I just bought The Legend of Zelda for my Gameboy Advance. The GBA I purchased through entirely legal means, and did not steal from Kmart as revenge for getting screwed out of a week of paid vacation. Nor did I steal Super Mario Advance 4 and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. That would have been wrong.

It’s almost identical to the original version for the Nintendo, with one major exception… the Engrish has been corrected! This is the storyline explanation taken verbatim from the original version for the Nintendo.

MANY YEARS AGO PRINCE
DARKNESS ” GANON ” STOLE
ONE OF THE ” TRIFORCE ” WITH
POWER. PRINCESS ZELDA
HAD ONE OF THE TRIFORCE
WITH WISDOM. SHE DIVIDED
IT INTO ” 8 “UNITS TO HIDE
IT FROM ” GANON ” BEFORE
SHE WAS CAPTURED.
GO FIND THE ” 8 “UNITS
” LINK ” TO SAVE HER.

Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? And that was the fun of it. Back in the day, when video games weren’t a multi-billion dollar industry, programmers did a lot of the translation. And they weren’t good at it. Occasionally the game would tell you things like “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US,” and you’d stare at the TV, shake your head in wonder and think, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Anyway, they fixed the into in the version for the GBA, much to my disappointment. The intro now reads:

LONG AGO, GANON, PRINCE
OF DARKNESS, STOLE THE
TRIFORCE OF POWER.
PRINCE ZELDA OF HYRULE
BROKE THE TRIFORCE OF
WISDOM INTO EIGHT PIECES
AND HID THEM FROM GANON
BEFORE SHE WAS KIDNAPPED
BY GANON’S MINIONS.
LINK, YOU MUST FIND THE
PIECES AND SAVE ZELDA.

If they were going to change things, they may as well have made a couple gameplay improvements as well. It’s still a pain in the ass to change between items. Would it have been hard to make the L and R buttons switch between items? I don’t think so. In the original, you were limited to a maximum of 255 rupees because of extremely limited memory on the cartridge. A single byte was allocated to store this information, making the maximum storable value 255. (If you were a programmer, you’d understand. It has to do with binary. I won’t bore you any further with it.)

Memory concerns are no longer an issue with the GBA. And yet they didn’t change this. It’s annoying.

I haven’t found any other major changes in the game. I’ll keep you updated, though. Because I’m sure you were enthralled by this entry.  Incidentally, Mike, we were both wrong. It’s not a warp whistle, and it’s not an ocarina. It’s a recorder.