This is the first Nintendo developed Legend of Zelda game in which you play as Zelda herself rather than Link. I think there were some CDi games released also with Zelda as the playable character, but they were developed by other companies and apparently some of the worst games ever made.
I bought this game near release to play on the original Nintendo Switch, but ended up putting it aside. I found the performance quite poor, especially as I got further into the game, and so I ended up playing something else. After the Switch 2 was released Nintendo released a patch for this game which upped the resolution and improved the framerate massively.
Zelda has to rescue Link after he has been swallowed into a mysterious separate dimension. A small floating creature called Tri becomes your sidekick, and they can summon items for you to place into the world. These items are everyday objects that you find in the world, and also enemies that you have beaten in battle. You can tell which you can learn because they have little sparkles floating around them. At first Tri can only summon one item at a time, but as you progress through the story they can summon more items at once as well as summon larger objects and more powerful enemies. This leads to interesting puzzles where you are summoning things to clamber on, fans to move things, spiders to cast a web etc. Although, to be honest, I spent most of the game spawning beds to build steps.
Zelda is not as capable a fighter as Link, she does not have his sword or bow and arrow. Instead the enemies that you summon fight the others in the area you are in. I had a lot of fun learning which are the best to use in each situation. Later on, you can transform into Link for limited periods of time. This is useful in bosses when their weak points become exposed.
I enjoyed this game a lot, it’s hardly the best entry in the series, but it had a lot of new ideas and plays very differently. I’m glad Nintendo continues to make overhead games in the Zelda series like the original despite the fact that the Switch is capable of playing the 3D over the shoulder adventure style ones.
