My last full game review dropped over a month ago, and it’s high time for another. The game in question probably isn’t a surprise, since I’ve been telegraphing it for a while now. I’ve just finished my decades-delayed first playthrough, so this post will be written while the experience is still fresh.
The game itself is almost 30 years old, so be warned–I won’t hold back spoilers.
Besides the subject of today’s post, frequent readers know that archiving and providing historical commentary on pre-Ground Zero pop culture touchstones is a pseudo calling of mine. I keep going back to the period from 1993 to 1996, since that was when 2D games reached their zenith before getting unceremoniously canned in favor of shiny, jaggy new 3D. As author David V. Stewart has observed, we lost an entire aesthetic to developer fiat. Who knows where 2D gaming would have gone if its evolutionary path hadn’t been arbitrarily cut short?
Myriad hints of what might have been reside within the game we’ll consider today, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.
Released in 1993, for Game Boy, of all things, Link’s Awakening started as an after hours side project of Nintendo programmer Kazuaki Morita. He’d gotten a hold of an early Game Boy dev kit and used it to experiment with the system’s abilities.
That was before vidya became a multi billion-dollar business rivaling Hollywood productions. Devs could putter around making intimate little games in their free time. Morita’s after-school club was eventually tasked with porting the smash SNES hit A Link to the Past to Game Boy. They drew on another game derived from Nintendo’s Game Boy experimentation to produce something else entirely.
And, arguably, superior.
Link’s Awakening picks up a few years after A Link to the Past left off. That chronology alone is a nod to The Adventure of Link being a direct sequel to The Legend of Zelda. The notoriously convoluted timeline, cluttered with alternate realities and contradictions, wasn’t even on the horizon. Having both SNES era Zelda games follow chronologically in sequence like their NES forebears established a pleasing symmetry. Except one of the SNES-era installments never saw a 16-bit release at all.
High 90s Nintendo fans often lament that the SNES only got two Final Fantasy games in the West. For my money, Nintendo only having one Zelda game on their greatest console is even worse negligence. Having a 16-bit port of a game that was conceived as a Game Boy port of a 16-bit game would have brought High 90s Zelda full circle.
The good, and nigh miraculous, news is that Link’s Awakening didn’t need 16 bits to achieve greatness.
On the surface, Zelda 4 looks much like the Zelda 3 port it began as. Link’s Awakening shares its art style with A Link to the Past, along with several items, game mechanics, and even a few characters. But the lower-powered platform didn’t keep the dev team from innovating. Unlike previous Zelda games, Link can map any item he carries to either the A or the B button. That means the sword can be swapped for a different tool or weapon, sometimes enabling combinations more useful than the sum of their parts. Equipping the bow and bombs lets Link shoot bomb arrows, for example.
Zelda 4 flat out improves on Zelda 3 by having a fully realized jump mechanic. Ys and Xers with Nintendo Power subscriptions back in the day might recall much being made of Link’s ability to jump in A Link to the Past. Playing the game only to find out that Link was limited to jumping down from higher terrain to lower ground came as a disappointment. Not so in the sequel, where equipping the Roc’s Feather enables Link to jump up, down, and diagonally. He can even stomp goombas to rival Mario.
That’s right. Link’s Awakening features character cameos from other hit Nintendo games. I won’t spoil any others; that way you can discover the Easter eggs for youself.
Speaking of eggs, the plot of Zelda 4 revolves around Link’s quest to crack open a house-sized one atop a mountain that overshadows a small island.
But that’s getting ahead of the story.
A few years after defeating Ganon in A Link to the Past, the victorious Link sets sail on a real voyage of self-discovery. Shipwreck strikes, leaving him marooned on tiny Koholint Island.
Rescued by the ethereal songstress Marin, only daughter of a familiar-looking beachcomber, Link sets out to escape the island and return home.
The deceptively simple setup includes a major callback to the original Legend of Zelda. Link’s first task is finding his sword, lost in the shipwreck that brought him to the island.
That seamless blend of old and new; familiarity and innovation is infamously difficult to achieve. Many’s the ambitious sequel that sought to strike that balance and failed. Not only does Link’s Awakening succeed, it does so better than any installment in a AAA franchise I’ve ever played.
The game only gets deeper as the player progresses, meeting a memorable and even lovable cast of characters along the way. More than in its predecessors, Link’s Awakening makes the player care about its NPCs.
Which sets the player up for one of the all-time emotional gut punches of gaming history when Link learns that the island and everything on it are figments of a sleeping god’s dream, and ending that dream is his only way home.
This revelation reframes the entire game as a quest to destroy the only world that Koholint’s denizens–the people and creatures who’ve befriended Link, and even saved his life–have known.
And yes, every last one of them, from the proud prince to the humble fisherman, from the innocent bunny to Link’s suspiciously Zelda-like (but better) main squeeze, will unambiguously die when he succeeds.
A post-Ground Zero game would show Link grappling with this terrible choice in angsty emo fashion. The more typically hamfisted modern game design would give him the false option of siding with the nightmares and letting the Wind Fish slumber forever.
Which perfectly illustrates why modern gaming is trash.
Link is the hero–the knight of his liege, and a Catholic knight, at that. Hyrule needs him. Mighty oaths bind him. Of course he sets out to do what he must–with heavy, yet undivided, heart.
And because he is the hero, mighty in heart and soul and hand, Link sees his quest through to victory, and the island is unmade.
Even if a modern game persevered to this point, the writers would not be able to resist tarnishing Link’s prize. A clever hint would be dropped at the end so the SMRT set could feel superior catching on to the devs’ grift: Link has not returned to the real world. He has only left Koholint for another in an endless series of dreams. Who’s to say what’s real and what’s fantasy, anyway?
Blessedly, Nintendo avoided such self-indulgent literary malpractice. Link explicitly awakens in the real world, just as the title promised. He sees that the Wind Fish, too, is awake and free, and he smiles, knowing that the most difficult truth is infinitely preferable to the sweetest illusion.
That is heroism. That is virtue.
What’s more, the player will be roused from the pall of games media gaslighting to know with certainty that his hobby truly was better before 3D, bloated budgets, and dev-centric games. I know, because I just finished playing through Link’s Awakening for the first time. It’s new to me, and it’s better than any game I’ve played from the last two decades. It is a rare perfect game, the likes of which have become even more vanishingly rare in these latter days.
Instead of subjecting yourself to post-Ground Zero mudgenre slop, rev up your Nintendo console of choice and revisit the Wind Fish’s dream.
And instead of paying people who hate you to desecrate a sci fi classic, read the first book in the award-winning series inspired by Frank Herbert’s classic–only with space pirates!
I do hope you cover the TWO (it was almost 3) Game Boy Color sequels one day. That was ambition of the like we won’t see again from AAA gaming, though Nintendo does a good job keep their franchises alive, far better than others do.
Their 3DS game and recent Link’s Awakening remake show that there is still plenty of gas left in the tank of this formula. Even Breath of the Wild took heavy inspiration from the old games, finally breaking the stale story-first formula birthed on the N64.
There is something special in the 2D style, for sure.
Link’s Awakening had direct sequels?
Oracle of Seasons/Ages were developed to be follow-ups to Link’s Awakening. They were originally meant to be 3 different games that you can link together via passwords to share items and whatnot with, but they had to knock it down to 2 because it was simply too complicated.
Nonetheless, they used the Link’s Awakening template for them and made some great games. I believe they even released on the same day. And yes, they were full fledged Zelda games with no corners cut or anything.
Thanks. Ocarina of Time is the most recent Zelda game I’ve played, and I didn’t even finish that one.
When the SNES rode into the sunset, I gave up my then-lifelong Nintendo fandom and switched to the PlayStation. Wheresoever goeth Final Fantasy, there I shall follow.
As a result, I missed the N64 era. About 10 years back, a younger friend suggested we play through Ocarina of Time together. We gave it a valiant effort but eventually gave up. Like most early 3D games, it elicited a lot of novelty buzz back in the day but just doesn’t hold up. Besides having the clunkiest title in the series, it’s just a slower, uglier remake of A Link to the Past.
When your 64-bit flagship series installment is a step backward compared to its Gameboy predecessor, you know you screwed up somewhere.
You’ll get no argument from me. I’ve never liked the N64 very much. If it wasn’t for the portables I probably would have missed out on a lot of good stuff Nintendo put out between the SNES and the Wii. It was a shame that 2D got railroaded to handhelds for over a decade. We missed out on a lot of potentially cool ideas because of the need for shiny new toys.
I’d say that Final Fantasy Brave Exvius gives us a taste of where JPRGs might have gone in the absence of the 3D revolution. Higher res pixel work, greater pixel animation, splashy effects (some of which are at least doable without 3D), combat driven by a riff on Valkyrie Profile’s timing-based attacks, and more angst. Lots more angst. Oh, and a hefty splash of Sailor Moon for no particular reason.
I know, it’s a Gacha game, plagued by common monetization ills, and it banks heavily on nostalgia for better games, but I think the *tech* shows where things could have gone. As always, though, in the absence of good *game* design and good writing, well, the best tech will never be enough.
We need a return to 2D gaming that doesn’t rely on retro aesthetics as a crutch. We need clever developers who can push old software or old hardware to its limits, yet work within those limits instead of bloating their games with unoptimized eye candy.
You might find this interesting, then, D Cal. It’s a walkthrough of how a new NES game was made a few years back. Fascinating stuff. It does rely on the retro a bit, which is at least partially inevitable, but it’s very much its own game, pushing the NES tech. https://youtu.be/ZWQ0591PAxM
The retro aesthetic of Micromages is appropriate, because it was dictated by the retro hardware of the NES. What I hate is when someone develops a game like a retro-style shooter that runs on a modern game engine, yet deliberately makes the game look ugly and pixelated for nostalgia’s sake. Meanwhile, Micromages looks pretty by even today’s standards.
This was my first complete Zelda experience. I loved the original, but my parents never got me a home console (my first one was a Gamecube I got as a birthday present from friends). However, I got a Game Boy primarily to pass time on road trips, and when this came out, it was all I wanted.
One of the elements missing from so many modern games is the ‘exploration gate.’ One thing I remember vividly is wandering east of the main village and for two screens hearing the main Zelda theme, but I could go no farther, because rocks were in the way. The second I got the bracelet, I knew what to do.
As a side note, the Switch remake is pretty good. It’s a true remake, with virtually everything in the same place and the soundtrack being the same music, but orchestrated instead of midi. My one objection is that the art style doesn’t work the same way for hi res 3D graphics and comes across as cartoony.
The Switch version’s art style put me off it, too. It looks like the “Corporate Ugly” style that’s overrun advertisements these days.
Each day, my urge to grab game devs and shake them while yelling “Use current tech to make better-looking 2D graphics. How is this hard?” grows.
The impression that I have about Zelda is that it went like this:
-First Game meant to be standalone.
-Second game is a regular sequel, but must awkwardly deal with Gannon being around.
-To get around this, they make a prequel for 3.
-To avoid having too many Links, they make a sequel with the same character but which is more of a side story.
-Since Link to the Past hinted at crazy stuff happening even before it, they make Ocarina of Time about those events. (Not perfectly matching, but I always assumed the account in Link to the Past was the legend of what occurred and not a literal history.)
-The tradition is now in place to have subsequent games within a console era follow the same Link and have later games be a side story. Hence Majora’s Mask.
At this point they decide that they’ve told about all they want to tell in terms of the overall plot and decide to make games about whatever interest them. This isn’t a huge problem for the oracle games, since they are essentially another side story, but Windwaker has huge changes to the world that don’t make sense anywhere.
And that would have been FINE if people just accepted it as a game thematic but not chronologically related to the others, like alternate Gundam franchises. But people insist on having a timeline and so we get the mess that we have now. Before there was an official timeline games would drastically shift their position on every release (I even remember a time when people insisted that Link’s Awakening took place during the raft ride in Link’s Adventure.)
Now they finally made their Frankenstein’s Monster timeline fit everything, but Breath of the Wild seems intentionally not to go anywhere. So it will just get more complicated.
With BOTW they were basically just throwing the entire timeline idea out. Trying to make so many games “prequels” was a symptom of this issue.
About the only thing that seems consistent and remains unchanging is that the 2D games (aside from Minish Cap which was the first game until Skyward Sword stepped in it) are all at the end of the timeline, showing how Gannon was finally defeated. They tell a remarkably consistent story if you just go by them.
I believe it goes:
~Distant Past Ancestor
A Link to The Past
Oracle of Seasons/Ages
Link’s Awakening
~A Few Generations Later w/ New Ancestor
A Link Between Worlds
~Many Generations Later w/ New Ancestor
Legend of Zelda
Link’s Awakening
You could pretty much start and end there and it makes perfect sense.
However, I’m fine with each game just being a new legend in Hyrule with no direct ties to what came before or after. These are supposed to be myths eternally retold, after all.
*Sorry, I clearly meant Zelda II at the end of the timeline. My mistake.
Debate over where each Zelda game fit in the timeline raged among fanboys for years. Releasing an official timeline is among the top five dumbest ideas Nintendo has ever had, and that’s a high bar.
On a scale of power glove to virtual boy, where would you rank it?
The Power Glove wasn’t made by Nintendo. It was produced by Mattel and licensed from–you can’t make this up–Gentile Entertainment.
Waaaaaaaaaait…they released an official timeline for games deliberately made with no timeline involved other than maybe a game they were direct sequels to? WHY?! To what purpose? I liked it the way it was.
I believe it’s because fans demand everything fit together. This has happened with comic books, with pre-Disney Star Wars, and with Zelda.
The rise of the Pop Cult is why a timeline (that is no longer canon, thankfully) was made. It’s for the same crowd who keeps begging for female Link: people with limited imagination who need shallow gimmicks to stimulate their minds.
The Legend of Zelda, outside of the original 2D games which were made to tell an ongoing story, are all standalone legends of a hero named Link who saved Princess Zelda and the land of Hyrule from the evil demon pig wizard Gannon.
Sometimes they made games like Link’s Awakening or Majora’s Mask, or Minish Cap, that tell other adventures in Hyrule (some of which are sequel adventures), but for the most part it is the same legend told a new way. This is why a timeline is pointless, because it isn’t in the spirit of the series.
I know people like to dunk on Nintendo now for some of the dumb things they do, but their software going back to basics and expanding from there with games like Metroid Dread, Mario Odyssey, or Breath of the Wild, is not one of them. This is what the industry is SUPPOSED to do.
There is this deep-seated concern about ‘canon’ in fandom that I’ve sort of lost touch with, if I ever got it to begin with, and that things can’t count for their own sake but only if they’re all part of the ‘real’ story. It’s one of the reasons “Pop Cult” is such an apt descriptor–people are trying to make this stuff into a religion, and that includes a canon of inspired ‘Scripture.’
We have a name for loose collections of stories featuring stock characters and tropes juxtaposed in entertaining ways: tall tales.
What Nintendo did with the 2D Zelda games ranked up there with Paul Bunyan, Baron Von Munchhausen, and the Laughing Man. As Matthew points out, the shift from a body of tall tales to a linear mythological canon marks the point when pop culture curdled into a cult.
The Ys games are explicitly accounts told centuries later and aren’t meant to be 100% accurate “live footage” of the events. I don’t know why Nintendo doesn’t do the same with Zelda. Maybe all the games are canon, maybe they aren’t. We don’t need to know exactly how or if every single one of them fits together.
The Zelda series’ explicitly Catholic elements are ready-made for a “pagan epic poems baptized by Christian scribes” meta-narrative.
I have a theory about why folks want everything to fit together. The use of the word ‘canon’ to describe such a body of work, and the aspiration to coherency that comes with it, really does give away the fact that these are – as Brian as said many times – substitute religions. As late modern knock-offs, they’re paper-thin and tawdry, of course, because we cannot make things bigger than ourselves. A cult needs a canon, which frames a mythology. Some of them are trying to be Tolkien, whose mythopoeia was so successful because he was already practicing the mythos that actually describes how the cosmos works. The echoes of the Christian mythos in the Tolkien mythos is most evident in The Song of the Ainur. Others may trying to be the anti-Tolkien, as that “dark materials” guy was trying to writing the anti-Narnia. In any case, they know somewhere deep down they’re missing something, so they try to fill the void with stories that seem grand and sweeping, if only one doesn’t look too closely.
Note, I use the term myth to mean a grand story, rather as the fedora-tippers and modern skeptics use it which is to mean a false one. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord.
On the topic of old school RPGs, have you tried Octopath Traveler? It’s a 2d sprite-based Squenix JRPG from 2018 that seems to fit many of the conventions of the old genre. While I’m not entirely certain if it’d be to your tastes, it has a better chance than just about any other game released recently, and I think you should try it. It’s also got a system where you can choose to start play as any of the 8 player characters (hence the name), and you can choose to recruit as many of the others as you wish (including none of them, if you want a challenge run!). Each character has a four-chapter story with progressively harder challenges, so the most natural progression involves getting multiple characters, levelling up, and going through their various chapters 2s (which typically require levels between 22-28 to complete depending on which character’s story you’re talking about), then going through the chapter 3s (which range from 32-40), etc. This does mean that the story is a little fragmented, and there’s not as much interaction between party members as might be desirable, but I still think it’s fun and worth checking out.
How about CD-i Zelda? The most memeworthy Zelda of them all:
You must die, or else you will die!
I 100% agree that a “is he still dreaming?” wink at the end would be terrible and unfortunately all too representative of the cheap tricks the current vogue storytellers use.
But I confess I would have liked a bit more turmoil and consideration represented in LA, on either Link’s part in the narrative or on the player’s part through possible choices.
The LA manga published around the same time actually explores this — Link temporarily loses the drive to fight the nightmares and tries to find ways out of the dilemma. He even builds a boat and tries to leave the island (with Marin in tow) but he’s mystically turned back to the beach.
Since Link was always a cypher in the early games, it’s fine that he doesn’t have any dialogue or doesn’t “share his feelings,” but a couple of side-quests or red herrings that gave the player a chance to act out any misgivings would have been icing on the cake.
This was the first Zelda game I played, and I played it on the original game boy. It’s still my favorite. I have very little to add, but you put your finger on the thing about its story that always stuck with me – Link has to end the dream to escape, and the game is unambiguous about this being a necessary action. The wind fish tells Link in the ending that it’s the nature of dreams to end. You’re right that had this been made today, it would be accompanied by endless handwringing at the very least. To be fair, they did put in a tiny wink/easter egg: if you beat the game without Link dying once, you see a brief animation implying that Marin got her wish to be a bird through reincarnation or something (or was the bird dreaming it was Marin? who knows!)
For me playing this as a kid, it was a weird, haunting story with characters that come alive despite being tiny monochrome sprites with very little dialog – even the ghost that Link takes to visit his old abandoned house was memorable. The game boy was the only game console I had, and this was the first game I got for it. It set too high of a bar, because literally every other game I got for that was a disappointment by comparison.
Man, I’m Gen Y through and through. I can’t resist these reviews of old games…