Zelda 2.5

I'm sitting here watching the credits roll on one of the strangest games I've played in a while, 3D Dot Game Heroes. It may have well been called The Legend of Zelda Tribute Game instead. But this is the most fantastic Zelda tribute game ever. They get the music right, the enemies, the story, everything! I made it to the first dungeon and got (of course) the boomerang. And I just KNEW that bats would be killed with one hit of the boomerang while other enemies would only be stunned.

There's some weird humor in there too, including a few caves where videogame designers toil away on a game that they hope you like. No joke. Of course, there's the thinly veiled Zelda references, but there's also the slight sexual references that catch you off guard if you get to thinking you really are playing an old 8 bit Zelda game.

Some Annoyances:
The not-quite-overhead-view in dungeons leads to you running into enemies or falling off ledges quite often. The ridiculous but badass huge sword is only available at full health and w/ temporary upgrades. Swinging your sword in anything other than a straight jab is tricky and hard to consistently do correctly. This is eventually helped by other swords with better "swing" rating. I couldn't quite decide if using the D pad or the analog stick to control the character is the right way to go. D pad feels more classic, but I end up pressing it really hard and my thumb ends up hurting, so the analog stick is a welcome relief. But it feels sort of "spongy" compared to the precise control of the D pad. Item selection is cumbersome. You have the traditional Zelda method of a pause screen and a grid, but you can also cycle through them with L2/R2. You end up getting quite a few items, and rather than use all the buttons of the PS3 controller, you're mostly stuck with the classic A and B configuration familiar in Zelda.

I hate Magis. I really really hate them.

Character selection is fun, but what I really want is a normal sized character that doesn't blend into any of the backgrounds. I ended up playing most of the game with the green dragon, partly because it reminded me of Link's green clothes and partly because there weren't any green dungeons that I could remember.


Going back the the 3D perspective thing, I was able to get it the way I liked it with an almost bird's eye view for the overworld. But you spend 80-90% of your time in endlessly repetitive and overly complicated dungeons which force you into a not quite bird's eye view.

I made notes as I was playing through this game and it made this post much easier to write. But I noticed that as the game went on my notes got more critical and less glowing. As a huge Zelda fan, the game blew me away at first. But once I got used to that I started noticing more annoyances. I almost quit on the last boss since he does ridiculous damage. Once I did some reading I found that if I did a quick little side quest to upgrade my shield I could block almost all of his ridiculously damaging attacks. And I did a lot of reading for this one. I think I had the GameFaq's page open in a tab on my laptop for over a week while I played through this. After the 3rd dungeon or so, the paths you have to take to get through the dungeons just get ridiculous. There's a lot of backtracking and one way paths that if you miss, you'll have to do all over again. Also, saving and reloading became sort of an art since you knew you'd start at the beginning of the dungeon, which might just be closer to where you needed to go next.

So anyway, it's a fantastic rental. Depending on how big of a Zelda nut you are, your mileage will certainly vary. Enjoy!