Link's Awakening

I never had any Gameboy. The Switch is really the first mobile gaming platform I've ever had (not counting an iPhone, which to be fair is actually a pretty substantial part of that field.)

The first Zelda game I ever got was Ocarina of Time - I would later get Link to the Past in college, despite having had an SNES since I was 10. While now, 21 years later, being first introduced to a game series at 12 feels pretty lifelong, I nevertheless felt like a bit of a newcomer.

Zelda is, I'd argue, Nintendo's most prestigious franchise. While Mario is obviously the headliner, he's also far more saturated - you can expect multiple Mario games per console generation. With Zelda, you tend to get one or two. The Wii U (which I think already stands as Nintendo's "forgotten console") technically had Breath of the Wild (that's the platform I have it on,) but much as Twilight Princess was a launch title for the Wii despite also being available on the Gamecube, Breath of the Wild feels more tied to the success of the Switch.

Zelda games are events. And as someone for whom Ocarina of Time is pretty hardwired into me as one of the most important games I've ever played, it's been kind of sad for me to say that I actually haven't really loved a Zelda game since Twilight Princess. Skyward Sword was too repetitive and disconnected - even if it had some really cool ideas - and Breath of the Wild is one of those games that has me feeling like I've gone insane given how passionately people love it when, to me, it abandons a ton of the things that I feel makes Zelda games Zelda games.

So it's kind of interesting to play Link's Awakening.

Released on the Gameboy, this was the fourth Zelda game, between A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. In a lot of ways, the game was an attempt to shrink down the style established in Link to the Past to a game that can work on the Gameboy. It's actually kind of funny to me to think now that, given how different the original Zelda was and especially how different Adventure of Link was, that LttP and Link's Awakening are actually the only 2D Zelda games of what I think of as the "classic Zelda" style (actually, that's not necessarily true, given the other Gameboy games that came out later, like Oracle of Ages/Seasons and such, which I have not played but could also be of that style.)

The remake of Link's Awakening is sort of fascinating, then, in that (I'm given to understand) it really, quite purely, just recreates the 1993 game as it existed, but with modern graphics, sounds, and a few control elements to make it easier to play (taking advantage of the larger number of buttons to give the sword and shield dedicated inputs, for example.)

In the classic Zelda vein, you're presented with a world that you get to explore more fully as you gain new items. The sword lets you cut through bushes, there's a feather that lets you jump over holes, and, and you get bracers that let you lift rocks out of the way.

The map is very grid-like, in that old style, but given how very easy it is for the Switch to load the entire map, they do away with the one-square-at-a-time transition between locations except when it makes sense to do so - like if there's a chamber with doors.

Now, I'd been given to understand that Link's Awakening had a very weird, even Lynchian, tone to it, but so far I've only seen a couple of hints at that. I'm two dungeons into the game, having just opened up a third (but I need to find a way to get to its entrance.)

In terms of challenge, it's definitely not too bad - and I wonder if the smoother controls on the Switch have made it easier than it would be on the original two-button Gameboy.

But in terms of the recreation, the art style of the remake is utterly charming. The world is rendered in plastic-toy-like simplicity - a modern take on repetitive sprites of the early 2D era. But also portraying it almost like a play-set with your camera looking down toward it, the foreground and background blur slightly. The soundtrack has some classic Zelda music, but it's also arranged simplistically, giving it a light tone in keeping with the art style.

As someone who is a bit nostalgic for older Zelda games and on top of that never played the original version of Link's Awakening, this is actually pretty ideal for me.

Naturally, I'll be looking forward to Breath of the Wild 2 with interest (unless they change the name, this would, I think, be the first Zelda game to be a part two of something that's technically already a part X.) It's not that I disliked BotW, but I think I just missed some of the elements that it cut out - and felt like for all the freedom that the game gave you, it also made things feel a little more like a generic open-world game than Zelda is supposed to be.