Game Review: ゼルダの伝説：神々のトライフォース 2

[dorchadas]

I almost bought a 3DS because of this game.

I stopped paying attention to gaming news for a long time--basically from late 2005 to 2011-- because 99.9% of my gaming time was taken up with playing World of Warcraft. I don't think I even knew Skyward Sword existed untl I played it at melishus_b's house, for example. But A Link Between Worlds came out in 2013, after I had tuned back into the general gaming consciousness, and everything about it looked great. A game made in the same style as A Link to the Past, set in the same world as A Link to the Past? My favorite Zelda game? And then all the reviews game out and praised it as the greatest Zelda game in years, free of the handholding that had slowly tightened its grip over the series as the years went on. Nonlinearity, with the ability to tackle dungeons and explore in whatever order you want due to the item system? Another system of two worlds like A Link to the Past's Light and Dark World, with intricate connections that need to be navigated to beat the game? All of that sounded like a dream.

Oh, and also Link turns into a painting? Well...I guess it's no stranger than Twilight Princess...

I did not end up buying a 3DS because I had no money, but I never stopped wanting to play A Link Between Worlds. And now I can tell you that it lives up to all that hype I felt five years ago.

The Japanese title makes the connection between it and A Link to the Past even more explicit. A Link to the Past is 神々のトライフォース, "Triforce of the Gods," and A Link Between Worlds is 神々のトライフォース ２.

This is consistently referred to in the game as 落書き (rakugaki, "graffiti"), which is kind of demeaning if you ask me.

A Link Between Worlds has the same structures as A Link to the Past, but with most of the latter's restrictions removed. The first part of the game involves collecting the three pendants of wisdom, courage, and power, and then confronting the villain Yuga (probably from 油画, "oil painting") in Hyrule Castle. After slashing through a curtain, now blowing in the wind thanks to the 3DS's graphical capabilities, Link sees the villain steal Zelda away and follows her to another world, where he has to find the seven descedants of the sages and rescue them in order to gain the power to defeat Yuga once and for all.

Unlike A Link to the Past, though, the order doesn't matter. Any of the sages can be sought out in any order, because unlike every other previous Zelda game, A Link Between Worlds doesn't build its dungeons as shells around necessary items. There are still dungeons that require the bombs or the ice rod or the other tools that Link gathers, but those tools aren't in the dungeons. They're on loan.

Relatively early on, Link meets a weird fellow named Ravio who takes up residence in an "abandoned house" that's only abandoned because Link is out adventuring. Pretty soon he sets up a store there, filled with all sorts of wonderful and mysterious items that he will happily loan to Link to a nominal fee. Link can use them as much as he wants, for as long as he wants, but dying returns all items so borrowed back to Ravio's shop thanks to his assistent Shiro-kun. Later on, it's possible to buy the items outright for a much higher fee. An item that costs 100 rupees to rent might cost 800 to buy, for example. Link keeps purchased items after death and, what's more, purchased items are the only ones that can be upgraded through the secret-hunting upgrade quest.

In practice, though, renting didn't matter because I never died.

Dodge this.

The Legend of Zelda games have never been as difficult as some of the more Nintendo Hard titles from the 8-bit days, and they've been gradually been getting easier over time. Even in Legend of Zelda, a large amount of the difficulty came from simply trying to figure out what "Dodongo dislikes smoke" or "Secret power is said to be in the arrow" even mean, though the combat was difficult too, especially in the larger dungeons. The ability to put fairies in bottles starting in A Link to the Past added a net to catch Link whenever he fell, and from then on, I basically never got a game over. The same thing happened in A Link Between Worlds, where I was saved a few times by bottle fairies but never actually died and so never had to return any of the tools that I "borrowed" from Ravio.

Some of that might be luck. As I said, it's possible to seek out the descendants of the sages in any order, and I did them in order of ease to get to them, so the Thieves' Hideout was first. In the Thieves' Hideout I unlocked the sand rod, so I went and bought it and did the Desert Temple next, and so on with Death Mountain last. I was listening to an episode of Nintendo Voice Chat where one host said that he went to Turtle Rock as soon as he arrived in Lorule and died half-a-dozen times against the boss there. My experience wasn't anything like that.

Some of it is also just streamlining. A Link to the Past had arrows and bombs and a magic meter to all keep track of, but A Link Between Worlds abstracts it out to a 頑張りゲージ (ganbari gēji, "Perseverence gauge"), and all of Link's tools just require energy, so there are no worries about running out of bombs or arrows in the middle of a dungeon. Furthermore, since it's stamina rather than magic, it regenerates automatically, so there's no need to farm for magic pots either. It meant I was much more willing to use secondary tools that I would have mostly left idle otherwise, and there were several dungeons that I went through blasting everything in sight using the upgraded fire rod rather than tediously trying to stab everything. Those pillars are fire also made the game easier, and a couple of the bosses, easier. The only boss I even needed to use a fairy on was Yuga during the final boss battle.

It's a lot of fun, don't get me wrong. But this isn't the game for people seeking a challenge.

An unusual art gallery.

The Japanese title indicates that A Link Between Worlds is a sequel to A Link to the Past, but in this case I think the American title is correct. Rather than a sequel, it's more like a reimagining. The map is obviously the same map, with all the same locations in the same places. There are familiar dungeons like the Tower of Hera, the Eastern Temple, Turtle Rock, the Thieves' Hideout, the Swamp Temple, and so on. The game requires finding three things, a confrontation, and then finding seven things before defeating the final boss. Most of the enemies and some of the bosses are the same, but now in higher resolution. And perhaps most importantly, there are two worlds that are mirror images of each other.

Rather than the Dark World, though, A Link Between Worlds has "Lorule," the mirror reflection of Hyrule accessible through strange cracks that appear after an earthquake. Link, with his ability to turn into graffiti and move along walls, can enter those cracks and traverse the space between worlds, arriving at the corresponding point in Lorule. Like the Dark World, then, traversing the map often reqiures navigating to specific points and crossing over, with some areas in either world only accessible by taking specific paths back and forth. In Hyrule this mostly consists of secret chests, heart pieces, and the children of Mother Mai Mai, the giant octopus who provides the collection quest that allows item upgrades. However, entire areas of Lorule are locked off until Link finds the proper area of ingress, mostly by the giant chasms that criss-cross the land. Lorule is falling apart, the victim of a disaster that remains unexplained for most of the game, and so like the Dark World it serves as the corrupted counterpart of Hyrule, where the very land is sick.

One of my favorite expressions of this that was also a nod to A Link to the Past was in the Thieves' Town. In A Link to the Past, the inhabitants of the Village of Outcasts were monsters, transformed by the power of the Dark World into the reflection of their hearts. Lorule does not have that transformative property, but the villagers in the Thieves' Town all wear masks of monsters, listening to the preaching of their elder, who tells them that by believing hard enough and aping the behavior of the monsters who thrive admist Lorule's corruption, they will be saved. Sadly, there's no mask item where I could have tried to infiltrate the group.

There aren't any extraneous items, sadly. No Cane of Byrna, no magic medallions, nothing. Those were some of my favorite items in A Link to the Past and I wish they had made a return, considering how closely the rest of the game models itself after its direct ancestor.

Of course there's a water temple.

I mostly enjoyed all the callbacks because a Link to the Past is my favorite game in the series. The upgrading soundtrack is fantastic, and I foudn the reuse of the old sound effects for situations like the Master Sword beam attack or the teleport tiles or bomb explosions to be charming rather than pandering. I mean, it's right there in the title. I knew I was getting a sequel, albeit a Nintendo-style one where it's mostly a reimagining of the same tropes rather than a direct story continuation.

However, the most interesting part was the graffit transformation power, exactly the part that originally sounded like a ridiculous gimmick to me when I first heard of it. It allows a wide variety of interesting puzzles and even some combat tactics. Link can phase into any solid wall and travel along it horizontally for as long as his stamina holds out, so many of the dungeons have secrets hidden in out-of-the-way corners behind a crack in the wall or around a bend over a pit that can nonetheless be crossed in graffiti form. Most dungeons puzzles require it, from transforming on the side of a pillar that's too tall for Link to cross and scurrying around to the other side to get across to hiding from a boss's attacks inside a wall and then popping out to get the drop on them.

There was one early puzzle that really drove home what was in store. In the northeast part of Hryule, on the way to the Zoras' dominion, I ran into a zora lamenting that the bridge to the waterfall was out and he'd have to go swim the long way around. Since I was on my way there to get the Zora flippers, I couldn't swim, so I figured that I'd need to get the hookshot and come back later. Then I noticed that there wasn't anything to hookshot on to but there was a wall that connected both sides of the broken bridge, and all of a sudden I knew what I had to do. I transformed into graffiti, crossed the gap, and popped out the other side.

It just got better from there.

"In the short time that I haven't seen you, you've grown much stronger. Thank you, Link."

Maybe I should have bought that 3DS. I would have been pretty expensive, especially at the time, but I managed to put a ton of money into Kingdom Death and a lot of expansions for it and that's all sitting in the apartment. I haven't even opened the boxes, much less assembled or painted the miniatures yet. With a 3DS, I could have played games like this while sitting on the couch, and I think time shows that would have been a much better use of my money.

Still, A Link Between Worlds is no worse now than it was then, and coming at it so fresh from Skyward Sword, it's even more exciting. After Fai constantly interrupting Link to tell him where to go, what to do, who to talk to, the various probabilities of any possible action, the freedom of A Link Between Worlds is even more refreshing. I can see the line that leads from here to the open world and find-your-own-way ethos of Breath of the Wild, and if anything, A Link Between Worlds has made me more excited to play that game than any other Zelda game I've played yet. All the people who said that this was a turning point for a series that had grown stifling were right, and if it sticks a bit close to A Link to the Past, I can forgive it because the overall execution is so great.

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