This is one of two Zelda games that were made for the Game Boy Colour. In this game Link finds himself in the land of Labrynna where time itself has been messed up by an evil force. As such, Link must go through various dungeons to collect magical artifacts which will help to restore things.
This may sound like it’s a rather run of the mill Zelda game, and it really is. It borrows a lot from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and is kind of like a rather inferior version of it; several characters from that game return and the idea of visiting the same areas in two different time zones is also reused. Having said that, I do enjoy the time travel features and I am pleased that it is played around with a little more than they had done before.
I think the biggest problem this game has is the fact that you often have to do things that are really tedious. At one point you have to spend ages making your way around the maze-like Goron city and you have to keep taking part in a particularly un-fun Gordon dancing game too. I was stuck at one point because the names of items are not made very clear. The puzzles in the dungeons are rather unimaginative too: there is one puzzle where you walk across tiles and have to change their colour without touching the same tile twice, it takes a long time, it’s quite hard and it appears so many times.
Even the items you collect in this game are weird. In other games in the series, you get useful and interesting pieces of equipment which are fun to use and that make it possible to reach new areas of the map. In this games you get things such as the Cane of Somaria which magically makes blocks appear and does nothing else, Then there’s the Switch Hook, an item which, if you fire it at a diamond shaped block, it will make you switch places with it. You also get a Mermaid Suit, which Link puts on so that he can swim underwater, it gives him a mermaid tail and makes everyone think he is a mermaid (not a merman). While weird, I did find this last item quite funny though.
On the upside, this game was released at the same time as The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and the two games can be linked together in order to unlock new items in both of them and also to add a nice extra part onto the end of the story. This is done through a password system where you’ll find a character in one game who will then give you a code to enter in the other game which will then bring you to a secret area or give you a secret item and I found this to be a very welcome and rewarding feature
But sadly, this has been the weakest in the Zelda series yet, though it still has its charms.
Rating: 7.9/10
(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show.)
