The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, released in Japan on November 21, 1991, as ゼルダの伝説 神々のトライフォース (Zeruda no Densetsu: Kamigami no Toraifōsu, literally The Legend of Zelda: Triforce of the Gods), and in North America and Europe in 1992, was the only game in the Zelda series released for the Super Famicom (in Japan) and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (in North America and Europe). It is hailed by many (especially of its generation) as Nintendo's finest hour, and the greatest video game of all time.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was originally planned for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Since Nintendo had a lot of resources at the time, they decided to carry A Link to the Past over to the SNES instead. It introduced many of the features of gameplay that are still included in the series to this day, such as trading sequences, multi-level dungeons, a dynamic environment (light and dark worlds), and items such as the Master Sword and the hookshot.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was ported to Game Boy Advance by Capcom in 2002. The Game Boy Advance version was released in North America first (December 2nd, 2002), then Japan (March 13th, 2003). This port was packaged with a Capcom-developed multiplayer Zelda game called The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords.

There was also a little-known port to the Bandai Satellaview during the days of the Super NES. Unlike the Gameboy Advance port, this version was unchanged from the original. The Satellaview itself never saw a release outside of Japan, so this port was never made available anywhere else.

Another game, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, a Zelda game specifically designed for multiplayer play on Nintendo GameCube, was introduced in 2004 that used 2D environments reminiscent of A Link to the Past. Players were able to play Four Swords by linking together multiple Game Boy Advances with the game.

Chronology

The chronology of The Legend of Zelda series of games is as of now officially unspecified. See the chronology section of the The Legend of Zelda series article for more information. According to the text on the back of the game's packaging A Link to the Past follows the adventures of Zelda's and Link's ancestors referring to the characters from the two NES games The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Thus A Link to the Past takes place before the events of the first two Zelda games. The story of the Triforce and the banishment of Ganon by the seven sages is a rough outline of the story of Ocarina of Time, thus placing A Link to the Past after Ocarina of Time in the Zelda timeline. Shigeru Miyamoto has yet to make an official statement about the true chronology of the Zelda series.

Meaning of the subtitle

The name A Link to the Past is a pun on the name of the main character and also refers to how this game's events occur prior to those of the first two games (it is a prequel). This supports the above-mentioned concept that the character of Link in A Link to the Past is not the same person as Link in the two former games, making this game the starting point of the Multiple Links Theory.

Relating the title of the game to the story of A Link to the Past alone is misleading since Link does not travel through time in this game but merely jumps between two parallel worlds, the Dark World and the Light World, explained in more detail below. No time traveling took place in any Legend of Zelda game until the release of Ocarina of Time.

The Two Worlds

A Link to the Past was the first Zelda game to feature two parallel worlds, similar yet different, that Link could travel between. The first, called the Light World, is the ordinary Hyrule where Link grew up with his uncle. The second was once the Golden Land, a place of light and pureness and home of the sacred Triforce, until Ganon corrupted it with his evil power, changing it into a world of darkness and despair, and it became the Dark World. Each place in the Light World corresponds to a similar place in the Dark World, often with much of the same structure.

Unlike Ocarina of Time, where there is only one place at which Link can travel in time, A Link to the Past allows Link to travel from the Dark World to the Light World at almost any outside location, and then return to the Dark World from that location; the Light World also has eight warp tiles leading to the Dark World. This flexibility enabled a variety of puzzles that exploited slight differences between the Light and Dark Worlds.

Music

The music was composed by Koji Kondo. The overworld theme of the original Legend of Zelda, or "Hyrule Overture" theme, was carried over to A Link to the Past and played in the Light World, redone in SPC700 style. It was also carried over to Super Smash Bros. in Nintendo 64 style and Super Smash Bros. Melee in orchestral style.

Possible Origin of Flute Boy's music

According to a contributor at the Desert Colossus fan site "Tonight on Turner Classic Movies, there was an old 1954 movie called Men of the Fighting Lady. I heard, note-for-note, the Zelda 3 flute boy music playing in the background at one point! Contributed by R.J. Smith"

The truth of this reference, if any, has yet to be verified.

Technical notes

At the time, most SNES game cartridges had 4 Mbit (512 KB) of memory. This game broke the trend in using 8 Mbit (1 MB), allowing the Nintendo development team to create a remarkably expansive world for Link to inhabit.

A Link to the Past features two fully-explorable worlds; the Light World has four palaces (what are known in the more modern games as dungeons) and Dark World has nine. Each palace has from three to eight floors, and each floor has quite a lot of rooms. Moreover, there are many places that expand to bigger maps (usually, through a door or a hole). In short, the game's world is very large and intricate for a game of this time.

The game also premiered a simple graphic compression method on the SNES by limiting the color depth of many (but not all) tiles to 8 colors instead of the SNES's native 16-color tiles. The tiles were decompressed at runtime by simply adding a leading zero bit to each pixel's color index.

See also

• The Legend of Zelda series