Time for my final thoughts about the game. Some minor spoilers inside.

The first thing that stands out to me after finishing this game twice (once in normal mode and once in hero mode) is the pacing. The pacing in this game is great. There is none of the bloat that you usually see in the 3D Zelda's, like the triforce quest, the tadtones collecting or getting a bottle of water. It usually is dungeon after dungeon, after dungeon. Sometimes you have to do stuff before you enter a dungeon, for example a stealth mission or finding some turtles, but they are all on the way to the dungeon. You do not need to back track and collect stuff. Compare it with Skyward Sword and the difference becomes clear. In Skyward Sword you have the slow beginnings. The fetching water for the stupid water dragon. The tadtone collecting that brings back horrid memories of collecthatons of the N64 era. A Link Between Worlds cuts of all the fat. This improves the pacing and also makes the game more replayable.

Also you can do the dungeons in any order you want. You can challenge yourself this way. Some dungeons like the ice ruin, are supposed to be one of the last. I did it first during my hero's mode playthrough. This increased the challenge, because I did not have my armour upgrade yet, making a single hit fatal. So much fun. In each playthrough you can picks and choose the way you tackle it. There is some strategy involved in the order you pick. Do I go for the armour upgrade first, so that enemies in Lorule do not kill me in a single blow? Or do I upgrade my sword, so that I kill them in one blow? Or do I do the worst possible order, so that the difficulty is increased?

The free choice of doing the dungeon in any order is made possible my the new rental/buy system of items. You do not find your items in dungeons anymore, you buy or rent them in a store. This has a advantage that is allows you to do the dungeons in any order and it allows you to tackle enemies and bosses with more strategy. You could for example use the fire rod of almost anything. Or perhaps use the boomerang to stun and then kill with sword?! The drawback is that you miss the feeling of finding the item and then suddenly realizing that all the areas you could not enter before are suddenly accessible! Also it feels cheap to just outright buy them! In the other Zelda's you earned them by solving a puzzle. Perhaps the could hide the items in the overworld next time, in mini dungeons like the ice rod in a Link to the Past. That way you have the best of both worlds.

Now lets talk about the dungeons, the dungeons are good, great even, but they never reach the level of the dungeons of Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword. After thinking about it, I realized that the dungeons in Link to the Past where not that great either. The dungeons in Zelda games, became fucking awesome when it went to 3D, with the pinacle being Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. Think of the best dungeons ever in a Zelda game and you will hear stuff like, Forest Temple, Water Temple, Spirit Temple, Stone Tower, Arbiters Ground, City in the Sky, Yeti's Mansion, Sandship, Mining Facilty, Ancient Cistern. All dungeons from 3d Zelda's. When the franchise went to 3D, the dungeons became more complex and more fun to solve.

Also the bosses are weak. They usually are pretty simple in design. Again I think this is because it follows a Link to the Past too much. Once it tries it own thing like the Yuga battles, it becomes so much better. Compared to Skyward Sword, Twilight Princess and Ocarina, the bosses are weak. They are not frustrating, but they are usually simple in design and are not giant moving puzzles like in the 3d Zelda's.

The overworld is almost identical to the Link to the Past. This immediately shows how weak the overworld of the 3d Zelda's are. The overworld here is packed with zero wasted space. While the 3d Zelda's have all these open big field with nothing to do. But it is a shame that it is almost a copy from Link to the Past, because I still remember most of it, so not much suprises there for me.

There are plenty of sidequest and most are pretty fun. Also the maimai collecting was extremely well designed and the rewards where actually quite handy. The minigames were also fun. No complains here. I had fun completing this game 100%.

Overall this game is awesome. It may not have the best dungeons, it may not have the best and deepest battle system, it may not have the best bosses or sidequest, but it has no real weaknesses either. It is simply the best paced Zelda game in a long, long time, that does everything well. It does do some thing to innovate the Zelda franchise, but it is also held back by its own legacy. The dungeon, bosses and overworld would all be better if they dropped the Link to the Past influence completely and made their own game.

Oh yeah, I am going to complete the Tower, with 3 hearts, no upgrades at all, no bottles and I am only going to use my freacking lantern.

I am going to do all that while your mother does unspeakable nasty thing to me!

I plan on getting this I got a gift card for Gamestop in a gift exchange so I will purchase Link Between Worlds.

I am having an extremely interesting discussion about ALBW at the RoF with crake which I feel is being wasted on that board cause almost no one there plays Zelda. So i am going to show you want I am saying and I want to see where you guys stand on this.

Crake wrote this review http://entertainium.org/3ds/the-legend-of-zelda-a-link-between-worlds-review/

He states that this is the most innovative Zelda in years cause it finally changes the formula. I disagree, I think ALBW is the most traditional Zelda game we have had in years and I find it hilarious that many believe this game represents actual change.

So we wrote back to each other and this is my latest post basically explaining my stance (italics is a quote from crakes response):

I do not agree.

"A nice change, but nothing that altered the core tenets of the series. Phantom Hourglass’ and Spirit Tracks’ centralized dungeons were interesting, but again, they didn’t alter the core of the gameplay."

What you consider the core of the gameplay is not what I consider to be the core of the gameplay. To me the core is the actions you the gamer perform and in games like SS, PH, SH the actual core mechanics to the game change dramatically than a other zelda games. In SS now I am controlling Link with 1:1 sword combat that is completely different than any Zelda game before it. The overwolrld structure is nothing like any other Zelda game before it. PH and ST don't even resemble 2D Zelda, they are almost side Zelda games. The control totally different, the approaches to the puzzles are different, the way the game world is structured is different as well. Those elements are the core of the game, that is what you spend 20+ hours doing, that is what is important.

All Nintendo did was remove the item from inside the dungeon to outside of it, how is that such a great innovation, how does that really change anything. You still go into a dungeon that clearly uses one item as the core focus of all its puzzles. And just cause you can choose what dungeon to go to really adds nothing either. You are still going to play them all anyway, don't get me wrong that is a neat feature but in the grand scheme of things allowing to pick any dungeon is nothing compared to say altering the core mechanics of how you play Zelda which is what many Zelda games do.

"Every single entry has followed the same formula of enter dungeon, find item, use said item to solve puzzles and defeat bosses, and repeat. It’s gotten to the point where you can predict the progression because they adhere to that design so rigidly, even with whatever little hooks they create to make each entry seem different."

That is EXACTLY what you do in this game with the only exception being you have to bring the item with you which I would argue makes the game worse. Did Nintendo put magic dust to confuse people. I am shocked at the reaction this game got, it is super traditional.

"The series was well on its way toward it falling into a rut because it hasn’t evolved in the slightest since A Link to the Past where this formula was established. This isn’t a case of wanting more classic Zelda, it’s one of wanting something new out of the series for once."

Sorry but I call total bullshit on this. Majora's Mask is nothing like any other Zelda game. Wind Waker is a huge departure in overworld design from any other Zelda. SS even more so. I think people get confused about evolution and the pillars of what makes the game that game. Zelda is an adventure game where you explore a world, go into dungeons and solve puzzles using items. That IS Zelda, if you change that you end up with a Resident Evil scenario where the future sequels are only sequels by name. The key is to come up with fresh new ideas to make that structure feel new, exciting and interesting. Zelda does this better than most franchises.

The reason this series feels like it is in a rut is not because it follows that pattern, is cause they haven't done anything truly groundbreaking or exciting in a while. The puzzles have become all predictable and not because you find an item and use that item in the dungeon. You can still have structure that but have far more interesting puzzles. Spirit Tracks had the best puzzles Zelda has seen in years, what that game did with the use of items (and how they control with the DSs controls) was just amazing and I wish ALBW was more along those lines. The combat has gone nowhere, SS has a really cool control scheme but there is such a lack of challenge that it makes any kind of expert play pointless. Dungeon design has become extremely formulaic, dungeons are almost linear now. It gets to the point where I know all the steps before they happen. I will give ALBW credit in that its dungeons were more open than the last few zelda games but don't be fooled it had nothing to do with the item not being found in the dungeon, it is all about the actual layout design of the dungeons.

Then there are the other elements, the game world is still super simple. We live in an era where you can create stuff like Skyrim but in Zelda you get one or two villages with very static NPCs (except for MM and a lesser extent SS). It feels like Zelda is being left behind in the technology department. OoT was the standard not just of gameplay but of graphics, of cutting edge controls, of everything. Zelda has not been a groundbreaking franchise since then and it is about time it comes back to that level.

Simply moving parts around within the formula is not really changing the formula. Overworld, items and dungeons never have to change. If they do, ok I could live with it but that is far from the issues Zelda has. It is about making that structure feel interesting and new again, to begin to catch up to its contemporaries in terms of scale and gameplay freedom. It is about changing the approach to the puzzles and the dungeons, stop making the solutions to a puzzles in Zelda be a classic Zelda solution. That is why Solid can get stuck in the first dungeon of TP and I can breeze through it like nothing, because Zelda puzzles follow a certain pattern and once you understand how it works it all becomes easy. Sadly its been the same pattern for many many games now, ALBW is no exception, in fact it has some of the most simple puzzles the series has ever seen.

Where ALBW excelled is that it cut out the fat. It got right down to what makes Zelda so much fun to play and gave us the most pure uninhibited classic Zelda game there has been in years. But I do not think it did anything to further this franchise.

I'm keeping this short, as I'm reading on my phone.

I agree that albw was very formulaic. I too don't think the new way of getting items changed how the game played. However, the only games I consider to deviate from that formula are MM and WW. SS still adheres to that formula, the only change being how you interface with the game. Also, it doesn't take a lot of change for a Zelda game to be called innovative, as they are all very samey. But also, all very good. I can't talk for the DS zelda's however, as I haven't played those.

I don't feel that it was much different from the overworld in oot where all area's connected through narrow pathways to hyrule field. The only difference in Ss was that travelling to or from the central hub area involved watching a cutscene. If I were to sat something about SS's overworld, it would be that it was very dense when compared to most other games in the series. Very little space to just travel through.

Iga_Bobovic said:

Yes you are crazy!

Happy now?!

Could you use colours to seperate your opinion from whoever you are talking to? That would make it easier for me to read!

There now you should be able to tell. But I dont have the full response there, click the link to see (oh it might be locked away...)

Iga_Bobovic said:

About A Link Between Worlds, the renting system does change some things. First it allows you to do dungeons out of order.

You could do this in A Link to the Past

Yodariquo said:

You could go out of order in the original as well.  I just picked out Link to the Past because of, you know, the whole sequel / spiritual successor thing.