(Originally published to Glitchwave on 4/7/2025)
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The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre(s): Action-Adventure
Platforms: Game Boy
Release Date: June 6, 1993
Simply setting a Zelda title outside the parameters of the glorious and all-too storied kingdom of Hyrule is enough to give any Zelda fan such as I a throbbing anticipation boner, and attempting this digression for the first time must’ve been especially arousing for a handful of gamers back in 1993. Instead of waking up in a bed to the call of adventure, Link is found washed ashore on an unknown beach after his ship is capsized by a mighty bolt of lightning during a tempestuous storm. Unconscious with a pint of salty seawater likely clogging his lungs, a girl named Marin arrives and awakens the hero of time from his drenched stupor. She informs him that he has luckily landed on the shore of Koholint Island, the interim setting where Link’s Awakening is paving new ground for the franchise. However, even without a moment to be gracious that he’s not a bubbling corpse floating face down in the ocean, Link desperately wishes to return home to Hyrule. To his chagrin, travelling back from whence he came is not as quick and easy as a click of the ruby slippers. In order to send Link back to familiar territory, he must find eight sacred instruments scattered throughout the island’s temples and conduct a rousing solo symphony to wake the Wind Fish hatchling in the giant, polka-dotted egg that sits atop a volcano. Only with the Wind Fish’s lucidity will Link be transported back to his homeland. Instead of a heroic epic with the magnificent stakes of saving the world, Link’s Awakening is presented with a man-versus-environment sort of conflict, forcing him to adapt to an uncharted land whose context implies he’s in survival mode. Downscaling the scope of a Zelda adventure could arguably risk underwhelming players who have grown accustomed to the formidable task of preventing the world from plunging into unfathomable darkness. Personally, dialing down the majesty of the typical Zelda adventure showcases a range of narrative potential that is often undermined with the cycle of resplendent triforce matters.
Still, I doubt any veteran Zelda fans would be fooled into thinking that Link’s Awakening provides a drastic shift in the standard series narrative by twisting the premise. If you’ve paid close attention, you’ll realize the instruments are surrogates for the triforce pieces, judging by the number of them needed for the orchestra and their MacGuffin roles that pinpoint every significant milestone in the game’s progression. Essentially, the player is still on the same overarching quest that Hyrule has consistently mandated, but the vital differences lie in the finer details. On the surface, traversing through the island nation of Koholint from a top-down angle, screen by screen, will remind any seasoned Zelda fan of exploring through the pixelated planes of Hyrule. Once they spend enough time in this queer little strangeland, its personality will start to flourish.
Given that Koholint is an island enclave surrounded by water, the environment of the setting is more tropical than Hyrule, which is enclosed by a mountain range. Link can revisit the southern shores where he was fortunate enough to be washed upon from the drink to further explore what lies between the sandy dunes. The villages directly north of the crashing waves are incredibly tranquil, probably due to each abode being spaced out by another square from its nearby neighbors. A cemetery located near the central district of Koholint features some strikingly eerie trees where hostile crows can be found perched on their branches. The atmosphere of Koholint can shift from peaceful to disquieting at the drop of a dime. Yet, the shift in mood is never jarringly sudden, making the player startled by the subtle changes if they pay attention. In my perspective, the inclusion of Mario properties, such as Goombas and a docile chain chomp named BowWow that Link borrows to clear away the wild vegetation in a swamp, is the most unnerving aspect of Link’s Awakening. Link apparently drifted so far away from Hyrule that he’s been sucked into a dimensional rift that caused an uncanny quasi-crossover. Despite the many peculiarities one will find around the island that instill a sense of Link being trapped in uncertainty, there are admittedly plenty of geographical similarities to Hyrule. The apex elevation point of the land where the Wind Fish egg sits comfortably is located in the north at a twelve o’clock angle like Death Mountain, which shadows the castle domain located only a few blocks south. However, the castle is as abandoned as the ruins located east of the presumably once-royal estate, bearing no significance as the land’s capital like the regal fortress at the center of Hyrule. While Koholint setpieces may connote strong structural similarities to the standard stomping grounds of the Zelda franchise, one core difference, besides Koholint’s general atmosphere, is that the world map is far more compact. One might negatively attribute this factor to the fact that the original Game Boy could only render so much inside its black and white mechanical and physical confines, but the limitations at play here make the map more succinct. There isn’t a single square of wasted space across the entirety of Koholint Island, giving the player a better opportunity to become more intimately familiar with their surroundings. Since A Link to the Past had already impressed us with its sprawling amplification of Hyrule, it’s honestly refreshing to explore an area scaled down more modestly.
While Koholint Island is comparatively less spacious than Hyrule’s 16-bit overhaul in A Link to the Past, do not conflate the relative ease in navigation with ease in progression. Ostensibly, in order to cause the player as much confusion and instability as the would-be green protagonist is probably feeling, the developers have formulated an invisible haze around Koholint that clouds the player’s sense of orienting themselves to the narrative’s direction. Pixelated Zelda titles tend to be notably obtuse, but Link’s Awakening is borderline ethereal in directing the player towards the main objective. The island’s few, yet charming, denizens will offer hints to the desired destination, but their directions are still clouded with too much subtlety to be of any helpful aid. It’s like asking someone to point in the direction where Las Vegas is located and getting a response saying that it’s a city in Nevada. An owl occasionally swoops down and sends Link on the correct path, but he still obscures too much information from the player for me to label him as his guiding light. Whether or not the locals are acting difficult to scorn the outsider or their manner of speaking doesn’t communicate clearly to Link because he’s a foreigner, finding any indication of the whereabouts of each instrument’s location can often feel as frustratingly hopeless as trying to find shelter in Siberia during a blizzard. A large chunk of the game’s progression runs concurrently with a trading sequence involving several needy Koholint citizens. It begins with Link winning another Mario trinket in the shape of a Yoshi doll during a crane game, and the line of bartering from then on is an exhausting one. The process of finding the specific NPC who asks for the specific item and then stacking over fifteen of these interactions on this initial encounter is an endeavor so circuitous that it would be better fitting for an optional side quest rather than the primary objective to further the story. Sure, the alarming lack of guidance in Link’s Awakening does a fantastic job at fostering that sense of freeform exploration that spurred the series creation, but executing that ethos here in particular feels like one of those off-kiltered days in the woods where Miyamoto ventured too far from home and became frantically lost when the sun set on him. A walkthrough would be a vital auxiliary piece of aid to accompany Link’s Awakening, like with any game. However, what the player truly needs is one of the developers by their side, pointing out not only what to do and where to go, but also the rationale behind their design decisions.
Once the player manages to locate their destination through traversal that feels like spelunking without a flashlight, they will fortunately be treated to what is definitively the finest roster of dungeons the series has seen thus far. Whereas the overworld in Link’s Awakening is unforgivingly ambiguous and A Link to the Past’s dungeons tend to be overly convoluted, the inverse seems to be the case regarding both games’ attributes. The winding labyrinthian constructs that house the various instruments aren’t necessarily straightforward, but none of them involve design gimmicks that are so leftfield that make the player scratch their heads in bafflement until they start bleeding, like the outside forest maze of Skull Woods or the multiple slippery floors of the Ice Palace in A Link to the Past’s latter dark world half. The gimmicks that diversify the dungeons of Link’s Awakening are consistently approachable and do not divert out of the box of dungeon parameters to work with too drastically. For example, the tasteful double entendre of “Key Cavern” involves managing the many metallic door and chest openers that fall from the ceiling upon defeating a block of enemies. “Catfish’s Maw” features both Cheep Cheeps and Bloopers as the aquatic enemies to contend with in this submerged dungeon, and Turtle Rock (no association with the dungeon from A Link to the Past, thank God) features segments where the player has to draw the remainder of the block’s floor by manually pushing around a device that resembles a Roomba. The one exception in Link’s Awakening that does break beyond the boundaries of conventional dungeon traversal is Eagle’s Tower in the northeastern mountains of the island. Here, only the impact of a hefty, green, and black sphere is enough to break the columns that structurally support this stone tower. I struggled in figuring out that razing the top half of the dungeon with this gleaming, glassy globe was the primary objective at hand, and configuring the possible directions to transport it proved to be equally as challenging as any of the harder dungeons in A Link to the Past. Still, the unconventionality of Eagle’s Tower is more enthralling than any dungeon from that game because it’s so satisfying to coordinate the ball’s location with the column and then smash it to smithereens. Hints given by the owl effigies erected across a few of each dungeon’s corridors are far more straightforward than the riddles of their flesh-and-blood counterpart, as long as the player finds the beak that allows Link to communicate with them. Overall, the dungeons of Link’s Awakening excel over the lineups in its console predecessors because of their consistency and balanced difficulty curve. Still, I do not appreciate progression points being impeded by bomb walls with imperceptible cracks, an unfair mark of early Zelda that the developers evidently did not reconsider yet, and that almost ruins the stellar streak in Link’s Awakening.
Much of the progression in each of Link’s Awakening’s dungeons is also contingent on the item that Link receives. Similar to the strengths of the contained areas that they are obtained in, the doodads that make up the space of Link’s trusty bag are equally as exceptional. The collective of items here doesn’t rewrite the content of Zelda's arsenals, but Link’s Awakening warps the way each item is utilized, which in turn makes it refreshing. In Link’s Awakening, the titular hero isn’t confined by a magic meter with a finite source of energy. Because the typical restriction has been lifted, Link is free to use magic items like the Pegasus Boots and the Magic Rod (although this item is obtained too late in the game to go buck wild with it) more liberally than ever before. Other items, such as the separate bag with the magic powder, not only illuminate dim sections of dungeons, but they can also ignite enemies in flames by sprinkling it on them, as if it has the same divine properties as holy water. The quest of collecting twenty seashells to upgrade Link’s sword isn’t nearly as stringent as the chain of trading sequences, for Link only has to collect four-fifths of the total of them scattered across the island. Somehow, the boomerang has transformed from an early game projectile compensation tool to an enemy-shredding powerhouse, the Zelda equivalent to Mega Man 2’s Metal Blade with inexhaustible energy (provided Link keeps catching it on reentry). Lastly, the one truly original item in the game that is the crown jewel of Link’s arsenal is the Roc’s Feather, which allows Link to manually jump to hop over gaps and essentially increase the capabilities of his overall mobility. If giving Link an ability that he struggles with in the astronomically more advanced 3D Zelda games doesn’t sell the player on Link’s Awakening, I don’t know what would.
To my dismay, Link’s Awakening is beset by an unfortunate case of DKC syndrome, even though the game predates Rare’s Donkey Kong resurrection title by a year. This term was coined (by me) to highlight a game in which the bosses are laughably easy, especially when compared to the levels with meaty challenges that precede them. Up until this point, the Zelda franchise hadn’t suffered from this awkward contrast, but Link’s Awakening proves to be a trendsetter for the worse. Given that the first boss is a repeat of Moldorm from A Link to the Past, the boss that every fan unanimously despises, it sets a terrible precedent. Still, future bosses such as the languid shooting section of Hot Head’s fight and the brief hacking of the Angler Fishes’ shiny protuberance elevate the doofy Moldorm into the ranks of a competent boss fight. Yikes. The giant, creepy face that is Facade is an especially new low for Zelda bosses, for I was flabbergasted that the intended method for defeating it was to simply keep dropping bombs on its immovable face. Only with the game’s final boss, the shadowy nightmare that resides in the deep recesses of the Wind Fish egg, does the challenge intended for a boss fight come to fruition. The phantom figure will use its amorphous physicality to transform itself into the shape of many formidable boss fights from the series’ past, and the last phase of the fight will test the player’s proficiency with the Roc’s Feather like an Olympic jump roper. Admittedly, while the final boss of any game should ideally be the most challenging, all of the substantial effort needed to beat it should not be allocated entirely to it.
Conquering the final boss should feel victorious, but the narrative of Link’s Awakening conversely suggests otherwise. In plenty of instances leading up to excavating the interior of the giant egg shell, NPCs and bosses warn Link that finishing his quest will result in the disappearance of Koholint Island. The setting is but the fabrication of the Wind Fish’s coma dream, explaining the illogical traversal and the myriad of Mario properties. One usually wouldn’t put any weight into the words of menaces, but they speak not out of deception, but of fear. When Link frees the Wind Fish from its indefinite slumber, the player witnesses Koholint Island disintegrate before their very eyes, transporting Link to a scene where he’s supporting himself on a wooden slab of his ship to keep himself afloat in the ocean. All the while, Koholint's NPCs, like Marin, whom we've come to know and adore, fade away into the ether of Link's hazy memory. Usually, I’d be lambasting any piece of media that decides to end with the revelation that it was all a dream because it’s the most contrived plot device imaginable. However, in the case of Link’s Awakening, the reveal of Link’s actual whereabouts is quite effective. I don’t buy the stance that he’s the game’s true villain or that he’s acting as a useful idiot for the Wind Fish, for I get the impression that all of the narrative context that would lead any player to that conclusion never even occurred in the first place. Seeing Link still in peril after the events of that fateful storm, when we were so confident that he had at least found somewhere with a solid footing, gives the player total narrative whiplash. His continual state of uncertainty leaves us with a potent sense of dread, and the juxtaposition to the whimsy and wonder of Koholint makes the reveal all the more devastating. Existentialism is a theme that the more unorthodox Zelda titles often explore, but Link’s Awakening presents such heavy themes in the bleakest fashion.
Farore, Nayru, and Din have all but abandoned Link, leaving him in the uncaring arms of lands outside of Hyrule that have evidently caused our hero much strife. For the player, Link stepping outside of Hyrule to a godless realm that exists in the metaphysical space of unknowing is exactly what the franchise needed. Despite how abstract the peculiar land of Koholint is in navigating it, it doesn’t distract from how this island provides the Zelda series with a burst of creativity that Hyrule wouldn’t allow, which extends, but is not limited to, the items, dungeons, and atmosphere. Let us not forget that Link’s Awakening is no less grand in length and content than A Link to the Past, despite that it was designed for a system with less functional power than an Easy-Bake Oven. That alone is impressive enough to elevate Link’s Awakening beyond any of its console predecessors. Decades onward, Link's Awakening maintains its allure because it's still one of the more unique adventures the series can offer. It's a Zelda Adventure oozing with personality and mystique.
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