Link: The Faces of Evil

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Link: The Faces of Evil
Developer(s)	Animation Magic
Publisher(s)	Philips Media
Released	October 10, 1993
Genre(s)	Action Adventure
Mode(s)	Single player
Platform(s)	Philips CD-i
Media	1 CD-ROM

Link: The Faces of Evil is developed by Animation Magic and released for the Philips CD-i in 1993, on the same day as Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. A follow-up to both games, Zelda's Adventure, arrived in 1994. All three CD-i Zelda games were the product of a compromise between Philips and Nintendo after the two companies failed to release a CD-based add-on for the SNES.

[edit] Gameplay

The Faces of Evil is played using the side-scrolling view introduced in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. For a variety of reasons, it is generally accepted that this game is superior toZelda II, and boasts a number of improvements from its predecessor. These range from the quality of the CD-i controller, to the speed of the gameplay and the realism of the character animations.

[edit] Plot

The lands of Hyrule are at last peaceful, so what more can a hero do? Link, feeling increasingly useless in this safe environment, has no idea that the far away island of Koridai has been taken over by his old nemesis, Ganon. A mysterious wizard visits Link on a magical flying carpet to inform the Hero of the dire situation. Only Link, with the aid of the Book of Koridai, can defeat Ganon, so Link willingly boards the carpet, and the two fly to Koridai. Later in the game, Zelda, who originally remained behind in Hyrule, is also captured by Ganon.

The story is largely told through animated FMVs, in an attempt to make best use of the CD-ROM format. The animation style is based on that of The Legend of Zelda animated series.

[edit] Controversy

These ground-breaking FMVs, written by professional Russian screen-writers, are now rejected by the recent Zelda community, despite containing what is considered to be some of the best scripting, drawing, animation, and voice acting seen in a video game of that time. Despite the gameplay not being up to series standards, the witty and ascerbic banter between the characters during the FMVs have spawned many memes not only among fans but also the wider internet community; for example '"Gee, it sure is boring around here!" "My Boy, this peace is what all true warriors strive for."', and '"When I'm Crouching, you can make me do the duck walk!"'. This game is known for being one of the infamous CD-i trio along with Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and Hotel Mario that have been ridiculed on Youtube in the form of YouTube Poop. It is a well known, and not entirely groundless, rumor that Nintendo gave the rights to Philips to develop the game in order to take advantage of Philips' in-house script writers.