The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past – Hands Down Awesome

I challenge anyone to say that The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past is not one of the best video games of all time.

For its time frame, The Legend of Zelda was heads and shoulders above most other games in the genre. Set the scene: the 16-bit Super NES was a huge hit and represented a big step forward from the previous 8-bit system, which was a monster hit itself. Zelda I and II were good and very involved for the time.

Some people pan Zelda because it’s a flagship game for the Wii and we all know that anything Wii-related is bad, right? (Insert sarcasm here.) Those people are fools. Zelda is a very successful franchise, and specifically A Link to the Past is rated as one of the greatest video games of all time. (This is but one platitude — there are many, many more out on the web.)

The thing that was most striking the first time we played it was on a fairly dark night. My buddies and I fired up the game and heard this muted sound of rain. Was it raining outside? Was the TV burning out? As an aside, I did burn out one TV playing my Atari 2600 back in the day. We checked the TV. Nothing. So we kept playing and low and behold… it’s raining! I can’t understate just how cool this was. There was thunder and lightning; when Link tramped through puddles it splashed. I think that was one of the big advances — the sound. You can tell the designers of the game put a lot of thought into this.

No, the TV is broken...

 Questing for hearts and pieces of hearts was also fun, trying to get all 20. This was before the advent of the internet, so you couldn’t just go online or grab a game book that detailed everything. And if I recall correctly, A Link to the Past was the first time it introduced pieces of hearts to collect. You had to explore on your own. Which leads to another awesome idea: finding the bottles. I remember distinctly after grabbing the Zora’s flippers, swimming through the rivers and heading up to the castle. A certain friend of mine was getting rather annoyed about me “wasting time.” Low and behold, I swim to the bridge and what do I find? The third bottle! Needless to say I had a smug, you know what eating grin on my face, much to his consternation.

A great thing that the game introduced was the upgrade path for the main weapon, the Master Sword, and if you had full hearts, the fact that you could zap enemies from afar. Likewise, the gloves, shields, boomerang, bows, and armor could be improved. This would set the standard for upgrades going forward. What else was there? A hammer, bug net, shovel, flippers, a flying duck to zip you around the board, the boomerang, etc! Bombing walls, hacking bushes, the heights of Death Mountain, the shadowy groves of the forests. Fighting Troopers and Poes, Tektites and Zoras, Moblins and Keese. Multiple palaces to explore, multiple towers?

In short, pure awesomeness!

For those not in the know (and I’m not worrying about spilling the beans on a game from the early 90s), the cool thing about the game is the interplay between the Light World and the Dark World. Link has a ton to explore before even getting to the Dark World. By carefully placing certain barriers that require certain items to unlock the area, Link is largely confined to certain areas at first. The cool part is the player has to use both the Light and Dark worlds to get to certain areas. Some might feel that in hindsight it’s “railroading” of the highest order, but in terms of game-play it’s actually fairly open, certainly for the time.

A Link to the Past had another great touch that made it memorable: the ending video scene after defeating Ganon. Everything is put back where it should be, from Link’s uncle recovering to the thief in the forest looking very put out by Link’s triumph.

Like an idiot, I sold my Super NES a long time ago and got a replacement combo 8-bit/16-bit system for it some years back. One of the first games I reacquired was this one. Playing through it again roughly twenty years after the fact, it was still a great game, it still played well, and it brought a smile to my face.

In my estimation, this game is a 10 out of 10. It’s pitch perfect. Now, I know many will say that Ocarina of Time is better in the Zelda franchise. I won’t argue, I think Ocarina is rightly on that list as well. In my mind, you could say Ocarina of Time and A Link to the Past are 1A and 1B, and a case can be made for switching that. 

On a random note for Super NES, the only other game that came close to me liking it as much as Zelda was Final Fantasy I (or III in Japan), with Illusion of Gaia a far distant third. Still good, but third.

How about you? Did playing The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past impact you as well? 

1st Edition AD&D- the Finale- Part VI

 

My dark elf fighter/mage is about to be killed next...

 

The Final Battle – Closing the book on THE CAMPAIGN

(Parts I, II, III, IV and V) 

This post marks the last entry in my series on THE CAMPAIGN—the high school AD&D 1st edition game that, for me, was the campaign. The one that still lingers decades later.

As with the rest of this series, I’m working purely from memory. I didn’t keep notes back then, and whatever map I had (drawn as we explored) is long lost. We were closing in on higher levels—by 1st edition standards anyway—and after nearly two years of weekly play, the campaign was winding down. Other games were starting to pull us away. I think Twilight 2000 was next, followed by Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. We ran through The Enemy Within in that system—with all the grim, disfiguring horror that implies.

But before the curtain closed, we had unfinished business.

The Trail of Dragotha 

We had been on Dragotha’s trail for the better part of a year—always just missing him, arriving to find carnage in his wake. Jim’s dwarf, in particular, had a personal vendetta. His kin had been slaughtered, and he wasn’t letting that go. Other characters had their own reasons. Mine was tasked with recovering the Shield of Arion, a dark elf relic lost to Dragotha’s grasp.

Eventually, we tracked him to a dungeon lair. The crawl was brutal, filled with clerics who stood in our way. I don’t remember the dungeon being more than one level deep, but I do remember the intensity of those battles. The enemy clerics weren’t just spell-slinging NPCs—they were designed to jam us up. And they worked. That design stuck with me. Years later, I modeled the clerics of Orion in one of my own campaigns after them: high-level threats with spells and powers that players couldn’t easily exploit. The same design philosophy that Gary used for the Drow—challenging, alien, and off-limits to players.

Into the Lair

Eventually, we reached a long, narrow hallway. At the far end was a reinforced door—and through it, Dragotha finally emerged. That's it, a door. Huh?

The Choke Point 

It was a clever setup. Not a grand throne room or wide-open space, but a choke point. No flanking, no big AOEs, no fireballing from range. He met us head-on. The melee fighters couldn’t all get into position at once. Our two big spellcasters—Daryl’s pyromancer and my fighter/mage—had no safe shots. Jeff knew what he was doing. He wanted the fight up close and personal. We couldn’t “call in the artillery” without nuking our own front line. 

And so the melee began

Dragotha came out swinging. In short order, he killed both Tom’s half-ogre and Jim’s dwarf—using, fittingly, the very weapons they were questing after. He wielded the dwarven axe and bore the Shield of Arion, turning our character goals into lethal instruments. Both were gone in the opening exchange.

Dave’s halfling fighter/thief stepped up next, narrowly dodging death. Then my dark elf joined the melee. I don’t remember Chris’s illusionist being present, and Mike’s cleric/ranger actions are fuzzy. But I clearly recall the turning point: with our heavy hitters down, I dropped a lightning bolt—not the spetum I was specialized in, but magic. That bolt finished Dragotha off.

Aftermath

I’ll always remember the scene: the dead on the floor, the battle map filled with fallen PCs, and the BBEG finally going down. That was the end. The campaign wrapped, and we moved on to other worlds. But multiple deaths and me ending it with a spell I used on occasion but not as frequently as fly and fireball.

The Campaign

Looking back, one of the most effective elements of THE CAMPAIGN was how Jeff personalized the stakes. Three of us had “McGuffins” directly tied to Dragotha. And they weren’t custom-made evil weapons—they were our cultural artifacts: a dwarven axe, a halfling bear cloak, a dark elf shield. Turning those against us was brilliant. Like Thulsa Doom wielding Conan’s father’s sword—it hits harder when the blade belonged to you.

Since then, I’ve played in great games, mediocre ones, and forgettable sessions. But THE CAMPAIGN stands alone—not just for what happened at the table, but for the friendships it forged. We’ve been at each other’s weddings, watched our kids grow up, argued, drifted, reconnected, and stayed part of each other’s lives.

And I wouldn’t trade it—or them—for anything.