A New Link, A New Life: A Link Between Worlds Part 1

Here is the context of this latest installment.  If you don't care about the grander scheme of things and just want to know about this game in particular, you can skip this part and pick up at the Green Sentence.  This game takes place in the Fallen Timeline.  If you have read my post about all the many Links over the years, you would know the Fallen Timeline involves the instance where the Hero of Time (Link from Ocarina of Time) was defeated by the demon king Ganon.  Following this, a war was fought known as the Sealing War where Ganon was defeated by the efforts of the knights of the land and its Seven Sages.  Ganon was sent back to the Sacred Realm where he sought the land's ultimate power, The Triforce, and in this realm he built his empire that became the Dark World.

Many years later, the court wizard Agahnim staged a coup in the land of Hyrule where he seized the seven descendants of the original Seven Sages as well as this reincarnation of Princess Zelda.  The nephew of a veteran soldier for Hyrule, Link, rose up to become the next hero who freed Zelda and the Sages, defeated Agahnim and the demon king Ganon again, and restored peace to the realm.  This Link would continue his adventures in other lands in such games as Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons before going on his final adventure in Link's Awakening.  

This brings us to the present where a lazy boy named Link is asleep.  All Links begin their adventures after waking up, but it is made apparent by his best friend Gulley that this Link is consistently lazy.  Link lives alone in a house that is in the same geographic location as the house where the previous Link lived, but such information was many years ago and lost to time.  He is an apprentice blacksmith under the tutelage of Gulley's father, but his consistent laziness has made everyone call his future success in this endeavor into question.  He runs into the captain of the castle guard who leaves the blacksmith shop without his sword.  The blacksmith sends Link on an errand to return the sword as punishment for his laziness.  Upon reaching Hyrule Castle, he is told by the guards that the captain usually goes to the chapel north of the castle before going on duty.  Link also hears that there has been an outbreak of vandalism all across the castle.

Gulley and his parents

When Link reaches the chapel, the doors suddenly slam shut and the screams of Seres (the chapel priest's daughter) can be heard inside.  Dampe, Hyrule's gravekeeper, tells Link there is a hidden entrance into the chapel.  After Link gives Dampe a run around on how he's ill equipped to face whatever is going on inside, Dampe threatens to tie the sword to Link's hand on the basis that he's the only one who can be of any assistance present.  This marks two differences with this Link from all previous Links. First off, this Link pretty clearly talks as he waves his arms around like he is conversing with another person.  Second, he is incredibly reluctant.

After descending through a network of tunnels in the graveyard, Link arrives within the chapel to find a painting of the captain on the wall.  The captain is nowhere to be found, but the priest is lying on the ground, and a dark menacing figure is approaching Seres.  The figure is a magician named Yuga who holds a flaming scepter that looks like a brush.  He talks about permanently capturing Seres beauty and hanging it on a wall.  He then creates a picture frame and zaps Seres into it, turning her into a painting.  Link recognizes this guy can't be allowed to escape because magicians are almost always causing trouble.  He rushes at Yuga head on, but Yuga jumps into the wall as a painting.  Link slams into the stone wall and falls over.  Yuga thinks Link isn't worth his time, and after he hops out of the wall, he walks off with the painting of Seres.

Link passes out.  

Without Me: A Link Between Worlds Intro

Guess who's back?

       Alright, so I wasn't sure if I'd bring this back, in large part due to lack of inspiration, but with the release of Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, I felt I could at least make an effort and see what happens.  I'm going to start off by saying my initial goal was to approach games on their story aspects and share it with gamers and nongamers alike, but admittedly this is a sort of difficult endeavor.  It's sorta like handing a Wii remote to someone and telling them to "swing it like a tennis racket" and they insist they can't do it because "they don't play games." So this time, I'm going to be a little more reasonable and recognize I can't get everyone to read it but I'll still leave it open for everyone to read.

    I also recognize reading takes time (and in the case of my stuff a little effort too).  So I'll just throw in pictures so we can all be on sorta the same page.


    So why am I coming back now?  Wind Waker HD came out last month(?) and I've sung its praises and considered it my second favorite Zelda game just behind Majora's Mask.  I wrote about Majora's Mask on the basis that it was so bizarre and outside the conventions of the Zelda series while being full of symbolism.  Well, I think I want to do Legend of Zelda A Link Between Worlds in large part because it is so close to the traditional Zelda formula and yet brings something new and exciting that makes it my third favorite Zelda game.  I'll have to do it a little differently, so this will probably be a shorter series.  By shorter series I mean it will be less than thirty pages.

   Without further ado, let's talk about the boy in green.