‘Link’s Awakening’ Is The Beautiful Black Sheep Of ‘The Legend Of Zelda’ Series
This remake's a wild and weird dream we never want to wake from, with a few subtle changes that go a long way.
Even with the 26 years that have passed since it first landed on the original Game Boy, The Legend Of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remains the series’ black sheep. And its remake, arriving on the Nintendo Switch last week, only lets its freak flag fly higher.
Link’s Awakening‘s story by-passes Zelda’s lore — there’s no mention of the master sword, triforce or even the princess name-checked in its title. After being shipwrecked, our hero wakes up on the mysterious Koholint Island, where a familiar all-knowing owl tells him he’ll only return home if he wakes the Wind Fish, a deity hibernating in a giant Pink-dotted Yoshi-like egg on top of a mountain.
The musical instruments he needs to do so are hidden in dungeons, guarded by ‘Nightmares’. Everything is just slightly off — it’s a fun-house mirror of Hyrule’s landscapes and its characters, where secrets are hidden at every corner and, for some reason, enemies from Mario’s universe appear in dungeons, or, in the case of Chain Chomps, as pets.
The deus-ex machina is spelled out in the game’s name, but Link’s Awakening runs with the freedom. Quietly inventive, the game holds its own as much as it did back in 1993, with a few minor additions going a long way to make it modern.
Friendship Ended With Hyrule, Koholint Island Is My Best Friend Now
Koholint Island is small — and compared to Breath Of The Wild‘s sprawling world, it’s a speck of dust. Built around the limitations of the Game Boy, Link’s Awakening‘s 2D over-world nether-less packs in a lot into a little. With each new ability found in your travels, you’ll be able to revisit previous roadblocks, moving previously un-passable barriers, swimming to once drown-inducing depths, or long-jumping long distances.
Given how condensed the world is (and the addition of a couple more warp points), back-tracking remains exciting, rather than tedious. Impossible-to-access areas are rewarding to finally reach hours down the line, as are just-out-of-reach pieces of heart or treasure chests.
Just roll with it.
And rather be forced to remember where everything is, the Switch adds a useful ability to mark the map, setting mental reminders for future exploration — it’s small, but it adds an extra incentive to follow through.
In the original, Koholint loaded grid-by-grid, with a fixed perspective meaning that a new area would swipe in when you reached the screen’s end. That’s gone here — things are fluid, and a cartoonish style indebted to Wind Waker only furthers the charming character of the game.
Where the original 8bit sprites helped with the haze, prompting, at times, a question of what exactly we were fighting, on the Switch everything is rendered in bright colour and texture.
The floating genie? Actually a gelatinous Flubber-esque figure. (Comparison to Link’s Awakening DX remake, via Tiny Cartridge).
Unfortunately, that can make for some frame-rate issues, especially using the handheld Switch mode. The slight slowdown never impinges on the actual gameplay, but it is pretty common. A motion blur around the screen’s edges also takes a little time to get used to, but the Koholint is so charming it’s hard to really hold onto any frustration.
Old Horse, New Tricks
Link’s Awakening by no means feels like a relic, even if its laws and puzzle logic might come from another time. Yes, there will be long periods of wandering the world unsure of what to do next, or continually failing at a challenge you simply can’t do yet.
But it only ever adds to Link’s Awakening‘s sense that the Koholint Island can never be completely explained — just as you’ll find yourself trading dog food to a monkey for a banana, so too will you just stumble upon the way forward. Plus, we have something they didn’t have in 1993: a fast internet connection proves you’ll never truly be lost, though it’s more enjoyable to hold out.
Goombas? In this Koholint comedy?
If anything, Link’s Awakening‘s top-down perspective is somewhat of a relief after Breath Of The Wild, its scope encouraging a genuine awe at first play which could prove near-impossible to best. Rather than compete, this remake aims for a different experience completely, and fixing some of the limitations of the game the first time around.
I’ve played the original Link’s Awakening recently: it was downloadable on the Wii U Shop, but, even having played it back in the day, it proved too inaccessible. Limitations on the Game Boy really inhibited the game’s flow: not only was the grid-by-grid loading slow, as was trying to achieve anything. With only two action buttons to work with, Link’s Awakening involved a lot of item swapping.
Old friends return, but not all is as it seems.
By moving the basics — sword, shield, other motions that become unlocked — over to the Switch’s various buttons, things speed up ten-fold. It also adds a sophistication to fights, with enemies’ movements requiring you actually use your shield, a lesson in mixing up combat learnt post ’93’s tendency for button mashing.
One completely new addition is a Super Mario Maker-lite dungeon maker. It has potential, but you’re limited to mashing together rooms from the game’s own dungeons — playing them is essentially repeating the same puzzled again, in a different order. It’s about as fun as it sounds.
Back when it was first released, the minds behind Link’s Awakening called it ‘a parody of a Zelda game’ inspired by the otherworldly tone of Twin Peaks. In 2019, its uncanny valley elements still jolt the senses, and its pure charm has only been heightened by the game’s new controls and graphics. It’s the sort of dream you don’t want to wake up from.
The Legend Of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is available now on Nintendo Switch.
Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio. Follow him on Twitter.