The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

The remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, released for the Nintendo Switch, presents an old classic with a new but problematic coat of paint. It still offers the same adventure set in a memorable setting that is both mysterious and tragic, but now with an art style that robs the narrative of some of its impact.

The game opens with Link sailing alone during a fearsome storm. After a shipwreck, he wakes up on Koholint Island, having been found on its shores by a girl named Marin. He is brought to her village and soon discovers that the only way of escaping the island is by waking the Wind Fish, who is sleeping inside a giant egg atop a mountain.

We can immediately sense that there’s something off with the island. Koholint is not depicted like other environments in the Zelda franchise – even Termina – abandoning any attempt at cohesion while embracing crossovers, anachronisms, and random weirdness. There are characters from other Nintendo series, such as Chain-Chomps, Goombas, and Shy Guys populating this world. Despite the medieval setting, there’s a house with a telephone sitting on a wooden table – and just this telephone. Characters have wacky designs or speak in a strange manner: Link meets an alligator wearing a straw hat and an ordinary man that prophesizes his own future as if it were a normal thing to do: “I’ll be lost in the hills later, so keep a look out for me, hear?” he nonchalantly warns Link.

The children we meet also seem to struggle with the idea of there being a place other than Koholint Island. Even the concept of time eludes them: “Dude! You’re asking me when we started to live on this island? What do you mean by when?”  In other words, this is a world that seems to operate under a specific logic, outside the boundaries of reality.

The characters quickly tell Link that his arrival on the island had an effect on its monsters, which became much more ferocious and dangerous. They are framed as a response to Link’s presence on the island, a sort of self-defense system, an obstacle designed to hinder his attempt to wake the Wind Fish.  Usually, we have a hero living in a stable environment who is then propelled to go on an adventure due to an event that upsets the balance of the world. But in Link’s Awakening, the hero himself is the upsetting event: his presence is the inciting incident that causes the monster activity to rise and kidnappings to occur.

This is the tragedy at the heart of the narrative: Link’s presence is a problem to the world, it’s a threat to Koholint and its inhabitants. Monsters will warn him about the consequences of his actions, and what his attempt to escape the island will mean to its people, including Marin. The hero’s quest, then, can be seen as a selfish one: he will be one of the only ones to benefit from waking the Wind Fish.

To that end, he must acquire several instruments and play a song in front of the giant egg at the top of the mountain – music, after all, has always been able to influence the world in the Zelda franchise. These instruments are guarded inside perilous dungeons, mazes filled with traps and monsters.

Most of the dungeons in Link’s Awakening are fairly simple in design, but always find new ways to present a similar puzzle or challenge. For example, there are a plethora of rooms where we must kill all the enemies to win a key to progress. But sometimes we must defeat them in a specific order (and discover what that order is). Other times, it’s the enemy design that forms the puzzle: there’s one monster in the second dungeon that copies all of Link’s movements and has just one vulnerable spot on its back, which means that we must discover a way to hit it without facing it.

Most dungeons follow this pattern, being quite straightforward, but some manage to stand out. One of the last dungeons, for example, has Link change its layout – the number of floors – in order to progress. Another is themed around keys – and has a lot of them to find –, while an optional one is themed around the use of color – to take advantage of the Game Boy Color’s main feature –, so enemies, tiles, and switches are now color-coded and we must find a way of matching these colors (pushing a blue enemy into a blue hole, for instance). Dungeons here also have some brief side-scrolling sections – suitably filled with Mario enemies – and one particular item allows Link to jump, which means some puzzles are built around very simple platform challenges.

Boss design, meanwhile, follows the always reliable principle of “form fits function.” There’s a dungeon where Link acquires an item that allows him to lift heavy pots and throw them around to break them. The boss, then, is a genie: its lamp is designed to resemble the same pots to make us instinctively try to lift it, and so use the freshly acquired item to beat it.

Progression in the main story is heavily guided at first, as an owl appears now and then to point Link in the right direction. Sometimes, however, it can be a bit too much: after beating the first dungeon, a voice tells us to head to the swamp and then the owl appears and tells Link… to head to the swamp. The owl is built as a guiding figure in Link’s Awakening – much like in Ocarina of Time – and we can even find statues of owls inside dungeons that also provide guidance – provided we find their missing beak, that is.

Even with the handholding, the game succeeds in making the tasks between dungeons engaging. Sometimes, Link must save a woman’s pet – a Chain-Chomp, no less – who has been kidnapped, or find golden feathers for a French monarch who has lost his palace. In other words, despite the compact size of Koholint Island – this was originally a Game Boy game, after all – Link’s Awakening is still brimming with creativity and manages to offer small, but whacky stories.

The remake adds some side activities as well, but with mixed results. In the original game, Link had 26 seashells to collect around the world to acquire a new weapon. The remake basically doubles this amount – and offers new rewards such as health upgrades – but not all of the new shells are properly hidden. The remake tries to remedy this by handing Link a “shell sensor”. However, it’s much more engaging to find a shell by noticing strange patterns in the position of stones and bushes in the environment than it is to just walk around and start bumping into random trees on the beach because the sensor has picked something up.

The other big activity added by the remake is much more complicated: we can build our own dungeons with pre-made rooms taken directly from the game’s main dungeons. However, we can’t share them with anyone online, which kind of defeats the purpose: since we were the ones who built the dungeon, we already know its whole layout, and since we have already beaten the original dungeons, we already know the puzzle solutions as well. To remedy this, the game offers some special challenges such as “build a dungeon and beat it with just three hearts” but we can use the same strategy to render all these challenges insignificant, building a dungeon where all the challenging and complicated rooms are optional.

Finally, we have the new art style: instead of the original pixel art, the remake goes for a toy-like aesthetic, making Link himself appear to be made of plastic. This art style is beautiful to look at and would have worked well in a Zelda with a more traditional tone and story, such as Minish Cap. But Link’s Awakening’s strangeness and especially the tragedy of its story required a more serious approach, while the nature of its world asked for a less “concrete” aesthetic than plastic. In other words, this art style may be pretty, but doesn’t fit this game too well: it’s too cute for its own good, making it harder for the game’s more tragic and strange moments to land.

That said, there are some undeniable improvements in the remake, such as having the sword and the shield in dedicated buttons instead of having to open the menu to equip and unequip them all the time. Now, Link can also explore Koholint Island seamlessly as well, instead of “screen by screen” like in the original. And the map screen is beautifully detailed, helping a lot during exploration.

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is an uneven remake of a great game. On the one hand, it makes exploration more pleasant, removing a lot of the hurdles of the original. On the other, its striking art style works against the tragic and strange tone of the story.

January 02, 2023.