Link: The Faces of Evil

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.

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 does not play as tightly as Zelda II. These range from the quality of the CD-i controller, to the speed of the gameplay and the jerkiness of the character animations. The button mappings have been criticised as being illogical, for example having to crouch to open the inventory screen.

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. Worse, he has kidnapped the Princess of Hyrule, Zelda, and is holding her captive there. 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.

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.

Controversy


These FMVs, however, are frowned upon by the Zelda community for containing what is considered to be some of the worst scripting, drawing, animation, and voice acting yet seen in a video game. And as mentioned, the gameplay was not up to series standards, to the point that the majority of the Zelda community outright rejects the CD-i trilogy as canon, something made easier by the fact that these games had nothing to do with Nintendo outside of the licence which it was all but forced to give.