The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (2019) [Switch]

I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.

-Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

I sat in the back seat of my family’s navy blue van, the hot equatorial sun piercing the window tint, recoloring the reading I’d brought on the road trip a purplish-gray: collections of Calvin & Hobbes, last week’s Sunday funnies, a couple issues of National Geographic, Zoobooks, and Highlights drained of their color. Mom said playing in the car would make me dizzy and throw up. I switched on the Game Boy anyway, greeted by that familiar chirpy chime. I made sure the volume was real low. It was time to enter my dream world. In 1993, or some short time thereafter, my heart was captured, imprisoned, and given Stockholm syndrome by The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.

The series represented one of the reasons why I became a fan of video games in the first place. It’s thanks in no small part to the original Zelda (a game for which I put bubblegum in my hair so I could stay home to play it) and also A Link To The Past. It was a no brainer to bug my parents (or grandma) for the tiny Game Boy adventure that stranded Link on an island.

Perhaps this is just me reading more convenience than was really there into the memories of my childhood, but I think I remember believing that this Game Boy Zelda was going to somehow be a letdown, a watered-down hold-me-over for the next console title in the series. As it turned out, Link’s Awakening thrilled me and the ending, in particular, haunted me. For years.

It became one of the most unforgettable games I’d ever played.

This sounds like a massive build-up toward a “review” that’s going to do more abject prostration before a childhood favorite than any actual reviewing. More a puff piece than a critique. However, the only way to overcome nostalgia glasses is to first realize that they’re there. Only then can you take them off. I tried just that when playing the remake by Grezzo and Nintendo for Switch. Thankfully, I had a few years of thinking critically about games and their intrinsic qualities to help. We’ll see if I can pick out flaws and merits alike.

Labeled as a “re-imagining”, Link’s Awakening for Switch walks a fine line between remaster and full-on remake, between honoring the past and providing necessary quality-of-life updates, between retro gaming history and sleek modernity. The significance of the original appearing on a handheld and the remake being released on a handheld-console hybrid isn’t to be ignored: I think that’s indicative of the kind of attention to historical authenticity and the general sense of the “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it, just update it” attitude that the developers of Link’s Awakening seemed to possess.

For instance, you’ll find the entire story of the original Awakening intact, from the opening cutscene of the fated hero being chosen by a bolt of lightning at sea, then washing ashore where he is found by Marin, to standing before the massive egg of the Wind Fish, full orchestra of magical instruments in hand, ready to pierce the veil of reality. Similarly, core gameplay remains unchanged: you are still exploring Koholint Island with an expanding arsenal of weapons and tools, uncovering secrets and unlocking dungeons.

As a friend of mine suggested, there’s a tendency to “Final Fantasy” things. That’s a kind of Mickey Mousing, I think. I usually call it the “animefication” of entertainment, which is this needless tendency to make remakes cooler, bigger, slicker, trendier, and subsequently bloated, if not unrecognizable. It seems as if they avoided that at all costs with this game.

In this sense…

Link’s Awakening on Switch is very much the same game.

For that reason, it is everything I called the original (at least) when I reviewed it:

“What began as an unsanctioned, after-hours hobby project for some of the staff at Nintendo tinkering around with the Game Boy’s capabilities eventually turned into one of the best titles for the original handheld… It’s enchanting, with its focus on collecting mystical, musical artifacts and waking what is essentially a supernatural solipsist, the enigmatic and magical Wind Fish. Taking us out of Hyrule allowed players to experience a Zelda game that wasn’t trapped by “canon” and all of the features that came before it. Link’s Awakening was originally intended to be a handheld port of the SNES title A Link to the Past but its “unrestrained” development evolved into something far more creative and unique. Director Takashi Tezuka said the game’s development made it seem like a parody of the Legend of Zelda series. He undersold it. Link’s Awakening began as an experiment. It became a true legend in the Legend of Zelda.”

Forbes, likewise, astutely pointed out that the Switch now has three of the best Zeldas on it. I count five, including Zelda II!

So much of the core game remains the same, you might wonder what’s different about it.

Actually, this was the question people most frequently asked me. And I understand why.

There are a lot of people who have already played the original game, perhaps even recently, so how much sense does it make to purchase what is really just the same experience? There are those who may be wondering how a game smalle enough to fit on a Game Boy cartridge could warrant a solo re-release for a modern console. And there may be those looking specifically for something new, perhaps under the belief that the older game is too antiquated or unplayable.

Well, there are some significant changes made to the game. I think that’s demonstrable. The extent to which the changes matter personally to you will of course vary, but we’ll tackle the updates included in this reimagining next!

The 8-bit Review

 Visuals: 8/10

The most immediately obvious update is to the graphics. The difference couldn’t be vaster.

The original monochrome adventure has been lovingly recreated and given its own special flourish. Equivocal to attempting a new aesthetic in the vein of risky Wind Waker, Awakening attempts a kind of toy and tabletop diorama look, which in my opinion serves the source material well.

Even more unusual, the game opens with an animated cutscene and closes with one, whereas all the content between these bookends, the game itself, has this plastic look to it. Are we to surmise that these visuals explain the world of Koholint as fantasy, even from the perspective of Link himself? Is it visually evocative of make-believe?

Fans of the Legend of Zelda series seem to frequently fall into two camps: those that like the more cartoony games and those that like the more realistic games, in appearance, of course. Awakening falls firmly in the cartoony realm, as if you need to be forewarned. Just know that if that’s not your thing, that’s all this game has to offer in terms of its visual design.

If you didn’t already know, there are many cameos by other Nintendo IP characters in Awakening.

As much as it was a delight to see so many elements I remembered re-imagined in full color and high definition, set at a tilted top-down perspective, there were of course the frame rate issues to surmount. These have invariably become infamous thanks to early reviews of the game which seemed to set them as the centerpiece of the discussion, even including notes about frame rates in review headlines. I tend to stand against headlining a game’s graphical mishaps, the assumption being that graphics are the most important part. However, having played through the game myself, here’s what I can tell you…

The frame rate issues do not severely slow down the gameplay, though their frequency is indeed severe. I encountered frame rate drops (when moving my character) about once every 40 to 50 seconds. That’s a lot throughout the entire game, though each drop lasts for only a short moment and doesn’t dramatically slow the game. They are, however, there. They are performance issues, perhaps due to the game’s inherent design or to the limitations of the Switch hardware in particular, but I’m taking off a point from the Visuals category specifically for them. Clearly, the game would be better without them.

Despite that, Link’s Awakening is an inspired reimagining. It does more than replicate the graphics. In many cases it reinterprets them, which is more than simply slapping a coat of paint over tiny pixelated sprites. Yuck, imagine if they had simply used a pixel smoothing filter!

Instead of single screens, Link moves between. The entire island is an open world now. Dynamic blurring affects the extreme foreground and background (perhaps a little over-eagerly). Even the title screen has been reworked and built for widescreen. But what’s most important, despite all the visual updates, is that everything is recognizable.

 Audio: 8/10

I love the original soundtrack but let’s face it, the chiptunes on the Game Boy can be shrill and ear-piercing, on occasion. Link’s Awakening on Switch re-crafts the musical compositions, again maintaining recognizable melodies while completely reworking the music itself. The new symphonic soundtrack is gold, if somewhat limited in scope and scale by the nature of the game.

Composer Ryo Nagamatsu is no stranger to Zelda games, having worked on the music for A Link Between Worlds and Tri Force Heroes, and has been with Nintendo since 2006. While he has a lot of experience overseeing music for Super Mario games, I think he managed to capture the aural sensations of a Zelda game. There’s a classic fairy tale lightheartedness balanced with the sounds of real danger, as well as nobility and austerity, and the matter of tradition, all woven into Zelda musical history. Any new work has to honor the motifs and heritage laid down before it, though this composition, fortunately, didn’t have to reinvent the wheel entirely.

 Gameplay: 9/10

Gameplay closely resembles the original game, though one of the biggest (and objectively best) changes, one could even argue “fixes”, made to the gameplay involves Link’s arsenal of tools. In the original game, Link had two slots in which he could equip tools and weapons, mapped to the A and B buttons.

This is how you used his sword, his shield, and anything else he picked up in dungeons, meaning if you wanted to do something as basic as jump, then you had to sacrifice equipping your shield (or your sword?!) since you could have only two things equipped at once. This becomes more of a problem the more items you accumulated, and I recall playing a majority of the game sans shield and hence sans the ability to do something as simple as deflecting certain attacks.

In Link’s Awakening for Switch, they rectified this extreme limitation by utilizing the additional buttons on the Switch’s controllers. The sword and shield are now mapped to separate inputs, meaning you can free up those two slots for any of the other goodies: the feather, bow and arrows, boomerang, magic wand, hookshot, and so on.

This, in turn, makes the game less tedious to play, since you have to spend less time opening and closing the menu screen to constantly swap out tools. When we talk about polish and streamlining game design, this is the sort of stuff that needs to be discussed. Menu design isn’t glamorous but it’s important for the user experience (literally UI). Less time spent sifting through menus means more time actually playing the game.

Link’s Awakening is well-known for including sections with 2D side-scrolling action.

Fans of the Link’s Awakening DX version may also be happy to know that the Color Dungeon makes a reappearance here in this definitive re-release. I myself had never played the Color Dungeon before, since heck I’d never even played DX before, so this was a nice little additional treat. The chromatic puzzles extend the original shelflife of the game, but if you want to talk serious replay value then we have to discuss the custom dungeon builder.

Dampé is a character who helps Link collect and assemble pieces of dungeons he’s visited, turning them into new dungeons you can patch together yourself. Take a room from the Tail Cave, another from the Face Shrine, and yet another from the Eagle Tower and stick them together to create your own adventure zone, complete with treasures and enemies and bosses. I made a custom dungeon that strung together all the game’s boss fights in a kind of ultimate big bad boss rush. The Link’s Awakening Link amiibo I picked up even lets you place a Dark Link enemy inside your custom dungeon, too.

You earn some handy rewards from playing in the custom dungeons, such as unique dungeon rooms and lots of rupees. Dampé has a selection of unique challenges for your construction, such as being forced to build in a heart-shaped room layout. Features like this one extend the replay value of the game, but it touches upon an issue seemingly inherent in a lot of Zelda games, namely post-game boredom. While there are custom dungeons and the Color Dungeon to tackle, and therefore things to do, the rewards which you receive from these typically place more rupees as the end you’re working toward.

More money is great, of course, but if there’s nothing to spend it on, it loses its value.

Link’s Awakening fortunately has collectible figurines you can earn from playing the crane game in the village, so you at least have something you can consistently spend your money on. The same can’t really be said for something like Wind Waker, but at least here you can some smaller goals to complete after the Wind Fish.

What players will find in Link’s Awakening is a definitive 2D top-down Zelda experience. Awakening was never the most traditional of Zelda games, but all the trappings are here from the collectibles to the exploration, the secrets and the dungeons. There is added replay value thanks to a few new and/or reimagined features, and the streamlining is absolutely top-notch. Still, it is a short experience, so don’t go expecting that they doubled the size of the original game, or anything of the sort.

 Narrative: 9/10

Time for us to talk SPOILERS, so if you want to avoid them, then you can skip to the next section with Ctrl+f Accessibility.

I scored the story of the game in my review for the original, so I wanted to revisit that here and poke some criticisms at the story in this reimagining.

It’s a fine line to walk when creating a remake (or reimagining, I suppose). There’s a sense in which this is an adaptation, and as we know, when it comes to adaptations (especially in film), there’s an element of being authentic to the source material being repurposed. I’ve already made a to-do about how authentic, honest, and honoring Link’s Awakening is to the original Game Boy game, but allow me to make a counter-point here.

The original game is frankly short. The core story itself is shorter, if we count necessary interactions with NPCs, acquiring required treasures in dungeons, and waking the Wind FIsh as “story”. Everything else is secondary, perhaps even fluff. If it doesn’t world-build or provide some extra exposition on the Isle of Koholint, then it’s likely something along the lines of playing the fishing mini-game or getting lost somewhere on the island and putzing about cutting grass and killing enemies until you either remember what to do or figure out how to do it. That sort of thing is part and parcel to many Zelda games, but it is not, strictly, “story”.

With a story as lean as this one, you’ve only a few moments to allow characters to make their mark and inspire drama.

This is most keenly observed with the character of Marin, who is just as wistful and poignant as she ever was… perhaps even more so now as the graphics allow her more human-like features and therefore more opportunity for the player to empathize with her.

Art by Katsuya Terada

She spends a lot of time in this game wishing. Merely wishing. She wishes to sing, to be somewhere else, to escape the island, to fly away, and she opens her heart up to Link about these things. At first, we could merely write this off as the familiar trope of a young person wanting to rise up out of the idleness of their youth and experience the world and life itself, except that we learn about the true nature of what Marin is: a dream that is dreaming. She’s a conscious illusion (for the herald of the Wind Fish, the Owl, who is a part of the Wind Fish knows that it is dreaming up the isle and its inhabitants), a conscious illusion which consciously bears its own illusions about life beyond itself, indeed beyond its essence.

The sense of loss stings as much today as it did nearly three decades ago. Marin confides in Link that she wants to become a seagull and fly away over the horizon. But of course at the end of the game the island evaporates and the shared dream ends as the dreamer wakes, revealing only the Wind Fish and Link himself to be real agents with any substance outside of the dream… unless you get the secret ending, of course. If you don’t get a game over before finishing the game, you’ll see a visual clue that Marin was granted the form of a seagull by the Wind Fish and her dream came true, in part at least, because we’re not told that she ever becomes human again or ever sees Link again.

There’s an ancient bittersweet tragedy to this.

I think of myths with characters turned into the shapes of animals for their own preservation, like Tithonus granted immortality:

THE GODDESS of the Dawn, like her sister the Moon, was at times inspired with the love of mortals. Her greatest favorite was Tithonus, son of Laomedon, king of Troy. She stole him away, and prevailed on Jupiter to grant him immortality; but, forgetting to have youth joined in the gift, after some time she began to discern, to her great mortification, that he was growing old. When his hair was quite white she left his society; but he still had the range of her palace, lived on ambrosial food, and was clad in celestial raiment. At length he lost the power of using his limbs, and then she shut him up in his chamber, whence his feeble voice might at times be heard. Finally she turned him into a grasshopper.

-Bulfinch, Age of Fable: Vols. I & II: Stories of Gods and Heroes

Art by Bernard Picart (1673-1733)

There’s also Acanthis transformed into a bird out of the pity of deity, Arethusa becoming a spring to escape unwanted affection, or even Daphne becoming the tree. Metamorphosis isn’t only for the Greeks; the Italian fairy tale The She-Bear allows its princess to escape wedlock with her father by becoming a bear, and in the modern era, Kafka wrote Metamorphosis about a man transformed into a hideous “vermin”, to the disgust of his family and the upset of his sense of responsibility.

In each of these, the binding nature of the transformation holds up a kind of tragedy, the loss of ability, human ability, sometimes speech, sometimes society, though the freedom afforded by the transformation at least allows the subject to continue to exist. Marin faced either non-existence or non-humanity, evidently, and so yearned for and received the latter (so far as we know). To my mind, alongside the revelation of the mystery of the island, this is the strongest part of Awakening’s story.

However, as strong as these thematic elements are, remember how the game walks a fine line?

It authentically replicates the past, but you might feel a pang of longing over the lack of any additional… embellishment to the story. With Final Fantasy VII Remake due next year, it’s easy to see how much embellishment can actually be done with an original story. Perhaps too much, to where the game becomes something else entirely and its original strengths are lost, or new narrative problems are potentially created, such as bloat. With Link’s Awakening, though, it seems fairer to ask more from rather than less.

Could we have learned more about the island’s history? The nature of the Wind Fish? More extrapolation as to Awakening’s place in the timeline? Or perhaps the fate of Marin? As with the Children of Lir, transformed into swans instead of being killed by their stepmother but retaining their human voices to sing, the song of Marin floating on the air is all the hint we get.

The world will never know more. Maybe that’s part of the haunting strength of the game.

Also, Marin for Smash.

Accessibility: 8/10

As action games, Zeldas tend to remain relatively simple, and Link’s Awakening is no exception. However, as adventure games, Zeldas can occasionally baffle and it’s easy for players to get lost. I myself, despite having played the original numerous times, still couldn’t remember the whole adventure and so got lost and had to retrace my steps or explore new areas. So while the game is easy to play, exploration does provide some accessibility challenges. You’ll need to think outside of the box to solve all the puzzles.

Case in point, the seashells.

 Replayability: 7/10

Seashells, mini-games, the Color Dungeon, and building your own dungeons, as well as simply strolling around on the hunt for treasure, provide some replay value to the game. It’s not extreme but it is there, plus there’s the additional replay value of this being a reimagining, provided you’ve played the original game.

 Uniqueness: 4/10

Because it is a reimagining, I can’t give Awakening on Switch too high of a uniqueness score. Most of its strengths come from the original design, excepting some of its streamlining, polishing effects and the updates upon its visuals. Something like custom dungeon building goes a long way, but if you’ve played the original on Game Boy or Awakening DX, you’ll have mostly the same experience here. That also means everything you loved is still here, too. It’s the same ride, just a little less bumpy.

Personal: 10/10

One of the biggest questions I asked myself ahead of this Link’s Awakening review is whether the game would remain my favorite Zelda after playing the reimagining on Switch. After all, since I first played the original all manner of new Zelda games have come out, and I’ve gained new favorite titles in Ocarina, Wind Waker, and Breath of the Wild. However, I can say with great delight and even satisfaction that Link’s unusual adventure on Koholint still marks my favorite Zelda title.

A source of true joy came to me in the form of my son, who sat with me the whole time I played through this game. I was a child when I first played Link’s Awakening, so to see the game both as an adult now but also through my son’s eyes anew represented an unparalleled gaming experience. He kept me motivated to play in asking when we could wake the Wind Fish. “Daddy, what is the Wind Fish?”

Nintendo didn’t fix what was broken. What was broken? They wisely adapted the source material for the modern palate with refinement and attention to detail. While I could’ve wished that more had been done to flesh out the sparse story, I’m happy that no meaningless changes were made to a game that’s been loved by me since 1993.

Aggregated Score: 7.9

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.