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The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Developer: Nintendo Based on: The original Legend of Zelda in a less frustrating world. |
Games | Super NES | A Link to the Past
Article by CalorieMate | March 16, 2009
There’s very little to say about The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (hereafter referred to as "LttP" for brevity’s sake) that hasn’t been said elsewhere on the internet, really. It’s about as "classic" as you can get...and yet, I missed out on it when I was a wee lad, having been introduced to it a few years after its time. I somehow managed to avoid the Zelda series as a whole until that point, and though the oversight has since been rectified, you never really forget your first. Perhaps that’s why I’m probably the only one to claim the game isn’t looked back on with quite as much respect as it should be.
Historically speaking, LttP is preceded by the world’s introduction to the land of Hyrule in the first place, and Zelda II – two games looked back on with rose-tinted glasses so strong you’d swear you were playing Virtual Boy?. On the other side of LttP’s release you have Link’s Awakening, which is not only the first portable Zelda but a major contender for "best Zelda ever" in many people’s eyes. Even more significant is Ocarina of Time, the Final Fantasy VII of Zeldas that boldly stepped into the mysterious Third Dimension and has ever after been cursed to be known as the Second Coming of Christ to video games.
So while never, ever omitted when waxing nostalgic about the SNES’ heyday, LttP’s importance to the franchise seems significantly downplayed these days. A shame, really, because the idea of what Zelda is had as much of a start – if not more so – in LttP than Zelda 1. Like the jump between Metroid and Super Metroid, LttP’s most impressive feat is smoothing out the rough edges of its predecessor. We may never know what happened behind closed doors at Nintendo back when the SNES launched, but I’d bet good money somebody must have wised-up to what made for frustrating game design and universally banned all instances of bombing seemingly random tiles and bushes as "challenge".
The most obvious improvement over the original Zelda (Zelda II being such a...shall we say odd offshoot that Nintendo wisely decided to forego that route and focus on the original's template) was Link’s interaction with the world. Unlike Zelda 1, the objects and landscape were not static images Link and enemies simply maneuvered around. Everything – trees, bushes, fences, stones, walls, etc. – could be struck, run into (and bounced off of), pulled, pushed, and whatever else you wanted to try. Nintendo even went so far as to trump the random bombing problem mentioned above by allowing Link to tap walls with his sword to check and see if they were hollow or not (admittedly it was used rarely, but at the time I thought it was the cleverest damn thing I’d ever seen). Enemies in particular received an overhaul, no longer frustrating because they a) didn’t move in short, random spurts that made them possible to avoid (the sole reason, for example, that Darknuts are still talked about with an angry, hushed tone); b) reacted to damage they received, meaning landing a blow didn’t result into them plowing through Link anyway; and c) when they did hit you, Link didn’t go flying half way across the screen at each and every time. All in all, with these few tweaks, the base Zelda game was surprisingly playable.
And yet, interaction was taken one step further still, in the form of, well, people. Not being content with letting RPGs have the last laugh after the mixed results of Zelda II’s experiment, it was decided that if Link can’t have an experience system he’ll at least flesh out the one aspect that worked: the plot. Well, ok, that’s not really being fair to Zelda II – technically, its "plot" was all we needed when it came out, and by today’s standards neither game really shines. LttP’s plot was expanded upon just enough to give the player enough motivation to keep moving throughout the adventure, though, and was sufficiently epic enough to warrant what’s still one of the best title screens to date. Likewise, Zelda II’s townspeople were about as fleshed out as you could expect in an NES action RPG. The best thing LttP did was clear up the localization and turn the town from a simple side-scrolling area to an area with a unique layout, meaning you spent more time exploring the buildings and less time exploring the philosophical meaning to the words, "I AM ERROR." And while no single line has been as quoted in LttP, it’s the first time Hyrule was populated with so many memorable characters: the lumberjacks, Agahnim, the flute boy, and Kiki the monkey, to name a few. I’d venture to say that even Tingle – the best character Nintendo has ever made – owes his existence to the template LttP put forth.
How LttP has shaped the destiny of the Zelda franchise ever since is pretty apparent at this point, but there’s one major – ahem – piece of the puzzle that makes Zelda what it is: puzzle solving. Tweaking how Link and enemies interacted made the game functionally playable, and the townsfolk were nice window dressings, but the puzzles are easily LttP’s claim to fame, what made it go from a better Zelda 1 to something else entirely. Even in later dungeons, the original Zelda’s puzzles were generally no more difficult than "defeat all enemies, and then push a particular block." By comparison, you’re asked to do as much in the introductory escape from the sewers in LttP. Later dungeons would require you to set the controller down and think strategically about what to do, and the overworld was sprinkled all over with puzzles and secrets (the hidden pieces of heart being another great innovation that intrinsically linked combat, exploration, and puzzle-solving). Perhaps the lack of coherent directions in the original somehow inspired Miyamoto to make a game where players puzzled over what to do for the right reasons. Who knows.
I should pause here and state that the original Legend of Zelda isn’t a bad game. I’m sure it was certainly impressive when it came out. Though it just hasn’t aged quite as well as some of its peers, the gap between the rough foundation it laid down and the plethora of improvements LttP offers across the board is astounding. Really, looking at one as the follow up to the other really says more about the quality of the latter, not the former. Despite the quirks of the GameSpite writers leaving it out, I’m sure the original was far more influential to more people’s tastes than LttP probably was – it did, after all, foster a sense of exploration unheard of in a videogame at the time. So in the spirit of this issue’s theme, I’ll quit using it as a punching bag to talk about what made LttP so great, especially since what first influenced me so deeply had nothing to do with how much better it was than a game I’d never played.
No, as I said in the introduction, A Link to the Past was influential to me because it was the first time I’d seen something that combined so many elements so effectively. Games up until this point had been more like Mega Man or Mario – very fun, and very good at what they did, but they were only that. LttP had combat, it had exploration, and it had environmental puzzles – and it did all of those things very well. Games simply used reflexes, or your brain; never before had they combined both in such a nuanced package. Maybe I had started to mature independent of games then, but the idea that the challenge wasn’t simply found in the fight to stay alive appealed to me. Even now, as an adult, I know that there are puzzles that could stump me for a time (Twilight Princess certainly had some); in some ways, the puzzles in Zelda taught me that games can be as grown up, as challenging mentally, as any "adult" activity is. And, yes, there’s the biological part of me that simply loves to be rewarded for being smart. To this day, there’s no easier way to make my brain shoot out those delicious endorphins than to crack a difficult puzzle and hear that famous chime.
In the many years since I first played it, I’ve watched as Nintendo has struggled to find that perfect balance between exploration and combat – heck, even the varying emphasis from game to game on towns – it had with LttP. Maybe that’s simply a product of trying to stand out when you’ve already made something where all the pieces fell into place so perfectly. It’s certainly not a phenomenon exclusive to games; musicians and film directors struggle with it all the time, and the Zelda series is as far from a one-hit wonder as you can get – having several games that fall just short of your best is never, ever a bad thing. And of course, this being the internet, a large number of you will disagree that this game’s balance was the best – and that’s ok. (I would ask those people to consider the fact that Link’s Dark World reflection of what’s inside his heart transforms him into a bunny before making any judgment calls on whether any other entry is objectively better than LttP, though.) As long as Nintendo keeps A Link to the Past’s template buried deep inside each subsequent game, I know I’ll always be able recapture, if briefly, that feeling that forever changed my expectations of what games can be.