The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (2013)

Published by: Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo 3DS

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is a video game that tells the story of a young boy who is forced to save the world when all of his friends are transformed into paintings by a mad clown or something. The hero is himself turned into a painting, but is allowed to escape eternal purgatory with the aid of a smelly leather bracelet acquired from a shady-looking bunny man. The bracelet allows him to turn into a painting and walk around on walls; the rest of the game explores this fascinating new superpower in a myriad of creative ways. In fact, many of the ancient dungeons of Hyrule appear to have been built specifically with this ability in mind, even though no one else in Hyrule has ever been known to use such unusual magic before. The Ancients are truly an awesome and wise people.

So the game is especially great for those nostalgic fans sighted clearly in Nintendo’s crosshairs. A Link Between Worlds is the direct sequel to SNES golden child A Link to the Past and pays homage in a way I can only describe as consistent. The landscape and the monsters and the set pieces are familiar enough, but now jazzed up with a nice 3D look and a little tighter AI where appropriate. It feels really nice tromping around the ol’ stomping grounds again, and the 3DS is well suited to this task with its 3D mode turning Hyrule into a beautiful diorama. You get this desire to merely pluck enemies off the screen with a pair of tweezers and put them on a shelf or something. That’s pretty neat. The effect really shines in the Water Palace stage; pulling a switch and watching the water levels rise and fall is one of those obvious but brilliant design touches. Seriously, it looks amazing.

Gameplay is on the same level as the graphics: there’s enough nostalgia to get you into it and then the experience veers in a new direction with a wholly new core mechanic. Link gains an ability to turn into a painting and walk along the walls, which comes in handy for most if not all of the game’s puzzles. If you get stuck, look around for a flat wall you can merge with and that is the most likely solution. The fact that the game is built around this mechanic means that dungeons can be technically challenged in any order. Nintendo understood this enough to allow the renting of most of the game’s items. This is okay, but oft-times wall walking is the only working solution, which dampens the joy of using your wit to find alternatives with the items you spent good money renting.

Finally, the game’s script and score are pretty much par for the course. Zelda is in trouble. Link is the only one that can save her. The world is a big, scary, place that requires its scores of monsters to be enthusiastically put down. Various MacGuffins are sealed away inside various gimmicky dungeons for tax purposes and they must be recovered. The same overture with a slight change in the bridge blares on through reedy 3DS speakers. It’s a tried and true formula, the comfort food of the gaming world; and if you find a fault in A Link Between Worlds it’s likely going to be this. I agree with Nintendo’s trepidation re: formulaic gameplay. After all, why fuck with a formula that works? You don’t see people bitching about E=mc^2 or pi*r^2, you know?

A

The Hunger Games (2012)

Directed by:  Gary Ross
Starring:  Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson

The Hunger Games is a movie that’s based on a book that’s based on an idea that nerds have been arguing over the origin of for decades.  Katniss Everdeen volunteers as Tribute from one of the poorer districts of a dystopian country named Panem in place of her super adorable younger sister.  As Tribute, she is whisked away from her Amish slummy hunter-gatherer lifestyle into the upper echelons of a fabulously wealthy society where people consume shitloads of calories and have weird hair.  Here she prepares for the titular Hunger Games competition in which teenagers annually slaughter each other while the crowd screams for their blood.  The winner are declared when only one is left standing.

The movie is split into two parts.  Part one is what I like to call “The Exposition.”  It is here we get a good look at a totally crapsack world where poor people live in squalor and filth while the rich people live in utopias (a utopia?) far removed from those who suffer.  It gives a sense of why the Games exist and just how fucked the lower classes of Panem are, even though it looks like these lower classes do all the labor.  And then there’s part two: what I like to call “The Ol’ Ultra Violence.” In which The Hunger Games begins in earnest and a bunch of teenagers start to murder each other with sparkling medieval weaponry and unusual enthusiasm.

Overall, The Hunger Games is a film that works in both concept and execution.  Jennifer Lawrence lives as Katniss both in poise and personality.  As for the rest of the cast, I have no misgivings about any of them; they all do a fine job, though Ms. Lawrence clearly carries the majority of the runtime.  It has more grit than the typical young-adult film especially once the Games begin.  Allowing teenagers to be killed violently on screen was an important and interesting move.  I’m mostly sure other directors or editors would have liberally used jump cuts to communicate this necessary roughness down to a mere implication.  But amping the stakes this way made the hour long build-up to part two really matter.

One more thought: someone else mentioned that this film should have served as some kind of commentary about our society.  I don’t think it should be held to that standard.  If you ask me, this film doesn’t have that kind of responsibility.  Yes, there are some creepy visuals about some nuclear war or whatever but this is more of an underdog story than it is anything political.  The people have all accepted this bizarre reality in which they were bred.  It’s too early to rise against it right now.  Let’s have an adventure and push that particular melodrama onto the sequels.  That’s what sequels are for: for when the initial shock wears off and for when these impressionable young teenagers become boring old adults.

A