The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (3DS)

Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series is one of its longest lasting, most beloved & successful franchises and for a good reason. They have offered a lot of memorable adventures and often been on the forefront of imaginative adventure games pushing the envelope. The series isn't without its few missteps, but there's a reason why so few games have risen up to par or even close to the quality & success of the Zelda franchise. My favorite Zelda has always been A Link to the Past and I was very excited when Nintendo announced this sequel, although I only got the chance to play the game now, in 2015, almost 1,5 years after its release. Fortunately, the wait has mostly been worth it.

Not the same but the same
A Link Between Worlds takes place in the same Hyrule as A Link to the Past, only six generations has gone by. Hence, the Link we play as now isn't the same as the Link in ALTTP. Much like A Link to the Past, this game features a dual-world with one being the sunny Hyrule and the other a darker, more corrupt alternative, which is called Lorule this time, with alternative versions of people like Zelda (called Hilda) living in the kingdom. While Lorule isn't technically the same thing as the Dark World in A Link to the Past, it looks and feels very much the same, though with similar kind of differences to the Dark World of ALTTP as ALBW's Hyrule in comparison to ALTTP's Hyrule.

The events of ALTTP are a thing of legend in ALBW (pun intended).

The story itself starts of in a somewhat similar manner as well, though the early moments aren't quite as dark as A Link to the Past's. You are an apprentice of the blacksmith and are late for work. You get to work and after being chastised by your master, you get a job to deliver a newly forged sword to a captain of Hyrule castle who forgot to take it with him. This leads you to run around for a while until you are directed to the same sanctuary that was a part of ALTTP's beginning.

Same home sweet home.

 In the sanctuary, a new villain Yuga appears and transforms one of the new sages, Seres, into a painting. You try to fight against him, but are unable to do anything. After a few other events, Hyrule Castle is under dark magic and no one can enter, which sends Link to find the same three pendants that he had to find in ALTTP so that he could go retrieve the Master Sword which can then be used to dispell the magic surrounding Hyrule Castle. Of course Link doesn't win Yuga even as he does this and while Link has been running around to find the pendants & Master Sword, Yuga has painting-fied the rest of the sages. They move to Lorule where Yuga uses the painting-sages' powers to unleash a kind of Yuga-Ganon fusion onto the world. Hilda saves Link but in the process the Sage paintings are scattered all around the kingdom. Much like the Dark World, Lorule has seven dungeons/castles Link has to go through to save the sages.

The world is a bit TOO similar to A Link to the Past's, for being a sequel.

The biggest difference between ALTTP and ALBW is that ALBW is less restrictive in how to tackle the game. You can actually rent all of the items (except one) from the start, so apart from big boulders and a couple of other kinds of obstacles, there's really not much that stands in your way of going through the dungeons in any order you want. I'm not sure if it's more of a mental thing, but I liked ALTTP's approach more. It felt like every new item & skill gotten and every dungeon beaten took me closer to the climax of the story, with Link gaining more experience & preparing to take on Ganondorf with all of his new equipment. In ALBW I was kind of just doing the dungeons in whatever order and got the more powerful items so early on that I never felt any kind of progression, never feeling that kind of build-up to the finale because neither the gamepley nor narrative was pushing me into it like it did in ALTTP. I was just suddenly standing in front of Lorule Castle, ready to take on the final dungeon & battle. Other than having more hearts and a better tunic & sword, I didn't feel all that different from the Link that I had been when I first entered Lorule.

I've got the power!

Wall-merger all the way
The big gimmick of ALBW is that Link can merge himself into a wall as a kind of painting and move around on walls' surfaces (though only left & right). It's used to get over & around gaps, move through tight spaces, evading enemies and popping out of the walls to push stuff that's laying against the wall. It is used a lot during the game, perhaps a bit too much, as it feels most of the items aren't used much at all while it's rare that more than one minute goes between wall-merging. The good thing is that it's not a lengthy process. You pop-in and pop-out of the wall very quickly so it doesn't become too tedious to use it and it just becomes one form of traversal. Even then, the problem really is that the rest of the tools take a backseat.

Be prepared to see a lot of this.

Even in dungeons that supposedly focus on certain item's usage, the wall-merging is used for a lot of puzzles that overshadow the items. This is a bit disappointing as the use of the items almost never goes beyond anything that was already done in ALTTP. As a sequel to ALTTP, I'd have hoped that they'd come up with new, inventive ways of taking advantage of old items. And while there are a few times when some old stuff is used in ways that I don't remember them being used in ALTTP, those instances are far too rare. The problem with this is that there really isn't all that much they do that uses the wall-travelling in inventive ways, so it ends up making the puzzles throughout the game feel a bit same-y. Most of the time, it's mostly just about noticing that you can use the wall-travel in certain situations instead of figuring out how to use it to your advantage.

Rent-a-thon.

Another thing that ended up bothering me is the uneven difficulty level, especially when it comes to the combat. The beginning of the game felt exciting. Enemies could kill you quite easily if you weren't careful. I had rented almost all of the items and because I actually felt vulnerable, there was the kind of tension that I could lose everything if I died that the often-too-easy Zelda series rarely has. But this was quickly done away by the abundance of hearts and the new tunics that halve damage, so the game turns ridiculously easy quite abrubtly quite soon after arriving to Lorule. Only the final boss offered some challenge after the first few hours and even that only because I didn't actually find the second tunic. The game does offer a more difficult Hero Mode after beating the story once, but I don't feel like playing through the game again this soon, so its worth will have to wait for another time. If only it had been available from the start.

Perhaps the most surprising minigame I've experienced in a Zelda game. And I hate it.

 Perhaps the biggest complaint I have of ALBW is not about its quality per se, but more about its nature as not-quite-a-full-fledged-sequel to ALTTP. It feels more like an alternate take on A Link to the Past instead of an innovative continuation to its formula like what Majora's Mask was to Ocarina of Time. The world is different but it's almost the same. The dungeon layouts are different, yet the dungeons mostly function in the same way, having many of the same gimmicks yet oftentimes they aren't even as challenging as ALTTP's dungeons. This feels almost more like a more extensive Ocarina of Time's Master Quest like rework of the original ALTTP with a slightly altered storyline than a completely new Zelda game. It perhaps plays a bit too much on nostalgia and is too afraid to make bigger changes to the formula. Fortunately, even if the game perhaps feels a bit too much like a retread of A Link to the Past instead of an innovative game of its own, it's still a high quality game.

Another nitpick I have is the rewards this game gives you. Way too much of it was rupees and some of the rewards were shockingly unrewarding. I threw what felt like thousands upon thousands of rupees into a fairy spring and what did it give me as a reward? The FIFTH bottle, as if the four I had already weren't enough. What did feel rewarding were the upgrades to my items rewarded for finding all the Maiamai squids. The upgraded items felt suitably powerful. But otherwise, most everything else was Rupees, with a few heart pieces sprinkled here & there.

Long time no see, d00d.

One neat feature is that A Link Between Worlds makes use of the StreetPass feature of 3DS. You can open up your 3DS to download challengers from other ALBW owners in the form of Shadow Links. They are other people's Links as they were at the time of the StreetPass pass-by, only controlled by AI that tries to emulate how the owner of the Shadow Link would play, with the equipment & hearts that the player's Link had. Unfortunately I only confronted one other person with ALBW, so my experiences with this are not that extensive. It seemed like something that could be fun if you live in an area with more 3DS owners, but my particular opponent was so weak that it wasn't much of a fight.


Well excuse me my smooth moves, princess
If there's something that I can't find any kind of fault in, it's the audiovisual side of A Link Between Worlds. The 3D effect is extremely well done (especially nice on New Nintendo 3DS' screen), the graphics are teeming with all kinds of nice details & personality that very few developers can do like Nintendo, it all runs so smoothly at 60fps no matter if you play with the 3D mode on or off and they have shifted the ALTTP 2d style into 3d pretty much perfectly. Although the graphics are a bit simple, it's still a very nice looking game and a joy to see in such smooth motion.

The music is an unbelievably great mix of completely new compositions and old tunes made anew with genius level orchestral arrangements that not only do good with the old melodies but also add new layers & extensions of greatness into them. The old melodies are recognizable yet fresh enough that it doesn't feel too safe. Ryo Nagamatsu has done an amazing job in arranging & upgrading Koji Kondo's old soundtrack to new orchestrated heights as well as offering worthwhile new music that will likely have earned its place among the best of the Legend of Zelda franchise's rich history of beautiful music once all things are said & done.

Meet Hilda. She's like Zelda, but with a totally innocent black/blue-ish hair.

Verdict: GREAT. After the extremely disappointing handheld adventures in Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, which I personally consider thoroughly mediocre or even below mediocre games, A Link Between Worlds is a return to form for handheld Zeldas. The openness of the game's structure does mean some of the sense of progression is lost and I do have a lot of other complaints about the game's nature as a kind of half-remake, half-sequel, but in the end I can't say I didn't enjoy the game. Despite all my nitpicks with it, it did sink its hooks on me and it didn't take more than a few evenings to play through the game. I guess my biggest problem with ALBW, in retrospect, ends up being the fact that it either does things a tiny bit worse than ALTTP or doesn't do them better/different enough, not that anything it does sucks complete & utter ass.

It's a quality game, but feels like a (re-imagining of a) game that I already played when I was around 7 or 8 years old. Not a bad thing per se, but not quite the sequel I was hoping for. I guess it ended up harming the experience a bit when Miyamoto & Co couldn't decide whether to just remake A Link to the Past or if they should make a proper sequel, so they kind of did something in between. Maybe my expectations were a bit too high, but as a sequel (especially as a sequel to a Zelda game) this is a bit disappointing in how overly safe it seems. While it's nice to see old environments again, at some point you do kind of go "so what's so different about this?" As a game it's still a great one far above most other action adventure games that are usually just pale imitations of Legend of Zelda games.







p.s. I absolutely loathe the baseball minigame and it will probably be the reason why I'll never truly 100% this game. >_<


INFO BOX

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer(s): Nintendo EAD Group No. 3, Monolith Soft

Platform(s): Nintendo 3DS, New Nintendo 3DS

Release Date (Europe): November 22nd, 2013

Number of players: 1

Rayman Legends (Vita)

Rayman Legends (Vita)

Platformers are a rare breed in the retailer space nowadays. Other than Nintendo, not many other publishers dare to enter that realm of uncertain sales. Ubisoft tried with Rayman Origins a couple of years ago to high critical acclaim, yet mediocre sales. Luckily for fans of platformers, Ubisoft didn't let that prevent them from trying again, resulting in Rayman Legends, another imaginative and fun platformer from the brilliant minds at Ubisoft Montpellier.

The detailed, colourful graphics really pop out on Vita's OLED screen.

Return to the legends of yore 

Legends' gameplay is an excellent proof of the fact that simplicity isn't a bad thing. The game is played with the d-pad and three buttons, which might sound simple and it can be, but you can push the simple mechanics to incredible lengths if you know what you are doing. When you are trying to shave away that final 0,5 seconds in your quest for a diamond trophy in the challenges, you'll learn all kinds of little tricks how you can increase Rayman's speed, get through certain parts faster or keep his momentum going.

There's really not much to complain about with the basic gameplay per se, other than it is perhaps a bit disappointing that Michel Ancel & his Montpellier crew didn't really come up with any new moves or abilities for Rayman. His skill set is exactly the same as it was in Origins. As it is, the game almost feels more like an expansion pack rather than a full new game, mostly offering more of the same.

Of course the depth of gameplay would be nothing without good level design and this is where Rayman Legends shines, for the most part. You can take your time searching every nook & cranny for secrets, collecting every lum and trying to free every Teensie, yet there is a lot of room for speed runs. Most of the levels can play very differently when you don't have to worry about collecting every lum and can just speed through the levels as fast as you can.

While Legends mostly feels similar to Origins, it does have some new tricks up its sleeves. One of the more fun addition are the music levels. These levels have been designed in a way that everything that happens on screen is in sync with the background music, so you are jumping, hitting enemies or bouncing on them in the rhythm of the music. The songs used in them are mostly new Rayman-fitting arrangements by Christophe Héral from more or less well known classics like Eye of the Tiger, Black Betty and Woo Hoo with a couple of original compositions from Héral. The music levels aren't too hard apart from the 8-bit versions, but they still offer fun variety to Legends' level selection.

Mini-Rayman is just one of the fun gameplay gimmicks in the game

Perhaps the best part of the offline content are the Invasion levels, especially for gamers who want a bit of challenge. These levels were originally missing from the Vita version, but after three months of waiting they were added into it for full level parity with the home console & PC versions. They are essentially time trials, where you have to go through remixed parts of the levels in the game as fast as you can to save all the Teensies. There are added enemies and dangers which mean you aren't playing the exact same thing as in the normal levels. In these levels, you really have to put your skills to the test if you want to save all Teensies. For the more experienced gamer, these aren't anything too impossible, but they do require much more skill & understanding of the gameplay mechanics if you are to get through the hardest of them.

Some legends are best forgotten...

Legends' origin as a Wii U exclusive game is most clear with the addition of new type of touch-based Murfy levels. In both the Wii U & the Vita version, you are not in control of Rayman's friend Globox, but have to rely on his AI to get around the levels while you are in control of tiny green creature called Murfy. Your job is to flip switches, move platforms, tickle enemies & cut ropes as the AI controlled Globox tries his best to die.

Unfortunately, the Murfy levels are the weakest part of Rayman Legends. You are in the mercy of Globox's AI, which can lead into incredibly annoying leaps of death that no human controlling the game would ever do. Globox seems to have no sense of self preservation, opting not to save himself even when it would be as easy as extending your leap by a couple of meters. The Murfy levels during the main campaign are passable, but frustrations will arise when you are trying to get through some of the harder parts of challenges. To give an example of how big of an issue this is, there was a daily challenge you couldn't even complete because no matter what you did, Globox would just jump into his death.

Who's the best Globox in the world

Another new addition to Rayman Legends are the daily & weekly challenges. These are randomly generated levels where gamers around the world compete for trophies. There are five types of challenge levels which can be further divided into a few different sub-types of challenges. In one type of challenge level, you might have to collect 150 lums as fast as possible while falling down a neverending pit filled with fireballs, spikes and other kinds of deadly traps. In another, you are trying to climb an infinite tower as high as possible with an increasingly challenging set of obstacles getting in your way. As mentioned before, unfortunately Murfy-levels are also a part of these challenges and they are the worst part of them as well.

While you'd think you'd get tired of repeating the few different kinds of challenges every day, the challenges are different enough to counter tedium. The set of challenge rooms in the Dojo are a fundamentally different experience from trying to make sure you are constantly moving up in the Infinite tower challenges or controlling the pace of your constant falling in the Neverending Pit.

9 seconds to go to one of my few diamond trophies.

The reward for the challenges are bronze, silver, gold and diamond trophies, each rewarding you with a certain number of points. In addition to challenges, you can get a set amount of trophies from the regular levels. The points you get are counted towards your Awesomeness level, which is a completely pointless addition to the game. Your Awesomeness level doesn't really do anything past a certain point and is mainly there to force perfectionists/trophy hunters to play the game daily. The base game only nets you around 4000 points, so to get to the final 11th level of awesomeness (6000 points), you have to go through months of daily Rayman Legends gaming. Unless you're continuously among the Top 1% who are rewarded with the 50-point Diamon Trophy, your maximum number of points per day is probably 20 or even less if you can't even reach the much more attainable Gold trophy.

As far as the more superficial side goes, Rayman Legends doesn't disappoint. The 2D art is even more beautiful than in Origins and the game looks gorgeous running on Vita's OLED screen in native resolution. The game manages to mostly keep up the respectable 60fps framerate throughout the 120 levels helping the controls feel extra responsive, but there were a few Invasion levels where, for example, the molten lava effects on the screen caused some slowdown.

The soundtrack offers the kind of catchy fun, whimsical tunes Origins did which compliment the colourful yet sometimes goofy style of Rayman perfectly. If you are not humming the themes as you play and don't get a smile on your face while listening to the happy melodies of Legends, you might just be dead inside. If only Christophe Héral composed more music for video games, the video game music world would be that much better for it.

All-in-all, I can't feel but a little disappointed in Rayman Legends. At its best, it's platforming nirvana on the palm of your hands but some things like the Murfy levels definitely bring down the package as a whole. As it stands, Legends perhaps has higher highs than Rayman Origins, but it also has the lowest lows of these two games. Legends is a no-brainer for fans of platformers, but you have to approach it with the knowledge that you aren't getting as thoroughly perfect a package from beginning to end as Origins was and the fully original content is over a bit too soon. The Vita version is a very good port - especially with the now-returned Invasion levels - but the lack of online multiplayer is a bit disappointing, considering there are likely a lot of people who don't have real-life friends with a Vita and interest in Rayman. Of course Rayman works perfectly well as a single player game as well, so us Rayman-loners of the world can still experience the platforming bliss. Alone.

Pros

* super-tight controls & simple yet deep gameplay
* imaginative & well designed levels
* Invasion levels offer challenge to those who want it
* daily & weekly challenges are a great way to get more out of the game and its mechanics
* the graphics are as gorgeous as ever
* Christophe Héral's OST perfectly compliments the visuals and shenanigans of Rayman

Cons

* doesn't really noticeably improve or add anything on top of what Origins already did, gameplay-wise

* the whole Awesomeness-thing is completely pointless and requires way too much grinding with the game being as it is

* Murfy levels are, frankly, passable at best, shit at worst

* there are too many Murfy levels vs. normal ones

* the ghost/closest challengers features in the Daily & Weekly challenges are a bit broken & often don't work

Verdict: GREAT. While Legends is a somewhat disappointing sequel because of the numerous mediocre Murfy levels and slight lack of wholly original content, at its best it's a masterfully crafted platformer that puts a lot of others in the genre to shame and even puts up a fight with Nintendo's best ones.

INFO BOX

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montpellier

Platform(s): PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 (upcoming), PlayStation Vita (tested), Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One (upcoming)

Release Date (Europe): August 30th 2013 (PC, PS3, Wii U, Xbox 360), September 13th 2013 (Vita) & February 27th 2014 (PS4, Xbox One)

Number of players: 1 (offline), 1-4 (online)