The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was originally released in 1993, and I vividly remember playing Link's Awakening on that bulky, unlit, green-screened Game Boy while sitting in church and on long car rides as a young boy. It's probably safe to say that it was one of my favorite games in my early childhood, and I was overjoyed when it was re-released on the Game Boy Color a few years later with extra content. With the 2019 remake for the Nintendo Switch coming out, I figured it was time to go back and re-examine a classic that I used to love so much as a kid, and see how well it holds up 25+ years later.
As it turns out, Link's Awakening is still really good. Surprisingly good, actually, considering it's one of the oldest games in the series on one of the most primitive Nintendo devices. The only thing really holding it back is the sheer limitations of the Game Boy, only being able to render a very small resolution and only having two buttons to work with; otherwise, the actual game designs feel timelessly classic, which makes sense seeing as later games in the series seem to have taken a strong influence from Link's Awakening. Its impact on the series is especially noteworthy considering it originated a lot of elements that have now become Zelda staples, like playing songs on the ocarina for various effects, trading sequences, collectibles that lead to extra rewards, fishing, owl and companion characters, and more. It is, as far as I'm concerned, a quintessential Zelda game and ranks among the series' best, easily making my top five, and maybe even having a case for top three.
The thing I love the most about Link's Awakening is its unique setting and story premise. I've said before in other Zelda reviews that I find the usual tropes of Zelda, Ganon, Hyrule, and Triforces to be kind of tiring and uninteresting when seemingly every game just rehashes the same, familiar beats, and that it's always nice when these games choose to break the mold and show that the Zelda formula can work without those cliched mainstays.
My video review of Link's Awakening.
Instead, Link's Awakening sees Link crash his ship while sailing the ocean and washing ashore on an uncharted, mysterious island known as Koholint, which as he soon discovers is apparently guarded by a slumbering deity known as the Wind Fish, who resides in a giant egg atop the tallest mountain. The island is home to a small village of men, women, and children, and also an Animal Village of sentient, talking animals, all of whom have lived their entire lives on the island and have never seen anyone new arrive, or anyone leave, with the island being threatened as of late by the strange appearance of more sinister monsters (called nightmares) around the island. According to rumors, the only way to leave the island is to wake the Wind Fish, which then sets Link on his quest to assemble the eight instruments of the sirens by defeating the nightmares and thus saving Koholint in the process, in order to play the Ballad of the Wind Fish atop Mount Tamaranch. Over the course of the game, Link has various interactions, encounters, and adventures with the Koholint natives, and through uncovering ancient, cryptic clues, we begin to realize that Koholint may not actually be a real place, and that awakening the Wind Fish might cause everyone and everything in this world to vanish out of existence, as if they were merely a figment of the slumbering Wind Fish's dream.
This is such a cool concept to me. The whole "it's all dream" premise can be pretty trite if not executed properly, but here they do a great job of giving the island this mystical, almost ethereal quality through the music, visuals, and little bits of lore that you stumble upon via owl statues, and the owl himself. Even though it seems like it could be an ordinary place at first glance -- basically just a knock-off version of Hyrule -- those little bits of lore are enough to make you question what's going on, here, while some of its more bizarre elements like all the talking animals and the odd breaks in the fourth wall, both from tutorial characters as well as the appearance of characters and creatures from other Nintendo games, give it this subtle other-worldly atmosphere. It's right on the edge of the uncanny valley, where the world is almost familiar to us, but at the same time it's uniquely strange, and that makes it a little hard to reconcile the reality or fiction of this place.
Over the course of the game you help out pretty much all of the island's various inhabitants in some direct, personal way, and begin to develop actual relationships with them -- you rescue Tarin when he's transformed into a raccoon, you rescue Papahl when he's stranded on the mountain, you retrieve Richard's golden leaves from his castle, you lay to rest the spirit of a ghost who hasn't been able to pass on to the afterlife, you rescue Bow-Wow from moblins, and you help various characters achieve minor goals and happiness through the various stages of the trading sequence, like getting a Yoshi doll for the newborn baby to stop it from crying, or finally delivering a response letter to Mr Write who laments that no one ever writes him back. Interactions with Marin are particularly personal, as she's the one there to rescue you on the beach and takes you home to nurse you back to health. You take her to the Animal Village and listen to her sing, you rescue her when she's kidnapped by monsters, and you sit by the beach with her and listen to her dreams of becoming a seagull so she can fly across the ocean and discover a new world. It's a surprisingly touching bit of character development, considering how primitive the game's presentation is and how relatively little dialogue there is in the game. Marin develops a bit of a crush on you, and it's hard not to feel some sentiment for her as well, and so as the game progresses you begin to realize that, once you awaken the Wind Fish, this world and all of these people will cease to exist, which can make you question your motive to continue on your quest.
The fascinating part about all of this is that the "it's all a dream" premise isn't treated as a surprising twist near the end of the game -- it's not a sudden revelation meant to make you reconsider everything that's happened previously -- but more as a matter of fact that is slowly uncovered and revealed well before the end, thus causing you to reconsider everything you're going to do. The game is sure to instill a minor element of doubt about all of this, emphasizing the fact that no one's ever woken the Wind Fish before, and so who knows what will actually happen if you do? The nightmares, who serve as bosses in each of the dungeons, progressively taunt you and try to convince you that, by waking the Wind Fish you'll be destroying this world, which, in a way, makes you kind of a bad guy in this scenario, since you would be seemingly causing more harm to the island than even the nightmares. It paints your heroic journey to save Koholint and find a way back home in a much more questionable light and makes you really wonder if what you're doing is actually the right thing, because all of the characters in this world are brought to life with such genuine authenticity, particularly for a Zelda game in 1993, with personalities and activities completely independent of Link's adventures, that ending their existence here on Koholint seems almost inhumane. Even if it is just a dream, these characters feel much more alive than characters in previous Zelda games, and even in some of the more recent ones.
Mind you, the game is 26 years old and has a fairly primitive presentation -- dialogue is minimal and to the point, and characters are rendered in low-res sprites with barely any facial features and only basic animations. To put it simply, Link's Awakening is not winning any awards for dramatic characterization in 2019, but the simplicity is kind of charming here, because it gives you enough details to set the stage for your imagination to fill in the gaps; it's not hard to imagine this being a real place populated by real people. The graphics don't even look that bad or out of place in 2019, seeing as pixel graphics and retro visual styles have been making a comeback in the modern indie scene. Even though it at all looks and sounds relatively primitive, it's aged pretty well, and it still manages to portray some decently cinematic scenes with its basic sprites -- the scene on the beach with Marin is a perfect example, but we still get fun moments with Tarin when he's transformed into a raccoon, or when he tries to knock a honeycomb down with a stick and then gets attacked by bees.
Likewise, the world design feels authentically real and interesting. Koholint has the usual Zelda staples of diverse environments ranging from tropical beaches to dark, mysterious woods to rocky mountain paths to dismal swamps to arid deserts to river rapids and bay areas. The diversity alone is enough to keep the world engaging, but I also find it fairly immersive that these areas connect to each other so well, as if they're all part of one greater world. It's common in 3D Zelda games for the different biomes to feel completely separate and isolated from the rest of the world, with you having to go through bottlenecked transition points and loading zones with a lot of virtual dead space around them, but because Link's Awakening uses a two-dimensional grid-based map where you can go to each and every one of its 16x16 squares, it means that each square usually has to connect to the other squares around it in some sort of plausible way.
Sometimes areas are cordoned off from the rest of the world, like the Yarna Desert which is in the corner of the map, can only be entered through one square, and has canyon ridges surrounding it on all sides, but it still has to fit into the space of the world around it, and even though it's only three little squares we do get a tiny bit of overlap between the desert and the fields around the Animal Village. Most areas usually have more of a gradual transition, though, like going from Mabe Village to the Toronbo Shores, where the ground tiles progressively switch from solid green with patches of dense grass that you can cut with your sword, to mostly green with spotty patches of thin, almost yellow grass, to a brown and beige mixture of dirt and sand with no grass in sight, and finally to wavy coastal sand, all while you progressively drop in elevation as you descend towards sea level. Something like this really shouldn't be noteworthy, but remember this is 1993 on the primitive Game Boy Brick, and details like these help a lot to make the world feel more plausibly real and immersive.
The world itself is ultimately smaller than, say, A Link the Past, but it doesn't feel all that small because it's relatively dense. A lot of the time, squares on the map have multiple entrances and exits with obstructions preventing you from simply moving to the next square up, down, left, or right -- you'll usually see a place on one square and then have to go through multiple other squares to find a path to reach that place. Sometimes it's a bit like navigating a maze, since you can't see the next screens over until you move into them to know where each path will lead to, thus creating an element of trial-and-error as you try to figure out how different areas of the map connect to one another. Exploration, therefore, feels pretty satisfying and engaging because it takes actual thought and effort to navigate around the world -- you don't just simply walk to the next area, but rather you have to figure out a way to actually get there. So even though the map only has so many squares on it, it takes quite a bit more time and effort to actually explore the world than simply going to each of its 256 squares.
As is typical with Zelda games, various obstructions that block your path are intended to be circumvented with items obtained from dungeons, with each new item you gain granting access to new areas of the map, which will lead to a new dungeon which will lead to a new item, thus perpetuating the cycle. At the start of the game, for instance, you're blocked from going into the mysterious woods until you get the sword to cut down some shrubbery, you're blocked from going into the swamp until you get the Roc's Feather to jump over some pitfalls, and you're blocked from going into the prairie or bay area until you get the power bracelet to lift boulders. These items also grant access to extra upgrades and collectibles in previously unlocked areas that you could obviously see but couldn't reach. Here, the smaller size of the world works in the game's favor as well; with fewer total squares to explore, and fewer collectibles to collect, it's far easier to remember where specific things are and how to get back to them after you passed them by several hours ago. By having only 12 heart pieces (as opposed to 24 in A Link to the Past, or 36 in Ocarina of Time) and only 26 secret seashells (as opposed to 50-100 Gold Skulltulas in Ocarina of Time, or 900 korok seeds in Breath of the Wild) it makes each individual discovery feel more special and rewarding because the game isn't diluting the experience with the same thing over and over again. Plus, each discovery feels genuinely earned, because even though there are fewer in total, that doesn't always mean they're easy to find or acquire -- I, for instance, ended up missing a few heart pieces and several secret seashells in my recent playthrough, despite being a pretty thorough explorer and always looking out for those sorts of things.
The game's overall progression is pretty linear, with most areas in the world being closed off until you're supposed to go there and having to go through the dungeons in a prescribed order, but the linearity doesn't feel as restricting as it does in some other Zelda games, in large part because the world itself feels so interconnected. With the map being comprised of a single seamless, uninterrupted landscape, it makes figuring out where you have to go next a little bit harder because different areas of the map just kind of blend into the rest of the world, rather than being obviously sectioned off into isolated zones with a single entrance, thus distilling your options into fewer possibilities where you can more easily use process of elimination to determine your next destination. Link's Awakening is sure to indicate the general area of your next objective every time you complete a dungeon, but it's ultimately up to you to figure out where that is and how to get there, and then you still have to explore that area to figure out where the dungeon is and how to get inside of it.
In previous Zelda games, the dungeons often felt like they were just kind of there, and accessing them was mostly a matter of just physically getting to them, which sometimes required a special item and other times not, but Link's Awakening makes the process of accessing each dungeon a little more involved. To access the Key Cavern, for example, you have to retrieve Richard's five golden leaves from Kanalet Castle, and then navigate his hedge maze to get the Slime Key; to access the Angler's Tunnel, you have to defeat a mini-boss in the Yarna Desert, but before you can do that you have to bring Marin to the Animal Village to wake the sleeping walrus who's blocking the way; to access the Face Shrine, you have to visit the Southern Face Shrine and defeat a mini-boss there to get the Face Key; and so on. Completing these preliminary tasks adds an extra sense of adventure to the overworld exploration, especially since they usually involve a lot of interactions with other characters, and it helps to make each dungeon feel more connected to the world because it has some sort of relation to something else. Plus, it creates a satisfying amount of build-up to each dungeon; just getting to the dungeon feels like an accomplishment on its own, and it makes completing the dungeon feel more momentous.
The alternating overworld exploration and dungeon crawling cycle in this game creates a really engaging pace of play where it feels like you're always moving forward in the game and always making actual progress towards achieving your goals, while still giving you a lot of freedom to go off exploring on your own. It strikes a good balance, in other words, of providing semi-open-world freedom alongside a more linearly-structured experience, which I find helps to make each one of those dichotomous elements more interesting since it makes the gameplay feel more varied while also providing a contrast that accentuates the positive qualities of each element. In other words, going into a claustrophobic dungeon where you have to solve puzzles and find keys to advance is more striking because you've just come out of a large overworld where you have a lot more freedom to roam about each square of the map and to go off wherever you want. Even Breath of the Wild, which focused entirely on its overworld, with very little emphasis put on its dungeons, realized that you can't have just overworld in a Zelda game, hence why it has a hundred mini-dungeon shrines spread all over the map. Those shrines served their purpose in Breath of the Wild, but ultimately I prefer the balance present in Link's Awakening, where the dungeons have a greater, more equal share of the focus.
It helps, of course, that the dungeons in Link's Awakening are all really good. They start out relatively simple and straightforward but get progressively bigger, longer, and more complicated the further you get in the game, with dungeons in the second half usually being 45 minutes to an hour long. Most dungeons are fairly non-linear, with maps that branch out in all directions requiring you to get keys and items or to manipulate a mechanism from one side of the dungeon in order to be able to progress on the other side. Whenever you get a key, you typically have multiple options of where to use it -- even though you'll eventually get all the keys you need to open all of the doors, your progression through the dungeon can shape up a little differently depending on where you choose to go first, which makes it feel like you have a lot more control over the process of beating the dungeon, rather than following an obvious dotted line from beginning to end.
I particularly enjoy that Link's Awakening doesn't telegraph its dungeon puzzles. Modern Zelda games (starting with Ocarina of Time onward) have a tendency to show or explain things to you in a very explicit fashion -- you walk into a room and the game yanks the camera away from you to pan across the room showing you the path you have to take to reach the door on the other side, or a monster will operate a mechanism to block your path and then run out the room thereby showing you exactly what it does and how it works, or a companion character will forcibly interrupt the game to tell you things that you could probably easily deduce on your own if they just gave you an opportunity. Link's Awakening doesn't do any of this -- when you walk into a room, the puzzles are just sitting there waiting to be interacted with, and it's entirely up to you to figure out not only what they do, but what you're supposed to do with them.
The puzzles themselves can be pretty devious, too, with really tricky solutions to things like having to find hidden entrances to secret rooms based on the suggestive layout of the map grid, or having to kill enemies in a room in a certain order, or figuring out how to move the giant ball through Eagle's Tower while having to take alternate routes to get places yourself, or diving underwater at a place where torch lines intersect, and so on. Although some of these solutions can be pretty obscure, the game does give you hints, and even outright solutions to some of them, in the form of the owl statues, however these statues require that you first find the beak in each dungeon before they'll tell you their secret, and are often found in a different room than where their secret applies, so it still takes effort to unlock those hints, and a little bit of brainpower to understand what it's talking about and how/where to apply that knowledge. Some of the later dungeons are still pretty challenging, even today, and required me to look up solutions in a guide on at least two occasions.
At first glance, the dungeons don't have as much theme as, say, Ocarina of Time's, or perhaps even A Link to the Past's, but each dungeon still gives off a unique identity that sets it apart from the rest in a memorable way. The Tail Cave is somewhat generic, but it does a good job of demonstrating how all of the dungeon mechanics work in a relatively safe and easy to understand environment. The Bottle Grotto uses bottles to block your progress until you get the power bracelet, and then requires you to use bottles to defeat certain enemies and to get past other obstacles in more creative ways, and has a map layout shaped like a bottle. The Key Cavern has a ton of locked doors that you have to navigate by finding keys scattered all throughout the dungeons, with a map layout shaped like two keys. Angler's Tunnel is the "water dungeon" where you have to swim and dive through water, and has a map layout shaped like a flipper, or a fin, or a fish head -- I'm not exactly sure what it is, but it probably has something to do with water.
Otherwise, most of the dungeons unfortunately tend to look and sound pretty similar. They all use different color palettes and have slightly different ground and wall patterns, but every dungeon has the same square, blocky design to it with a lot of the exact same pushable blocks, flippable switches, wall torches, doors, blade traps, statues, and so on. Unless you happen to remember what color each dungeon is, or have each dungeon completely memorized, it would be pretty hard to identify a screenshot of a random room taken out of context and attribute it to the correct dungeon. Dungeon music, likewise, isn't very memorable, since most of the tracks are all spin-offs of the basic cave music -- one of them is literally just the same thing but higher and faster -- so rather than creating unique tones and atmospheres for each dungeon, they basically set the same tone and atmosphere, but with minor variations to keep it from getting repetitive. It's a welcome change, seeing as the previous games all reused the exact same music for every dungeon, but it's only a small step forward compared to the huge leap Ocarina of Time would take in this department a few years later. The soundtrack for the Face Dungeon is the only one that really stands out in a positive way, since that's when it finally breaks away from the Cave theme motifs to give us something more radically different, which also coincides with the biggest revelation in the story that Koholint is just a dream, thus marking the home stretch of the game.
Of all the dungeons, the Color Dungeon (added in the Game Boy Color re-release as a new "hidden dungeon") probably represents its theme best, with most or all of its puzzles and mechanics dealing with the newfound addition of color to the game's visuals. As such, you have to toss colored enemies into a space with the matching color, or flip switches so that the colors are all the same, and fight enemies that blend in with the colored floor tiles. There's also these weird, bouncy tiles that progressively changed from green, to yellow, to red before they eventually break and disappear. Other than the unique theme, the rest of the dungeon is unfortunately pretty lackluster. The puzzles aren't very challenging and take hardly any effort to solve; the boss is basically just a DPS check where you spam arrows at it; its hidden location in the graveyard maybe doesn't make a whole lot of sense; and the dungeon reward, where you get the choice of either a red or blue tunic, which will double your attack power or reduce incoming damage by half, respectively, is a little game-breaking. The final dungeon, likewise, where you finally get inside the Wind Fish's egg, is incredibly anticlimactic since it's basically just a single repeating room with four exits, where you have to go through the exits in a prescribed sequence much like the Lost Woods in the original Legend of Zelda. The boss rush nightmares within the final dungeon are tough and pretty interesting, but actually getting to them is utterly bland and underwhelming.
It's kind of interesting that the trading sequence in this game is actually mandatory, since you need to see it through to completion to get the Magnifying Glass, which is required to read the tiny print in one of the library books which tells you the secret path through the Windfish's Egg. Likewise, you'll need the bananas in order to get the monkeys to build a bridge for you to access Kanalet Castle, which is a prerequisite for getting into the Key Cavern. Fortunately, the trading sequence in Link's Awakening works pretty smoothly since characters are sure to indicate in advance that they're interested in particular items -- just talking to people around the island you learn that the mom wants the Yoshi doll from the game shop, little BowWow likes stylish accessories, Sale (the alligator) collects canned food, Christine (the goat)'s favorite flower is a hibiscus, and so on, so each time you get a new item you should have already received some kind of hint about who might want it. Some exchanges aren't explicitly hinted at, but they're at least logically intuitive, like that the fisherman under the bridge might want a fishing hook, or that Grandma Ulrira might use a broom.
Collecting the Secret Seashells is more of a mixed bag. I like the idea of collectible items in Zelda games, because that adds extra little rewards to exploration, and the fact that there are only 26 seashells makes the task of finding all of them more manageable, but it's kind of disappointing that you don't get any reward whatsoever until you get enough to claim the final reward -- an upgraded sword that does double damage. That's certainly a worthwhile reward, but it means you spend the entire game collecting seashells with no real indication of what purpose they actually serve until you're already done with the collect-a-thon. Ocarina of Time, for instance, gives you smaller rewards in progressive intervals as you obtain more Gold Skultulla tokens, until you eventually get the big prize when the collect-a-thon effectively ends, which helps to build excitement and anticipation with each token you acquire and wonder what your next reward will be, with a little bit of context in assuming it'll be something better than what you got at the previous interval. In Link's Awakening, there's no buildup to the grand prize because it's essentially an "all or none" ordeal; you do get two smaller rewards before reaching the 20 seashell grand prize, at the 5 and 10 shell marks, but these only give you more seashells and require you to be carrying exactly 5 or 10 -- no more, no less -- so those preliminary rewards are easy to miss and aren't really that rewarding anyway.
Combat plays like you'd expect for a 2D Zelda game, but it actually works better than in the previous top-down games due to the greater functionality of the sword and shield. The sword is bigger than the one in A Link to the Past, so it has longer reach and also hits at a wider angle to the side as you swing it, which makes it easier to hit enemies without bumping into them, and the shield now functions as a manual toggle that you equip to one of the two buttons, meaning you have to defend attacks manually rather than just standing there and letting the shield block attacks automatically, in addition to also blocking more types of damage thus making it generally more useful and more engaging. One major twist in Link's Awakening is the inclusion of the Guardian Acorn and Piece of Power, two temporary upgrades that drop from defeated enemies at certain intervals and which grant temporary buffs to your offense and defense, halving incoming damage and doubling outgoing damage respectively. I don't really care for these. For starters, the music that plays while these buffs are active is obnoxiously repetitive and extremely grating to listen to, and they almost randomly make the game easier -- by sheer coincidence I happened to have a Piece of Power active while fighting each of the first three dungeons' bosses which made them die almost instantly. After a while I just stopped picking them up whenever they dropped because I didn't want to get blasted by that annoying music, and just wanted to play with the normal combat difficulty.
It's also annoying that you have to sit through the descriptive text window that tells you what they do each and every time you pick them up. That's kind of a recurring problem with Link's Awakening, since those types of messages pop up basically everywhere, all the time, for almost everything you do. Every time you get a compass in a dungeon, the game needs to remind you that it has a new feature that will make a chime sound whenever you enter a room with a hidden key; every time you bump even slightly into an object you can't lift without the power bracelet, a window pops up telling you it's much too heavy to lift. These are minor annoyances, but they shouldn't have been there in the first place -- just tell us about the compass chime in the first dungeon, and only tell us something is too heavy to lift with our bare hands if we actively try to pick it up without the bracelet equipped.
Despite these recurring tutorial messages that continually explain game mechanics to you that you've already learned, I appreciate that you don't have an obnoxious companion character following you around doing the same thing. The closest we get to that in this game is the owl, who only appears briefly in sporadic moments, usually to deliver narrative exposition, rather than to explain game mechanics to you or explicitly telling you where to go or what to do next, all-the-while disrupting the flow of gameplay. Link's Awakening still has optional hand-holding elements -- if you're stuck in the overworld, you can always call Old Man Ulrira in Mabe Village, who'll give you more direct instructions on what you're supposed to be doing at that particular moment, and inside dungeons you can seek out the owl statues to get hints on some of the dungeons' more dastardly puzzles -- but both of these are optional and require effort to seek out those means of assistance, since you have to find a telephone booth to call Ulrira and have to first acquire the stone beak before the owl statues will speak to you.
The most interesting thing about Link's Awakening, other than the story premise, has to be the bizarre inclusion of so many non-canonical elements and references from other Nintendo games. Right off the bat we see a Chain Chomp and Yoshi doll in Mabe Village, and later encounter Piranha Plants, Bloopers, Goombas, and Thwomps in side-view underground sections, all of which look and behave exactly like they do in the classic Mario games. There are tons of others beyond those, including a detailed photograph of Princess Peach -- all of which sort of break the fourth wall in a way that adds to the whimsical dream-like quality of this world. These sorts of things are obviously not normal in a Zelda game, and so it's like a blurring of reality to see them so nonchalantly present in Link's Awakening. Then you've got other silly, somewhat zany elements like an alligator who's a collector and connoisseur of canned foods, all of the comical interactions with Tarin, a bat-like demon who ironically helps you by casting a curse on you that forces you to carry more "junk" around, the shop-keeper going Super Saiyan and zapping you to death if you steal from him, the rat photographer who follows you around snapping comical photographs of cartoony situations, an acapella trio of singing frogs, and more. As a game sandwiched between A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time, both of which take themselves pretty seriously, Link's Awakening's more lighthearted nature offers a nice change of pace from the usual tone of the series and makes it a genuinely fun environment to be in.
The question for me, as it usually is any time a remake is announced, is "does this game actually need to be remade?" In terms of financial incentive, the answer is obviously "yes" because a remake is guaranteed to sell more copies at a higher price point than if they were to simply re-release the original version as a port to a new console, but in this case, the game doesn't feel so out-dated as to need modernized updates to make it playable. Most of the time, the benefit of remaking a beloved classic is to improve the overall quality by enhancing graphics and gameplay features that were limited by the technology of the time -- that's certainly the case with Link's Awakening, considering the 8-bit graphics, chiptune sounds, and two-button inputs on the Game Boy, but the core gameplay design remains fundamentally enjoyable to this day, even 26 years after its initial release. Maybe my perspective on this is a little skewed since I played it as a child 25 years ago, so maybe it doesn't feel as out-dated to me, but I feel confident that you could hand the original version to someone who's never played it before, and they would still get as much satisfaction out of playing it now as I did back then. I know I certainly enjoyed replaying it for the first time since my childhood, and some of its design elements are as good as or even better than some of its successors.
I haven't played or really even looked into the Switch remake to know what all it does, but just going off of the original version, these are the sorts of things I would want to see in the remake:
(1) Better button-mapping with dedicated sword and shield buttons and extra buttons for equippable items. This seems like an obvious thing that is guaranteed to happen, since the Switch has way more buttons than the Game Boy and it would be foolish not to make use of them. Of all the technical limitations of the Game Boy, this is the only one that I feel actually detracts from gameplay in a significant way, just because of the tedium involved with constantly pausing the game to switch out items.
(2) A better Secret Seashell system. Mainly, I'd like to see more iterative rewards as you gain increasing amounts of seashells so that you can feel progression building towards the final prize. They could basically copy the Golden Skultulla rewards from Ocarina of Time and give you things like rupees, or minor upgrades to existing items (like a bigger wallet), or a Stone of Agony-type thing that helps you find secrets in the world.
(3) Get rid of the repetitive tutorial messages. We don't need to be told how the compass works every time we find it in a dungeon, and we don't need those damn messages constantly popping up telling us that certain obstacles require a certain item to be circumvented every time we graze against one. It's just annoying and needs to go.
(4) No more Guardian Acorns and Pieces of Power. I just don't care for the variable nature that these buffs add to the game's difficulty. They're meant to be a reward for doing well in the game -- buffing your defense when you defeat a certain number of enemies without getting hit, for instance -- but the end result is they make the game significantly easier, and even if they happen at fixed intervals based on your specific actions it still comes off feeling pretty random. Plus, the music is annoying. If these must stick around, then I'd like to see their frequency reduced, alter the music so it's less grating, or maybe just change how they trigger altogether, such as being a super rare buff that you carry around as an inventory item with enough limitations that you can't stock up on them before facing every boss.
(5) Better mini-games. In Link's Awakening we have three mini-games -- the claw game, fishing, and river rafting -- and they're all kind of mediocre. The claw is pretty simple and straightforward once you understand the timing, and fishing is basically just a matter of mashing a single button over and over again. The river rafting involves a fun bit of exploration trying to navigate the different currents, but the only substantial reward within this whole section is but a single Secret Seashell. For these, I'd like to see the mechanics tweaked to make them more interesting, and in the case of the river rafting, just something more rewarding.
(6) A better final dungeon. I don't like the Windfish's Egg being so drab-looking and mechanically simple. The mega-boss-rush is cool, but getting to those boss fights is boring and anticlimactic just walking through empty rooms in the proper sequence, so I'd like for that first section of the Egg to have a little bit more puzzle-solving and platforming involved to make it more actively engaging and challenging than simply looking up the solution in the library and walking through doorways. I mean, they could basically just recreate the Lost Woods from Ocarina of Time with some sort of trick to figuring out the sequence on your own, where wrong turns punish you with difficult enemies or make the final boss rush harder.
(7) Just generally more content. When it comes to remakes, I don't want to play basically just the exact same game but with better graphics and controls -- I want new things to experience so that it can feel like a brand new experience, even if only in small quantities. It doesn't need to be anything too major, since you don't want a bunch of extraneous content distracting from the base game, but things like extra heart pieces and secret seashells, an extra mini-game or two, a new character with a new side-quest, or a new hidden dungeon seem like they would all be pretty feasible.
As I said before, I haven't played or even looked into the Switch remake, other than watching the initial announcement trailer, so it's entirely possible that Nintendo is already doing some of these things with the Switch remake -- some of them seem like expected guarantees, while others may just be wishful thinking. Seeing as I don't own a Switch, I won't be able to see for myself any time soon.
Anyway, the point of this review is not to focus on the remake, but rather to examine the original game in the context of why it's being remade. I find it interesting that Nintendo chose to remake Link's Awakening and not, say, the original Legend of Zelda, which I think is a testament to the lasting appeal of Link's Awakening and its overall quality, that Nintendo would decide that this game is what deserves a modern update and that this game is worth introducing to a newer generation who likely never played the original version. That's no disrespect to the original Legend of Zelda, but Link's Awakening is the game that really defined the "Zelda formula" according to how we understand it today, maybe even more so than A Link to the Past. And besides that, it's just a really good game in general, with solid dungeon design and complexity, a tight and satisfying overworld design, and a good and interestingly unique story. It's one of my favorite Zelda games, and the original version still holds up extremely well, even 26 years later.
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