The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (2019)

Link's Awakening was one of the few Zelda games I've played before this current run through of all the games, I had it for the gameboy and played it a bunch as a kid. Though not being able to look things up whilst also having what is likely undiagnosed ADHD meant I never got far into it before being stuck and simply starting over after a couple dungeons. Still it was enough that the early stages of this playthrough on the Switch was very nostalgic for me and I have thoughts about the game to ramble about.

First the new visuals, as that's the thing that this version makes very front and center. The cute, plastic toy looking, chibi style is nearly all upside for Link's Awakening in my opinion. It compliments the game's dream-like ascetics and, although I'm all for old school visuals, it makes the pure 2D game look a lot more modern and approachable. The artificial nature of the graphics also lends itself well to some of the story elements that come along later in the game. The only downside is that is takes away any ability for the game to come off as spooky or dreadful, which although rare, would have lent itself well to some of the later revelations.

Performance was a much worse situation however. The game struggles to hold it's framerate on the switch 1. I had to force it into handheld mode and do some light overclocking (I have a special switch given to me by my uncle who works at Nintendo) to get it to sit at a steady 60fps and even then it had a moment or two of it dropping frames. That's pretty hard to excuse in a game this simple. Presumably its due to the lighting system? Either way I'm glad I could overcome this but obviously most people playing who are sensitive to frame drops aren't going to have my options to fix it.

Gameplay is fantastic but admittedly a small step down from A Link to the Past in my opinion. It is more streamlined in many ways but I did find myself missing some of the complexity of aLttP as well, presumably this was due to switching to a handheld console over the SNES release of the previous game.

The story and characters though really shine in this game. The plot of aLttP was very bare-bones and although the characters were fun the story was about as simple as it gets. Link's Awakening on the other hand wasn't afraid to a get a little weirder with things and tell a story that, while still simple, wasn't afraid to have some twists and turns and experiment with some strange concepts. The ending in particular is quite tragic (or bittersweet if you beat the game deathless which I did thankfully without knowing about it) and again I congratulate the game for not just writing a simple happy ending and wrapping up everything in a neat bow.

The last thing I feel like I need to write my opinion about is the Mario franchise stuff all over the game. Normally I would greatly dislike it, not because I dislike Mario at all but because it feels...cheap I guess? The painting of Mario in aLttP is one thing but Mario enemies, characters, artwork, collectables, etc etc etc is much more involved in this title. However it doesn't bother me for this game in particular because of the nature of the world it takes place in and the artificial nature of many of the other things in the game (hard to avoid spoilers here so I'll end it at that).

Overall 4 / 5 Stars. I think I would have probably given it a 4.5 if the performance was rock solid for what it's worth.

4/20 Zelda games played this year. Ocarina of Time next, looking forward to playing it on the very special Wii U my uncle at Nintendo just sent me as well!

Not much needs to be said about Zelda: Link’s Awakening. It’s a traditional Zelda experience with a healthy dose of quirkiness and a charming art style. It has satisfying puzzles and progression. Exploration and curiosity is constantly rewarded. It’s also got beautiful, classic Zelda music and sounds. The story is simple but really enjoyable. It was originally a Gameboy game but this kind of makes it even more impressive. They did a great job with this remake. It looks modern and has modern conveniences but feels and plays old school.

Maybe the price point is about $10 too much. There are some minor technical/performance issues. Also working out what to do or where to go can at times lean towards being a little too obtuse, especially if you gave this to a younger gamer. But it is mostly just a great time.

Zelda: Link’s Awakening is an easy recommendation. It is a must play for every Zelda fan and is a great entry point for newcomers.

9.0/10

• Year played: 2019
• Playtime: 15-20 hours
• Completion level: 100%

Zelda games always perfectly hit every checkbox of "what I want in a game" for me, and Link's Awakening is no exception. I don't know if I ever finished the original back in the day as a kid, so I went in mostly blind and didn't have a lot of expectations.

Admittedly when I first launched this I was immediately put off by the graphic style. The toy aesthetic didn't bother me so much as the edge blur did. I've always had problems with these type of effects - motion blur and low field of view make me especially nauseous - so the edge blur made me feel pretty sick at first. Luckily it seems to be less prominent outside of the starting village, so I was able to make it through the game regardless (but seriously nintendo, PLEASE think about providing accessibility options on your games). One thing to note is that I did not experience any of the lag or framerate drops that I saw people complain about online. No idea how I managed to avoid this (I played both handheld and docked), but I didn't have any performance problems.

Anyway, getting back on track, I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed this game from start to finish. It's everything you'd want from a classic top-down Zelda game: well-designed dungeons, clever puzzles, hidden collectibles, and an arsenal of fun items to use to explore, fight, and uncover the map. Some of the changes from the original are hit-or-miss. I actually loved the way the claw game worked with actual physics, even though it was frustrating occasionally, I never found it to be unfair or un-fun. The build-your-own-dungeon minigame was interesting, I quite enjoyed building dungeons to meet the various challenges, I just feel like it was drawn out a bit too long. In particular, when I was working towards 100%'ing the game, realizing I needed to spend a couple hours rupee grinding so I could purchase the last couple of dungeon tiles felt pretty bad. I don't see why these couldn't have been thrown into some of the extra dungeon chests that only contained a few rupees.

The edge blur, the rupee grind, and the price (full price for a 15 hour remake game is kind of obnoxious) each knocked off a couple points from a perfect score here, but I enjoyed my time spent on it regardless.

Well, there it is, almost 15 years after my first completed Zelda in Twilight Princess, I finally got all the way through one of the 2D ones. This is an odd entry with many pros and cons that grew on me as it went along.

I really enjoyed the game's well-known dream theme. Dreams and nightmares can still have an impact on us even if they don't really happen, and while games and other media are not quite as ephemeral, they are the same in that regard. Through this game's ending and its incorporation of elements of prior Zelda and Mario games, it captures that sense where you may finish a game and never play it again, but it can still stay with you through the little memories of its emotional moments, challenges, music, iconography, and so on. The game itself also has enough cute or funny little moments, interesting levels, and artistic value to make that kind of impact on its own.

Speaking of music, this is one of many Zelda games where music plays a big role not just in the background but also as part of the actual game, through ocarina songs and the collection of instruments in the main questline. There are not many songs to actually play, but the music in-game overall is exceptionally nice to listen to.

As an actual game to play, there are some hit or miss aspects. Some parts of the main progression cross the line into overly cryptic territory and definitely required use of a walkthrough. Some bosses and dungeons are a little too easy to be interesting. However, later dungeons became these wild labyrinths that I actually really got into despite all their backtracking. Unlocking these dense puzzle boxes was a neat experience, and each was filled with mostly interesting little puzzles to solve and decisions to make along the way. I think the last 2 dungeons, the level 7 boss, and the final boss were especially cool.

The game's most unfortunate aspect is the pervasive significant frame drops throughout the game. I experienced immersion-breaking slowdown several times per hour, to put it lightly. It really is that bad, and it's ridiculous that it is still not corrected in a mainline 2D game of one of Nintendo's crown jewel franchises. If Metroid Dread ends up like this, yikes.

If there's one other easy fix the game desperately needs at times, it's breaking free of the limitation of only having two items equipped at once. This holdover from the Game Boy era is entirely unnecessary and makes the second half of the game really cumbersome to deal with at times.

While this experience is overall uneven in terms of difficulty and quality, and has some overall technical and design issues, I can't say I didn't enjoy it quite a bit. It was not the page-turning immersive experience that BotW was, sure, but I enjoyed playing one dungeon per day and felt it fit the handheld game style it was going for pretty well. Looking forward to trying other 2D Zeldas again now.

This was a fun little game. I know i played the original a long, long time ago, but i liked this on more because it reminded me of A Link To Tha Past, the Zelda game for SNES.

I heard before playing it that there were a lot of old-school cryptic things that would be confusing and frustrating, as some very old games could be. I did find one of those extremely cryptic ond abtuse things very late in the game, but there was only one time i had to look up a solution to a puzzle online.

I never liked the puzzles in Zelda-games but the puzzles in this one was a bit charming at least. Some had me scratching my head to find a solution, but overall the puzzles could be solved by just exploring the dungeons or the world just a little bit more.

Combatwise this was an extremely easy game. I died once, during my entire playthrough, and that was in the very last battle of the game, the one that is supposed to be the hardest one of all. I don't think that was a bad thing, this game is cutesy and charmy enough to warrant an easy playthrough, and the battles are still fun. If i wanted a challenge i would try another game.

The presentation is very cute. Every character look like a plastic doll, there is happy peppy music playng wherever you go and each character has something cute or funny to say.

The game is very small. At first it gives the impression of beeing a large complex world with a lot of different locales, but no, the world is tiny, and when you have the tools to get around in the world, it wont take a lot of time to walk from one end of the map to the other.

Overall, a fun, nostalgic, old-school and easy zelda game.

Not much to this game honestly. It reminds me of those old school games where you have to find a bunch of tools to figure out puzzles and go back and forth all over the place. The bosses are not insanely hard at least. The graphics are super cute and the art style overall was the highlight. If you're a Zelda fan you might dig it, but overall there is not much to this game.

Big shout out to my lady wife. I would have given up on Link's Awakening but she has such a good memory for who wants what and what staircase or tunnel leads where and what new area or treasure chest is now available after I pick up a new item. The game is very vague about where to go next and I would have been frustrated by now with wondering around the island lost, but together, we're making great progress and I'm really enjoying the game with her.

If you don't have a special someone in your life to act as your wingman, I strongly suggest taking notes in this game and using the map pins to remember who wants what.

I have positive memories of this game on my old Gameboy. I remember it being fun if a little difficult. I remember getting stuck for a long time on some boss because bombs needed to be placed just so in order to damage it, or you had to come at it at the right angle, or something like that. My grandfather showed me how to beat it finally, and I remember I was upset because the solution was to use an item I had already tried, just in a specific way which you didn't need to worry about elsewhere in the game. But overall, fond memories of what felt like a complete Zelda game on a small device.

This remake is aggressively faithful to the original, including the replication of these obtuse user feedback clues. Overall, my impression is that the game is too easy in most respects, except when it's hard for dumb reasons. Although it is certainly not a bad game, I feel cheated to have paid full price. There is simply not enough here to justify it.

I've heard a lot from friends about how much they like the visual style. This is down to taste of course, but I find it boxy and needlessly busy, consistent with how I feel about New Super Mario Bros. designs. It doesn't appeal to me and I think mostly it obfuscates important visual information, which is exacerbated by some of the design elements in Link's Awakening.

A good non-spoilery example of these issues is the fishing game. You're given a great deal of visual and rumble feedback while you play this. The fish you've hooked will tug on the line according to its script and the controller will vibrate significantly according to that rhythm. But all that matters in terms of when you should be reeling is how much your little 2 pixel wide fishing line is vibrating (which is affected by the animation cycle, for sure, but not exclusively). Nowhere in the game is it even hinted that this is how the fishing mini game works. I ignored fishing for most of my playthrough, assuming that I was eventually going to come across a "steady lure" or something which would improve my chances at the more exotic fish.

Some of the boss fights rely on similarly obscure visual cues. Almost universally the answer is to use the item found in the same dungeon but, as noted, sometimes this has to be done in a particular fashion. The game generally offers no indication if you're doing the right thing but in the wrong way.

Obscure boss mechanics aside, the hardest part of this game is the beginning, before you have many hearts or items with which to defend them. After the first or second dungeon, I was probably never more than six hearts in the hole. You can "fix" this by playing in hero mode and having everything deal double damage, but I feel the problem isn't that monsters don't hit hard enough. It's that they're simple and fighting them generally wasn't very fun.

A lot of this is just down to the fact that there is little enemy diversity. There are enemies that fly or that hop to dodge, enemies that have shields and require you to parry, enemies that throw projectiles, and your basic one-shot baddies like bats and slimes. Throw in a few unique mobs like the mummies, pols voice, shield-eaters, the green electric stick, a couple of inconsequential Mario transplants, and that's basically the whole menu.

I don't remember if all of those variations appeared on the Gameboy (I'm sure the shield enemies played differently since parrying is a new feature). Even if it was only half of them, together with all the bosses and mini-bosses, that is an impressive technical feat on a cartridge game in 1993. In 2019, running on a modern console with effectively infinite disk space, it feels like there is a lot missing.

The new features in this release I mostly found lacking. The fishing game is infuriating until you learn how it works, then it is boring. The dungeon builder in Dampe's Shack, which is the most significant expansion, I found to be tedious and I had no interest in doing the bonus missions after I'd completed my inventory. The new dolls in the Trendy Game add nothing except a reason to keep playing the Trendy Game after your first visit. Other advertised "features," such as the partially unsegmented maps and 4-button inventory management, are nothing more than the price of admission on a modern device.

There are updates I like: There are new pieces of heart and new seashells to find, along with the ability to mark up the map as you locate them so you can easily come back later. The map also keeps track of where you've found things, making it easy to cross reference against an online guide if you've for instance got a 98% complete save file and are tired of the experience and just want to find that wall you missed bombing at the start of the game so you can move on.

The game's design holds up well overall, a testament to the strength of the 1993 release. Dungeons still provide a satisfying ah-ha moment as you figure out how to get where you need to go and this is by far the strongest element of the game.

I feel it's a little disingenuous to ask a lot from the story in a Zelda game but this is one area of a remake that seems like an obvious point for expansion. The game seems to suggest that you ought to feel a little tore up about having to wake the Windfish since it will mean Kohlint disappears, but the island's peaceful inhabitants don't seem very put out about it. Marin and Ulrira both cheer you on as you close in on the final instrument. Link has no deep connection to anything on the island and the game offers no path forward except to wake the Windfish.

I mean, I guess this is a game for babies and I'm overthinking it. It's not difficult, and to the extent that it is difficult the solution is usually just trial and error, so why shouldn't it skirt around the hard moral questions about whether you should erase an island from existence in order to... continue being shipwrecked in the middle of the ocean...? But they want full price for this game and so I felt justified to play the whole thing and I don't feel very good about it and so now Grouvee.com is going to hear my many thoughts.

You know, it's such a small thing but I feel it really epitomizes my frustration with this release: The dialogue moves so slowly. Every time the owl flew down to explain where I had to go next I just wanted to turn the game off. I eventually stopped picking up power pieces and acorns just to avoid clicking through the two screens of dialogue. This is such an easy thing to optimize for the player and it just wasn't done.

it's a bit unfair how cute this game is. in almost every aspect the game is just incredibly fun and playful and it feels like a game that exists to pummel buyers with nostalgia for the kind of game you might have played when you owned a game boy.

i went into link's awakening blind (except for having played a link to the past) and found it generally approachable. if you're sort of new to the genre i suppose it helps to remind yourself that its pedigree is a gameboy game and that it can only really be so complex, so don't really overthink it too much.

what's particularly rewarding though is that the game retains lots of the hilariously gameboy-esque constraints, weird bugs that jump at some what comic intervals, tight dungeons, and, let's not lie, pretty straightforward bosses. those are not complaints at all, though, this game goes down smooth, it's just like dipping into a 3 camera sitcom or something, you won't be totally surprised or wowed but the game has plenty to offer and lots of fun and silly moments.

to be fair, the only complaints really have to do with some of the awkwardness of the boots and feather, the inexplicable frame drops, the oddly long load times that seem just a second or two longer than you expect each time. beyond that, the game is lovely to look at, the music is great, the vibe is chill and it's a great way to pass the time.

i haven't dipped into the amiibo functionality, to be honest i did not find the dungeon building to be all that engaging, but it's nice that it's there and a fun little addition to a nicely crafted remake.

I never played the original version of this remake, but I know it is a fan favorite and went in with pretty high expectations. I can't say I was disappointed.

The game starts when Link is shipwrecked and washes ashore the island of Koholint. In order to leave, he must collect 8 magical instruments and wake the Mythical Windfish. The game provides clues but few directions, leaving it up to you to wander, explore, and interact with the island in order to find the dungeons and the items you need to clear them. The dungeons themselves are more about puzzle solving than adventuring, and some of them are quite challenging. And, of course, there are plenty of secrets to discover if you're willing to spend some time searching for them.

Even without having played the original, the elements of the game managed to communicate a sense of nostalgia. I was reminded of the many other classic Zelda games I played in childhood.

I think this actually makes up for some of the game's drawbacks. Namely, that it is incredibly short. I completed in 16 hours at the most. Even though this is upsetting, it's also a callback to simpler times, and it's nice to enjoy it for the short while that it lasts.

I've finished all 8 dungeons as well as the special dungeon, and I'm now on my way to 100% completing the game and getting all of the collectibles. This, of course, means that it's time for Dampe's Dungeon mini-games.

I'm not yet sure how I feel about the dungeon creator aspect. On the one hand, it's cool that it prolongs the game and lets you keep playing for more items and prizes, but the feature itself can be very time consuming and it gets old. Quickly.

I found myself getting more efficient at crafting dungeons to satisfy the requirements, and I'm done about 8 of them so far. Unfortunately I feel myself getting burned out on it already, just wanted to wrap things up. Typically, I try to use the room tiles that require the least amount of time to play through. By that I mean, using regular room tiles instead of miniboss chamber tiles, and generally trying to use as little treasure chests (so, keys) as possible.

It's a neat idea and I can understand how one might get a kick out of making some custom dungeons and handing them out to friends via the Link amiibo, but having the remainder of heart pieces and seashells hidden behind the feature is a bit of a let-down.

Not a big complaint by any means as the rest of the game was a delight to play, and the crane-game with the Mario universe figurines was very cool to see. Just not sure how I feel about the game being artificially extended using this questionably entertaining feature.

This remake is exactly what I hoped for with a Zelda game on the Switch. It was pitched as a remaster of sorts, but so much of the game skews it towards a re-imagining then a simple remake, and Nintendo clearly put the love into it to recognize it as a standalone game from the original of which it's based upon.

Aside from some minor framerate issues that never really affect minute-to-minute gameplay, this port is completely gorgeous from a graphical perspective, and the overall tone is adorable. It absolutely delivered on everything I had hoped!

5 Bags of popcorn and a golden Link Amiibo.