
(now I'm jut curious about your takes on Minish Cap...)
I really liked reading your opinions on this game, I thought you were praising but fair.
I've only attempted to play Link to the Past when I got a SNES mini but got stuck on a worm boss that kept pushing me off a platform to the lower floor, forcing me to start over again each time. I am prepared to give it a proper sbot though one day.
I also like how you reference the Zelda timeline. I myself am not too bothered by it - it exists and some people like connecting the games together, but I'm also not offended at it's presence. I quite like Nintendo's attitude of just making a game first that is good, then deal with the story later. It at least means, like you've just done, that we can praise the fact these games are still fun to play decades later.