“Zelda: A Link to the Past” Brings Fond Memories

It should be no surprise that the Zelda franchise was one of my absolute favorites growing up. When I first got my hands on The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past one fine Christmas morning, I could hardly wait to run downstairs (the game consoles were plugged in to a TV in a den in our basement), pull the cartridge out of its box, and fire up the Super Nintendo. For the next few years, despite having beaten the game several times, I’d frequently find myself wanting to do yet another playthrough of the game. I recall that I’d often come one heart container short of perfection and that it was a big deal when I finally completed the game one day with a full set of 20 hearts. It also seemed that each time I played the game I would discover something new, even if it was just some weird little quirk.

I recently put up a poll on both Twitter and Google+ inviting followers to vote on a game for me to kick off some retrogaming on my YouTube channel. Unsurprisingly, A Link to the Past came out as the overwhelming majority winner. For a little bit, I was torn: would I want to include the first video as the first entry into The Retro Play Show, or would it be best to give it its own playlist right from the get-go? I thought about this perhaps more than I should have, but after talking with a few folks I finally decided on just giving it its own playlist.

At any rate, this video here will be the first in a fairly long playlist that will include the entirety of the game. It’s worth pointing out that this will be a casual run – I don’t know that I’ll get every heart piece along the way, but I’ll make an effort here and there to look some things up and make sure we do our best. I’m also playing this on an emulator while upscaling the graphics to a very high quality level, and I think you’ll quickly agree that it looks beautiful.

In this first video, our quest begins with us heading to Hyrule Castle one rainy night to rescue Princess Zelda from its dungeons. We soon learn that we’ll need to track down the Master Sword if we are to have any hope of defeating the evil Agahnim and so this means tracking down the Elder of Kakariko Village. I take some time to talk to the NPCs, track down a few heart pieces that I remember the locations of, pick up some useful items, and then finally make our way to the Elder and, ultimately, the Eastern Palace. This first major dungeon of the game goes pretty smoothly and I even defeat the Armos Knights without taking a single hit!

Next time, it looks like we’ll be going to fetch a “useful item” from a cave near Lake Hylia and then seeking out the second pendant.

I won’t be posting every update to this series on this site, so check out the full playlist for this series here to keep abreast on future episodes!

Jessica Brown

Retro Games and Technology Editor. She'll beat pretty much every Mega Man game without breaking a sweat.