I am sorry that this video did not manage to release in December. However, I hope it shall mark the beginning of a productive and quality 2020 for the channel. While I struggled and tore my hair out over it – and if I’m being honest, I still do not think it was as strong as the three videos preceding it were – I am pleased to have put together such a positive video on a game that I’ve grown to lose some love for.

It’s not like I’ve suddenly begun to hate A Link to the Past. It’s more that I found it equally engaging and frustrating in parts. If you were to ask me why I was irritated, I could only come up with half of a solid answer. As stated in the video’s conclusion, I find the Light World too easy and linear to progress through. There is neither challenge nor freedom, and I feel a game ought to have one or the other. It is also a game where increased skill does not increase the pace at which one progresses by much. If you are good at, say, Super Mario Bros., then you can speed on through the early levels with minimal engagement with the enemies and only tackling those obstacles that are required. The early levels will take exponentially less time upon subsequent playthroughs. A Link to the Past does not have the same benefit due to the perspective of the camera and static speed of its protagonist.

Once you’ve skipped past those first few hours, the game should be a lot more enjoyable, yes? I will admit that the discovery of just how open the game can be provides an additional layer of engagement. You’re no longer just following the rails, but actively choosing what manner to tackle the dungeons on your own terms. There is one question that I struggle to answer, though, that may hold the secret to why this game may have lost some of my favor.

Is the combat any good?

When I was a child, I always thought that was a house and its chimney in the background as opposed to Ganon’s Tower atop Death Mountain.

There are some games where you can pinpoint what makes it so engaging. In A Link to the Past, I think the need to line your attacks up at an angle with the soldiers of Hyrule is a positive design choice. It adds a new dimension to combat, allowing you to defensively deflect them back for a split second and create an opening. Positioning is important. However, there’s only one enemy species in the Dark World that capitalizes on this same design choice. The rest simply take several more strikes in order to take down.

Strategy instead primarily focuses on avoidance of the enemy’s movement, waiting them out, or evading projectiles. As the game wears on, the typical tactic is to simply throw more at the player at once. I discovered too late in Ganon’s Tower that some chambers are best approached by adorning the self with the Magic Cape, becoming invisible and impervious to the majority of hostile forces or environmental hazards. It was a tool that I had under-utilized, and I can only wonder how much less troublesome a number of the game’s chambers would have been.

That would have been avoidance of combat. While it is certainly an active choice on the part of the player and thus counts as engagement, it begs the question of whether the combat itself is enjoyable or not.

Honestly, I think the answer lies somewhere in-between. There are some chambers with an excellently assembled assortment of beasts in just the right placement, begging the player to swiftly make decisions to most efficiently wipe those monsters out without taking damage. These are well-designed rooms, though they risk the same problem of becoming rote and tiresome on repeat playthroughs. Other chambers feel as if a series of obstacles and enemies were dropped in haphazardly just to ensure the player takes damage. These are more annoying and stink of “old school difficulty”.

The end result is a game that I played through because I was engaged. Was I enjoying it, though? I’m not sure, and ultimately I think the answer was “at times”.

Regardless, I decided to put my most positive impressions of A Link to the Past in this video, leaving the negative aside as I have nothing but vague theories and guesses as to why I no longer love it as much.

Of course, the answer is probably very simple: I simply enjoy what later entries in the franchise do better. Mechanically, at least. As I continue to analyze the franchise, you’ll no doubt discover that there are still some elements that I believe A Link to the Past did better than its predecessors.

I’m going to “take a week off”, by which I mean focus purely on recording footage from three different games that I intend to make videos of this year. I am very excited about each one. In the past I never really tried to record footage for multiple videos at once, instead focusing on just the next video in the line-up. Recording footage for three separate games simultaneously is new, and I’m curious to see if it will speed the process up, slow it down, or make no difference.

None of those are my next video, however. After I take this week “off”, I’ll be watching Godzilla 2014 and taking notes so I can prepare a script. I make no promises, but I acknowledge that I could have a video ready to post in February. I’ll do my best to make it happen.