The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

, also known as Zelda 3 or Zelda III, 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, and in North America and Europe in 1992. A project conducted by Shigeru Miyamoto and his team.

The game is hailed by many (especially of its generation) as Nintendo's finest hour and is considered one of the greatest video games 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.

Storyline

The opening story sequence from Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past featuring the Triforce.

Shigeru 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. There was also another sidenote in one of the issues with EGM that the game takes place 100 years before the events of Zelda and Zelda II. Neverthless, it would seem A Link to the Past takes place before the events of the first two Zelda games. One theory presented against this is that A Link to the Past is in fact the last chronologically besides the 'Oracle' games, as it is the only game which features Ganon actually losing the Triforce and thus being immortal no longer. It is speculated that this is how he is finally destroyed before being resurrected in the 'Oracle' 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, with some changes (the sages did not seal Ganon in whilst he was in the sacred realm). References to the Imprisoning War places A Link to the Past after Ocarina of Time in the Zelda timeline. It is currently unknown how the triforce got in the sacred realm with Ganon however. It is possible that the future release Twilight Princess may shed some light on this matter.

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 golden power; known as the Triforce. Once the vile Ganon gets into the Golden Land, he holds the Triforce and turns it into the Dark World. To lock Ganon there, the Seven Sages* created a seal to the Dark World, which can only be broken by the Sages or their descendants. (In the original version of Link to the Past for the Super NES, the Sages are referred to as the "Seven Wise Men", but in the GBA remake, the name is changed to the Seven Sages because, as Ocarina of Time clearly demonstrated, only two of the Seven Sages were actually men.) This story became a legend, and it is told to the player as the game unfolds.

Right before the game starts, 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.

Two ending scenes, Princess Zelda and other maidens at Hyrule Castle (left), and Master Sword back at the Pedestal (right).

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.

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. With his quest completed, Link returns the Master Sword to its resting place.

It is probable that the title "A Link to the Past" refers to the next game in the series, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Several of the maidens describe Ganon's rise to power, which is arguably portrayed in Ocarina of Time. One refers to him as a thief named "Ganondorf," the first time that he is called by that name in the series. In Ocarina of Time, Ganondorf steals part of the Triforce, as chronicled in A Link to the Past, and only after Link defeats him at the end of Ocarina of Time does he turn into "Ganon," the giant, pig-like monster that Link fights in A Link to the Past. At the end of Ocarina of Time, Ganon (or Ganondorf) swears to Link that he will return one day to exterminate his descendants. Presumably, A Link to the Past is the story of Ganon's promised return. Therefore, Ocarina of Time is a prequel to A Link to the Past.

Gameplay

Gameplay in both the Light and Dark Worlds.

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.

Despite 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.

A 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.

Characters

*Link: A young man who lived with his uncle in a lone house outside of Hyrule Castle until one stormy night when he would be contacted telepathically by Princess Zelda. His uncle, also hearing the call, urged him to stay behind while he investigated the situation, yet Link followed and soon found his uncle on the brink of death within the castle walls. Realizing he was the princess' only hope, the aged swordsman bestowed upon Link the secret sword arts of his family before passing away. Link's destiny was then revealed to be the protector of Zelda, and after her eventual re-capture by Agahnim, he was forced to enter the mysterious Dark World, and free the maidens from their respective prisons.
*Princess Zelda: As a descendant of the royal family of Hyrule, Zelda's ancestors were the very people who sealed away the fabled Golden Land years ago, and she has thus become a target of Agahnim as a catalyst for re-opening that very world. She is captured before the start of the game, yet is rescued by Link before she and the other maidens can be sent to the Dark World. After hiding in a church safe house while Link searches for the legendary Master Sword, Zelda is captured by Agahnim once again, and is at once sealed away in a magic crystal at the top of Death Mountain.
*Agahnim: A mysterious sorcerer who arrived at the Hyrule Kingdom not long before the beginning of the game. Although his motives were at first unclear, he gained favorable reputation with the royal family by ridding them of a number of problems plaguing their kingdom using unknown magic. He later developed an interest in the wise men who sealed away the mythical Golden Land ages ago, and realized that once this land was found, he could have all of its power for himself. He then placed a spell on the knights of the land, putting them under his direct control, and ordered them to find the descendants of these sages of lore, not the least of which was Princess Zelda herself. After murdering her father, King Hyrule, Agahnim was about to send Zelda to the Dark World when Link intervened, and escaped to the other world himself.
*Sahasrahla: An aged, learned man who happens to be a descendant of the seven wise men. Link meets him early in the game, and Sahasrahla informs him that in order to obtain the Master Sword, he must release its magical seal with the power of the three pendants. Whenever Link finds a Triforce-shaped glyph on a wall inside of a Dungeon, Sahasrahla is able to communicate with him telepathically, and regularly offers advice on how to approach a certain situation.
*Link's Uncle: A former knight in service to the royal family of Hyrule, Link's uncle has been his caretaker for sometime, and taught him how to effectively use a sword. When he is summoned to the aid of the Princess, he takes off for the castle, only to be critically wounded by the mind-warped palace guards. He tells Link the secrets of his family's sword techniques, and urges him to protect Zelda.

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.

Music

Front cover to the official soundtrack, The Legend of Zelda: Sound & Drama.

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.

A Link to the Past introduces several musical sub-themes to the series, such as the Theme of Princess Zelda (Zelda's Lullaby), the Royal Family Theme (Hyrule Castle), Kakariko Village and the Select Screen / Fairy Cave. Each of these tunes were reused in later games of the series.

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 holes that lead 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).

Like Super Mario World, this game used 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 or one bit to each pixel's color index.

But the most technical advance was to save memory by duplicate elimination. The Light World and the Dark World are almost identical and only the differences were saved, otherwise they would have needed to wait for a 16 Mbit ROM.

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, BS Zelda: Kodai no Sekiban, was released in Japan 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.

Comic

A page from the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past comic part 3, "The Book of Mudora".

A comicbook miniseries based on Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past by Shotaro Ishinomori appeared in Nintendo Power magazine beginning in January 1992 and ran for 12 issues. Due to the series' short run, many portions of the game were omitted, and several new story segments were added.

A new character, Roam, was introduced, a knight with the ability to take on an avian form, growing wings and feathers. While at first meeting Link as an enemy, the two quickly became allies and joined forces to help take down Ganon, as is tradition with some Shotaro's designs, Roam has a large nose.

Trivia

*Mario makes a cameo appearance in the game, appearing in paintings hanging inside houses around the game.
*Chain Chomp also makes a cameo appearance inside the 7th Dungeon in the Dark World as an indestructible enemy.
*Link to the Past was the first Zelda game to feature a counter after you beat the game that keeps track of how many times you died on your file (and with some work, you can finish the game with 000). How ever the SNES version added to the counter every time you "Save and Quit", so the only way to do it was to go through the whole game wilthout dying or turning it off. The GBA remake fixed this and saving & quiting dosn't add to the counter.
*Early in the game, Link's uncle says "Zelda is your...". This caused some people to speculate that the full sentence would have read, "Zelda is your sister" (less popular sentence endings included "ally" and "only hope"), but the Japanese version of the game confirms that the translation of the sentence should have read, "Zelda is your destiny". The later release would alter the text to read "It is your destiny to save Zelda".
*In recent years a Japanese commercial of the game has become famous for its bizarrness. In the commercial the entire cast of characters from the game are seen dancing (similar to Michael Jackson's Thriller) while a cheesy pop-song plays in the background. Link (who is played by a woman) soon uses his spin attack to block a fireball and rescue Zelda as Ganon appears, leading to more dancing until the end of the commercial. The television show X-Play commented that it is one of their all-time favorite commercials from Japan.
*The fifth dungeon in the Dark World contains a notoriously difficult puzzle which requires the player to push a block through several gaps down several levels in order to open a door leading to the boss of the dungeon. Many players worked out that it was in fact much easier to complete the sixth dungeon first, as by doing so they could obtain an item which would let them bypass the puzzle.

References

See also

*The Chris Houlihan Room, an odd hidden area in Link to the Past that has only come into widespread knowledge thanks to the internet.
*List of best selling computer and video games

External links

*The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past official site
*Mean Machines - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past review
*Nintendo Magazine System - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past review

*Collection of reviews of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)
*Collection of reviews of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (GBA)
*Zelda Legends has an exhaustive line-by-line comparison of the game versions.
*Speed Demos Archive - Speedruns
*Retrospective: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past