Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past: Dark World discontent

I’m in the Skull Dungeon, a warren of chambers spread throughout the bizarro world version of the Lost Woods. I’m getting frustrated. It is at this point that, had I not promised myself to complete the game, that I would quit again. It had been awhile since I played Link to the Past, so at the outset, my reasons for abandoning it in the first place seemed vague and unconvincing. We’re talking about Zelda here! My favorite games! But absence, fondness, etc. Proofing your nostalgia may always be a doomed enterprise.

After the jump, can you go home again?

Landmark games like this one have a — yes, I’m going to do it — strong link to the past they were created in. That’s when they blew away the competition and won their reputation. And a game needs to do nothing to maintain that reputation. If, after that first round of reviews and playthroughs, a game has charmed the public, it is set for life; nostalgia will do the rest, growing warmer and more golden in your memory in lockstep with general quality inflation. I rarely revisit a game so long after my initial play. Without the distraction of nostalgia, here’s what’s driving me crazy about Link to the Past.

1) Art Design

As a first-grader, I didn’t like the Dark World. The colors were too drab, there were fleshless skulls everywhere — some that would chase you if you tried to pick them up — and the music made me nervous. The bomb-throwing ogres and porcine peltasts freaked me out. (By the way: what was up with 1991 and pig men? Link to the Past, Duke Nukem, Rocksteady on the TMNT cartoon…) Many great fantasy stories begin with a mysterious portal to another world. It’s the call to adventure, and the story can’t begin until the protagonist plucks up his or her courage and passes through to the other side. Not for me. I was perfectly content to wander in the leaf shade of the Lost Woods.

Now I can better appreciate the Dark World’s melancholy brilliance — but I’m sick to death of looking at withered grass and skulls. Skull Dungeon, as the name might suggest, is the most generic of RPG settings — a bog standard crypt with bone motifs. And all the backtracking I’m doing means I’m seeing all of it, multiple times.

2) Resentment

Puzzle games are obligated to frustrate us: your satisfaction at solving a puzzle corresponds exactly with your frustration at not solving it. Maybe some people like to stroke their ego and blitz through a People magazine crossword, but generally, puzzles exist for us to feel smug about our own intelligence. Paradoxically, a puzzle must first convince you you’re dumb — by confounding you — before you’ll permit it to flatter you.
But a designer shouldn’t confuse frustrating and annoying the player. The puzzles in the Skull Dungeon are reasonable, I suppose, but they’re placed in the context of a maze, which is the lowest form of puzzle. You move according to a mindless heuristic — if you meet a dead end, you simply turn around and try again. A maze requires no cognitive leap, only patience and spatial memory. No one walks out of a corn maze enjoying a eureka moment, just the alleviation of a low-grade claustrophobic anxiety.

Worse, this maze has the most annoying enemies yet. Link to the Past is a puzzle game at heart. The combat is incidental, something to do as you run between brainteasers. Remember, Link can’t attack on a diagonal, and the hit detection is sometimes spotty. Because of this I’m getting pounced on by motile squash while wandering the foggy woods, inexplicably losing huge chunks of health. Underground, the place is crammed to the rafters with durable zombies, leaping skeletons, and rubbery jellyfish that knock me into bottomless pits. Not only that, but giant hands descend from the rafters, to grab Link if he stays in one spot too long. The giant hand doesn’t damage you, just restarts you at the room’s entrance, and respawns the enemies to boot.

3) Illogical

After claiming the fire rod, the player is meant to approach an eerie statue much like the xenomorph in the film Alien, with the proboscis and the second set of jaws, the whole thing. The player is then supposed to set fire to the stone with the newly acquired fire rod, which exposes a secret entrance. In Zelda logic, this makes perfect sense. After acquiring any item, the first roadblock you encounter must require its usage. But as I said, Skull Dungeon occurs in a maze full of dead ends. I’d already been to this statue and figured it for another dead end. I didn’t see it and think, “Yep, let’s melt that stone right down.”

Up next, the most annoying thing
Click here for the previous Link the Past entry

Erik Germani is 23 and has a pretty sparse CV. You may recognize him from such pieces as the one you just read.