What’s The Game? Link’s Awakening, the 2019 Switch remake rather than the original.
How Much Did You Know About It Before Playing? Not a huge amount. I was aware that it was a remake, of course, and that the game generally had a good reputation. In particular, the remake I knew was thought of as retaining the charm of the original while updating the whole look, feel, and implementation for a more modern audience. And I knew that it wasn’t set in Hyrule so sidesteps a lot of the familiar aspects of Zelda games. Well, familiar to some anyway – given that I’ve only played one so far the trappings of Hyrule aren’t as engrained in me as they are for some people. Nevertheless, the little I did know of it was intriguing and it was exciting to get stuck into a second Zelda game after loving A Link To The Past so much.
How Was The Experience? It is a complete and utter delight! It’s very, very hard to do whimsy and cuteness without it becoming cloying or sickly but Link’s Awakening manages to walk that line almost preternaturally well. There’s something just so incredibly delightful about the way the game looks, the overall feel, the sheer quality of the graphics work, and the way it all fits together that really helps to bring the island of Koholint to life.
The swaying plants, the water lapping against the beach, the statues, all of it just looks remarkable – toylike without simply being childish and cartoonish without just looking like that’s a shortcut. There’s a physicality to the way the graphics look too which prevents them from looking “cheap” (for lack of a better word) and like they have real substance to them. The graphics are nothing shore of amazing, in fact, and perfectly capture the environment and what makes it unique. The game remains a 2D scroller but the 3D graphics add depth and a degree of realism that really helps sell what’s going on.
And that really does extend to every element of the production – for all that it is graphics, it does just look real. Link himself is a completely splendid and fabulous representation and somehow I never got tired of him doing his little somersault jumps or the munching-the-apple routine or… well, or any of it. Throughout, Link is simply charming and a delightful character to be playing. Even his yells as he falls into yet another pit, guided there so expertly by my cack-handed gameplay, are easy to hear again and again (and again and again – did I mention that I’m somewhat cack-handed?). Every bit of Link’s design is designed to draw the player in and does so expertly.
Given that this is only the second Zelda game I’ve ever played, I didn’t miss the Triforce, Zelda herself, Hyrule or any of that malarky. This was simply a game that had was what it was and stood or fell on how well it implemented what it wanted to – which is, in this case, to say very well indeed. Orphaned from the usual plot lines or back-story, here we have a simple(ish) premise. Link’s stuck on an island after being shipwrecked and needs to get off it, and to do so he needs to wake the Wind Fish, at which point the island will disappear and he’ll be able to leave. Because the island only exists as a dream of the Wind Fish, you see. The opening scenes, done in an almost Studio Ghibli style, are beyond wonderful and I wanted so much more of them. But then you get into the game and that’s where there is no escape because once I started playing that was it – I was in.
The dungeon design feels like it’s pitched a little better than A Link To The Past. This might be my unfamiliarity with the games rearing its head but generally speaking, I found the puzzles here a little less “random” and pitched at a slightly better level. There’s more than enough to keep the player thinking (well, this player anyway) without just becoming impossible or “whoops you missed that one tiny detail early on, go back and do the whole sodding thing again” that aLttP sometimes did. Progress here is linear enough to be easy to keep track of but expansive enough to still feel open-world, which is a perfect balance to strike. It’s not really open-world, of course, not in the true sense, but one of Link’s Awakening’s great tricks is making it seem like it could be or sort-of is.
Chickens! God, I love the chickens in this game. Whether it’s the little ones wandering around the village or the great big air-lift one you need to complete one of the dungeons, they’re just an absolute joy. See also: foxes, the dog-on-a-chain and even the jumping fish that never failed to piss me off every time I stupidly walked into them.
I also loved the fact that there’s a help mechanism that can clue you in enough to get you going in the right direction but not so much that it’s either too obscure to be of use or too specific to ruin the fun. The telephones (I guess those exist in this world?) are, like so much of the game, just pitched perfectly. This is, I am led to believe, a feature going forward and it’s a most welcome one. It takes some of the frustration out of the gameplay without just spoiling everything.
Another thing I greatly loved – and I cannot stress this enough – is the music. From the little kids-piano theme of the village to the Spanish-infused Zelda theme on Tal-Tal Heights, the music is a completely integral part of the world and it’s all completely amazing. I have no regrets about leaving the Dungeon Theme from aLttP in the past – it still haunts me, and not in a good way – and instead, we have a wide variety of overground and dungeon themes, each enhancing its location perfectly without getting in the way of the action or the primary sound effects. It’s a careful, nuanced balancing act that’s carried out with great aplomb.
Oh, and the Nightmares feel better judged as well this time out. A least a couple of the aLttP Bosses just pissed me off. Not in an “I’m not good enough to defeat these” sort of way (well, that too, given my limited skillz) but more that they just didn’t feel they were always quite calibrated as they should be. Here, the Nightmares feel challenging enough to defeat but not so challenging that frustration sets in as interest drifts. Indeed, the final Nightmare, inside the Wind Fish’s Egg, constantly evolves into new forms, each testing a skill you’ve deployed against one of the previous Nightmares but here all wrapped up into one final baddie. It’s a great conceit and makes it feel like the final battle is a development on, and growth out of, what’s come before rather than simply being One More Bad Guy To Beat.
And the mini-bosses help a lot in that regard too. They give you a sense that you’re building up to the final Nightmare, providing you with a challenge and skill-learning monster while still allowing plenty of scope for the Actual Nightmare to be a challenge. This, alongside the exploration of the dungeons, always helps to give Link’s Awakening a sense of forward momentum. Not that aLttP didn’t have this as well – it definitely did – but Link’s Awakening manages it even more adroitly.
That sense of progression is important because if there’s one way that aLttP scores over Link’s Awakening, it’s scale. aLttP is simply vast (considering the hardware limitations) and every last kilobyte is deployed in squeezing as much terrain out of the game as possible. Link’s Awakening and the environs of Koholint Island are a delight beyond measure but there’s no getting away from the fact that this is a noticeably smaller realm the game is being played out in. In a way, that’s a compliment to Link’s Awakening – I simply want more of it, and ideally a lot more of it – but the smaller world and smaller dungeons do lend a feeling that there’s less to explore here (because there is). At least having that sense of forward progression helps to offset this a little.
The dungeon design is universally great though and, silly though it is, I love the conceit of each dungeon’s layout looking like the thing it’s named after. That’s exactly the sort of silly I enjoy and the implementation feels perfectly in keeping for such a whimsical, delightful game. The whole island is a dream so why not apply dream-logic to something like the dungeon layout? It works incredibly well, even though it’s just a small detail.
And small details are exactly what Link’s Awakening is good at. From the weird suck-things that sometimes steal your shield if you walk into them, to the plants and grasses, even the library… all the little details add up together to make a coherent, complete world for Link to explore. The sound effects help with this as well, everything helping to produce a unified whole (well, except for the deeply weird “music” that plays inside the telephone hut, which doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard before or am likely to again).
So, yes. Basically, I loved this. Adored it, even. It’s an incredible game that I just couldn’t get enough of. My experience of remastered games is exactly one – this – and it’s hard to see it as anything other than a complete triumph. The closing titles go back to the anime style of the introduction as the Wind Fish awakens and flies off into the sky while Link awakens to find himself safe on the driftwood from his boat. It’s a rather beautiful ending, as always backed by immaculately written and produced music, and gives the game a suitable and appropriate send-off. This is something really rather special.
Do I prefer it more than A Link To The Past? Yes, I do. And that’s really quite something.
Scores On The Doors: 9.5/10
* I did have a look at the Gameboy version as it’s available in the Switch Online store. It looks great for what it is but I’m also glad I played the 2019 version.
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