Best Ever
Action Adventure Game?

There’s a moment early in A Link to the Past where you pull the Master Sword from its pedestal in the Lost Woods, and the game pauses, and the music swells, and you feel — genuinely feel — like something important has happened. Not in terms of mechanics (you’ve just acquired a slightly better weapon) but in terms of meaning. You are now the hero. The sword has chosen you. Shigeru Miyamoto and his team understood that the best games aren’t just systems. They’re rituals.

The structure was revolutionary in 1991 and remains influential today. A light world and a dark world, mirrors of each other, with puzzles that span both. Stuck in the dark world? Find a portal to the light world, move to a different position, return, and the obstacle is gone. This wasn’t just level design — it was spatial thinking, training players to consider environments as three-dimensional puzzles even on a two-dimensional plane.

The item progression is a masterclass in gating. Each dungeon gives you a tool that’s required to beat its boss and opens up new areas of the overworld. The hookshot lets you cross gaps. The hammer lets you flatten stakes. The flippers let you swim. But none of these items ever become obsolete — the game keeps finding new uses for old tools, layering complexity until the full map feels like an interconnected machine where every part depends on every other part.

The dungeons themselves are tight, elegant, and escalating. The Eastern Palace teaches you the basics. The Desert Palace adds complexity. By the time you reach Ganon’s Tower, you’re solving puzzles that would have been incomprehensible hours earlier, and you’re solving them because the game has trained you without ever feeling like training. The learning curve is invisible. You just get better.

The combat is deceptively deep. Link’s sword has a range, a hit box, a recovery time. Enemies have patterns, vulnerabilities, tells. The spin attack — holding the button until your sword glows, then releasing — rewards patience over button-mashing. Boss fights require observation, timing, the right item selection. None of this is explained. The game trusts you to figure it out, and the figuring is the fun.

Hyrule in A Link to the Past is dense in a way that modern open worlds, with their thousands of empty acres, have forgotten how to be. Every screen contains something — a heart piece, a secret cave, an NPC with a hint, a fairy fountain. The world rewards exploration not with map markers but with discovery. You find things because you looked, because you bombed a suspicious wall, because you dashed into a pile of rocks. The game never tells you where the secrets are. It just makes sure secrets are everywhere.

The dark world is the game’s emotional core. Same geography, transformed into nightmare. The Lost Woods become the Skeleton Forest. The peaceful village becomes a wasteland of thieves. NPCs who helped you in the light world are now monsters, or trapped, or gone. It’s a vision of corruption that hits harder than any cutscene could, because you’ve already built a relationship with the light world. You’ve walked those paths. You know what’s been lost.

The ending sequence — storming Ganon’s Tower, defeating the wizard Agahnim, the chase through the pyramid, the final battle — is paced like a symphony’s closing movement. Tension builds on tension until the release, and then the triforce glows, and the world is restored, and you’ve earned it. You’ve earned all of it.

Every Zelda since has been chasing this high. Some have come close.

Nintendo: The Best Ever is adventure as architecture. Is A Link to the Past the Best Ever Action-Adventure Game? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• The original SNES cartridge remains the purest experience for those with the hardware.
• If you missed it, the GBA port adds a bonus dungeon that’s worth the price of admission.