The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Accidental Innuendo: When you upgrade the Tempered Sword to the Golden Sword: "Your sword is stronger! You can feel its power throbbing in your hand!"
  • Awesome Music: The awesome music, Dark World.
  • Breather Boss: Arrghus is not only a much easier boss than the Helmosaur King, but arguably even the easiest boss in the game overall. If you get the tempered sword before fighting Arrghus, he becomes even easier, as the creatures surrounding him only take one hit that way.
    • Depending on your strategy, Mothula could be either this or That One Boss. The boss is vulnerable to almost any attack from any angle and dies fairly quickly.
  • Breather Level: Thieves' Town (Blind's Hideout). It is MUCH smaller and shorter than all of the other Dark World dungeons; in fact, you can obtain the Map, Compass and Big Key less than a minute after entering the dungeon. The only difficult part is the boss.
    • The same could apply for the Mountain Tower in the Light World. It does have six floors, but floors 2, 4, 5 and 6 all have one room apiece, the other 2 floors have few rooms as well, the enemies are mostly easy, and once again, the only difficult part is the boss.
  • Complete Monster: Ganon, the great king of evil himself, is established as one in this game. And it's not to be the last time.
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • The Beamos (laser statues). Not only are they unkillable, but their beams are stupidly fast, unblockable (even with the Mirror Shield) and also pack a lot of punch.
    • The Lynels (lion-headed centaurs) of Death Mountain can only be hurt by a few select weapons, have a particularly nasty fireball that cannot be blocked without the Mirror Shield and are often fought in a very narrow mountainside. Thankfully, there are only three in the entire game.
  • Epileptic Trees: Like every Zelda game, this one had a debated place in the timeline before its official release, not at all helped by the ending line of "The Master Sword sleeps again... forever!"
  • Game Breaker: The Cane of Byrna makes you invincible and simultaneously deals damage to enemies. Most experienced players contend that "Only wimps use the cane."
    • The Bombos Medallion might cost a bit of magic, but it will destroy nearly any enemy on the screen outside of bosses. The one boss it works on is Kholdstare, whose shield of ice can be broken much more quickly with the Bombos Medallion than with the Fire Rod, and with less magic consumption. The Ether Medallion can also count, as even though it doesn't kill as many enemies, the ones it freezes can be hit with the Hammer for magic jars. The Quake Medallion, on the other hand, is significantly weaker than the other two, and usually only gets used for its one required use.
    • The Magic Powder's ability to turn Anti-Fairies into Fairies probably qualifies.
    • Speed Runs make heavy use of the Pegasus Boots and the fact that Link flies a few tiles backwards through the air after running into a solid object. This allows players to cross gaps that would normally require the hookshot or some other item.
      • That feature was used in at least one place in Ganon's Tower, intentionally, in the form of ramming into a wall to fly backward across the gap to get to the entrance of a room on the other side (the only Hookshot point across the gap is when coming from the side that is accessed by using the Pegasus Boots trick). It was either that, or use bombs on oneself. Regardless, this room is completely optional, as it only contains several Rupees and is not required to progress.
    • The Magic Cape, which renders the player invisible and invulnerable, automatically renders any boss fight that doesn't require a magic item ridiculously easy.
  • Goddamned Boss: Moldorm might not be the toughest boss in the game, but he's easily the most frustrating one, simply because he has a completely unpredictable pattern and can knock you off the edge of his platform, forcing you to restart the battle. Falling through the hole in the middle of the platform is even worse, as you will end up falling through a second hole on the floor underneath, and have to climb up two stories to fight Moldorm again. Worse still, if you attack him but fail to hit his weak spot, that also sends you flying backwards. It's even worse when this rule still applies outside the boss battle. You can beat Molodorm, but the moment that you fall through the hole in the ground, you have the beat this boss again.
  • Growing the Beard: This game is often considered to be this for the Zelda franchise, as it was the first to set the series' formula into gear and introduce more intricate characters and deeper lore for the series.
    • As for in the game itself, after Agahnim warps Link to the Dark World is when the game starts to become truly epic.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: The original Shotaro Ishinomori Nintendo Power comic adaptation is practically prophetic when you look back on it now. Link has a fairy companion, the magic of the Dark World transforms him into a wolf (instead of a rabbit), and Zelda is the one to kill Ganon by shooting him with the Silver Arrow.
  • Older Than They Think: The comic adaptation had a couple of these. For instance, instead of receiving the expected flippers from Zora, Link ends up with "Zora's Mask", a nondescript monster mask that is useful for a Dressing as the Enemy sequence. This was written more than half a decade before Ocarina of Time, let alone Majoras Mask.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: The fact that you need to play through The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords in order to unlock the bonus content added to the GBA port of A Link to the Past, due to Four Swords being multiplayer-only. For introverted players or people who just didn't have any friends with Game Boy Advances, playing the game was pretty much impossible, and even if you forked over enough money for three more GBAs and four wireless adapters, trying to play the same game on four controllers at once isn't exactly a manageable task. The fact that the Game Boy line's been discontinued for several years only adds to the problem nowadays.
  • That One Boss:
    • Moldorm might not be the toughest boss in the game, but he's easily the most frustrating one, simply because he has a completely unpredictable pattern and can knock you off the edge of his platform, forcing you to restart the battle. Worse still, if you attack him but fail to hit his weak spot, that also sends you flying backwards.
    • Making it more of a Goddamned Boss?
    • The Helmasaur King is also very frustrating, mostly because you face him at a point in the game where you have relatively few upgrades, and probably only six or seven heart containers. The latter becomes an even bigger problem when you take into account the fact that he has an attack which drains a full heart container, and can be difficult to dodge, especially if he uses it and his other attack at the same time (he often does).
    • Mothula: Not only is his movement pattern random and diagonal, but the floor keeps moving to send you into spikes. While the boss spits fireballs at you.
  • That One Level:
    • The Ice Palace, which is full of some of the game's strongest enemies, has a ton of rooms filled with slippery floors, and requires you to double back on yourself twice in order to defeat the infamous "Block-Switch" puzzle. Many players skip over to the following Misery Mire dungeon in order to obtain the Cane of Somaria, which nullifies the aforementioned puzzle -- and the fact that so many players are willing to delay getting hold of the Ice Palace's armor upgrade to skip the puzzle should tell you everything. Nintendo themselves seem to have tacitly admitted that the puzzle was overly difficult, by redesigning it to only require backtracking once in the GBA version.
    • Skull Woods. Not that bad on its own... but if you die during the outdoor segments between entrances and exits? Good luck walking all the way back! Oh, and there are these new enemies you haven't seen yet in any level 'til now called Wallmasters. They drag you all the way back to the beginning. Have fun!
    • The Misery Mire lives up to its name very well, especially if you show up early to pick up the Cane of Somaria to skip That One Puzzle in the Ice Palace, since you won't have the Blue Mail from said dungeon, and the enemies here, especially the Beamos and Wizzrobes (let alone Vitreous, whose mini-eyes take off three hearts apiece to a green Link), will take you out quickly if you're not careful.
  • Unfortunate Character Design: Link's in-game sprite has pink hair, despite official art showing him as blonde.
  • Unwinnable by Insanity: It's possible to glitch your way into the first battle with Agahnim immediately after you rescue Princess Zelda right at the start of the game. If you beat him however, then you get transported into the Dark World -- which is a very bad thing since you won't have either the Magic Mirror or the Moon Pearl, meaning that you instantly turn into Bunny Link, can't return to the Light World, and can't do a thing in the Dark World beyond wandering around until you eventually get killed.
  • Woolseyism: The Book of Mudora in the Japanese version was treated more like an instruction booklet for what Link can do. The English version translated it in such a way that made it seem as though it contained various myths and prophecies, and worded the instruction in such a way that did seem somewhat prophetic.
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