This new thread title isn't that good because it doesn't bring across the purpose of what I wrote. I didn't write this to just write up "my thoughts" on the game; that would be a very different article, with different contents that cover all aspects of the game, not only the problems. No, this is a work of criticism, and the thread title should reflect that. It could be rephrased, but the key point that the work is a critique is important to bring across in the title, not only in the text itself.
So, I renamed the headline in the first post to "A Criticism of Zelda: A Link to the Past". Hopefully whoever changed the thread name will change it to this.
Beyond that, it's nice to see one of the things I write get a bunch of replies here for once, it's been a while...
You can't use the word over rated and then try and make it factual that it is.
Anything about "rating" with regards to gaming is a statement of opinion, so this comment makes no sense. Ratings are opinions.
So the game discourages exploration but is also not good because it requires that you explore it to find multiple key items?
Yes, and I did my best to explain exactly why this is in the article. The game requires you do do that NES-style exploration stuff of randomly wandering around looking for hidden things. Two problems, though: first, I find the world boring due to all the reasons I stated. And second, I have never enjoyed that kind of game design, as I want to have a clue about what I should be doing in a game. So, the actual gameworld and design, and what they want you to do in that world, conflict. The best Zelda games do not have this problem because they have better-designed, more interesting worlds, and don't hide required items in random corners with minimal clues.
Seems pretty contradictory to me.
LttP requires me to do something which goes against how I found it fun to play the game. The game is contradictory.
Also I massively disagree with the notion that it has one of the boringest overworked in a series that has the empty fields of OoT, MM, and TP.
Those have so much more to do than there is here, though! Yes, OoT's Hyrule Field is just an empty space, but at the time it looked so cool! And besides, the ranch, the town, and the side areas all around (mountains, lake, river, forest) are all far more interesting than their LttP counterparts. The dungeons are a lot better as well, but that's different of course. As for MM, that game has a dense, detailed overworld full of stuff to do, not sure why you're putting it on this list. As for TP, I love that overworld, there is plenty to see and do...
It took some of the lethality out of Zelda. Not as much as the 3D games did but enough to make the world a little less interesting.
LttP is probably harder compared to its NES predecessors than Super Mario World is compared to its NES predecessors, though, so it just fits with Nintendo's attempts on the Super Nintendo to not make games quite as hard as they did before. It was a good move because extreme difficulty can drive people away, and with larger game sizes you can fit in more game so you don't need to cover over for very limited amounts of content with super-high difficulty quite as much as you did before. That process, of course, continued over time and probably went too far, but it makes sense.
I'm sure you've thought of a lot of reasons, but none of which is the real cause: that you played it in 1994, and you played ALttP in the 2000's. You think you are above nostalgia and context, and can evaluate each game objectively in a vaccum. You can't. Nobody can. You are unconsciously looking for reasons why you dislike ALttP and love LA, but that's what they are, justifications and rationalizations. The
bottom line is already set.
While I agree that nostalgia is a factor, that's why it is an item on my list there, I put it as number zero because I think that most of the reasons I don't love LttP would apply regardless of when I first played it. Sure, I'd just have accepted things like the combat system, but the hidden required item stuff would have annoyed me anytime, I'm sure, for example! So nostalgia helps, but I do think it's more that LA happens to fix most of the things about LttP that I dislike. And I definitely do not think that it's because LA shaped what I want out of games, but that the game happens to do a lot of things in ways I really like.
My experience mirrors yours, in the sense that is perfectly symmetrical. I played ALttP on release, fell in love with it, then played LA in the early 2000's and it felt primitive and user-unfriendly, got stuck often, and I ended up dropping it. As I said, nobody is above nostalgia and context.
If you thought that LA felt primitive, then you should never play LttP again, because it's dramatically more so than LA in many, many ways...
Apparently rescuing a princess is a garbage sexist story now.
It definitely is. "rescue the kidnapped girl" is a game plotline that should have gone away forever decades ago unless you come up with a REALLY good excuse for it. As much as I love Nintendo, it's incredibly sad that they are so devoted to sexist game stories... like, the only Nintendo game from the past 20 years I can think of that actually pulls off the "rescue the kidnapped girl" plot in a way that works is the first Paper Mario, and that's because it played with the Mario formula in some amusing ways. And even there it's really only the first Paper Mario game that worked so well.
Many of your complaints remove LTTP from its historical framework which really isn't fair.
While only comparing games to other titles available at the time of their release is an understandable idea, nothing exists in a vacuum. Newer games than this one exist, and I think it's fair to compare them, particularly when this game not having some of those things hurts it so much!
I¨ve always wondered how every best SNES games list has ALttP as a number one. I get that people like it but when there's great games like Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario World and so it's just puzzling how it can always be number one. IMO ALttP isn't nowhere near the best Zelda game but that's just me. Hell, A Link Between Worlds is better than ALttP though in my book it's the best Zelda game ever made.
I think you are on point with the nostalgia. It's same with the first Zelda. As a kid everyone had much more time and patience than average gamer nowadays. Some stuff was really tough to figure out when I played it for the first time in 2014. That kinda made the experience less fun. But when you've played the game as kid you don't get stuck in later playthroughs which may make you blind to some of the shortcoming.
Still a damn good game that has aged pretty well but it's not perfect and definitely not the best SNES game ever. Not even in my top 10 actually. But that just shows how great library SNES had.
It's hard to separate nostalgia from fact, yeah... impossible at times.
I think calling it overrated paints a slightly confusing picture-- yeah, nothing's perfect, but in your post you call it a "great classic."
I probably should have said 'good" there instead of great, yeah. That'd be more consistent with how I refer to the game everywhere else outside of that one mention. Maybe I should change that... there are times I've thought LttP is a great game, but then one of the issues gets in the way and my opinion of the game goes back down again.
Yet it's overrated? If something is indeed a great classic, how can it be overrated?
But even if I leave that language in, I do think it works -- remember, this is a game often mentioned as the best game on the Super Nintendo, maybe the best game ever made by Nintendo, the best Zelda game ever in any list that doesn't have OoT on top, etc, etc. The usual consensus opinion on it is that it's a nearly perfect masterpiece, not just good or even great. And I've never agreed with that.
Something can have flaws but in the end if many people love it and think it's great, as you seem to, I don't think that makes something overrated. For example I have problems with Resident Evil 4, but the consensus is wildly positive and I acknowledge that it's a great game overall, so I couldn't realistically call it overrated.
I agree here, yes. Every game is flawed, the question is about how much the games' flaws bother you, and how big those flaws are.
It's a solid, in-depth analysis with plenty of merit and I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I think it should have been approached from a less deliberate, matter-of-fact standpoint. The header is going to dictate the rest of the conversation
The point of a title is to sum up your argument in a few words, and that's exactly what that title did well.
(As for people who only react to a headline without reading the text, that's unfortunate and that isn't why I write stuff like this. What I want is for people to actually read it.)