The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds — Same Hyrule, Wide Open

For most of its life, Zelda has handed its world out one key at a time. Earn the bow, and the thing that needed the bow opens up. Find the hookshot, and the far ledge is suddenly yours. It's a proven formula — it built the franchise. A Link Between Worlds makes a bolder bet: throw the whole world open early and trust the player to explore it. And it makes that bet on a map I'd walked a hundred times as a kid — the exact Hyrule from A Link to the Past — which is the strange magic of the thing. Same ground, and somehow the most new a Zelda has felt in years. It hands you nearly the entire toolbox up front and says go wherever you want, in whatever order you want, and figure it out. That one act of trust reshapes everything around it. Here's how it holds up.

Woke: 0.0

Nothing here. No message, no lecture, no box being checked. It's a fairy-tale adventure about a boy, a painting, and two kingdoms, told straight. I went looking, the way I always do, and came up with nothing to name — which is exactly how it should be. No deduction, no notes. Onto the game.

Gameplay: 9.4

This is the whole reason the game exists, and it's where all that talk of freedom turns into something you can hold in your hands. Two systems do the heavy lifting. The first is the merge — press up against a wall and Link flattens into a painting, sliding along the stone as a piece of 2D art. It sounds like a gimmick and it absolutely is not. It's a genuine third axis of puzzle-solving, and it's the one place the 3DS's stereoscopic effect earns its keep: depth stops being decoration and becomes the puzzle. You're reading walls now, not just floors.

The second is the rental shop, and it's the bolder swing. Instead of doling items out one dungeon at a time, the game lets you rent almost the entire arsenal up front — bow, hammer, bombs, the lot — and then walk into the dungeons in nearly any order you please. That's where the freedom lives. It's the design everyone would point to a few years later when Breath of the Wild "reinvented" open Zelda, except the blueprint was sitting right here on a handheld in 2013. The tradeoff is real — die and you lose your rentals — and it gives even the early hours a welcome edge. And it all feels good: the controls are crisp and responsive, movement is instant, and the game runs very smooth.

Story: 7.8

The story is good — not the reason you're here, and it knows it. Yuga carries what narrative weight there is: a flamboyant, vain, genuinely memorable villain obsessed with sealing people into paintings and forever pausing to admire his own handiwork. You meet him at his cruelest early, when he traps one of the sages in a portrait right in front of you and strolls off, leaving you to give chase. When the game pivots to its mirror-world second half, the parallel kingdom and its troubled royalty hand the back stretch some real weight. But the bones are familiar — a hero, a princess, a sealed evil, the dark reflection of a world you know. It's told well and never drags. It just saves its daring for the design, not the narrative, and that's a conscious choice that keeps it from reaching the heights of the best story-driven games.

Graphics: 9.0

Judged where it lives — a 3DS game in 2013 — this is near the top of the pile. The top-down art is clean, bright, and readable, the world carries a storybook warmth, and the whole thing holds a rock-solid frame rate that plenty of its shelf-mates couldn't manage. The real trick is the stereoscopic 3D. I usually leave the slider off. Here I left it on, because the depth isn't a party trick — it's woven into how you read a room, especially in the merge puzzles and the vertical dungeons where the layers stack. This is the game I'd hand someone to show them what the 3DS was actually for.

Audio: 8.6

Close your eyes and it's unmistakably Zelda — the chest jingle, the secret-found sting, all that muscle memory intact. The score leans on reworked themes from A Link to the Past and they land, nostalgia and all, while the mirror-world music brings a colder, uneasier flavor to the second half. If I'm holding it a hair back, it's because it draws so deeply on the classic well that it doesn't stake out as much new ground as the gameplay does — but what's here is warm, confident, and exactly right for the world.

Replayability: 8.2

There's real reason to come back. The rent-and-go structure means a second run can look genuinely different depending on the order you take the dungeons, and Hero Mode raises the stakes for players who want the world to bite back. Add in the Maiamai hunt and the heart pieces tucked across both Hyrule and Lorule, and there's a healthy tail on this one. It's not the endless rabbit hole of a deep RPG, and I won't pretend it is — but it's a game you'll happily run through more than once.

A Link Between Worlds is what happens when a studio takes its most beloved map and, instead of coasting on it, uses it as the foundation for the riskiest idea in the series: trust the player. The merge gives you a new way to see the world, the rental shop gives you the freedom to explore it on your own terms, and every input backs it up with the kind of polish only Nintendo seems to manage. The story plays it safe and the music leans on the past, but those are gentle marks against a game that got the important thing exactly right. It took the Hyrule I grew up in and threw the doors wide open.

Did you take the dungeons in order like a good soldier — or rent the whole shop and go tearing off across Hyrule in your own order? Tell me how you played it in the comments.