The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds Review

Nintendo took the boldest structural swing in the series here and almost nobody noticed, because it is wrapped in the warmest possible nostalgia. Renting items from Ravio hands you the entire toolkit inside an hour, which means dungeons stop being locks and start being problems you choose in whatever order suits you. Wall merging is the other half, turning Hyrule into a set of flat planes where the solution is often a route rather than a gadget, and the 3DS stereoscopy is one of the few times that hardware gimmick genuinely clarified a puzzle.

It holds a rock solid sixty frames when almost nothing else on the handheld did, and the Lorule half is far more than a palette swap, with its own broken geography and a bleak reason for existing. The story is thin and knows it, an excuse plot with one good twist near the end. What matters is that this is the tightest dungeon design Nintendo has shipped since A Link to the Past, and it fits in a pocket.