Stuck within a wall and a hard place.
A Late to the Party for A Link Between Worlds.
So I got started with gaming at a young age. First I saw my uncle playing Super Mario Bros, and then more prominently, I watched my aunt play a shitload of A Link to the Past. My aunt was a serious #gamer. She had a dedicated gaming set-up with over 100 NES games, several dozen Super Nintendo games, a Turbografx and Master System, and loads of games for those consoles too. She wasn't a huge fan of 3D gaming so she didn't like Ocarina of Time as much as A Link to the Past, but she had a soft spot for Majora's Mask. She was a fantastic aunt to us, but she also beat her kids. She would later die in 2001 of alcohol poisoning, being a heavy drinker. This death shook my mother for the rest of her life, and ironically enough suffered the same fate as her sister, just dying this year, also of alcohol poisoning. So it goes.
I remember specifically what she was stuck on in ALttP: finding the silver arrows to defeat Ganon with. She was also hunting the red boomerang. Eventually—years later—she would have her triumph by watching my brother and I figure it out. But even given that triumph, I generally preferred Link's Awakening as my 2D Zelda game. Still do. This rubbed off on her, and whenever we came to visit she would be fixated on borrowing our Game Boy and playing through it during our visits.
I don't know if you can tell, but I have a lot of baggage with A Link to the Past. Despite it being one of the most formative games I've played, I never had a soft spot like I did for other Zelda games, let alone SNES games. I found enjoyment in the first two Zeldas tickling my brain in enticing ways that ALttP didn't, perplexingly enough. Hell, I almost found the Turbografx equivalent of Neutopia as interesting as A Link to the Past. But that's neither here nor there.
Despite having a massive DS catalog of games at my disposal, I found college and work to be more pertinent as I got older, so my 3DS backlog is pretty substantial. But with Echoes of Wisdom for the Switch on the horizon, I still couldn't help but lament that I couldn't play it due to a lack of funds; I'm on the poverty bus at the moment and I can't afford rent let alone video games. And after an exhausting discussion of Zelda among friends, it kept coming back to the fact that I haven't played A Link Between Worlds yet. And that's through no sleight of its own; there are a lot of good 3DS games I haven't played yet either. It has been on The List for a long time. But with nothing better to do and now with the Zelda itch, I decided to start on A Link Between Worlds almost on a whim.
Also I was stoned during this discussion and decision, so that was probably it, too.
Let's talk about nostalgia, because boy howdy does this game evoke it. ALttP is like a parasite in my brain; I know virtually everything about it, I remember the locales, I remember the enemies, I remember the music. I booted up ALBW for the first time, and what a massive slap of nostalgia in the face; the opening is almost beat-for-beat the same as ALttP. ALBW is a true sequel despite coming out over two decades later. Everything in the game feels like ALttP, and it's mindblowing how faithful they managed to be, to evoke nostalgia for a game I haven't played in literal decades.
Everything gets turned on its head when the dungeons start, though. First off, dungeons have stakes now; die, and you drop all your items and have to trudge back to your house in shame to rent them again. I wouldn't call the game hard, but I've died in this game, and it feels punishing when you do. Ultimately it amounts to rupees lost, but your wallet feels important. The item rental system is ingenious; it feels like the world is both open to you and closed off simultaneously; you can tackle most dungeons in whatever order strikes your fancy as long as you have the right tools at the given time, which won't be the case most of the time. Dungeons feel themed after particular items, and the game feels very focused as a result, ironic given its open-ended structure.
At the time of starting to write this, I did the first three dungeons and just entered Lorule, the parallel sibling of Hyrule. The first three dungeons turned my brain to paste already. Let's talk about puzzles. Ultimately the puzzles amount to finding a way to traverse into the next area; they almost feel like levels within a dungeon world. And finding that way to traverse into the next area gets tricky. Full disclosure: I am bad at spatial puzzles. Captain Toad whooped my ass a lot. Zelda has these puzzles in spades. It's one of the only games where I feel like the 3D is necessary to gain perspective in a lot of the puzzles that involve height. Funnily enough I have an accessibility issue with 3D since I have a lazy eye and that kind of fucks with the perspective thing. But fuck it, we ball. There is a lot of verticality to ALBW's puzzles that really lend to the game's depth, both figuratively and literally. It's actually kind of a lot to take in.
And then you add the wall merge mechanic.
Wall merge is what takes these dungeons to the next level, because now you're working in effectively four dimensions. Dungeon levels basically become rubix cubes where you have to go “Am I at the correct height to reach this platform? Can I cheese the walls and get over there?” And it's a serious learning curve. My brain has not had to struggle this hard since Baba Is You. The Eastern Palace is a tame introduction to the game, but using effectively a jump and doing puzzles in the House of Gales gets complicated, and the Tower of Hera gets even wilder by having jump pads with the Hammer and scaling the massive building. Traversal is very much a puzzle in and of itself, and it's been a blast finding out how the game tries to push that concept to the limit.
The only real flaw I have with the game are the bossfights, either being retreads of ALttP which function as nostalgia bait, or more frustrating encounters like the Knucklemaster making me catch that hand for multiple game-overs in the Skull Woods.
The story is good. No notes. Go into it unspoiled.
ALBW is utterly riveting. I have not felt a game sink its claws into me for quite a long time. It is everything I enjoyed about ALttP but more. And it also fucks with my feelings on how I feel about Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. In fact it retroactively makes me recontextualize the entire series. It's non-linear but still makes room for Link's unique toolbox of items and gear. The toolbox enables the tight and focused dungeon design, each with a specific mission to make you rethink how said tools can be pushed to their limits to solve some complex and frankly mind-numbing puzzles. I wanted Zelda in 3D to be like this, and this entire time I've been sleeping on what makes the 2D games so great.
What a ridiculous video game. Absolutely demented in every regard. I wonder what my aunt would've thought of it.