The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

The remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening 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 by 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 totally 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 in the world. 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 setting 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 there, a sort of self-defense system of the island, 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.

And 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 deeply influence the worlds of 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 they 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), while 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 fairly 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 the monster.

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 mysterious voice tells us to head to the swamp, and then the owl appears to tell 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.

But 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 wacky 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 with creative methods of signposting. The remake tries to remedy this by handing Link a “shell sensor,” but, it’s still much more engaging to find a hidden 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 or digging holes 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 now, 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 in the first place, we already know its whole layout and puzzle solutions. To remedy this, the game offers some special challenges such as “build a dungeon and beat it with just three hearts,” but we can easily cheese all these challenges by building a dungeon where all the more 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 ridiculously beautiful to look at and would have worked pretty well in a Zelda game with a more traditional tone and story, such as Minish Cap. But Link’s Awakening’s strangeness and especially the melancholic tone 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 very pretty, but doesn’t fit this game too well: it’s too cute for its own good, making it harder for the game’s sadder or more bizarre 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 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 Switch version of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, then, is an uneven remake of an excellent game. On the one hand, it makes exploration more pleasant, removing a lot of the hurdles of the original. On the other hand, its striking art style works against the overall tone of the story.

June 28, 2025.