A Link to the Past
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The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (aka Zelda 3 in Arabic or Zelda III in Roman Numerals) is the third video game in The Legend of Zelda series, designed by Nintendo and released for the Super Famicom and Super Nintendo Entertainment System video game consoles. It was released in Japan on November 21, 1991 as ゼルダの伝説 神々のトライフォース (Zeruda no Densetsu: Kamigami no Toraifōsu, literally The Legend of Zelda: Triforce of the Gods), and in North America and Europe in 1992. The game is hailed by many (especially of its generation) as Nintendo's finest hour and the greatest video game of all time. It is also noted for its exceptionally long life in Nintendo Power's top games list: when the SNES list was finally retired, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past had more than five consecutive years in the number one spot. Because of its astounding success, it was re-released in 2002 on the Game Boy Advance with a new multiplayer expansion, entitled Four Swords.
Although Zelda II: The Adventure of Link was well-received by the market, it was stylistically a major departure from the first game - being a 2D side-scroller rather than a top-down view - and as such, greeted with a less than enthusiastic response. Therefore, A Link to the Past returned to build on the original NES Zelda's gameplay. Despite its return to an earlier style, A Link to the Past greatly expanded on the game mechanics of the original, introducing many of the features of gameplay that are hallmarks of the Zelda series to this day, such as multi-level dungeons, the Master Sword, the hookshot, and a dynamic environment with parallel worlds. Along with Ocarina of Time and Link's Awakening, many fans consider A Link to the Past to be one of the finest games in the Zelda series.
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Storyline
A Link to the Past title screenShigeru Miyamoto has yet to make an official statement about the true chronology of the Zelda series. However, according to the text on the back of the game's packaging, A Link to the Past follows the adventures of Zelda's and Link's ancestors, referring to the characters from the two NES games The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Thus, A Link to the Past takes place before the events of the first two Zelda games. The story of the Triforce and the banishment of Ganon by the seven sages is a rough outline of the story of Ocarina of Time. References to the Imprisoning War and the Great Cataclysm places A Link to the Past after Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker in the Zelda timeline.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow. Long before the period during which the game's events occur, stories were told in Hyrule about a Golden Land, with unknown powers and controlled by an omnipotent and omniscient Triforce. Once the vile Ganon gets into the Golden Land, he aholds the Triforce and turns it into the Dark World. To lock Ganon there, the Seven Wise Men created a seal to the Dark World, which can only be broken by the Wise Men or their descendants. This story became a legend, and it is told to the player as the game unfolds.
Right before the game starts, the wizard Agahnim, who had achieved an important advisory role in the kingdom, gets rid of the King of Hyrule and starts searching for seven maidens, descendants of the sages, in order to send them to the Dark World and break the seal.
At the beginning of the game, a young boy named Link receives a telepathic message from a girl named Princess Zelda. She says that she is locked in the dungeon of the castle, and Link goes to rescue her. On the way, however, Link finds his uncle severely wounded in the sewers, and receives his uncle's sword and shield before his uncle dies. Link and Zelda escape the castle via a secret passageway to a Sanctuary where Zelda stays while Link collects three pendants needed to free the Master Sword from its resting place.
Link retrieves the Master Sword only to learn that Zelda has been taken to the castle by Agahnim. Link goes to the castle to rescue her but arrives too late; she is the seventh girl Agahnim needed to break the seal. Zelda disappears into the Dark World and Link and Agahnim do battle. Agahnim falls but sends Link into the Dark World.
Once in the Dark World, Link finds himself standing atop a Great Pyramid where the castle stood in the Light World. The only way to destroy Ganon's Dark World (and subsequently save the once-peaceful Light World) is to defeat Ganon and take the Triforce from his clutches. In order to do that, Link must first rescue the maidens (including Zelda) from seven dungeons within the Dark World.
Two ending scenes, Princess Zelda and other maidens at Hyrule Castle (left), and Master Sword back at the Pedestal (right).Once the girls have been freed, Link fights Agahnim one more time before confronting Ganon inside the Great Pyramid. As in the first Legend of Zelda game, Ganon can only be slain with the Silver Arrows. When Link touches the Triforce, his wishes cause the Dark World to disappear and peace returns to the Light World. His quest completed, Link returns the Master Sword to its resting place.
Gameplay
A Link to the Past featured gameplay much closer to the original The Legend of Zelda than its immediate sequel Zelda II: Adventure of Link. Though not completely ignoring the changes made to the gameplay in Zelda II, A Link to the Past was largely a throwback to the original Zelda. Instead of building on Zelda II's overhead/sidescrolling hybrid system, A Link to the Past returned to the original's formula of both exploration and combat taking place in the same environment, with an overhead perspective. A Link to the Past also did away with the RPG-style leveling system implemented in Zelda II, and although the concept of a magic system was retained, it was closer in nature to the items system of the original Zelda than the magic spell system of the sequel.
The Light World in playDespite the return to an earlier style of gameplay, A Link to the Past continued to move the series forward. Many new items and techniques were created for this game, most of which would continue to appear in later incarnations of the series. Some new items in A Link to the Past that would continue to appear in the series include the Hook Shot, the Master Sword, and the Pegasus Boots. The Hearts that increased the player's maximum life points in the earlier two games were split into pieces of heart, four of which make an extra life point. Most of them are hidden, allowing for replay value to players who want to collect all of them. Another innovation was the multi-level dungeon, which allowed for Link to climb stairs to traverse floors, and even fall through holes in the floor and land in lower levels.
The Dark World in playA Link to the Past was also the first appearance of what would later become a major Zelda trademark: the existence of two parallel worlds that the player could travel between. The first, called the Light World, is the ordinary Hyrule where Link grew up with his uncle. The second was once the Golden Land, a place of light and purity and home of the sacred Triforce, until Ganon corrupted it with his evil power and changed it into a world of darkness and despair: the Dark World. Everything in the Light World looks fairly normal, while the Dark World is true to its name by being dark and depressing; the water is a dull shade, the grass is dead, there are skulls everywhere, and the trees have distorted faces. Even people change forms when entering the dark world. Each location in the Light World corresponds to a similar location in the Dark World, generally either with much of the same physical structure, or its exact opposite (e.g. a desert in the Light World corresponds to a Dark World swamp).
Unlike The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, where there is only one location at which Link can travel back and forth in time, A Link to the Past allows Link to travel from the Dark World to the Light World at almost any outside location by using the Magic Mirror item, thus creating a "portal" to the Dark World. Once in the Light World, the player can only return to the Dark World by stepping into that portal (which will then disappear) or by using one of the eight warp tiles hidden around the world. Walking through the gateway of Hyrule Castle after having defeated Agahnim will also send the player back to the Dark World. This flexibility enabled a variety of puzzles that exploited slight differences between the Light and Dark Worlds.
The Game Boy game 'Oracle of Ages', makes use of parallel worlds as well, one being the present and the other being 400 years in the past. Much like the Magic Mirror, Link can use the Harp of Ages to travel between the two. The Harp either generates power to create time portals, warps Link from the past to the present, or simply from whatever age he is currently in to the other. The latter two are adaptations of the Magic Mirror and portals.
Music
The music was composed by Koji Kondo. The overworld theme of the original Legend of Zelda, or "Hyrule Overture" theme, was carried over to A Link to the Past and played in the Light World, redone in SPC700 style. Many tracks from A Link to the Past resurfaced in later Zelda titles, especially Ocarina of Time. The original soundtrack for A Link to the Past is entitled "Sound and Drama", all A Link to the Past songs are featured, and a bonus track is also included. The soundtrack has 2 disks, disk one has about 44 minutes of playtime, and disk two plays for about 54 minutes.
Regional variations
The English language localization includes a number of changes to the original Japanese game. The most common type of change was the removal of religious references to conform with Nintendo of America's content guidelines. The most obvious change was made to the subtitle of the game, which was changed from Triforce of the Gods to A Link to the Past. The font used in the game to represent an unreadable language, Hylian, originally had designs of a vulture and an ankh (). These designs were based on Egyptian hieroglyphs which carry religious meanings, and were altered in the English version.
The localization also made changes to plot included in the manual. The priest Agahnim became a wizard, and his background, which originally implied that he was sent by the gods, was altered to remove any celestial origin.
The Chris Houlihan room
The Chris Houlihan room is a secret room in A Link to the Past. Chris Houlihan was a subscriber to Nintendo Power magazine, who won a contest, in which the winner's name would be included in a secret room in the game. NOA's Debug Team accidentally altered the coding of the game to prevent the original intended "access" of the room in the SNES version. Subsequently, the only known ways to reach the room now are through various programming exploits, most of which have recently been discovered through the work of Tool-Assisted Speed Runners. The room is not present in any future builds of the game, or in any version of the Japanese builds.
The Chris Houlihan room has a message on a tile on the wall, and 45 blue rupees (225 rupees total). The Chris Houlihan tile was removed in the Game Boy Advance version of the game, and the room was renamed the Top Secret Room. However, the Top Secret Room is not known to be accessible outside of emulation. There are a number of known ways to reach the room through ordinary play, and the Pegasus Boots are the only item required to do so. One has to start the game at the Sanctuary and dash through the woodlands into a secret cave as quickly as possible. It should be noted this method does not always work because it is dependent on certain variables which are not always within the player's control on a normal SNES.
Technical notes
At the time, most SNES game cartridges had 4 Mbit (512 KB) of memory. This game broke the trend by using 8 Mbit (1 MB), allowing the Nintendo development team to create a remarkably expansive world for Link to inhabit.
A Link to the Past features two fully-explorable worlds; in addition to the overworlds, the Light World has five dungeons and Dark World has eight. Each palace has from two to eight floors, and most floors have several rooms. Moreover, many entrances on the overworld lead to more places to explore; cave mouths (sometimes needing to be bombed to open) lead to caves, all houses with doorways can be entered and explored, and sometimes bushes or gravestones conceal a hole that leads to secret places. In short, the game's world was very large and intricate for a game of this time (and in fact, was larger than the worlds of several subsequent Zelda games).
The game also premiered a simple graphic compression method on the SNES by limiting the color depth of many (but not all) tiles to 8 colors instead of the SNES's native 16-color tiles. The tiles were decompressed at runtime by simply adding a leading zero bit to each pixel's color index.
Ports
A Link to the Past was also made available for the Satellaview, the Japanese add-on for the Super Famicom. The game was completely unchanged, except for being converted into a downloadable format. A Satellaview-exclusive sequel, Kodai no Sekiban, was released in 1997.
In 2002, Capcom ported A Link to the Past to the Game Boy Advance. The Game Boy Advance version was released in North America on 2 December 2002 and in Japan on 13 March 2003. This port was packaged with a Capcom-developed multiplayer Zelda game called Four Swords. The two games worked together; extra features could be unlocked in one game by completing tasks in the other. Additions to A Link to the Past include voice clips, an additional dungeon, an additional end sequence for clearing the new dungeon, and the ability to unlock a continuous spin slash attack. Other changes include an easier puzzle in the fifth dungeon of the Dark World and a text overhaul.
Written by: Admin-Alx
