RetroPiece Theater: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Rolling out a new blog series this year that merges my recurring RetroAchievements rundowns with a retro game review format. I'm going to try and publish two of these a month, one exploring an old favorite while the other examines a game that's new to me.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Nintendo EAD, 1991)

Playing A Link to the Past in the 2020s is bittersweet. For so long, ALTTP was this brass ring that every subsequent 2D Zelda aspired to surpass, along with Ocarina for the 3D games. Now that Zelda's taken this sudden left turn into survival sim territory and scrapping the set-piece puzzles for a more creatively open-ended approach to getting past obstacles, like building a bridge to cross a chasm or some ridiculous mecha that can just step over it, it feels like there's been a conscious effort of leaving the old model behind having almost exhausted it of its potential. It's neither a good nor a bad thing but simply an indication that even a format as rock-solid Zelda has to eventually adapt with the times (though I imagine we'll see plenty of Indie Zeldersatzes for a while yet trying to prove otherwise).

Rather than get too experimental in the way Breath of the Wild was, though, ALTTP felt like Nintendo was looking to return to the original game's blueprint after the comparatively tepid reception of Zelda II (which I liked quite a bit) as well as an opportunity to take advantage of the 16-bit format to fill Hyrule with more incidental details, secrets, NPCs, and traversal-enabling gadgets for Link to play with such as the Hookshot and Pegasus Boots. Some might argue they were playing it too safe by essentially remaking the first Zelda with a visual upgrade—true for many other NES-to-SNES franchise continuations also—but between the Dark World reveal (and the huge number of dungeons that came with it) and the additional complexity with the dungeon design it probably felt like a far more momentous shift back then when compared to playing these games for the first time now, given so many retro throwbacks straddle the line between 8-bit and 16-bit that it's messed with our ability to consciously separate the two. The Mode 7 overworld map, the introduction of reusable bottles as a safety net of curatives or storage for other notable catches, that amazingly atmospheric Koji Kondo soundtrack, to even the expressive sprite work and sound design that is demonstrated whenever Link or an enemy tumbles into the abyss after a futile Looney Tunes struggle to regain their footing.

In most playthroughs Vitreous isn't a problem but all those flying eyeballs and his Palpatine lightning are a real pain to avoid when you're trying not to get hit.

It is hard for me to judge this game qualitatively with the number of times I've played it over the decades but I will say doing so this time with the added wrinkle that is its RetroAchievements set did have me appreciating more of its gear variety and quirks; if I hadn't known that anti-fairies could be transformed into regular-fairies with magic powder I've have really struggled with some of the more punitive dungeon runs in the set, for example. The boss-specific achievements even occasionally taught me some new tech: for instance, fighting Blind the Thief with the Cane of Somaria (which you'd normally just use to create blocks that can hold down switches) is actually quite effective owing to the fact he takes contact damage whenever he passes through an inanimate block while floating back and forth. It still made his no-damage run agonizing, especially when you eventually have three heads all firing at you from different directions, but it's a helpful tip to know if I'm ever in the Dark World during a randomizer and the Cane is all I have to go on. The no-damage boss achievements did dampen my enjoyment to some extent—in particular because Zelda hadn't introduced warps from the entrance to the boss's antechamber by this point, and Misery Mire/Ice Palace in particular had some long walks that almost immediately went to waste when I got tapped by the boss or one of its many projectiles as soon as I entered its lair—but the rest of the set's challenges more than made up for it. As expected from the carefully curated sets for the site's more popular games.

RA Challenges

"I Shoulda Saved the Others Too? Well Excuuuuse Me, Princess!"

Saving Zelda before all the other maidens sounds daunting but it really just means getting through Turtle Rock with 13 max hearts instead of the 19 you hypothetically have by then (if you've been diligent in sweeping up heart pieces, that is). As any ALTTP randomizer fan will tell you, there's a certain degree of wriggle room in the game's approach to completing dungeons in their intended order: you typically only need the item from one to reach the next, not beat its boss. The exception is accessing the powerful Golden Sword and Silver Arrow upgrades: you will need to have completed the fifth and sixth dungeons (Ice Palace and Misery Mire) before you can buy the giant bomb needed to blast your way to the game's best gear. What I liked about this challenge is how it serves to demonstrate just how ahead of its time the third Zelda was about progression, taking after its original antecedent somewhat with the sequence breaking, and why that makes it such a good candidate for the randomizer conceit.

Oh right, I knew I was forgetting something.

"Jack of All Trades"

The set's penultimate challenge is to conquer Ganon's Tower—that is, to never leave or die from the moment you enter until Agahnim is defeated for a second time—without your sword. The game is merciful here in reducing a swordless run to only its most difficult phase but by this point you have Silver Arrows for significant damage and the Hookshot and Hammer combo for everything else (if the Hookshot doesn't kill a foe it'll likely stun them instead, leaving them easy pickings for the Hammer). Still, there's some real nasty chokepoints in the tower not to mention it has a whole mini-dungeon in its basement, inside of which you'll need to grab the lifesaving Red Tunic upgrade.

The way I tackled this Herculean task was by liberally using the Magic Mirror to return myself to the dungeon's entrance room whenever I got dangerously low on health. The first room when ascending has an anti-fairy in it that regularly respawns whenever you leave and come back, and with a sprinkle of Magic Powder it becomes a reliable source of healing. There's a few more of them scattered around the tower too; they invariably feel like checkpoints where I can take a breather before the next boss redo or some horrifying trap zone full of spikes and Beamos statues. The last hurdle is Agahnim himself, since he also has an achievement for defeating him exclusively with the Hammer: since I didn't have a Sword to reflect his bullets, the Hammer was an adequate substitution (though the Butterfly Net is funnier; see below). Tough to stay alive in that fight with Agahnim and his two shadow clones pelting you with fireballs but after some of the tower's other delights it was relatively breezy.

Get hammered, idiot.

Genuinely, this is the sort of challenge that RA was created to introduce. The tense high stakes, the resourceful item management (including stuff you'd probably have forgotten about already by the endgame, like the Magic Cape and Staff of Byrna for extra protection), the relief whenever you made some "permanent" progress like defeating the Moldorm boss rematch to make a chest appear (if you warp back to the start, the chest will still be there when you get back, obviating the need to fight that overexcited caterpillar again): these are the sorts of paradigm-shifting requisites that make returning to a game for its achievement set worthwhile. Well, in addition to getting to play ALTTP again, anyway.

"Link's Not Old Enough To Drink"

The set's ultimate challenge is this one, which requires you defeat Ganon and recover the Triforce without ever picking up a bottle. That means no portable healing for the entire game, including the above Ganon's Tower gauntlet and most of the boss fights. There were times where I needed to momentarily put a pin in the bottle-free run for the sake of some missable achievements that required I had either a bottle or the net (which you need a bottle to claim)—defeating Agahnim with the net, defeating Mothula with the "Good Bee" you can catch near the Ice Rod chest, or a certain transformation I'll get into below with the "Discoveries" section—and in those cases I duplicated my save and then used it to overwrite the main one once those achievements were in the bag. Sort of not in the spirit of RA but also sort of is; as long as you don't cheat or turn off Hardcore Mode it's all fair game.

Suffice it to say, going the whole game without potions or captive fairies isn't for the faint of heart. If you've played this game to death, though, you've probably picked up several tricks and know the boss strategies off by heart so it's not too demanding either; the no-damage boss achievements means you won't be looking to engage in any lengthy brawls of attrition with them regardless. Some places (*cough*Ice Palace*cough*) can certainly be a pain to navigate without a reassuring tonic down your tunic but so many of their worst traps or mini-bosses tend to be one-time things: once you have the key items needed to move on that's the last time you'll ever need to visit that corner of the dungeon. I enjoyed this, as a means of increasing the difficulty without making it overwhelming or, unlike the accursed no-damage bosses, is a case where you would have to seriously work towards screwing it up and voiding your attempt rather than some unfortunate RNG being responsible.

Of all the no-damage boss clears, ol' Pig Wizard was unsurprisingly the hardest. Those darn fire bats of his.

RA Discoveries

I've played A Link to the Past all the way through at least five times in my life but it's true of any Zelda game that there's likely stuff you never found or never knew could be found, unless you're the type of watch a whole lot of YouTube "did you know?" shorts about the series as a whole. The below include some tricks I didn't know about until I started pottering around with the randomizer a few years back and there's others still that were completely new to me until I embarked on this set. Even if the pro challenges aren't what you mark out for with these older games, there's always the potential of discovering something new about them:

"You Really Bug Me Out" + "Bringing a Hammer to a Magic Fight"

The classic Easter egg most would know from Zelda 3 is that, narratively speaking, you're meant to collect the Master Sword because it's the only weapon that can reflect the magic of the evil sorcerer Agahnim (the villain for the first two acts of the game) except the bug net you get from the sick kid does the same trick but better. It's about as hard to perfectly deflect the bolts with the net but its wide swing means it usually absorbs the bullets from the blue magic missiles he'll sometimes shoot at you instead as a fakeout. When you have the rematch towards the end of the game in Ganon's Tower you're tasked to use the Magic Hammer instead, which is much slower but still as effective—the timing on it takes a little while to get used to. This is a trick known especially well by ALTTP randomizer enjoyers, as without it you might be stuck in the Light World portion of the game if you weren't fortunate enough to have found both the sword and its upgraded version in some random chests somewhere.

"A Fowl Date For Link"

I had no idea this was a thing but there's a Cucco hiding in a pot in a farmhouse building on the south side of Kakariko village. This one Cucco can be transformed into a human woman by sprinkling some magic powder on her after which she yells at you a bit and gives you a hint about the town's weathervane being something of an avian guardian for the village's Cuccos (it's actually the game's fast-travel system, though it takes a while before you can activate it).

I feel so bad for doing this. Cuccos are immortal, unlike humans.

"Granny's Coming Along For the Ride"

Similar to the above, there's an old lady in the same village that's one of the few that refuses to believe the rumors about Link being Zelda's kidnapper. Sprinkle her with powder and she becomes a fairy you can trap in a bottle and take with you. I thought it came off as slightly malevolent at first but perhaps someone that advanced of age might prefer being transformed into an eternally young sprite.

"It's-a Me ....Hario?" + "Stone Hard Cash" + "Shaking Hands With Dinosaurs"

Three achievements related to pulling on an object for a decent stack of change: the Mario portrait in one of empty Kakariko village houses, one of the Agahnim statues in front of the Dark World's golden pyramid, and one of the claws (paws? hoofs?) of Turtle Rock. Cash is always handy in this game given how much you eventually need to spend (500 for the Zora Flippers and about 1,400 to fully upgrade bombs and arrows).

"A Friend in Need is a Friend Indeed" + "A Fishy Exchange"

When you drain the sluice gate in the swamp (needed to enter its Dark World equivalent, the Swamp Temple) you can get a piece of heart. You might also notice a couple of fish flopping around the now shallow puddles outside the gatehouse. If you grab one and throw it back into a pool of water (you can exit the current screen and go back to refill the puddles) it'll thank you and give you money. You could also pick it up and carry it all the way back to Kakariko—you might have to take the long route around the castle since there's stuff in the way—and throw it at the merchant for a bunch of goodies. A talking fish has to be worth a mint, right?

"A Link Between Jobs"

You get this one for trying to use your Magic Hammer on the Dwarf Blacksmith's anvil. I just appreciated the A Link Between Worlds shoutout here.

I almost forgot about this guy and his top secret room. In the '90s, the kings of recess were Chris, Justin Bailey, and anyone unfortunate enough to be legally called Ermac.