Author: Game Infliction

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Save $10 on Donkey Kong Bananza for Switch 2

I would not be in this line of work without The Legend of Zelda. It’s my favorite franchise of all time – video game or otherwise – and it’s the series that will always draw me back into gaming and Nintendo, no matter what. My story is not unique; I know several IGN editors who feel the exact same way.

It’s not a secret to anyone that Zelda is critically important to so many of us here: we’ve awarded seven different Zelda games a 10/10 since IGN was founded in 1996 (the most of any franchise), we were one of very few outlets to recognize Tears of the Kingdom as Game of the Year in a packed 2023, and we crowned Breath of the Wild as the greatest game ever made on our most recent Top 100 Games of All Time list, compiled in 2021. It’s a series that’s constantly growing alongside us: how many franchises contain a game that’s essentially redefined a genre? You could argue Zelda would appear on that short list at least twice.

So as The Legend of Zelda celebrates its 40th anniversary this weekend, a few of us wanted to share our personal memories of this beloved franchise that we hold most dear. These are our legends of Zelda.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link – By Seth Macy

There aren’t a lot of people whose first exposure to The Legend of Zelda franchise was The Adventure of Link. I’d go so far as to say, for most normal, well adjusted people, playing Zelda’s NES sequel as their first foray into the series would turn them away from it forever. But not me. No. I was completely hooked.

I rented Zelda 2 for a weekend and, when I went to school the following Monday, my thumbs hurt from playing for so long. And the thing is, I didn’t really even understand what the hell was going on. I just fell in love with the setting, the weird way it transitioned from an overhead map to self-contained battles, and the massive castles filled with opportunities for Link to die. It set my young imagination on fire and I became obsessed with it from a stylistic and presentational point of view.

I need to point out, at no point did I actually like the gameplay. It was, and remains, brutally difficult, practically impossible for a kid to complete over the course of a rental weekend. The Death Mountain section was where I hung it up many times out of sheer frustration. And even though I was so angry and defeated and saddened to be unable to get through to the end, I still could not resist renting it week after week. I pored through the tattered rental store copy of the manual, captivated by the art style – so distinctively Japanese and at the time, so new and exciting. I borrowed concepts for my own middle-school drawings and rudimentary pen and paper role-playing creations. I also didn’t realize it at the time, but that top-down world view and the experience point grind had awakened in me a love for JRPGs I didn’t even know existed at the time.

It wasn’t until 2018 I finally beat The Legend of Zelda: The Adventure of Link, playing through the version available on Nintendo Switch Online, and only because I spammed the hell out of save states. Still, even all these years later, my imagination roars to life when I look at those classic illustrations, and I get a weird inkling to start up another playthrough. Then I remember how brutally unfun it is and I play something else. But man. What a world changing experience it was when I was a kid.

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening – By Brian Altano

I hated school. OK, maybe “hated” is too strong a word. I strongly disliked school and it probably didn’t like me very much back. To give the place some credit, I loved cracking jokes with my friends before class started. I loved that the cafeteria sold warm, three-for-a-dollar Otis Spunkmeyer cookies. I loved every art class, the only class where the teacher didn’t have to call my parents after and say “Brian is smart and creative, he just doesn’t seem to care about this class.” See, in 1993, I didn’t want to be in school. All I wanted to do was play video games, talk about video games, read about video games, draw video game characters, and eat video game-themed breakfast cereals.

A particular video game that I could not stop reading about (specifically in a Nintendo Power preview article that made frequent trips with me everywhere in my school backpack) was The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, the first portable Zelda game ever made, which was making its way to the Nintendo Game Boy. The idea of a Zelda game that I could bring with me everywhere was absolutely mindblowing at the time. I would hop off the school bus every day to do chores, scrounge for coins in the couch cushions, and save money until I had enough to buy Link’s Awakening.

But if I’m being honest, the real cash cow was my daily lunch money. Every day I got three bucks for lunch, which back then was enough to buy a sad cafeteria meal and a drink, usually one of those hockey puck shaped breaded chicken patties smooshed between two wet buns with a canned ice tea made by some questionable bootleg brand like “Ol’ Orchard” or “Teaslees” to wash it down. But one day I realized that if I instead bought three Otis Spunkmeyer cookies, I’d A) still be sort of full, B) get to eat cookies for lunch like some sort of child king, and C) save two whole bucks a day to put towards The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. I’d have the game in a few weeks without having to do much of anything for it. There were some downsides to this plan, obviously. For starters, I’d have to hide the money from my parents. I’d also have to find a way to buy the game without them knowing it. And lastly, (and I can confirm this as a father now) there’s a very real science fact that if a little kid eats nothing but sugary breakfast cereals and three chocolate chip cookies all day and then needs to focus on school work, that kid will instead bounce off of the walls like an insane little maniac. By now you’re probably figuring out why my teachers didn’t like me very much.

A few weeks (and probably several detentions and cavities later) I had successfully saved enough money to buy my game. I walked down a highway in New Jersey to that magical, brown roofed, giraffe themed castle known as Toys ‘R’ Us and came home with my treasure tucked inside the big pocket of my winter jacket. To be fair, I paid every penny for it, but by the way I covertly and anxiously snuck it into my house you’d think I stole the thing. To this day, my parents never found out. Dad, if you’re reading this, a different Brian Altano at IGN wrote it, not the one who is your son. He would never steal lunch money to buy a video game. Weird coincidence that there’s two guys here named Brian Altano, right?

Anyway, for the next several months, my Game Boy came with me everywhere, but especially to school. On the bus, I played Zelda. In between classes, I played Zelda. On the playground, I played Zelda. Strangely enough, having video games to play at school between the actual school parts of school helped me focus on my classes more. Instead of day dreaming about when I’d get to play video games next, I’d walk into class feeling fresh after taking down another Zelda dungeon, and then I’d do everything the teacher needed me to do until I could play video games again. My grades started improving and my parents stopped getting as many disappointed phone calls from my teachers. This also coincided with me not eating chocolate chip cookies for lunch anymore, which also definitely helped.

So thank you to Link’s Awakening for being my first portable Zelda game, one of my favorite games ever made, and a game that rescued my academic career and also almost made me fail out of school. Thank you to Otis Spunkmeyer and Geoffrey Giraffe who went on to get married to each other, maybe. Apologies to my teachers and my parents and to the other Brian Altano here who is now in huge trouble with my dad. And happy birthday to The Legend of Zelda, a franchise that I’ll always be there for on day one, to purchase a brand new game with actual money that is no longer earned by eating chocolate chip cookies for lunch.

The Zelda Timeline – By Logan Plant

Spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

Hyrule’s history has been passed down countless times from one generation to the next. In that same tradition, I didn’t discover my love for Zelda on my own: I inherited it. Just like every child with pointy ears who gets wrapped up in the never-ending battle for Hyrule, this story begins before my time. My dad played The Legend of Zelda at a friend’s house when he and my mom were in college, which led to them eventually saving to buy an NES of their own, just so they could bomb every last wall in that original 8-bit Hyrule.

Fast-forward roughly a decade to when I entered the picture, born the same year as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s launch on N64. My mom tells me I’d sit on her lap and watch my dad explore a new Hyrule, this time in 3D. Like our favorite childhood bedtime stories, I have no recollection of witnessing Link’s journey to stop Ganondorf. I’ve just always known it. This universe of talking trees and evil pigs and boys without fairies carved a home in my mind during my earliest days and hasn’t budged since.

Which is why it should come as no surprise that my first vivid memory comes from Hyrule, too. I’m four now, and my older sister and I are watching my dad fight the final boss of The Wind Waker. The very first thing I remember is Toon Link leaping into the air and plunging the Master Sword straight into Ganondorf’s skull. I was shocked: it was far and away the most violent, gruesome thing I’d ever seen. I recall walking into the living room to tell my mom what had happened, but then everything goes fuzzy again and all I’m left with is the everlasting image of Ganondorf turning to stone.

No matter where I’ve gone, I’ve taken my love for Zelda with me. Breath of the Wild came out when I was in college, and I spent launch night marathoning it on the enormous, blurry TV in the dormitory lounge as my floormates passed by and watched for a bit on their way out to the evening’s events. Once the hall was empty, and the motion-activated overhead lights went dark, there was nothing left but me and the peaceful glow of the Great Plateau. I was confused when my friends returned just a few moments later. “You’re back already?” I asked, only to learn that four hours had glided by in what felt like minutes. That was the first of dozens of long nights with Breath of the Wild, and later, Tears of the Kingdom, which still managed to hijack my sleep schedule years after the days of going to college parties were long gone. Time changes all things, but Zelda has never seemed to mind.

Zelda tells us a tale about an endless cycle of good rising up to ward off evil, and as we eagerly await its next chapter, I can’t help but wonder where I’ll be when a new 3D entry finally arrives. Maybe I’ll have a child of my own by then, and they’ll watch me take my first steps into whatever wild world Nintendo offers us next. Maybe their first memory will be something creepy or strange in a Zelda game years from now. I like to think they’ll play a new Zelda while off at college, homesick for their childhood but equally giddy to be experiencing a brand new take on Hyrule for themselves. And hopefully, they’ll always call their parents and siblings to talk about Zelda, just like I do to this day. That’s a cycle I wouldn’t mind repeating for generations to come.

Logan Plant is the host of Nintendo Voice Chat and IGN’s Database Manager & Playlist Editor. The Legend of Zelda is his favorite video game franchise of all time, and he is patiently awaiting the day Nintendo announces a brand new F-Zero. You can find new episodes of NVC every Friday on the IGN Games YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Magic: The Gathering’s crossover frenzy continues, and Marvel is landing in June. It includes plenty of heroes and villains, but the chase card will be infinitely more likely to appear in Collector Boosters.

Ahead of the set’s official spoilers and reveals, here’s all we know about Collector Booster availability for Marvel Super Heroes.

It might not have the same kind of ambition or bells and whistles as its contemporaries, but Styx holds a special place in my heart as one of very few pure stealth game series we have left. Will you find the incredibly creative scenarios of Hitman or the insane level of polish and replayability of Dishonored? Nope. Instead Styx contents itself with simply being a reliable way for stealth fans to get their fix, and Styx: Blades of Greed is no exception. More often than not, the usual playbook of sneaking around, stealing and assassinating everything in sight, is as fun as it’s ever been, and this sequel makes some important tweaks, like removing weak multiplayer mechanics to refocus on a solo stealth experience and swapping smaller, mission-based maps for absolutely massive regions. But it’s also saddled with quite a few of the same issues it’s always had, finicky movement, performance issues, and an unremarkable story, which are as disappointing as they are completely expected.

Like its predecessor from 2017, Blades of Greed puts you in the leather boots of an elderly, grumpy goblin as you sneak into small spaces, stab humans, elves, and monsters in their soft places, and use an arsenal of gadgets and special abilities to overcome the fact that getting spotted will get you killed in two seconds flat. There are some modest additions, like a couple of new gadgets and abilities that let you do things like mind control NPCs from afar or use a grappling hook to close large gaps in a short period of time, but for the most part there’s very little that’s changed about the moment-to-moment gameplay. You’ll still find, for example, the ol’ reliable ability to turn yourself invisible for a short period of time, and will still find yourself hiding inside closets and barrels before popping out to slit the throat of some idiot guard. Good times. As ever, stealth is absolutely the star of the show, and Blades of Greed has the same high quality sneaking around that you’d hope it would.

The story in Styx has never been very good, and Blades of Greed lives up to those low expectations by having a completely forgettable story in spite of the fact that its protagonist is inherently interesting and unique. After developing a craving for magical abilities granted to you by quartz crystals found throughout the world, you begin a repetitive journey to, well, find more of it, and 90% of the campaign is just going from place-to-place stealing these glowing rocks to power yourself up with little in the way of plot in between those scavenger hunts. You meet some characters along the way, like a gadget-obsessed dwarf and an orc who becomes your spiritual guide, but they don’t get enough screen time to leave much of an impression and what they do get isn’t used effectively, with everyone spouting off explanations of telling you what you need to do next and little else. You’re unlikely to have come to the Styx series looking for an engaging story, but just in case you were hoping to be pleasantly surprised: I wouldn’t count on that.

Though the vast majority of Styx’s bones remain the same, one major change is that instead of treading (and sometimes retreading) through mission-specific levels, Blades of Greed lets you loose in three extremely large maps filled with both mandatory and optional areas to explore, pilfer, and fall to your death within. It’s a neat idea that allows for significantly more freedom over prior adventures, and it’s quite easy to become distracted and assassinate your way through an entire region before realizing you didn’t even really have any objective behind any of it, except that it’s just hard to see a guard walking by unaware and not take him down. These huge levels also allow you to express creativity in how you navigate the area and solve the problem of getting around when every 10 feet there’s someone who could kill you by breathing on you. When you’re staring at an objective that’s a mountain’s distance above you, you’ll need to just creep around and try things to figure out how to get there – maybe you’ll find a nice spot on the side of a tower to make daring leaps while avoiding the notice of guards along the way, or maybe you’ll find a quieter path via a sewer system that leads you to the same spot, but is infested with giant bugs that will swarm you if you get too close.

That can be a really interesting stealth challenge to figure out, but comes with some unique drawbacks as well. For one, it can be exhausting to have to cross such a massive area slowly sneaking along all the while, and if you try to just sprint past everything to get to the objective, you should be prepared to reload a whole bunch as you work through the trial and error process of doing so. That travel time feels significantly less focused and curated than the more linear model for level design as well, and oftentimes you’re kinda just half-assedly sneaking through ruins and across rooftops with no real obstacles along the way until you get to the place that the objective marker wants you to be, at which point things start to feel much more focused. In other words, it’s a whole lot of fat before you get to the meat of the main objectives. I actually spent the vast majority of the more than 20 hours it took me to beat Blades of Greed trying to figure out where exactly my next objective was and how to get there, rather than actually pulling off the heist in question.

The good news is that each of these maps is pretty awesome across the board. The Wall is an absurdly cool vertical labyrinth of concrete castles and rickety slums, Turquoise Dawn is a jungle of trees, swamps, and massive, deadly roaches swarming in dark areas, and the Akenash Ruins are a ruined, kingdom where everything floats in the air unnaturally and enemies are extremely weird monsters, like something out of Elden Ring. Each visit to these places throughout the story unlocks new areas to explore, though you’ll also do quite a bit of backtracking through areas you’ve already been, which is a bit of a drag. Still, these are some of the more interesting areas I’ve stalked the halls of in a stealth game and highlights the unique, strange, and magically-infused world that this curmudgeonly goblin calls home.

Though the huge amount of space these maps have can be pretty great to explore, they sometimes feel a bit too big for the much smaller objectives within them. The story’s main objectives are much smaller than a typical stealth mission, usually just requiring you to steal a key and open a locked door, or shut down a machine so you can reach your objective – miniature quests that usually only take a couple minutes to complete, if that. Once you’ve checked it off your list, you’re back to the mostly uneventful traveling stealth as you find a way to the next objective, often requiring you to backtrack through some of the same spots in the process, which is how I have spent the bulk of the adventure so far. On the bright side, this format means you’re basically just locked into a constant stream of pure, unadulterated stealth scenarios for hours on end as you work your way through each set of missions, and since that’s Blades of Greed’s strong suit, you’re getting exactly what the doctor ordered.

If you’re familiar with the shortcomings of the previous Styx games, then you’ll probably be less-than-stoked to hear that Blades of Greed doesn’t address most of these. Combat, which is a last resort, but sometimes required, is quite sloppy and overly simplistic, and moving around, especially jumping onto ledges and the like can be finicky at times and caused me to fall to my death or get caught out in the open dozens of times by this point. Worse than those though, are the usual performance issues and technical challenges, like NPCs becoming invisible while talking to them and frames dropping to horrifyingly low levels after extended play sessions. Framerate issues are actually a fair bit worse than I remember them being in previous games, presumably due to the significantly larger maps, and it can get pretty bad for long stretches when there’s a lot happening on screen. Most of these issues are sort of baked into Styx by this point, but it’s still worth shouting out that the bulk of this stuff has mostly gone unaddressed, seemingly.