Game Details Developer: Nintendo

Publisher: Nintendo

Platform: Nintendo 3DS

Release Date: November 22, 2013

Price: $40

Links: Official website | Nintendo eShop Nintendo: Nintendo: Nintendo 3DSNovember 22, 2013: $40

In the world of literature, there's a specific brand of often-scorned prolific novelist who consistently cranks out book after all-too-similar book without much variation or surprise. Elmore Leonard, Tom Clancy, and Sue Grafton fall squarely in this camp. I used to hate these authors, but the older I get, the more appreciation I have for such comfort-zone writers whose books shamelessly line beaches and lakesides. They make no bones about their output, nor do their readers. You know what you're getting, and you can expect specific archetypes at a breezy pace. What's so bad about an occasional indulgence?

Longtime fans may not take kindly to the comparison, but The Legend of Zelda has truly grown into the industry's biggest serial mystery series. Every Zelda game offers a lengthy-yet-breezy retread, always following certain tenets to the letter with the occasional window-dressing tweak.

Even portable Zelda games fall into this category in spite of moments that are occasionally odder than most of their bigger-brother console entries. Touchscreen controls here, link-cable madness there—not to mention the Honey I Shrunk The Kids-approach or the two-game, Game Boy Color combo that warped across time and seasons. At their core, all of these games are still pure Zelda: a kid in green tights, a giant adventure, tons of temples, and puzzles that require new items to solve.

Welcome to nostalgia town

At first glance, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds seems to give up, to admit defeat in the face of originality. This is the closest the series has come to serving up a direct sequel, and it borrows a lot from 1991's beloved Link to the Past: the world map, top-down 2D visual style, theme songs, and sound effects are all very familiar. Even the game's power-on intro syncs up with the 1991 game to the beat. Welcome to nostalgia town.

Certainly, LBW plays like Zelda comfort food, serving about 12 hours of cozy, beachside-appropriate play. Still, beneath the super-familiar exterior, there are a few tweaks that actually make this entry the most experimental Zelda game in recent memory. Low as the series' bar may be, LBW clears it.

Fans shouldn't be surprised to hear that this Zelda game asks players to explore eleven temples scattered across a mostly outdoor kingdom (named Hyrule, of course) complete with a "dark world" portion that appears midway through the game (sound familiar?). In LBW's case, Hyrule starts to suffer once a nasty wizard shows up and starts casting spells that turn certain residents into flat paintings. This somehow lets him harness their power to reawaken an ancient evil in the dark world. Don't think too hard about it. I don't even remember that wizard's name off the top of my head—he's that forgettable.

Link is somehow immune to this mandatory flattening problem. Indeed, his most notable superpower in LBW is to turn 2D at will, like a walking poster in the shape of Link, to stick flat to the world's walls. So if your path is blocked by a giant chasm but the chasm is connected by a solid wall, you can cling to the wall and walk along it to get across, then pop back out of the wall and continue on your way.

Alternatively, you can use this power to slip between tiny cracks, dodge enemy attacks, and find sneaky shortcuts. The gimmick is no Fez-like revelation, but it's a welcome-enough maneuver, so much so that it's hard to imagine future 2D Zelda games not employing the trick.

For my money, LBW is more effective when making use of its temples verticality, which it does quite often. As the first Zelda game made for the 3DS, Nintendo emphasizes details directly above or below Link's head—holes in roofs and ceilings, cracks of light, other visual hints—and the design team has exercised enough restraint to make sure hopping from floor to floor never feels confusing. The game's memorable ice temple has an elevator in its first room, meaning players can ascend and descend its entirety from the first steps in, offering a striking sense of scale before they try to tackle its tricky rooms.

This is good, because LBW makes a few curious decisions that mute some of the series' sense of exploration and discovery. For one, players receive temple maps by default. Walk in, and boom, you've got the whole layout on your touchscreen immediately rather than having to hunt down a map hidden deep within. It's an unnecessary and unfortunate bit of hand-holding on Nintendo's part.

LBW's inclusion of a "hint ghost" system isn't quite as bad, but it does essentially pack a complete Player's Guide into the software. Don a pair of special glasses in the game and you'll see various ghosts appear. Pay them a single "play coin" (the 3DS' pedometer-based currency), and you'll get a pretty blatant hint for what to do next. My issue isn't with the easy hint access; this is a GameFAQs world, after all. Rather, the hint ghosts' appearance isn't consistent, as the game's few truly tricky points offer absolutely no relevant hints.

Rent your way to victory

Sadly, this game also includes the series' worst gameplay design decision in years: offering every single game item in one fell swoop. Very early in the quest, Link's house becomes a "rental" shop, where players can pay 50-100 in-game rupees to rent any item they want. Boomerangs, bombs, bows, and arrows—this is the only way to find and equip almost all of the dozen-plus items in the game, and the rental lasts semi-permanently at that. The catch is that if you suffer an in-game death, the rental house reclaims your rented items, and you must pay all over again to re-equip. (You can also pay a far steeper price—in the 800-1,200 rupee range—to save items permanently.)

It may sound like a promising, vaguely roguelike risk-reward tweak to the familiar find-and-unlock Zelda formula, but in practice it makes a mess of things. For starters, the risk of losing your items to death is stupidly low. I only died three times in my full-game playthrough. Two of those deaths came because I'd grown careless thanks to the ridiculously large rupee stash I'd racked up. You'll swim in thousands of rupees with little effort, nullifying the rental-loss risk almost entirely.

Worse, one of the most enjoyable parts of a Zelda temple is that feeling of item discovery—of walking up to a tough stretch, knowing you need a new item to tackle it, and then getting some new booty midway that opens up the puzzles you've been walking past futilely for about ten minutes. Instead, players walk into every temple fully stacked, like Bear Grylls walking across a tiny stream.

The few new items in Link's knapsack disappoint, but not for a lack of trying on Nintendo's part. The sand rod is the series' coolest new item: aim it at a flat strip of sand and the entire strip will raise a few squares off the ground as a temporary bridge. LBW's “flat Link” mechanic makes this power doubly interesting, as sometimes you'll need to comb those bridges' sides to advance. So in its corresponding temple, the sand rod opens up some lovely “how do I get over there?” puzzle opportunities.

Sadly, you'll rarely find sand rod puzzles—let alone any other patches of sand—elsewhere in the game. Use the sand rod once, leave it behind. The same can be said for both old standbys (hookshot, hammer, bow-and-arrow, etc) and the few other new items (the “tornado rod,” which is used primarily to send Link skyward for a second). Zelda fans have come to expect the occasional challenging item-juggle as a game drags on, which makes LBW's one-track temples a particular disappointment. (It's worth noting that I beat the game and gathered most of Hyrule's bonus content without once using the series' classic boomerang. Talk about your Zelda sacred cows!)

Every time LBW flashes brilliance, it turns around to disappoint or bore the exact kind of Zelda fan who you'd expect to giddily gobble up a Link to the Past semi-sequel. The game world looks so small when it first starts, and it remains claustrophobic even after the later dark-world turn. And while the overworld is pockmarked with bits of side content, only a few items—a weird baseball mini-game and a cross-world running race—stand out as substantial. The game's largest collection quest asks you to find 100 small critters, but the bonus for doing so only benefits the game's selection of items—most of which, as previously stated, get pretty much zero use throughout the quest.

The game may look boring in screenshots, but its high frame rate, lively animations, and subtle 3D effects make this a real looker; the swamp levels alone make the title a real 3DS show-off. On top of that, fans would be fools not to plug in a pair of headphones thanks to the game's fully orchestrated stunner of a soundtrack.

Really, the level of polish and consistently solid mix of overworld and temple challenges make the game a solid middle-ground addition to the Zelda library. But this entry's compromises and weird oversimplifications mean something. The series has finally—and loudly—embraced its all-Zelda-games-are-the-same pedigree. Go ahead, take LBW to the beach. Hold a fancy drink in one hand and take on some octoroks with the other.

The Good

Wall-merging is a welcome mechanic, alongside temples with a cool stress on verticality

Surprisingly smooth visuals once the game is in motion

A symphonic score good enough to rival Skyward Sword

The Bad

Short quest in a surprisingly small Hyrule

Giving players all items at once results in some lousy pacing

General lack of challenge undermines the game's most clever moments

The Ugly

You won't find a more disappointing series of Zelda boss battles

Verdict: It lives up to the series reputation, if barely. Buy if you can't get enough Link.