This game is best known for one thing, and one thing only: the cutscenes. Most people don't even really know how the actual game itself plays - they only know how the cutscenes look. With the magic of emulators, you no longer have to pay hundreds of dollars to purchase an actual CD-i with a controller and a copy of this game. And unfortunately, if you went in looking for the same kind of wackiness and unintentional hilarity present in the game's cutscenes, you would be pretty disappointed.

When the game is started up, you're greeted with a decent-looking map screen and a menu with a series of confusing options. Why is "Save Game" an option when I just started it up? Why are there two different options for starting the game? WHY?! WHY?! WHYYYYYY?!

Okay, let's get down to business. The entire storyline is basically explained in a short cutscene: Ganon attacks Koridai and conquers it, so you have to go and aid them. That's pretty much it. Now, the main issue comes into play when you watch the tutorial: The broken controls. Even though it's a 2D sidescroller with platforming elements, jumping is mapped to up on the control pad/joystick. Considering that your jump gets very little height and no hang time, not to mention the fact that you can't maneuver in midair if you jump straight up, it's very frustrating when you have to do any sort of platforming.

But that's not all! The CD-i had a variety of different controllers, each with its own design. And since some of those controllers have only two buttons, all you can use in the game is the directional pad and two buttons on the controller, even if it has more buttons. You'd think they'd realize how limited their system was and make a simpler game, but instead they decided to make the second button do literally almost everything. You use it to enter doors, because up is already assigned to jumping. You use it for item usage. And you use it to open the menu, which requires you to crouch. So you can't use items or open the menu while standing in front of doors and you can't use items while crouching. You can imagine how annoying this is.

Surprisingly, the graphics and sound are probably the best part of the game. The backdrops are all reasonably pretty and have a unique style to them, while the sound is actually quite fitting, aside from the voice acting. The biggest issue with the graphics is that the background is rendered as the level itself - basically, all they did was add collision detection to it. This can lead to problems like falling through platforms because you didn't land squarely enough on them. Thankfully, these problems are rare.

The game's difficulty is incredibly high, for all the wrong reasons. The gameplay has barely any strategy, if any at all. Enemies can drain your entire life bar with a few hits and you get no invincibility time after being hit, so you can die very quickly. Blocking attacks with your shield, a very easy process in any other Zelda game, is a hassle by itself, since you have to stop and stand perfectly still to be able to block anything. The bosses have even less strategy than the gameplay itself - either you need to use one item that defeats them quickly or, in some cases, in one hit, or you just need to come in with enough health to tank the boss's attacks and beat him down with ease. The worst part is when you make your way to Ganon - he offers you power if you join him, and then you walk down to him and literally throw the book at him and kill him in one hit. Can you say "anticlimactic?"

There is one impressive thing, though - instead of just using text, all of the NPCs have fully-animated cutscenes with voice acting when you interact with them. Of course, because of the convoluted control scheme, you have to stab people to talk to them. The tutorial explains it away by saying that Link has a "Smart Sword" that "won't hurt anyone friendly. In fact, it makes them talk!" Presumably by threatening to kill them with it if they don't. The bad thing is that these cutscenes are no better than the one in the introduction. So you have to choose between having your eyes and ears bleed or not being able to progress in the game. Pick your poison.

The gameplay is surprisingly like a regular Zelda game, considering that it's a sidescroller. You do a lot of item collecting, and obtain a large number of useful items while exploring the island of Koridai. Although the map screen would appear to make the game less linear, most of the "alternate" paths that you can try to take are blocked off by some sort of insurmountable obstacle until you go the "right" way and find the item that you need to progress down that road. This is common in Zelda games, so you can't really complain, but some non-linearity would certainly be nice, especially for a game that already takes so many liberties with Zelda both as a game and as a franchise.

Speaking of liberties with Zelda as a game and as a franchise, you won't find much of anything familiar from the official games. Most of the monsters are either not present or redrawn and reimagined so much that they're nearly impossible to recognize. The only thing saving this game from huge, gaping continuity errors with the rest of the franchise is the fact that it takes place in a completely different location than the official games. And even then, there's still plot holes: At the end of the game's tutorial, Link is all like "Let's go save Zelda!" Now, that's all fine and well, but at that time, Zelda hadn't even kidnapped! Link's quest was just to drive Ganon and his forces out of Koridai! It's only revealed later in the game, at a later point in time, that she had been kidnapped, and there's no way that Link would've known that. Did these writers even pay attention to what they were writing?

It's already known that Link: The Faces of Evil wasn't a very good game. But did you know WHY it wasn't a very good game? It wasn't just because Link "looked like he just chugged a gallon of drain cleaner,(1)" it was because the game sucked horribly! The controls were terrible, the story had obvious holes and didn't tie in with other Zelda games at all, and the gameplay was awful! This is why Nintendo is so protective of their franchises - they don't want ANYTHING even close to this to ever happen again!

Overall Rating - 3 gallons of drain cleaner out of 10

(1) A quote from Nintendo Power.

Another pretty decent review you have made November, I think you have made a decent amount of words, maybe add a few more things into the review and I think you will make a whole lot more great reviews. I hope you keep up the good work.