Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
Or Alundra A Link to the Past? Considering many cite Alundra as the better Zelda: A Link to the Past, I was pumped to obtain the game for 20€ mid-last year and played about half the game in summer, the second half I played over the last few days, currently in the most likely final dungeon (the one you can enter when you have all emeralds and place them by the sea). I'm playing on PlayStation Portable, which hampers controls a little, because I feel it is harder to hit diagonals than on a Dual Shock, but I like portability.
However, I am not too pleased with the game. Granted, it has some nice puzzles in it, especially some more riddle-like puzzles and the ice sliding ones come to mind. But overall I feel it is a surprisingly weak game and the reason for that comes down to a few gameplay points.
This sounds extremely negative, but I must say overall I did enjoy the game, because there were some well designed dungeons in there (especially the more puzzle oriented ones which mostly happened to be the dream dungeons), the graphics are nice and when the game doesn't bother you with awful perspectives and platforming, it often has a nice flow to it. I just cannot understand how anyone can cite this game as a superior ALttP though, because from a gameplay perspective, I think it is overwhelmingly inferior.
However, I am not too pleased with the game. Granted, it has some nice puzzles in it, especially some more riddle-like puzzles and the ice sliding ones come to mind. But overall I feel it is a surprisingly weak game and the reason for that comes down to a few gameplay points.
- The overworld is difficult to navigate, because the game is often quite vague in telling you where to go and the paths are difficult to find, some signs are even irritating (particularly when trying to enter the woods)
- The much cited difficult puzzles are actually... not difficult? I had my fair share of problems with the game, but none arose from puzzles. In fact, up until now the puzzles have been quite simple. What comes into play here is also the bad sense of progression in the puzzle design. Take for instance the last dream sequence, which had a nice concept and was one of my favourite parts of the game. However, the puzzles in this dungeon are all "repeat this pattern mirrored vertically". The developers did not bother to increase complexity, but basically recyceled the same puzzle over the course of the dungeon all the time. This was never as obvious as in this dungeon, but the concept of introducing puzzle concepts and then adding to the complexity was completely alien to the developers apparantely. Maybe this was a reason many think the game is difficult in its puzzles, since encountering a puzzle archetype for the first time usually means having to deal with the full complexity of it at once. The overall complexity of these puzzles is rather low though. The most difficult puzzle was a block sliding puzzle in the ice dungeon, which I actually liked a lot, but which was still considerably easier than comparable puzzles in Lufia 2.
- The perspective is annoying. More often than not does the difficulty come from deceiving perspectives. In particular around the 2/3 point of the game it was spamming with obnoxious "haha, you cannot see the path" moments - which were actually used fully conciously in the world design
- The god awful platforming. It's just absolutely devoid of any kind of fun and it is solely difficult because it controls like ass and you cannot judge heights and distances properly due to the perspective. At one point there was a platforming section where you had to freeze fireballs repeatedly in order to build stairs to reach the top of the room, I was furious. I don't know what the developers were thinking with all this platforming, but as a big lover of platform games (my favourite genre): Please, please, don't put platforming sections in your game if controls and perspective are actively working against platforming
This sounds extremely negative, but I must say overall I did enjoy the game, because there were some well designed dungeons in there (especially the more puzzle oriented ones which mostly happened to be the dream dungeons), the graphics are nice and when the game doesn't bother you with awful perspectives and platforming, it often has a nice flow to it. I just cannot understand how anyone can cite this game as a superior ALttP though, because from a gameplay perspective, I think it is overwhelmingly inferior.
