Watching a Twitch streamer poke around in this last week, I really got itching to play LTTP again. Once I remembered that I could just DO that because I brought my SNES Classic to me from America, I hopped right in over the weekend and played through it over just under 7 hours on Sunday morning. It was a lovely nostalgic romp through a game I haven't played the SNES version of in MANY years (it was a game I lost as a child, though still have no idea how).
I played the GBA version a LOT more than the SNES version growing up, and I was surprised at just how many things I had assumed were quality of life additions in the port were in the original all along (keep in mind I had that game from the ages of like, 3 to 5, so my memory of it from then is very rough). Fantastic bits of signposting like the village boy actually marking on your map where the elder is, or the dark world dungeons being listed in order on your map are there in all their glory (and apparently always had been XD). Early Zelda games have always had shaky relationships with good signposting of where next to go and how to do it (especially Link's Awakening) in my experience, so it was a really cool realization of just how well this game had been put together back then. That said, my 7 hour completion time is very largely due to how good my memory is of this game up to about the second to last dungeon, so the real benefits of the signposting were something I couldn't really enjoy organically as if it were my first time playing. This game is also so much harder than I remember it being. Maybe they made the GBA ports easier or something, but there are SO many enemies, especially early bosses (and MOST especially the one you fight in the first dark world dungeon) deal SO much damage, like two hearts in one hit, that you can die in like 3 or 4 hits if you haven't been tracking down every heart piece you can get your hands on. Certainly not the the extent of something like Zelda 2, which is a game I find so hard that it's very difficult to enjoy playing it, but it was still a surprising entry for me of back when Nintendo made HARD games that did not hold your hand. Going back to the short completion time, it was weird to see JUST how small and short so many of the dungeons are. Some of the quickest can be done in like 10 or 15 minutes barely trying if you're just following where they point you to go and don't get stuck on some logic puzzle or lost inside them. They always seemed SO huge and sprawling to me as a kid, it's weird to go back like, 10 years since I last beat this and see just what a relatively tiny experience this game is (granted it has like a dozen freaking dungeons, so it's not that bad that they're small. If anything I prefer them this way). Verdict: Highly Recommended. Still not my favorite 2D Zelda game, but I do certainly appreciate it more this time around than my memory had treated it before. Not really enough NPC interaction for my tastes, as this is still very much an exploration-based action/adventure game more in the style of the games that came before it, but it's still easily and obviously one of the best action adventure games on the system (shocking news to you all, I'm sure XD)
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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