A Link Between Worlds - Underappreciated?

[LincolnLegend]

I love this game, personally; I fall into the Youtube Rabbit Role sometimes (don't we all?) and I rarely see this game on any top 10 lists. I think it many ways, this game can serve as a model for BOTW in its openness. I personally think it's nearly flawless, perhaps the handheld contributes to it's lesser popularity? Any thoughts on this game?

 

[pyjamas5189]

I really enjoyed this game I liked the fact you could do the dungeons in any order rather than a set order, the weapon hire was interesting you could get any weapon from the beginning of the game as long as you had the money. The only annoyance was loosing your weapons when you died if they were rented rather than bought. I think it does deserve more credit than it gets.

 

[LincolnLegend]

I really enjoyed this game I liked the fact you could do the dungeons in any order rather than a set order, the weapon hire was interesting you could get any weapon from the beginning of the game as long as you had the money. The only annoyance was loosing your weapons when you died if they were rented rather than bought. I think it does deserve more credit than it gets.

Yes that mechanic was a pain; in some ways though, it gave me an incentive 1. Not to die as much (lol) and 2. Made me want to get more rupees so I explored more. But yeah I agree, deserves more credit!

 

[raizelmik]

I enjoyed the game, but I'm not so sure about the 'buying items' mechanic. I did like that it allowed for non-linearity (and finding actual stuff in dungeons that wasn't the 'dungeon item'), but it also caused me to grind rupees and then immediately buy all the items, because that's just the sort of player I am naturally. So after I was done buying all the items, rupees became useless and I was always at 9999.

But still. Fun game for sure. I played it 3 times or so.

 

[Dio]

I don't think it is underrated. It is a decent game, but it does not really fit in with the established lore, there is a lot of contradictions there for people in it for the story.

It does actually look like crap in terms of visuals, very ugly indeed. Yuga would not approve.

There is also the borrowing items aspect which is a departure from what we are used to. Some love it some hate it.

 

[DarkestLink]

It was a good game, significantly better than aLttP and the older titles, but it didn't quite live up to PH and ST. By leaping through a few hoops (mostly with item renting) they were able to implement a non-linear dungeon structure. Did it add anything? ...Not really. But we did have to deal with the item renting, and because you were essentially limited to one single item per dungeon, the puzzles were very predictable. Before you even really examine the puzzle, you know the answer is either "use dungeon item" or "wall merge".

That said, they really did put a lot of effort into these puzzles to try and overcome their limitations and I appreciate that. It's one of two factors that puts ALBW higher than the early precessors for me, which honestly lacked puzzles. In addition, I really liked the addition of a regenerating cooldown meter. It was much less limiting than the magic meter, made resource management easy, and gave me more incentive to actually use the items in combat, which in turn made the combat a lot more engaging than the button mashing that aLttP was. I'm glad to see something like this is returning in BOTW as well....if only the rest of the equipment didn't degrade. <.<

Personally, I feel the game would have been a LOT better if:

1) They made it linear. This would have allowed us to continue finding items in dungeons (which is half of what makes a dungeon fun), increase difficulty in puzzles and combat in later dungeons, and would allow them to build on puzzles and give the developers more wiggle room on what puzzles they can make, as well as the options players have, making puzzles less predictable.

2) I would have prefered if they kept the stylus gameplay. Simply put, it was more fluid. For example, in PH and ST, I can aim an arrow in literally any dirrection I want whereas in ALBW, I am limited to 8 directions. I'm sure they will have overcome this technical limitation by the next game, so I'm fine with traditional controls in the future, but in this particular case I would have prefered stylus controls.

 

[TattooArtist]

I won't lie, it wasn't my favourite. The only good thing about ALBW was his powers since it was original otherwise the game was disappointing.

 

[Sheiken]

I loved the game. I wouldn't call it under appreciated though. Pretty much everyone who has played it likes it.

I think it does not get as much attention outside of that though due to the fact that it is really easy to beat and kind of short.

 

[Spirit]

I like it. But having it share ALttPs overworld made it feel more remake/reimagining than a propet sequel. And it wasnt as good as AlttP either which did it no favours.

It had some nice touches but they werent enough to elevate it to heady heights.

It feels in a lot of ways like half a job or poor attempt at bettering something that cant be matched so i think a lot of people wash over it for those reasons

 

[WindFishTacos]

I loved this game, the art style is fantastic. Merging onto the walls opened up a whole new way of thinking to figure out puzzles. Playing the dungeons in any order was a nice feature. I wasn't a huge fan of renting items, I would save up and buy them. The game offered plenty of rupees to make this happen. A lot of this game felt not super difficult but I think that is because the controls were so good.

 

[Salem]

Yeah, I love this game, I noticed not a lot of people talk about it.

 

[A Link In Time]

ALBW is my favorite handheld Zelda. I think it does ALttP's overworld better than the original. Familiar overworld areas and dungeons were literally granted a new layer with the wall merging mechanic. I also think renting items was a great way for the series to take a first step back to its nonlinear roots in preparation for Breath of the Wild.

 

[Morbid Minish]

I love ALBW. It has great characters, an interesting story, fun mechanics, and (in my opinion) the art style is nice. The one thing I didn't much care for however, was renting items - I like finding them in dungeons. Though I do see why others liked that aspect of the game, since it allowed for nonlinear gameplay.

 

[Robert Jonas]

Top 10s take into account personal experience. For example I love Wind Waker, its an amazing game and probably one of the best but I still rank Ocarina of Time higher cause it's the one I grew up with.

 

[magnann]

ALBW is either my favourite or second favourite handheld Zelda (Link's Awakening being the other). I remember when it came out it got a LOT of praise for being so good (91 on Metacritic with user score of 8.9), so I don't believe it's underrated. Basically as highly rated as it deserves. It's just likely that a lot of the people who made the lists didn't play the game. It came out fairly recently and it's on a handheld device so that's probably the answer right there. It's not like WW, MM, OoT, ALttP, Zelda 1, etc where you can play the game on any console/emulator under the sun.