Overview

Long before the period during which the game's events occur, stories were told in Hyrule about a Golden Land, with unknown powers and controlled by an omnipotent and omniscient golden power; known as the Triforce. Once the vile Ganon gets into the Golden Land, he holds the Triforce and turns it into the Dark World. To lock Ganon there, the Seven Wise Men (Sages in the Game Boy Advance remake) created a seal to the Dark World, which can only be broken by the Sages or their descendants. This story became a legend, and it is told to the player as the game unfolds.

Right before the game starts, Agahnim, who had achieved an important advisory role in the kingdom, gets rid of the King of Hyrule and starts searching for seven maidens, descendants of the sages, in order to send them to the Dark World and break the seal.

At the beginning of the game, a young boy named Link receives a telepathic message from a girl named Princess Zelda. She says that she is locked in the dungeon of the castle, and Link goes to rescue her. On the way, however, Link finds his uncle severely wounded in the sewers, and receives his uncle's sword and shield. Link and Zelda escape the castle via a secret passageway to a Sanctuary where Zelda stays while Link collects three pendants needed to free the Master Sword from its resting place. To collect the three pendants Link must go to the Eastern Palace, The Desert Palace, and The Tower of Hera and defeat the bosses there.

Link retrieves the Master Sword only to learn that Zelda has been taken to the castle by Agahnim. Link goes to the castle to rescue her but arrives too late; she is the seventh girl Agahnim needed to break the seal. Zelda disappears into the Dark World and Link and Agahnim battle. Agahnim falls, but sends Link into the Dark World.

Once in the Dark World, Link finds himself standing atop the Pyramid of Power where Hyrule Castle stood in the Light World. The only way to destroy Ganon's Dark World (and subsequently save the once-peaceful Light World) is to defeat Ganon and take the Triforce from his clutches. In order to do that, Link must first rescue the maidens (including Zelda) from seven dungeons, The Palace of Darkness, The Swamp Palace, The Skull Woods Palace, The Thieves Town, The Ice Palace, Misery Mire Palace, and Turtle Rock Dungeon within the Dark World.

Once the girls have been freed, Link fights Agahnim one more time (Inside Ganons tower along with the first three bosses The six Armos Knights, the three Lamnos and the Moldorm) before confronting Ganon inside the Great Pyramid. As in the first Legend of Zelda game, Ganon can only be slain with the Silver Arrows. When Link touches the Triforce, he wishes for the Dark World to return its former glory as the sacred realm, and for peace to return to the Light World. With his quest completed, Link returns the Master Sword to its resting place.

Gameplay

Though not completely ignoring the changes made to the gameplay in Zelda II, A Link to the Past was largely a throwback to the original Zelda. Instead of building on Zelda II's overhead/sidescrolling hybrid system, A Link to the Past returned to the original's formula of both exploration and combat taking place in the same environment, with an overhead perspective. A Link to the Past also did away with the RPG-style leveling system implemented in Zelda II, but retained some elements of the game's magic system.

The overall control of Link is more flexible than in previous games, as he could now walk diagonally instead of just vertically and horizontally. He is also able to run using a obtainable item in the game. And for the first time, he slashed his sword sideways instead of merely thrusting it forward like before. This gave his sword attacks a broader range and made combat easier. Link continued slashing his sword as the default attack in future Zelda games (although thrusting was also a possible attack in the later 3D incarnations).

A number of new items and techniques were created for this game, many of which would continue to appear in later incarnations of the series. Such items include the Hookshot, the Master Sword, and the Pegasus Boots. The Heart Containers that increased the player's maximum life points in the earlier two games are present, but many are split into pieces of heart, four of which make up one Heart Container. Most of them are hidden, adding replay value to the game. Another innovation was the multi-level dungeon, which allowed for Link to traverse up and down floors, and even fall through holes in a floor to land in lower levels.

A Link to the Past is also the first appearance of what would later become a major Zelda trademark: the existence of two parallel worlds that the player can travel between. The first, called the Light World, is the ordinary Hyrule where Link grew up with his uncle. The second was once the Sacred Realm, but became a corrupted version of Hyrule called the Dark World because of changes made by Ganon's evil power. Everything in the Light World (Hyrule) looks fairly normal, while the Dark World is true to its name by being creepy and depressing — the water is a dull shade, the grass is dead, there are skulls everywhere, and the trees have distorted faces. People even change forms when entering the Dark World, based on their nature with Link himself turning into a pink rabbit without an item to protect him. Each location in the Light World corresponds to a similar location in the Dark World, usually with a similar physical structure but sometimes with an opposite nature (e.g. a desert in the Light World corresponds to a Dark World swamp).

Unlike The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, where there is only one location at which Link can travel back and forth in time, A Link to the Past allows Link to travel from the Dark World to the Light World at almost any outside location by using a magical mirror. Once in the Light World, the player can only return to the Dark World by stepping into the stationary portal created by the mirror or by finding other hidden warp locations. This flexibility enabled a variety of puzzles that exploited slight differences between the Light and Dark Worlds.

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