Thursday, June 23, 2011

A Link to the Past Manga



Instead of randomly picking a manga, I decided to read them in the chronological order of the games from now on, so A Link to the Past was my next choice. However, this was actually one of the later mangas made by Himekawa, following the release of the GameBoy Advance version. Himekawa's first Zelda manga actually was Ocarina of Time, which I will read next.

Overall the manga got a much more serious tone and Link is also a more serious character than in the mangas featuring Toon Link. They added a larger personal vendetta against Agahnim, he actually kills Link's uncle at the beginning of the story and banned both his parents into the Dark World, where they died. A Link to the Past originally didn't have a sidekick character, so the Himekawas thought they just should add one. There's a thieving girl named Ganti and she's following Link. She turns into a wolf in the Dark World, actually Link does the same at some point instead of turning into a bunny...

The healing apples, which were more or less just a fun feature in the original game, became very important to the story. Link even got his own apple plantation.

The manga pretty much avoided all dungeons except for Hera's Tower. And the bosses in the dark world were all people, who entered the Dark World and got transformed into beasts, who match their personality. It was actually quite weird, but it also gives a deeper meaning to the bosses. The ending was different, because the King and the Uncle weren't resurrected with Link's wish and Zelda became Queen of Hyrule. While it was nice to see Zelda becoming Queen, it was a bold move not to resurrect anybody. But I guess Link's resurrected parents wouldn't have fit so well into the story...

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