Headphone Games

IDK where exactly else to put this and wasn’t sure if it was worth its own thread,
but i’m playing Link’s Awakening (as part of my recent Zelda Mood) and thinking a lot about good the dungeon design is, and at how effective the soundtrack is, especially in its use of leitmotifs, and while looking for “Link’s Awakening dungeon analysis” i came across this great article that talks about leitmotifs in the dungeon themes!:

It’s my favorite Zelda game, and also one of the first games i remember insisting on playing with headphones in, and those two things are likely connected!!

edit: yeah wow – in particular the way the dungeon themes change motifs after the big plot reveal is so subtly brilliant. This game! MAN!! It’s so GOOD

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objectively The Greetest

I played through over December and man it just wipes the floor with Link to the Past

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ALttP still holds up great for me but while playing ALBW i definitely thought, more than once, “hmm this might actually be better than the original”

I don’t get much value out of comparing original to post-LttP; they evoke such different feelings that I value them completely differently.

Well, ALBW directly calls back to ALttP, and feels closer in design to that era of Zelda than anything else post-OoT, so it naturally pointed to that comparison for me.

ah, I misread “original” as Zelda 1 NES

Having no emotional bond to LttP, I do think that the clever dungeons and snappy pace of LbW are worth losing the very small amounts of majesty and atmosphere in LttP.