I played Blossom Tales on the Nintendo Switch for a couple hours. I captured the experience and then trimmed it down to less than a single hour. It’s like a livestream, except I cut out all of the parts where I messed up in ways that weren’t funny.
It pleases me to no end to see an independent developer take up the big dream of 16-bit Zelda. Blossom Tales is forthcoming about its Zelda influence. In the frame story, a grandfather tells his grandchildren a bedtime story which is unapologetically just the old man remembering and rewriting the story of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I love it.
It’s not exactly like Link to the Past. At times, it is more like Link’s Awakening. This is a good thing, because Link’s Awakening has a focus that few games (especially Zelda games) have ever had.
I like Blossom Tales an extreme amount. I am almost as big a fan of old Zelda games as I am a fan of Sega’s repeated attempts to make or bankroll a Zelda-killer in the 1990s. I’m serious: Landstalker, Crusader of Centy, Dark Saviour, Light Crusader, Magic Knight Rayearth, Beyond Oasis, Legend of Oasis, and Shining Wisdom are genuinely some of my favourite games. Sure, none of them are as good as a Zelda game (except Landstalker, which is better), though all of them are so excellently good that it’s a serious wonder why we don’t have more Zeldalikes. (Special shoutout to Alundra, which didn’t fit into my previous sentence because Sega didn’t make it. It’s second only to Landstalker in its greatness.)
Blossom Tales reminds me as much of Sega’s Zeldalikes as it does of Nintendo’s official offerings: it’s charmingly rough in all the same places Sega’s games were, as though Nintendo has some secret button they press to make a game finally achieve Maximum Zelda. Blossom Tales makes me want Nintendo to port A Link Between Worlds to the Nintendo Switch. Also, Blossom Tales makes me want to keep playing Blossom Tales until I’ve finished it.
By the way, if you were going to comment about how Nintendo is going to “send these guys a cease and desist,” just don’t bother, dude. Despite some graphical similarities, Blossom Tales is not at all a Zelda fan game. It’s definitely its own thing. Also, game developers can’t copyright game mechanics. If they could, we probably wouldn’t have any video games today.
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