The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

[Lady Soniko]

So I decided to give this game a go...

 

Wow, it's much more fun than I expected and the freedom is pretty dang cool with the renting items, I'm taking a break for now, since the game is heavy on pushing you forward and rewarding you for keeping on going, it feels like I've accomplished so much in such a short period of time.

 

The battles feel satisfying too! Needless to say I'm thoroughly enjoying this more than I thought I would, dang.

[Blue Blood]

I think this game is going to be one that'll just as fun to replay as it is to play the first time, and that's not common for the Zelda series. While I love running around chatting to every NPC in sight every time I think their dialogue might have changed a little, doing all the sidequests and just grinding for Rupees in my first playthrough, it's rare that I ever want to bother with those things the next time I start a new file. Normally I just get fed up with the pace.

 

This time though, with how quick it is to throw you into the action and how you're pretty much able to tackle the game any way you like, it's going to be a different story.

[SIXTH-RATE SOMA]

I think Lorule is the future Termina... 

 

Gosh darn it.

[Blitz 'n Burst]

So I guess this game continues the tradition of Ganon being nothing more than a plot device

 

Disappointed that Ravio isn't actually the Lorule counterpart of the Happy Mask Salesman

. Unless you believe the Happy Mask Salesman is Termina's Link counterpart, in which case I guess he would also be Ravio's counterpart by proxy. Or maybe Lorule is actually future Termina. Termina was a "doomed land."

[Marcello]

So that spoiler is just there and the non-spoiler is in spoiler tags? xP

 

Anyway comepleted it in both modes now:

Hero Mode wasn't as I hard as I thought at first. It definitely starts getting easier once you start getting hearts.

 

 

Hero Mode isn't all that different. The end slightly changes and

there's a diary in the vacant house in Lorule. With a minor MM reference)

 

The changed ending:

[Blue Blood]

The MM reference for people who aren't bothered about Hero Mode.

 

Verdict?

Yawn.

[Marcello]

Yeah, it's pretty boring. It means MM3D will be announced in 3 days. If you read it today it's three days away. If you read it tomorrow it's three days from then.

 

AKA, it's not coming.

 

What's fun in ALBW is thinking about who's the Lorule counterpart for everyone..

 

Like..

The Thief Girl in Thieves' Hideout is the Lorule counterpart to the Shady Guy that stole the Smooth Gem or the mask cult leader being Sahasrahla's counterpart

[Octarine]

It's kind of cute how some of the Lorule counterparts of characters are actually doing a little better than their Hyrule versions despite the world slowly dying, like

 

how the Lorule Blacksmith is more talented than the Hyrule Blacksmith, or how the Witch and the Fortuneteller are an item in Lorule but it didn't work out for them in Hyrule.

 

Anyway, I finished the game last night. It's really good stuff.

 

Even though I'd already been spoiled on who Ravio was, it was totally surreal to see basically see Link with a bunch of dialogue. Not in a bad way at all, though; if I had to assign Link a concrete personality, I think it'd probably be something like Ravio's. It'd be kind of unfitting for the main character of a series as weird as Zelda to not be kind of an oddball himself.

 

I liked the ending a lot, anyway, but my favourite part was Hilda and Ravio basically resigning themselves to death to spare Hyrule. It was much more successful than most of Zelda's attempts at the I-must-go-now ending trope, even if they ended up being saved anyway.

 

And on the subject of timeline bullshit nobody cares about:

 

Since the Triforce is in pieces at the start of this game, I kind of figured that the Sleeping Zelda story took place in the generations between LA and ALBW and that's how it was divided. The whole Triforce is assembled again at the end, though, so maybe that's not right... but if that's the case, what actually did split up the Triforce between Link's Awakening and now?

[Blitz 'n Burst]

So that spoiler is just there and the non-spoiler is in spoiler tags? xP

I should think Ravio being Link's Lorule counterpart is a far bigger spoiler than Ganon having no impact on the story, which has been the case since forever, but okay

[Marcello]

^Fair enough

 

Anyway, saw this on Gaf

That's pretty awesome.

 

His Lorule counterpart has a few choices words to say, too:

[ProfessorZolo]

Hey, how do I bottle fairies in this one? I can't seem to just use the bottle to catch 'em. Am I doing something wrong?

[Octarine]

You need to use the net.

 

...not that that knowledge has kept me from trying like a dozen times to just catch them in bottles. It's a reflex at this point.

[ProfessorZolo]

Oh.

...There's a net? Where do you get that?

[Marcello]

Go to the house in Kakariko with a bee on it when you have an empty bottle.

[ProfessorZolo]

Ah, right. I guess I went through that town a little too fast.

[Salamander]

Finished the game about an hour ago.  Time for my thoughts.

 

I enjoyed that far more than I thought I would.  Rereading some of my earlier posts in the thread then the fact that I was not sold on the ALttP remake element is pretty obvious, and I'm still not; I'd have been really interested in seeing the item rental and painting merge ideas applied to a new game a new world and some more new items.  However, there's no question that this game made absolutely the best use of its remakiness.  There are so many subtle little changes to how things work, the remade bosses have had some pretty significant tweaks, there are new bosses as well... I expected it to be kind of a chore, and it really wasn't.  Just to talk about the new bosses a bit:

 

The House of Gales boss, Margomill, I particularly liked - in much the same way as the new Skull Woods boss is a Floor Master, did anyone else think that Margomill was a Like-Like?  Although I didn't like how the Skull Woods boss kind of... how it wasn't solid when it was ready to be hit, and you can just walk through it to hit the eye.  It confused me for a while as it looked more like I was meant to hit the eye from a distance with the hammer or something.  In addition, I think the final boss could have used a bit more spectacle.

 

Graphically it's really pretty and smooth, the gameplay was really free-flowing and it was clear that you could move through the game so quickly if you wanted to, but there was a huge amount to do if you wanted to stop and smell the roses.  The Maimais in particular were a fantastic idea.  I do regret, though, that there wasn't more to do with the Titan's Mitt - giant boulders either block caves or conceal Maimai, with the exception of one mini-dungeon entrance.  I was hoping for a few more hidden staircases beneath them in obscure areas, but no.  A note on the dungeons, in fact:

 

Some of them were quite small; the Zelda development team seem to have gotten used to doing fewer rather than more dungeons, so I wonder if some of the later dungeons like Turtle Rock, Thieves' Town and the Swamp Palace were smaller simply because there wasn't time to make them bigger?

 

One thing I do think is a serious disappointment, though, especially when considering how non-linear the overworld is, is how linear the dungeons are.  As in the past few titles, on handhelds at least, they're basically a straight line with a lot of corners, but no branches.  They could've used more choices and being a bit more open-plan in places.  Also, swapping around Turtle Rock and the Ice Ruins looked like a really obvious ploy to make the overworld look less remakey, but I accept that the Ice Ruins were in teh right place, even if Turtle Rock was bizarrely placed in the swamp.

 

Mostly, though, I wanted to talk about the story.  I'll spoiler tag it all, as the game hasn't been out that long.

 

I thought that the story was quite predictable - but in a good way.  I think it was the obvious story to tell and also the right story to tell - reinventing the Dark World from ALttP as a fallen parallel world with its own tragedy, a failed version of Hyrule, was a really compelling idea, as was giving it its own real population.  I guessed pretty quickly that Hilda was after the Triforce and that at the end Link would wish to restore Lorule, but it was the sensible story to tell.  I really liked the ways in which the dark trio - Ravio, Hilda, and Yuga - play on their Hyrulean doppelgangers; Ravio as a conniving and lazy coward, Hilda manipulative and desperate, Yuga as obsessed with beauty as with his mission.  They don't just oppose their Hyrulean counterparts but have their own personalities.  I like to think that Yuga, as the Ganon counterpart, was originally a mysterious foreign sorceror as in Hyrule, but with the world being destroyed owing to the Triforce's absence, he threw his lot in with Ravio and Hilda despite his evil inclinations because if he didn't, all of them would lose.  I like the idea of this alliance between the usual implacable enemies of the series happening because there was nothing else they could do - and nothing else to do with the rest of their lives.  I got such a strong sense of despair from Lorule and its characters, and I can see why Hilda was willing to do anything.

 

A note on a point of continuity between this and a previous title:

 

I assume the backstory, with Ganon being defeated and sealed, is actually a dramatisation of ALttP, and that the reason Ganon is described as merely sealed rather than killed is because he's so very easy to resurrect.  His evil soul has such staying power that there is barely any difference between killing and sealing him!  I'm also going to assume that, after Link's wish at the end of ALttP to restore Hyrule, the Triforce split as he didn't have a balanced heart either - more Courage than Power and Wisdom.  And that's how the backstory for this title was set up.  I also assume that Ganon was so malleable and so easily absorbed by Yuga was because, as in the Oracles games, this was an imperfect resurrection - and that's precisely because Yuga wasn't interested in doing a good job, he just wanted Ganon's power rather than risking Ganon's wicked intelligence supplanting his own mind.

 

One last thing which I haven't seen pointed out so far.  As far as I can see it, absolutely every character in Hyrule has a reasonably obvious Lorulean counterpart, but...

 

...

not the seven sages.  It's pretty subtle, and took me a while to realise, but things started to fall into place once I realised the Masked Elder was probably Lorule's Sahasrahla.  I take this as one more sign of Lorule's fallen state, for in the absence of its gods and Triforce then naturally they also lack the chosen guardians of that power who can save them in times of need.

 

So, yeah.  It took them too long to get this game done, partly as, I gather, they had a previous idea thrown out by Miyamoto, and this game has a lot of unoriginal elements in it, but it makes the best of a bad job.  Now I'm looking forward to what they can do when they're trying to make a truly new game again.

[SuperLink]

Funny this thread just popped up in my notifications cause I was just thinking about how much I enjoyed it, and how much I enjoy thinking about its plot and little timeline curiosities.

 

And how I

think Lorule is actually Termina after many disasters, the mask thing is what does it for me if only because it really serves no purpose to LttP or LBW's individual plot, and yet is still given focus - in promotional art, Lorule residents are shown as creepy figures with masks. It might be picking at straws, but..

 

One reason a lot of people hate the official Zelda timeline is because they thought it meant the end of Zelda theories and little non-obvious connections between games. And haha nope, that's not the case at all and I couldn't be happier with that.

 

Also on the subject of...

Ganon, I do like how he was treated in this game even if I wish it was better explained. Ganon is so evil and impactful to Hyrule and Lorule's history that he is like a real evil Triforce, he is the "goal" for evildoers, when people are corrupted by power, they seek to revive him. This follows on from the Oracle games too, and even if they didn't intentionally reference the Oracle games, it makes a lot of sense considering his revival in Oracles was a half-complete one that revived him as mindless and rampaging - he had transformed into a physical manifestation of a source of greed for power, and Link Between Worlds continues that notion.

 

It's pretty interesting to think about how Demise's legacy isn't just Ganon himself, but the way Ganon affects and corrupts others with the greed of power.

 

As for the game itself, it was hella fun. While it was easy and the overworld was too samey, the dungeons and the freedom were just.. GREAT? I liked it far more than I expected to, and they managed to give the game's plot some kind of structure even with all the non-linearity, not to mention the game was just packed to the brim with hidden goodies and stuff. Man. I seriously hope they take this angle again, but with a completely new and hopefully much bigger overworld. That would get my doki doki-ing.

[VO.SUPER]

“With The Wind Waker HD we naturally expected many people to have played the previous version, so we made the harder Hero mode available from the beginning. However, although it is a sequel, this time we have a brand new game.

 

We felt that it was more suitable to have the players first enjoy the game at an appropriate difficulty level and then let them try a harder challenge.

 

 

Straight from Aonuma in a recent OMN interview about why Hero Mode was locked.