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!
