The Legend of Zelda fan community had a mild collective heart attack earlier this year after an interview with the producer of the long-running Nintendo series, in which he seemed to be saying that he was drawing inspiration from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the massive open-world Western-style role-playing game.
"Obviously I play other games, and I'm curious what Zelda fans like about the Skyrim experience," Eiji Aonuma told Eurogamer in June. "Maybe there are some Zelda fans who are looking for something similar out of a Zelda game."
But then a few months later, he said it was all a false alarm. "I started playing Skyrim because the name was so close to "Skyward Sword" and I wanted to see what that was about," he told USgamer. "But there was no inspiration taken from Skyrim."
Now, at the same time, Aonuma did say he was actually planning some major shakeups to the long-standing Zelda formula, and that the newest version – Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, to be released November 22 for the Nintendo 3DS – would be the first example of this. So is it Zelda: Skyrim?
Actually, it kind of is, a little.
A Link Between Worlds is a sequel to 1991's Zelda: A Link to the Past. You may rightly point out that there have been many sequels to A Link to the Past, so many that the series has gotten a little stale to the point where Nintendo talks about radically reinventing it. And this is true. But what Nintendo means by this is that A Link Between Worlds takes place on the exact same world map as the 1991 game, and mimics a 16-bit game's top-down static camera angle.
But while it may look like a 22-year-old game, it doesn't play like it. Main character Link can transform into a two-dimensional wall painting, which lets you travel along vertical surfaces, through cracks and out windows. When this happens, the camera zooms in closely and you see the world for its true 3-D nature, revealing secrets that are often unseen through the top-down viewing angle.
But this in and of itself – while lending itself to some clever puzzle designs – wouldn't change the nature of the Zelda experience. What actually flips the table over is the fact that this is the first non-linear Zelda. Though the worlds of previous Zelda games have felt expansive and vast, attempting to explore them at the game's outset mostly reveals a bunch of things you can't do yet – a cave with a giant rock in front of it that you can't lift or blow up; a bridge with a big gap in it that you can't jump over. As you build up Link's arsenal of items, you slowly become able to experience the world in the order foreordained by the developers.
Not so here. Very shortly into the game, you gain the ability to go almost anywhere you want, because every one of those items becomes available to you. For a small fee (note to people who mostly play iOS games now: NOT REAL MONEY), you can rent all of the classic Zelda items immediately. Want to blow that rock up? Rent bombs. Want to cross that gap? Rent the Hookshot. Want to set some dudes on fire? Rent the Fire Rod. You can rent everything all at once if you want – but if you die, the rental store will take them all back off your corpse. That's the risk of renting.
But it's actually not much of a risk. I only died three times during my entire playthrough of Link Between Worlds, although that's because I acted out of an abundance of caution – if I was running out of hearts I abandoned whatever task I was on and warped away to safety. I never bought a magic potion; I only rarely had to use fairies trapped in bottles to revive me. So the mechanic that's supposed to make it difficult to just rent everything and have the run of the whole world only made me find ways of abusing the fast-travel system.
What this mechanic ends up introducing to the Zelda series is: grinding.
As you explore the world, you'll mostly find three things: Heart containers that give you more life, Rupees to spend on stuff, and a set of collectible baby octopuses. These latter two go hand in hand. As you collect money, you can buy your equipment permanently from the rental store. And once you buy stuff permanently and collect enough octopus babies, you can upgrade those items to make them more powerful. (This is the true incentive to buy instead of rent.)
So not only does Link Between Worlds allow you to explore the whole map, it rewards you, substantially, for doing so. Once you get the run of the world, you can put in a few hours before you ever set foot in one of the dungeons and get enough cash and upgrade material to buy everything and trick out most of it. Now, instead of going into the Ice Palace with a rented Fire Rod that you'll lose if you die, you can swagger in there with a fully-juiced wand of death that causes Hindenburg-scale blazes.
The game's relative easy difficulty level combined with the fact that you can grind up to full power very early on means that once you do start knocking out the dungeons, they go by very quickly. I finished the game in under 20 hours, which doesn't include getting every single doodad but does include a couple hours of messing around with a puzzle that to this day I still can't solve. Link Between Worlds doesn't guide you to its secrets (I am missing major items and have no idea where they are) but it's trivially easy and doesn't take much time at all to complete without them.
Freedom, in this case, creates an imbalance: Once I was done with that first big sprint around the world, I didn't get to have that experience again since most of what was left were the dungeons.
While Link Between Worlds was a lot of fun, I don't know if it'll go down in Zelda history as one of the standout entries. But the experiment with nonlinearity has to be read as a success. Building up one's arsenal of items is more fun when it's not being drip-fed to you at the precise rate of one per dungeon, when you can feel like you're cheating the system, when defeating enemies and finding chests full of Rupees feels like you're making tangible progress towards being significantly more powerful. As with 2011's Skyward Sword, Link Between Worlds slaughters more of Zelda's sacred cows and finds that the series didn't need to stick to that rigid formula just to "feel like Zelda."
With Nintendo at work on a new Zelda for Wii U, I don't think it has to go full Skyrim, but Link Between Worlds is an indication that it should travel further down that road. It's got me imagining a similar experience on a console, where you can again wander all over a world, but a properly large one instead of a tiny one pulled directly from a 1991 16-bit game. If nonlinearity can make something this old can feel this new, imagine what something entirely original could do for Zelda.
