Unfortunately the game just isn’t very memorable. Fire creates a wobbling distortion on the ground and enemies burst into dazzling light when defeated. The font and special effects are also inspired by The Wind Waker, creating a unique 2D-3D hybrid look. It made for a fun opportunity to see the hero’s Toon Link design and other iconic characters like Gorons, Gerudos, and even Epona translated into this aesthetic for the first time. Its aesthetic is a marriage between the sprites of A Link to the Past with the special effects and design of 2002’s The Wind Waker. The hook of this game is that you and three friends can play as four different Links at once, solving puzzles and battling in unison. 2002’s Game Boy Advance port of A Link to the Past had a multiplayer mode called Four Swords, which would later be spun out into the full-fledged cooperative Zelda game Four Swords Adventures on the GameCube.

The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventuresįour Swords Adventures is a weird game. An extremely serviceable look for the time, but when considered in the context of a ranking, there are simply 12 titles that look better. While all three of these games handled the task of fitting a large Zelda adventure onto a portable console, their aesthetic has aged poorly.

Character designs are minimal but the hardware was able to render memorable locals like Ricky, Moosh, and Dimitri, who are all dudes I would get a beer with. Some areas even capture the essence of an autumn day. The games’ locales transition from warm to cool tones.

They came out on the same date (similar to how Pokémon likes to double dip) and took advantage of the portable’s full color spectrum. on the same screen makes Awakening feel strange, whimsical, and distinct from other games in the franchise.Ģ001’s Oracle of Ages and Seasons for Game Boy Color brought this style of sprites to the world of, you guessed it, color. Seeing classic NES Zelda enemies and a Chain Chomp from Super Mario Bros. On the other hand, 1993’s Link’s Awakening has always been applauded for its surreal, dreamlike tone. While the sprite work on these games is superior to Nintendo’s previous 8-bit entries, they don’t come close to the level of detail of their 16-bit older brother, A Link to the Past. Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Ages, and Oracle of Seasons brought A Link to the Past’s style of adventuring to the smaller, portable, Game Boy and Game Boy Color. The sprite-based, top-down dungeon crawler coexists next to 3D Zelda adventures even today. When A Link to the Past came out in 1991, it defined a specific type of Zelda game.

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