Zelda: Link to the Past – GBA Review

In a Link to the Past Link receives a telepathic message from a princess named Zelda. She is held captive in a dungeon cell, and needs Link to come to her aid. His adventure is just starting as he must obtain the Master Sword, fight monsters, talk to village people, and change worlds. Ganon the master of evil would love nothing more then to take over the land of Hyrule, so Link must stop Ganon from destroying the world and restore peace to the land. Zelda has a very mixed up storyline, but when you play them all you get a pretty good understanding of which ones fall into which. Link to the Past plots Hyrule surviving a great flood, so you tell me where this one falls. Anyways… On to the review.

Zelda has always had it’s reputation of having top notch gameplay. In a Link to the Past, you play the part as Link in an overview look. Zelda has a huge inventory full of weapons and gadgets, that include a sword, a bow and arrow, and boomerand, and much much more. With a push of a button Link can hold items and use them with the push of another button. There are four different main directions Link can go… Up, Down, Right, and Left, so the controls are not hard at all. The learning curve is about a half hour in this game for the average gamer. Overall the gameplay us flawless, and Zelda lives up to it’s name from Link to the Past.

For the SNES the graphics were spectacular. The overview look made gamers feel more comfortable about where Link was, and how he handled his enemies. I liked the overview look because it gave me more of a boundary to work with. Zelda was developed by Nintendo, so you had to believe they were going to make this game look ultra special. There isn’t much difference between the SNES version and the GBA version of Link to the Past, but the other version Four Swords looks a lot different, more detail if you want to put it that way, but similar gameplay, etc.

The soundtrack for every Zelda game has always been special too. The sound is enhanced in the GBA version of Link to the Past. You can hear Links voice as he performs his swinging attack, and you can hear the sound of the sword swinging at all times. When it comes to the music part of the game, Nintendo didn’t enhance any part of the music, or change anything, so it is still classic Link to the Past, SNES style.

Overall this game has a similar feel to that of the SNES version, so don’t expect too much in the way of change. If you add in the fact that Nintendo created another Link to the Past remake, with better visuals, then you can say there was a big change, but only for multiplayer. Four Swords allows up to four people to play against each other to save the land, and it looks very good. The clean visuals, and the crisp sound add to the Zelda franchise.