“Geetchee not dumb. He have rope.”

So remember all the things I said that Clyde Bosco did right with the first two Mario books? How they had strong opening chapters, and took the time to build up to the main plot device, and seemed to have fun adapting the game universe into something that felt tangible and engaging?

This book is the exact opposite.

Clyde Bosco is a tough act to follow. He wrote the first two Mario books in the Nintendo Adventure Books series, and I think he only wrote two more after that. Matt Wayne seems to have written half of the books, and I suspect he was responsible for many of the duds in this series, if The Crystal Trap is anything to go by. It’s been a while since the last time I tried to rush through a book just to get it over with.

There’s not much of a setup to speak of. Link and Zelda (based on their insufferable portrayals from the 80s cartoon, unfortunately, the overconfident surfer dude and snooty feminist respectively) have just entered a spooky deserted palace in hot pursuit of nasty ol’ wizard Ganon, and this time they’re gonna get him, by Jove! No sooner do they mention Ganon, he appears and traps Link in a big crystal, laughs about how Zelda will never figure out how to free him, actually says “bye bye,” and skedaddles. You take the role of Zelda as she quite literally bumbles around with no idea where to go or what to do, and hopefully you eventually figure out how to rescue Link within the next 24 hours before he suffocates.

From beginning to end, the narrative is weak. Where Bosco’s work felt like he was having fun with a Nintendo property and trying to make something fun and engaging out of it, Wayne is clearly here for a paycheck. He seems to think adapting a video game into a book means the plot should progress like a video game. Zelda goes here and faces a threat. Then she goes here and faces another threat. Then she goes here and the first threat shows up again, but worse.

Going into this, I had hoped that it would at least have a moodier tone than the whimsical Mario stuff. That would have been great, to explore a dark, ominous gamebook rendition of Hyrule, giving off the vibe of those older, darker Disney movies where everything is fantastical, but also you’ll totally die, and die horribly if you take a wrong turn. Or in this case, even worse, your best friend will die horribly. Zelda always had more of an edge to it than Mario, and I would love to have seen that realized in this book.

But this book doesn’t have much of a tone or vibe at all. It’s just there. The author was writing this to get it over with and get his paycheck, and as a reader you feel like doing the same. Except there’s no paycheck for the reader. Only boredom and despair.

The puzzles by themselves aren’t terrible, but most of them are arbitrary abstractions with no connection to the task at hand. It feels as if a bad Zelda fanfic and a brain teaser anthology collided in a traffic accident, and now whether Zelda should travel the grassy path or the rocky mountain is decided by puzzling out how many arrows Zelda has in her quiver, which you figure out through a logic riddle based around how much jewelry she’s wearing. What is this, the SAT’s back from the dead?

I think the author and artists were kept in separate offices and told to make something Zelda-themed, but then had their phones confiscated so they couldn’t coordinate.

Matt Wayne wrote the other Zelda entry, and I’m hesitant to give it a whirl after how awful this take was. If you want a decent adaptation of The Legend of Zelda, dig up the old manga from Nintendo Power. Avoid The Crystal Trap like a four-headed Gleeok.

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.