Note: This review contains spoilers.
When I was a teen, I played Link's Awakening by accident. Having grown up playing A Link to the Past years before, I got the itch to replay the game and relive my youth in a bout of early nostalgia. At some point I confused myself, and thought my friend's copy of Link's Awakening was the game from my youth. At the time it was a somewhat surreal experience, something very fitting for what Link's Awakening is. I'd played through A Link to the Past very young, so most of my memory was of specific bosses and an overall art style more than any sense of place (outside of the castle and Link's home early in the game - a section a six year old me was stuck on for days until my cousin pointed me towards the bush leading to the castle dungeons). So when I picked up Link's Awakening, it wasn't immediately apparent I had started the wrong game. After all, the game looked relatively right, if a little simplified which I credited to it being ported to the Gameboy Color (making this the DX version of the game). I wasn't one for text boxes when I was younger, preferring instead to jump into the action, so I missed several key exchanges with Marin, this game's analogue to Zelda. I was pretty sure something was off while I played, but every once in awhile pieces of A Link to the Past would filter through, such as some of the enemies, or the worm boss that you have to hit the tail to defeat. It was mostly due to remembering so little about the SNES classic that it took until I got the jump feather (the same dungeon as the tailed boss) that I decided to look the game up and realized my error.
This first play through Link's Awakening is something I cherish because of how the accident played so well into what the game is trying to do. Very early on, it is easy to notice some things are off. There is a chain-chomp, for one, sitting outside of a house. The dotting of Mario enemies (and Kirby) throughout give a very bendy sense of reality that only enhanced my confusion as a teen. Link's Awakening was said to be influenced by Twin Peaks, which isn't particularly strange given the game's dream-centric plot. In the Zelda canon, it is Link's Awakening that started the pattern of surreal side-games outside of Hyrule that Majora's Mask would eventually follow. Started as a straight port of A Link to the Past for the Gameboy by some bored Nintendo employees, the game eventually found a life of its own as the programmers became more and more invested in programming Zelda for the little handheld. The somewhat relaxed atmosphere of playing with a game's construction rather than the serious, impassioned work of a traditional "product" games certainly played into the game's surrealism. It's aloof. Link's Awakening to date feels the breeziest of all the Zelda games (unless we are searching for a Wind Waker pun), relaxed mostly in pace and whimsical in tone. The game doesn't have a serious villain, only an abstract: a nightmare is terrorizing the Wind Fish, a giant whale slumbering in an egg on top of a mountain. Your task is to travel the eight dungeons (as you do), collect the eight instruments, and play the song of awakening to wake the Wind Fish from his nightmare and free him. The whole island you are on, however, is within the dream of the Wind Fish, and doing so will destroy the entire island as well as all of its charismatic, and downright adorable inhabitants. There is a tragedy in this, and somewhat of an irony in that the villains of the game are the ones trying to keep this world alive. Granted, these nightmares want to rule this world, but the sense of preservation over that world is something kind of unique to a Zelda game, and most games in the RPG genre (funnily enough, the only other game I can think of is the awful Fable III, but there it is a gimmick and here it seems to be more of a tonal theme).
Link's conflict of needing to save the Wind Fish but lose all of his newfound friends is one of the more unique and somewhat postmodern themes in a Zelda game. While postmodernism is lauded in later games like Bioshock or Braid, many of the similar themes there are echoed here, nearly a decade earlier. In particular, the central conflict is a reflection on the game's own game-ness. During the final boss battle, the boss takes the form of Agahnim, the wizard from A Link to the Past, and he must be defeated the same way as in that game. The game is very aware that this is most likely not your first Zelda game, and that, if you are interested in a handheld port, you must have played the previous, larger-selling entry in the series. This boss phase plays exactly like that of the SNES classic, and though it doesn't directly require your knowledge of another game in order to beat, it is enhanced by it. More so than these little additions of mechanics and characters, however, is in how the game wants you to beat it while self consciously knowing that to do so means you can no longer live in this world. It reminds me of how in Dark Souls your ultimate goal is the right to die and not come back. It is the game recognizing that its win condition is something happy, but also in ending itself. It wants you to stop playing, but it wants you to earn that ability to stop playing, it wants you to feel a conclusion. Here they don't mince words about this, and call the game a dream. David Lean, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Stanley Kubrick all explained in one interview or another that a film was like a day dream, that it allowed you to live through a world and characters without that explicit feeling of consciousness, that you didn't have to feel personally morally at odds, but could live through or with a character that was without the guilt or ethical burden. It allowed us to explore concepts, people, and situations we otherwise couldn't in real life, and that this ability could be used for escapism or for confrontation on what we were too worried or closed off from to confront. Likewise, games are like that, as are books if we really want to get into it. Link's Awakening takes this seriously, telling you to enjoy the dream as it goes, to miss it when it's gone, but to never forget it. All games are daydreams, and there is a beauty in acknowledging them as so.
The Switch remake has done a near perfect job recreating this experience, even if the game isn't so perfect. The new toy-like style perfectly realizes this sense of unreality in a twee package that never ceases to be cute. Though it may feel like a glossy coating on a rather old game (the layout still uses an archaeic tile based system for an open world RPG), I think Link's Awakening holds up incredibly well on its own merits to not warrant an overhaul, as interesting as that prospect may be. On a technical side, frame dropping is incredibly annoying and far more frequent than in Breath of the Wild, a much more intensely technical game. Some of this may be because the game largely discards the "scene" like loading of areas outside of dungeons as is usual in 2D Zelda games in favor of a free moving world, without requiring the camera to swing to the next scene when you reached the previous scene's edge. This change makes the map feel much more open, but wouldn't have been a hindrance if the game ran smoother the original way. The base Link's Awakening can at times be opaque in what it wants you to do, partially because of a game-spanning trade quest that can sometimes be downright senseless, but usually has some sense of consistent logic to it. Being gated out of areas of the map without a required tool is something I hadn't realized was out of Zelda for so long until confronted with it here, and it has its pluses and minuses. Mostly pluses, as it makes gaining a new item exciting on an exploratory level, but occasionally it can feel like you are out of places to go without a new item when in reality it just takes some experimentation. Overlap such as the Hookshot and the combination of Roc's Feather and Pegasus Boots in getting over gaps was particularly annoying, as sometimes I would either pass up areas I could access or try at areas I couldn't. The game also loses steam item-wise by the end of the game, giving you the flame rod and mirror shield towards the end, neither of which change the game except in virtually arbitrary ways. Luckily, there is a built in hint system to help you through if you are sick of wandering around. Going into one of the phone huts allows you to call one of the in game characters and ask for a hint, which is usually not overly spelled out and can generally relieve some frustration when the game's world seems to not be giving you any sense of where to go next.
As far as Zelda games go, Link's Awakening is still one of my favorites, even if it falls at the bottom of the list of Zelda greats. It is an entry in the series that could have easily been overlooked, but instead it has been lovingly rendered again with a distinct artistic style that compliments the themes of the game. Here's hoping Nintendo is excited by this game's reception, because there is nothing I would love more than a similar port of the Capcom Zelda's as soon as possible.
8.5
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