#if ghirahim can make his sword any easier to obtain | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gascon-en-exil · 7 years

Text

The Not Really Definitive Ranking of the Zelda Series: #3

#11-19 (link to #11, with further links to each of the others)

#10 - Tri Force Heroes

#9 - The Wind Waker

#8 - The Minish Cap

#7 - A Link to the Past

#6 - Link’s Awakening

#5 - Ocarina of Time

#4 - Twilight Princess

#3 - The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

My greatest obstacle in putting together this ranking was laziness a long-standing personal prejudice about directly comparing the 2D and 3D Zelda games. I never felt comfortable making those judgments, because the 3D titles enjoy such an advantage when it comes to scope and presentation. When I began this project I therefore resolved to have at least one 2D game in the top 5, although this proved easier than initially expected once I established that Skyward Sword and The Wind Waker were never going to be top 5 material in my book. I mean, there’s only four other 3D games.

To think of A Link Between Worlds at #3 as a kind of pity ranking does the game an incredible disservice, however. As I see it, what Twilight Princess did for Ocarina of Time, LBW did for A Link to the Past but with even greater results. It turned what had become for me a nostalgic but rather tired SNES game into something fresh and new enough to where I could enjoy it on its own terms, while also hearkening back to my favorite memories of LttP. LBW lovingly recreates the Hyrule of its source material even as it adds a fair amount of new things to do and collect. Around half of that may be the one hundred Maimais, but at least the game helps you keep track of them much more easily than OoT’s Golden Skulltulas, TP’s Poe souls, or Breath of the Wild’s damnable Korok seeds. The world of LBW is essentially a more colorful and more active re-imagining of LttP’s, and I love every minute of it.

The dungeons too have all been touched up, such that they now all feel thematically distinct. You could complain that they’re unilaterally shorter than their LttP equivalents, but in my opinion that works in their favor. It facilitates the new item system and the almost completely nonlinear approach to dungeon exploration (particularly in Lorule), which anticipates BotW even down to that game’s brief dungeon segments. LBW arguably comes out as the better of the two in this regard for incorporating classic Zelda items, and by requiring a particular item to enter most of the dungeons the entire experience can be shaped around the use of that item (as opposed to the standard design in which an item is obtained around halfway through). Both overworld and dungeon exploration are further improved by the wall merging mechanic, which initially seems like a gimmick out of a Paper Mario game but rapidly becomes one of the most useful and cleverly-employed abilities of any in the series.

I haven’t even touched on this game’s plot. Unlike LttP’s basic narrative largely conveyed in text scrawls, LBW takes the time to give some development to all of its major players. This applies to the sages, whose screentime is just as limited as that of the Ocarina of Time set from whom they clearly draw their inspiration, but it applies even more to Lorule’s parallel trio of Triforce bearers. Yuga generally doesn’t come off quite as well in the effeminate villain department compared to Ghirahim, though he does manage what is apparently impossible elsewhere in the series and bends Ganon to his own will so kudos for that. Hilda is an unexpected hit as the tragic but manipulative true antagonist. It’s sort of a shame that you never get to fight her, but the throwback to the LttP Ganon fight you get instead more than makes up for it.

Ravio is the weak link (pun intended) of the three, though he’s still not a bad character. He’s just underutilized, consigned to renting Link his items for most of the game until he pops up after the final fight to talk Hilda out of going further off the deep end. In that brief moment there’s at long last a glimpse of what a relationship between Link and Zelda - or two people very much like them, at any rate - would look like if Link were allowed to talk. It’s not making me a shipper or anything, but it was a pretty significant moment. Ravio’s costume calling back to Link’s pink bunny form in LttP was also a cute touch, doubly so as Lorule actually explains why all of its non-monster inhabitants take on the faces of animals (even if here it’s not literal transformation). That this incidentally fed into a subtle marketing push for the 3DS remake of Majora’s Mask makes all this even more amusing.

LBW is fairly short, but it’s a tremendously fun game to replay. I’ve even completed the seriously challenging Hero Mode (quadruple damage taken!) once, and I usually shy away from hard modes. It’s actually become harder for me to motivate myself to revisit LttP ever since this game was released, because it delivers a perfectly polished version of the same general experience. LBW is the pick-up-and-play Zelda for me, easy to get into and engaging from start to finish. I may have resigned myself to never getting the giant cucco -

- but I can live with that.

(Mostly.)

Next time: the one everyone’s talking about right now finally comes up for review.

#The Legend of Zelda #A Link Between Worlds

9 notes · View notes