#nintendo 3ds | pixelgrotto (2025)

C’mon Zelda, prove the haters wrong

I’ve been playing the newest game in The Legend of Zelda series, titled A Link Between Worlds. It’s a 20 hour romp for the Nintendo 3DS and a direct sequel to the series’ pivotal 1991 entry, A Link to the Past.

It’s also a bit disappointing, for a few very specific reasons.

Some background info first – I’ve been a fan of the Zelda games for a long time, and although I haven’t played the more recent entries in the franchise, like 2006’s Twilight Princess and 2011’s Skyward Sword, I have kept up with the series’ popular reception, certainly enough to know that these days, more than a few anti-Zelda critics exist.

Frankly put, in a phenomenon that became amplified sometime after Twilight Princess was released, the Zelda franchise has been getting flak for essentially rehashing itself over and over again from game to game.

In some ways, this rehashing sensibility has been a part of the series since its genesis. After all, every Zelda game is a re-telling of the same tale – a boy named Link travels the land of Hyrule to rescue Princess Zelda from the evil overlord Ganon. Sure, there are occasionally games that deviate from the formula, but even since its 1987 NES inception, the Zelda franchise has always been less about a groundbreaking story and more about how standard story beats are recycled and regurgitated in interesting, unforeseen ways. (For example, sometimes Link is a little boy, other times he’s a full-fledged man. Sometimes Hyrule is a bustling fantasy realm, other times it’s a post-apocalyptic, flood-ravaged oceania.)

The gameplay of the Zelda franchise, although augmented with better controls and more options, is also pretty similar to how it’s always been since the 80s. You control Link as he tackles various Hyrulian dungeons, collecting weapons like the bow and arrow, the grappling gun-esque Hookshot and the powerful Master Sword. There might be assorted bells and whistles, but the core experience remains the same.

Some might call this unchanging core experience the soul of the series. Others might call it laziness and unwillingness on Nintendo’s part to embrace innovation. Me, I’m somewhere in the middle.

When I first booted up A Link Between Worlds, I could certainly see what the anti-Zelda crowds were saying. As a direct sequel to A Link to the Past, A Link Between Worlds takes place in the same version of Hyrule as its 1991 forefather, only a few hundred years later. This means that the game uses the old map from A Link to the Past and features a structure exceedingly similar to its predecessor. Case in point: Link must travel through two parallel versions of Hyrule in order to defeat Ganon, and only the names are different - in A Link to the Past, it was the Light World and the Dark World, while in A Link Between Worlds, it’s Hyrule and Lorule. (They’re all supposed to be “separate” parallel realms according to the story, but the whole thing strongly smells like a case of “same ol’ shit.”)

If this weren’t problematic enough, there’s also a plethora of scenes (such as the one where Link unsheathes the Master Sword in the Lost Woods) that are near-exact reenactments of stuff that happened in A Link to the Past, only with prettier 3D graphics. They’re nice throwbacks, yes, but also derivative.

But then, as if mocking you, the game pulls some nifty parlor tricks that shatter expectations just enough. For example, in prior Zelda games, Link would start out as an easily-killable weakling, and you’d have to tackle dungeons in a very specific order, because the weapon uncovered in the first one would allow Link access to the second one and so on.

Rather than conform to this rigidity, A Link Between Worlds says “eff that” and lets Link rent all of his weapons from a shopkeeper within the first twenty minutes. That means Link instantly levels up into a walking armory of doom from the get-go, leaving players free to tackle dungeons in any order. This discarding of the franchise’s traditionally linear trappings creates the aura of an open-world experience a la the Elder Scrolls or Grand Theft Auto series, where the sky’s the limit and the player can go anywhere and do anything from the outset.

Furthermore, Link also gains the ability to transform and cling to walls in the form of a 2D picture fairly early on, and this tactic lends itself to damn fine dungeon design, with multi-tiered floors that’ll have you swapping in and out of dimensions in order to solve fiendishly designed puzzles.

It’s just a bit vexing that this cool picture-transforming ability, along with A Link Between Worlds’ newfound sense of freedom, are both attached to many other facets that so slavishly over-imitate A Link to the Past. The seeds of originality and freshness are here, but they’ve been squashed under a facsimile of a game that’s over twenty years old. Nostalgia is lovely, and it’s fine to make a sequel to one of the most-loved chapters in the Zelda franchise, but this approach certainly isn’t going to convince any cynics that yes, the Zelda games are innovating, albeit in a stubbornly slow way.

I like The Legend of Zelda. I don’t want to begrudgingly say that the haters have a point. But even though A Link Between Worlds is a good game, even a great one, what I’ve played of it certainly hasn’t made me feel like the naysayers aren’t justified in their critiques.

And that is a tad bothersome.

Artwork courtesy of Link-LeoB on Deviantart, screenshots courtesy of Nintendo