[Japanese version reviewed]

So I didn’t know that this was by the same key staff that created Landstalker and Ladystalker. After Alundra 1 and 2, they went on to make Dual Hearts for the PS2.

But it’s Zelda. It’s totally Zelda.

You’ve got a young lad with a sword, scampering about a big overworld, occasionally venturing into dungeons filled with monsters, environmental puzzles, a new piece of equipment, and a boss. Then you grab a new heart container and go off on your merry way.

The sprite graphics are lovely, but there’s a fatal flaw in that they create ambiguous perspective, so you don’t know whether, for example, an adjacent platform is diagonally up and to the right, or simply directly to the right of you at a higher height. This results in a lot of trial and error jumping around. Jumping is very finicky too, with very little room for error. You have to jump off the last pixel of a ledge sometimes.

Combat is a chore because although you can move in eight directions, you can only attack up/down/left/right. Enemies on the diagonal will wreck you time and again.

Also frustrating is the lack of maps. There’s a world map available, but you can only access it by paying money to the fortune teller in town. There are no dungeon maps of any kind.

There’s a heavy emphasis on solving environmental puzzles, which is right up my alley, but the puzzles can be hit or miss, and occasionally very challenging. The dungeons also seem just kinda random I guess? You have “real life” dungeons but also “dream dungeons” when you enter someone’s mind, but they’re visually and functionally the same for the most part.

Compare this to Zelda’s well-worn but solid formula. You enter a dungeon, gain a new item/powerup/skill about 1/3 of the way through, spend the rest of the dungeon solving environmental puzzles designed around the new feature, and then face off against the boss, which requires you to utilize the new feature under pressure. Succeed 3 (sometimes 6) times in a row, and you beat the boss.

In Alundra, you get a bow after awhile. GREAT! Except it’s too weak to use against most enemies. You can then use the bow to hit a green jewel that unlocks the lizardman den. Then… nothing. You don’t use the bow at all in the dungeon. No puzzles make use of it. The bow is useless against the lizardmen because they block attacks by default. You have to close in, wait for them to attack, then slice them with your sword. The bow just sits in your inventory unused.

Alundra is far from a bad game, but it makes you realize how polished and fine-tuned Zelda really is.

And it just drags on and on with this bizarre story about old gods and this village where everyone dies off one by one. What's funny is that the deaths are narratively tied to new powerups, so you're thinking, "Another villager died?! Oh no! Anyway... "

All in all, it’s a huge disappointment. I thought I was going to love this game. I still want to try the sequel though, because Alundra 2 is in 3D, it’s much easier, and it’s got a more lighthearted adventure story.