The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

It’s not an unbroken record...though I might sound like a broken one. I just don’t particularly enjoy Zelda games, even if they seem like exactly my sort of thing. Like so many others, I am a sucker for Link’s design in all its forms. I mained him in Brawl and I have a T-shirt from Qwerty with a cute grumpy picture of him after harassing cuccos and suffering the consequences. This game’s retro design had him looking particularly cute, especially when doing things like running into walls, and though it was divisive, I enjoyed the gameplay mechanic of Link’s merging with walls and the dungeon design possibilities it brought with it.

Yet once again, I just found no connection with the story or Link’s simplistic characterisation.

In A Link Between Worlds, a baddie is on the loose turning important people into statues. The blacksmith’s apprentice seems an unlikely hero, but soon gets involved in the usual quest to gain the Master Sword, free seven Sages and use a piece of the Triforce to rescue Princess Zelda – who it should be noted is still formidable here despite being the damsel in distress. The unique twist here is that Hyrule has been united with an alternate world, fittingly named Lorule, which is a far more dangerous and unpleasant place, and can be entered through tears in the wall in various locations. The princess there, Hilda, assists you in your quest, as does a strange little cowardly merchant in a fun rabbit-themed costume, who towards the end in a twist that may be obvious but actually blindsided me, turns out to have more of a place in this story than might be expected. Padding this out is the side-quest for Maiamais, annoying little baby octopus-hermit-crab-things that make plaintive mewls at you from hidden locations until you save them and take them to their mama.

It took me a while to play through this short game. I put it on hold in favour of Bravely Default, and it hasn’t been tugging me back to it desperately, so that I mostly made progress on public transport. Nothing was really a challenge here, with the dungeons mostly being a case of going through the motions with nothing very devious involved, and the only mechanically challenging part being one optional mini-dungeon where you have to dash through various gates to get a rupee reward. The idea of Streetpass opponents was quite fun, but the computer AI was really too predictable and incapable of dealing with boomerangs from behind. The final boss wasn’t a pushover, either, and his patterns were fun to figure out, which is testament to good game design.

I’ve played a fair few Zelda games, now, though I can’t claim they were part of my childhood, which may account in part for my indifference. But I need a lot more character and plot to engage with a game, even one of the stature of Zelda. Mute characters can have a lot of development, but I feel like Nintendo just treat Link like he’s already fully fleshed-out and doesn’t need new characterisation. Yes, we know the archetypal story, and yes, gameplay comes first, but this was nowhere near enough fun to make up for how dull I find lil’ Link’s collection quests. Yet I’ll probably still keep buying Zelda games and seeing if the next one will engage me more, or the next, or the next. 

Infamous

This has been a long time in coming. I had quite a difficult time getting through Infamous, which I got as one of the free games given as compensation for the 2011 Playstation Network outage. I played it for a few hours but didn’t much like it, and it lay dormant on my hard drive until I decided to start finishing all the PSN games I had. Even then, it took a long time to finish Infamous because I had a hard drive problem resulting in having to replay about two hours of the game, which is a good way to make it unappealing for a while. Still, the prospect of getting a good background in before playing Second Son on PS4 took me back again, though I’m not going to get Second Son until its price comes way down and I’ve finished various other games I have lined up.

Ultimately, Infamous won’t be on my favourite games lists, but it was actually pretty good fun. Every time I played it, I enjoyed it, and there’s something endearing about Cole’s ridiculous Batman voice, the jerky way he climbs buildings as you hammer the jump button, and the funny way his head turns as if he smelled something unpleasant when he heals people.

But I have to say that Infamous feels very old-fashioned at this point. After playing games like The Last of Us, even though I know Infamous is much faster-paced it feels extremely clunky and rather late-PS2 in presentation and play style.

Infamous tells the story of Cole, a normal sort of guy who is given powers by contact with a mysterious ‘Ray Sphere’. A select few people are ‘conduits’, able to receive impressive powers from this strange power source, and as it later turns out through some time-travelling parallel-worlds comic book plotting, Cole being one who would be empowered rather than destroyed in an explosion of the Ray Sphere was a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, his hometown, Empire City, is quarantined in the wake of the explosion and soon overrun by different gangs – the Reapers, the Dust Men (probably sounds cooler in the US, where ‘Dustman’ doesn’t commonly used for ‘garbageman’, though this seems to be the intended allusion) and the First Sons, each with their own powerful leaders who soon grow interested in Cole.

The game’s gimmick is that you can choose to make good or evil decisions to affect your ‘karma’. Though this is suggested to be an interesting mechanic, really it’s utterly binary – there’s no advantage to mixing up your decisions, and really you have to place through twice, once as a goodie and once as a total bastard in order to get any benefit at all. I went for good, and I doubt I’ll repeat the experience for the small variations evil decisions will make. Ultimately, I think too much is made of this minor mechanic.

But what really works are the electricity-based powers. Essentially the game plays like the first 3D Grand Theft Auto games, giving you a city to explore and missions you can engage in to move the plot along if you fancy it, but lots of other things to do and random citizens to randomly assault if you so desire. Your path is shaped somewhat by areas only unlocked by plot progression and the rather annoying mechanic of having an area go blurry and unpleasant if the mains electricity is not yet switched on there, but it’s pretty sandbox-like in scale. Cole’s actions are somewhat goofy, especially the scrambling-climbing and the badly-targeted melee, but the electricity-based powers definitely enhance this. There’s something very satisfying about grinding along electric cables, turning on slow-mo precision targeting as you go for some headshots, then leaping off and going into a powerful ground-slam move. I put the game on hard and it seemed a good setting, balanced between Cole’s powers and the grunts’ remarkably good aim, though until the final boss nothing was really much of a challenge – and he was more irritating than anything else.

The story suffers from being badly-acted and the characters being pretty uninteresting, as well as in-game models not suiting cutscenes at all, though I liked the short comic-style sequences for key events. The story is left wide open and I probably will play Second Son, but I consider this very much a second-tier title, even for its time.