Legend of Zelda: Lost Isle

The Legend of Zelda: Lost Isle is a game that was made with Zelda Classic. As a personal fan of the Zelda series I have decided to embark on a journey to play some of the Zelda games that are on RMN. I really wanted to enjoy my first experience playing a Zelda game, but I hate to say that Lost Isle isn’t the sort of experience I was expecting. This review will break down the game, as far as I was willing to go, to give you an insight into the good and bad of this game.

To start of I want to give myself some credibility for this review. I have played and beaten many Zelda games, including: The Legend of Zelda for the NES, A Link to the Past for the SNES, Link’s Awakening for the Game Boy, Ocarina of Time for the N64, and Twilight Princess for the Wii.

The Story:

Link crashes his ship on an island. He soon discovers that the town has been abandoned by its residents and an evil is lurking on the island. The story is delivered in short cut scenes and clues are given to Link as to where to go next by NPCs. The quality of the story really doesn’t matter since this is Zelda after all, so the story in this game serves its purpose to give you a reason for doing what you’re doing. So I had no problem with the story per say.

The way the story is delivered; however, can sometimes be jarring. The text is delivered in a slow manner and it can sometimes just slow down what you want to really be doing: killing enemies and searching for stuff.

Graphics:

Expect the standard Zelda fair here. Everything I saw in the game looks like it belongs there. Nothing seems to be out of place. The maps, enemies, Link, and even the animation for the equipment look natural and like they belong in a Zelda game.

The way some maps are cut off can be strange. Some pathways are too close to the edge of the screen and some buildings are oddly cut off. This is only a minor thing though, so most of the graphics are pretty decent.

Music:

The sound effects for the equipment, such as Link swinging his sword, or even placing a bomb, sound good. The background music fits in and seems natural. I have no complaints here.


Gameplay:

There is a lot of good here. The island and the dungeons are really vast. There are a lot of places to go and a lot of treasure to be discovered. And I was really eager to find it and get it all (And maybe after some cooling down time I’ll return to it and see if I can find it all.) There is a decent variety of enemies and the puzzles that I played through actually seem really decent and well thought out. I was really impressed with some of the puzzles in the first dungeon, as some puzzles allow you to choose one of two pathways (So you can decide how you want to play. This seemed to be the strongest aspect of the game.)

I didn’t really know how to start this off. I wanted to just say the game is difficult, but I knew that wouldn’t fly. I need to explain in detail how, in many different ways the game is self-defeating. Most people will notice that each screen seems to have a large amount of enemies on it. When you first start off this can catch you off guard, though, after some time I found I got used to it. Though it’s still kind of odd since I feel the real Zelda games show more balance in this area. The problem is added to with the size of the screen, so you have a large number of enemies in a small area. And some enemies are places too close to the edge of the screen. When playing I noticed that when you enter the screen you can’t attack until you take at least one step into the map. Of course, stepping into some maps will immediately get you hit by some of the enemies gathered around there. At times I felt the difficulty similar to some old NES games that I used to play back in the day (But this is way more difficult than the original Zelda, and it’s mostly because of bad enemy placement on the maps.)

I was going to mostly there right? What’s the biggest issue with this game? It’s not the enemy placement. I could actually get over that. The biggest issue is the item drop. Getting items you need to kill enemies and to actually continue through dungeons is the most glaring issue here. Why are bombs so hard to find? Why can’t I cut these pots and bushes to refill my health? Even the most the original Zelda gave out more drops than this. I think if just this one thing was fixed this game would be much more approachable. But as it is I must score this game 2.5 / 5.