This is also one of my top favourite Zelda games, it’s so whimsical and approachable in ways many Zelda games aren’t! It’s very underrated, I would love another 2D Zelda game at some point, especially if it’s anywhere near as fun as ALBW.
I think that’s very likely considering that it was followed up with Tri Force Heroes, which is even more whimsical and easy to get into (though I’m guessing it’s easier if you use the online multiplayer feature – single player can be pretty challenging). The general look and feel of these two games seems like it’s meant to be the new iteration of Toon Link, and the original version of that lasted for six games and nearly a decade.
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.
My initial romp through the latest Zelda game has just come to a close, and as I mentioned yesterday the playthrough got me thinking again about a few different thematic points of the series. I say “again” because over the summer I wrote up a long post series on both Zelda and Fire Emblem commenting on their queer representation – for better or worse (last post with links to previous ones here). Consider this a brief follow-up to that series, though this is much less organized and is really more just me throwing out a bunch of unconnected ideas that occurred to me as I was playing LBW. Maybe it’ll generate some discussion?
Needless to say, expect extensive LBW spoilers, as well as spoilers for any and every other Zelda game I happen to mention.
First things first – we need to talk about Yuga. Comparisons to Ghirahim are inevitable given how androgynous his design is, though I will say that Yuga completely lacks any real sexual element: he doesn’t creepily flirt with Link (quite the contrary – he calls him ugly more than once), his outfit is rather shapeless and is never removed (not counting his merging with Ganon, which is more of a standard monster transformation moment), and his relationship to Hilda is nothing so symbolically sexual as that between Ghirahim and Demise – you know, with Ghirahim being Demise’s sword *ahem* and all. His commentary on the people he captures in paintings is more that of a demented aesthete than a sexual predator, though I suppose that characterization carries shades of the stereotypically effete gay man anyway even if his “artistic” subjects are more often female. Honestly Yuga’s personality gets a bit lost in all the references to earlier series villains, but I will say to his credit that he is never superseded by Ganon as Agahnim or Zant is (or as Ghirahim is by Demise, though he seems to rather enjoy it), but rather defies and absorbs the power of Ganon and Hilda both. Overall, I’d say that Yuga is a fairly interesting addition to the series’s growing set of effeminate male antagonists and Tingle *shudders* who contrast against the hypermasculine Ganon(dorf). And no, I don’t think that his name being “a guy” backwards is anything more than coincidence – Zelda already has a bit of a reputation for using terrible puns for names (let’s start with “Link” and “Hyrule” and go from there…), but that feels like a stretch and a strange way to emphasize his otherwise-ambiguous gender.
In the aforementioned series I mentioned that Zelda is somewhat uncommon among video game series for featuring a predominantly female supporting cast in most of its games. However, this isn’t going to win it any prizes for gender equality when most of those female characters serve as little more than literal objects to be collected (sometimes even becoming a part of Link’s inventory as in A Link to the Past and Four SwordsAdventures…really takes objectification to a new and very strange level). I did note that the sages of LBW are slightly more evenly split, with three out of seven being male. That’s better than the collectible maidens of LttP and FSA or the 5/7ths female sages of Ocarina of Time (wherein only one of the two male sages needs to be saved like the rest – the other is already safe in the Sacred Realm and all set for necessary plot exposition), and unlike Wind Waker’s one male sage those of LBW are not (all) children. We get to watch the haughty elder-in-training Osfala objectified (pun intended) by Yuga, and there’s also the hypermasculine Rosso. When it comes to characters who are basically glorified damsels in distress, a more even gender ratio is always welcome. Building upon this game and the only sort-of humanoid giants of Majora’s Mask, now we just need a set of entirely male sages (that Link actually has to rescue… *glances at Twilight Princess*) and for Link to get ship teased with all of them and it will truly feel as though inactive plot significance in Hyrule knows no gender. Regarding that strikethrough, however…
Rejoice, slash shippers: Ravio is essentially Dark Link with a more humanoid appearance and personality already in place, although I gather that the usual characterization of fanon!Dark Link is very different from Ravio’s. LBW is not quite Skyward Sword as far as slash potential goes, but it’s there at least. And at least Ravio has a more significant role than that of a non-speaking (mini-)boss…
I’m a bit surprised after Spirit Tracks and Skyward Sword that the Link/Zelda subtext has been toned back down to its usual near-nonexistent level. For that matter, we even get a parallel relationship (where both characters get to speak! *gasp*) in Hilda and Ravio, which is similarly platonic. I’ve complained in the past about a video game protagonist who is theoretically only a tabula rasa player surrogate having a defined sexuality, so I don’t need to go into here that this fact pleases me.
Hilda herself is a fairly interesting character and a rarity among female antagonists in the series in that she’s working on her own instead of under a more important male villain. A rather cynical part of me wonders if her gender is part of the reason why Hilda remains sympathetic even though she’s technically the game’s main villain, more so than either Ganondorf at his most developed (Wind Waker) or any other villain (say Zant, for example, who is also motivated – in part, anyway – out of despair over the ruin of his kingdom, though he’s never represented as anything but childishly selfish and deranged). One could probably write a whole post on this series’s odd attitude toward female antagonists.
Whew…in all honesty I wasn’t expecting this much meta fodder when I picked up this game, considering how generally light its narrative and thematic predecessor A Link to the Past is on this kind of thing. That has to be a good thing though – more than two decades have passed since LttP, and video games are a much broader and (when they want to be) more artistically and socially conscious medium now. It’d be a shame if LBW were just LttP with better graphics and a few new game mechanics.
(Endnote regarding Yuga: I know that both he and Ghirahim draw upon a similar sort of evil harlequin/clown design, and I’m vaguely aware of that archetype appearing in effeminate villains of the Final Fantasy series, none of which I’ve played. Kefka, I think? I’ll have to leave that to someone more knowledgeable.)
You may be in luck, followers of mine who are also Legend of Zelda fans (so about two of you): my recent and still-ongoing playthrough of A Link Between Worlds has got me to thinking about effeminate villains, damsel-in-distress gender equality, and other such topics for possible future meta after I’ve completed the game.
It’s also made me rage against game designers throwing in mini-games based around either luck or unintuitive skill *glares at the Octoball Derby* and requiring them for 100% completion, but that’s neither here nor there.
Gascon-en-exil: Gallophilic Cultural Posturing 