A Link to the Past

I make a wish, send a star, and pray,

I listen, share, and feel,

But can we ever truly understand each other's suffering?

I've finished A Link to the Past!

I was looking forward to this one for quite some time -- it's a bit of a crime, really, that I don't remember having fully gone through this game, though I do certainly remember all of it.  It's one of those numerous games that I played during the golden ages -- during my elementary school times, when we literally had three or four boxes full of NES and SNES cartridges for us to pick from.  You could call me spoiled, but having access to all of those titles really had a big impact on me.  Unfortunately I was also younger at the time, and as such was less mature both in terms of my gaming prowess as well as my diligence, so a great deal of these games I may not have actually played through all of the way.  Even the ones that I didn't, though, I usually had watched my brother play through.

It's refreshing to finally go back to these beloved classics, though it's debatable whether I should really call it "going back", as you really could argue that I've never left this era at all.

Anyways, Link to the Past was really fun!  I think there's an obvious comparison to be drawn between Link to the Past and Link's Awakening and I think in this regard everyone has their own preferences.  Link's Awakening probably sticks out as a favorite to a multitude of people (though it's completely overshadowed by people's love of Breath of the Wild, Ocarina of Time, and Wind Waker), but it's really hard for me to enjoy anything more than a proper SNES game.

Zelda games have an interesting challenge of trying to toe the line between complexity and momentum -- dungeon and world designs need to be interesting enough to actually make you think and explore, yet if they're too complex it leads to a feeling of being overwhelmed and losing your inertia.  It's been a while since I last played Link's Awakening, but I think this is one of the main points that I think ought to be compared between the two games.

I found the dungeons in LttP to be...quite refreshing, actually!  It actually hit a pretty sweet spot for me where I needed to spend some time revisiting/scouring some areas in search of something that I missed, but in the end was always able to get through things after enough effort and diligence.  There definitely weren't as many unique puzzly mechanics compared to the dungeons in Link's Awakening (remember carrying around the ball all around Eagle's Tower???), but I think the dungeon layouts themselves were a little more "satisfying".  I think a big part of this is actually just due to the simple fact that because there's more screen real-estate, you get these bigger rooms and longer corridors with a lot more visual and spatial differences compared to each other, whereas in Link's Awakening ALL of the rooms are the same size and shape.

You also get these large "hub" rooms, as well as rooms that have both a foreground and a background, which provide a lot more interest in terms of parsing them.  I quite enjoyed this aspect.

The overworld, as well, feels a lot more open and bigger (which it is), and I'd echo much the same sentiment about the freedom of navigating the space -- again due to the fact that you don't just have a fixed camera, but rather have screens that pan around.  Everything feels a lot more open, a lot more cinematic, which of course all makes sense.  It's a landscape rather than a small jigsaw puzzle.

The dark world / light world aspect of the game was actually pretty cool, and I found myself picking up on a lot more of the environmental clues hidden around in various places of the overworld than my 10-year-old self.

In the end I think a lot of it is going to come down to preference.  I watched a pretty good video comparing Oracle of Ages vs Oracle of Seasons and it seems like despite these two being "sister" games there is a ton of difference between the focus of each one -- with Ages being puzzle-focused, and Seasons being action-focused.  The dungeons in Link's Awakening I think (?) require you to keep track of a lot more things at once -- in general I found them to be much more mentally taxing.  In LttP the dungeons are more interesting to =explore=, but they're also simpler to actually get through and navigate for the most part.  Again, I think a big part of this is simply due to the room design -- what would be a single room in LttP could get split into 4, or even 6 rooms in Link's Awakening.  There's all of these different rooms everywhere so traversing the entire dungeon just takes longer and you need to remember many more areas in your mental map.  I think this is why in LttP I found myself rarely ever bringing up the actual dungeon map, but in Link's Awakening I remember using it all the time!  So the pacing is a lot different here.

In the end I think I can say what we all knew already -- LttP is probably still #1 in my heart.

Now that I've finished the game proper, this also opens up the whole door of.....Lttp randomizer!!!  We'll see if I start diving into that world....

I got myself some ballet slippers!  I'm not sure how often I will actually end up using them, but I'd like to give them a try, as they just...have a different aesthetic that I enjoy.

That's all for now really, this post was mainly a celebration of LttP :)  It really wasn't any less enjoyable despite the fact that I'm already somewhat familiar with all of it.