The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

 

First of all I would like to apologize for the lateness of this review but really if you are a regular reader of my blog you are probably used to it by now.  The reason for the timing issue is because before I played this game I set a mental rule that I would not play another 3ds game until I completed Pokemon Y.  So, you may be asking yourself, why am I not reviewing Pokemon Y?  Because I have almost nothing to say about it.  It was good.  It was fucking long but it was good.  But let's move onto another Smash Bros. character, Link.

In this adventure, the inspirational, disabled mute hero we all love so much is a blacksmith's apprentice.  He lives a quiet life (ha mute, quiet) in a home not far from the Blacksmith's.  A strange homeless man named Ravio who dresses like a rabbit has asked to move in with Link and Link is totally cool with it.  I just went back and read this paragraph and realized how fucking weird the plot of the early game is.  Anyway, Ravio gives Link a bracelet as thanks for the food and shelter and no expectation of rent which is totally fair right guys?!

 

Link's boss gives him the job of bringing the Captain of the guard's sword to him.  He is eventually found in the castle squaring off against a wizard named Yuga.  The Captain is grateful to have his sword but it doesn't do him much good when Yuga turns him into a painting.  Princess Zelda is there and mentions that Yuga is trying to summon Ganon.  Boom painting!  Link grabs the Captain's sword and tries to attack Yuga but guess what, BOOM PAINTING!  Yuga, feeling confident strolls out of the castle and presumably into somewhere evil.  Link's wrist then pops out of the painting first quickly followed by the rest of his body.  It seems Ravio's bracelet saved Link's life.

 

Now it's Zelda so at this point you have got to get the Master Sword.  But how do you do that, Link may have asked if he wasn't a poor disabled mute forced to play charades whenever he feels compelled to speak.  Well the game gives you some stupid convoluted answer involving pendants but the point is go do dungeons until you're able to get the sword.  Now you have the master sword HOORAY THE DAY IS SAVED!  So go to the castle which is big and evil and guess what Yuga is inside.  CALLED IT!  Link confronts Yuga and Yuga flees through a crack in the wall.  Thanks to Ravio's bracelet, Link is able to follow.  He pops out in the dark world of Lorule (I see what you did there) and Yuga summons Ganon and forms this weird pig monster thing.  Just look.

 

So Links dead right? Wrong.  This chick Princess Hilda (I see what you did there) shows up and imprisons Yuga/Ganon.  She also quickly explains that there are seven sages that protect the tri-force but Yuga has imprisoned them in paintings.  Now go get 'em tiger.  To make a short story even shorter, Link goes out and saves all seven sages and comes back to confront Ganon/Yuga.  You may expect him to still be imprisoned but instead, all we find is Princess Hilda.  She informs you that in Lorule the tri-force was fought over so viciously that it was decided that it needed to be destroyed.  Her land was then plunged into darkness and chaos.  When she learned of another world with another tri-force she needed to have it.  She sent Yuga to take the sages and use their power to steal the tri-force.  This left Link speechless (HA!).  Time to fight Yuga/Ganon.  After he/they are defeated, Princess Zelda is freed but Princess Hilda still has the tri-force.  She is going to use it to remake Lorule and leave Hyrule to fend for itself.  It was at this this moment that I was thinking to myself, 'If there is a Zelda Lorule counterpart, why isn't there a Link Lorule counterpart?' As soon as I had finished my thought, Ravio entered the scene.  My next thought was, 'Why can he talk?'  Anyway Ravio takes off his hood and reveals that he looks just like Link but with black hair.  He talks some sense into Hilda and stops her from committing genocide.  Hilda gives Link and Zelda the tri-force to do with what they would like and they use their power to bring Lorule back to it's former glory.  Everyone has a happy ending... Except of course for Yuga who was just following orders from her princess and was then killed.

Let's get into how the game plays shall we?  Something that bothered me in the early stages of the game was Ravio's shop.  You do not acquire items in dungeons like you did in classic Zelda.  Instead, you went to Ravio's shop, which is just your house, and he would allow you to rent items.  This is all well and good but whenever you die, you lose your items and have to make the trip back to his shop to get the necessary items to complete the dungeon.  This can be a real pain in the ass until you get to the point where he allows you to buy items.  The prices to buy items are pretty high compared to the rental prices, but I was never low on money and I never rented an item after that point.  Something I highly recommend is buying the hookshot and upgrading it as soon as possible.  Yes, there is also an upgrade system that surprisingly has nothing at all to do with Ravio.  In the North-East corner of the map in Hyrule, you can find a friendly squid monster who lost her babies.  For every ten of her babies you find scattered throughout the world, she offers to upgrade one of your owned items.  The hookshot is the best buy I've found although there are some items, like the boomerang, that I had no need to use at all.

I have heard a lot of people criticizing the game for being too easy but I don't think that's true.  A hardcore gamer could breeze through this game rather quickly but he would also want all the collectibles.  And the difficulty certainly ramps up at the Yuga/Ganon boss fight.  The bottom screen of the 3ds is only used to manage items and can be used in the pause menu, which is the way it should always be.  Instead of focusing on making a neat gimmick for a specific system, game developers should focus on making a solid game and then make it work for that system.  It's nice to see Nintendo doing that.

 

Me Doing Stand Up

So first of all I would like to apologize for the lack of activity as of late.  Believe it or not I have actually been busy.  I have been working a lot, spending a good amount of time with friends, recording several different podcasts and I even started a Let's Play channel with a good friend of mine Dan Kurtzke.  You should check it out here.  So that's all stuff that's been going on.  I'm sorry I haven't found time to update my blogs more frequently especially Green Acre School Paper since I just started it but I do hope to change that in the near future.  Well thank you for reading this list of excuses and plugs but please enjoy this video of me doing stand up comedy.

Sleeping Dogs

If you have an Xbox Live gold membership like I do, every month they put up a new game that is completely free to gold members. At least they do on the 360 I don't know if they do it on the Xbox One.  The point is, most of the time they are really good games.  A couple of months ago, the game of the month was Sleeping Dogs a game by United Front Games and published by Square Enix.  Which is weird because I really liked it and usually Square Enix games just make me feel uncomfortable.

In Sleeping Dogs you play as Wei Shen (seen ripped and sexy above), a man who is torn between two lives.  He just got got back to his home in Hon-Kong after a few years living abroad in America.  Wei gets up to his old tricks right away and the first time you get to play as him is during a drug deal that goes south and Wei ends up in jail.  He bumps into his old friend Jackie in his cell and he starts telling Wei about how bad things have gotten since he left.  Jackie is part of the gang the Sun On Yee under the command of Wei's other old friend Winston.  A lot of rival gangs are out there after the Sun On Yee but at the moment their biggest problem is another faction of the Sun On Yee led by this asshole named Dogeyes.  After all this catching up, Jackie informs Wei that he could probably get him in good with Winston when they are released.  Wei is finally brought to speak to a detective.  A man named Pendrew (I know it seems like a lot of people but stay with me it's not that bad).  Pendrew interviews Wei alone and turns off all the cameras in the interrogation room to make sure there will be no witnesses.  It turns out Wei is an undercover cop and his current assignment is to get in good with the Sun On Yee and destroy them from the inside.

Jackie introduces Wei to Winston who is at first hesitant to trust him.  Winston asks about Wei's sister because they grew up together and he informs him that she recently overdosed and died.  Dogeyes was the one who got her addicted to drugs in first place.  They quickly bond over their hatred for Dogeyes and Wei is very good at what he does.  During a few of his assignments for Winston Wei had to kill people, use guns and in one situation blow up a building.  Naturally, his superiors in the police department were not happy with him and were beginning to question his loyalties.

Meanwhile, Winston no longer has any question of Wei's loyalty.  Winston is getting married and all of the leaders of the different Sun On Yee families will be there including the big boss himself, Uncle Po.  So all of the leaders of this gang are going to be in one place at the same time?  I can't see this going wrong in any way.  Of course a rival gang attacks and kills Winston and his wife in a really really sad scene.  This is like the red wedding before the red wedding.  Everyone gets shot except Wei of course because he is essentially Japanese Batman.  Wei finds Uncle Po shot and bleeding and manages to get him to a hospital and saves his life.  Pendrew gets sick of Wei's bullshit and has Jackie arrested to spite him.  Uncle Po promotes Wei to a higher rank in the Sun On Yee as thanks for saving his life.

Wei manages to track down one of the shooters from the wedding and he tells him that Dogeyes was actually behind the shooting.  We finally get the confrontation we have been waiting for.  Wei against Dogeyes.  Both of them now leading their own gangs.  When Wei captures Dogeyes there isn't much of a fight.  It's like he is beneath Wei now.  He is nothing to him.  Wei takes Dogeyes to Winston's mother to allow her to inflict whatever kind of justice she deems fit.  He could have taken Dogeyes in to the police but that wouldn't really have been justice would it?  Believe it or not there is still quite a bit left to this game's storyline, but this seems like a good end point doesn't it?  And I should probably talk about the gameplay a little bit before I end this review.

When I first picked up this game I assumed it was just another Grand Theft Auto clone but it turned out to be so much more than that.  It takes hours of gameplay to even unlock a gun.  I have compared the fighting to the Arkham series of games but I'm not sure if that's accurate.  In Arkham its basically button mashing and then you get attacked and you press a different button to counter.  The fighting style in this game is button mashing early on, but then you learn new combos and grapples.  I would say the fighting style is more like that of Yakuza then anything else.

Alright, this is supposed to be a review isn't it?  Thus far I haven't offered any of my own opinions.  Most gamers believe that gameplay is number one and story is secondary.  I am the opposite; I can handle bad controls and gameplay but it has to have a good story.  This is why I believe Assassin's Creed 2 is the worst game ever made.  Some games are exceptions to the rule like any Mario game or Cloudberry Kingdom but for the most part I look for a good story in games.  I was very happy to find Sleeping Dogs because it is not only one of the greatest organized crime stories I have ever heard but it is also one of the most fun games I have ever played.  Square Enix has confirmed a sequel set in the "Sleeping Dogs universe".

Scenes Out of Context: Stolen (Part 2)

This is one of the strangest scenes I have ever seen.  I have no jokes or anything.  Please subscribe to my youtube channel here and enjoy the video.

Scenes Out of Context: The Wicker Man

I would like to thank you my loyal fans for helping me reach over 1,000 views on this, The Coffin Chronicle.  I know it has been a while since you have heard from me but fear not I have returned.  Anyway, here is a very special episode of Scenes Out Of Context thanking you for your loyalty.

Scenes Out Of Context: Phineas and Ferb (Part 2)

Hooray I'm back on schedule!  So, we're back with Phineas and Ferb.  It's amazing the mileage I am getting out of this show.  Don't forget to subscribe to my youtube channel here to see these episodes and more first.

Scenes Out Of Context: Power Rangers

 So Scenes Out of Context is back and about the same as ever but hey you didn't actually think I'd be improved or anything did you?  Anyway, here's the video I hope you like it and please subscribe to my youtube channel here.