When talking about some of the most innovative adventure games in existence, you’d have to be pretty crazy not to include this one on your list.
1992 – Super NES (Nintendo)
It seems like forever ago, but seeing screens of “Zelda III” didn’t really get me that excited. I mean, I knew I loved the first two Zelda titles, but not quite enough to warrant as much excitement as would a new Mario or Mega Man game. With them, you more-or-less knew what to expect, whereas The Adventure of Link was quite different from its predecessor. Who knew what Zelda III would end up like?
Well, it ended up being a big pile of awesome-sauce, on top of a huge slab of awesome-steak.
To begin with, A Link to the Past was the first title in the series to introduce the concept of a parallel dimension for Link to travel to. Where the Light World was brightly coloured and full of joyful NPC’s, the eventual journey over to the Dark World showed a bleak and depressing side of Hyrule that struck an emotional chord with gamers. Characters you’d come to enjoy interacting with in the Light World became animals or beasts, while shacks and villages were abandoned in favor of thief hideouts or haunted houses.
While it was somewhat of a bummer to see Hyrule in that kind of state, it opened up a world of possibilities for puzzles by travelling back and forth between the two worlds. The developers exploited it perfectly, and have tinkered with the “alternate dimension” a few times since then (most notably Ocarina of Time).
We managed to snag a copy of this one shortly after it came out. It was Spring, and I remember the feeling that came with Summer vacation looming just around the corner. It was a rare treat to get a game when it wasn’t my birthday, or Christmas, so I was going to enjoy the heck out of this game.
I played through it, tried my best to explore every nook and cranny of the Light and Dark Worlds, but still ended up a bit short on collecting *everything*. I did beat the game, however. Not long afterwards, my mom was asked by a friend’s mom if they could borrow the game.
Alarms went off in my head; there was no way I was willing to part with it after the Mega Man 3 fiasco. Furthermore, this guy was more of an acquaintance than a friend. In fact, I was scared of him! Not that he was a bully, but he was somewhat intimidating to me, and other kids. With some convincing (“Here, I’ll write your name on the game, so they know it’s yours.”), I relented, and the cartridge was his for about three weeks.
I get it back, everything is good. I turn it on to continue my exploring and—THEY DELETED MY SAVE FILE! Why the heck couldn’t they create a save file from slot #2, or even #3?? I was livid! All the side-quests I had completed, all the heart containers I had found… all gone. What could I do, though? I knew I couldn’t complain to my mom, because she knew I had already beaten the game. I couldn’t complain to the kid who borrowed it, because he certainly didn’t care. I would just rant about it with my friends. Those who knew him weren’t surprised, either.
I was left fuming, but I did get to re-play the game because of it. It’s a fantastic game, so looking back, even though I was mad at the time, perhaps he was doing me a favor.
This was fun to play through yet again, so it was fun to make a movie out of. With the Zelda games, there can be countless side-quests and unimportant dialogue, so I had to be picky about what was included in the movie. I usually just stick to whatever helps the plot move along, or helps explain this and that about acquiring certain items.
I always found the fourth Dark World dungeon to be pretty awesome… it was quite a difficult level, but at the same time, what you needed to do to get the boss to show up was brilliant! Bomb the floor in the room above where the boss appears so that the sun shines down to it, bring the “fake” maiden into the room and into the light… poof! Boss battle!
