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Elemental Video Game Critiques

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (1993)

11 min read
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” –William Shakespeare

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
–William Shakespeare, The Tempest

 

 

The fourth installment in Nintendo’s adventure franchise, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is an unusual entry in the series, though not quite the black sheep of the collection like Majora’s Mask. It’s a little less bizarre and a little charm goes a long way. But it is for the Game Boy, first of all, and it’s one of the few Zelda games to take place somewhere other than Hyrule and it does not feature Princess Zelda, Ganon, or the Triforce. However, it’s influence on the direction of the Zelda franchise is indelible.

gfs_28963_2_19Whereas the Super Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past can be remembered for founding gameplay elements such as traveling between two different worlds in order to advance and solve puzzles, something which would be echoed later down the line in Minish Cap and Twilight Princess, it is Link’s Awakening which must be credited for introducing more mystical/philosophical outlines to the series, as well as adding in a layer of music and artistry to the world that Link inhabits. Gameplay foundations were laid with A Link to the Past but Link’s Awakening brought in culture and mystique. The contributions of both games really culminate in Ocarina of Time, which is often touted as one of the best in the series and a real fan-favorite (until Breath of the Wild). However, I hope it’ll become clear through this review that a lot of what made Ocarina of Time so great really began with Link’s Awakening.

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Released in 1993, the was highly successful in terms of sales and critics, and it was lauded for its depth, creativity and gameplay. It was later remade for the Game Boy Color as The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX. This review will focus on the original game. Link’s Awakening not only departs from Hyrule, but it also adds a new final boss, a new jump feature (the first bird’s-eye-view Zelda game to do so), fishing and seashell hunting sidequests, and the ability to learn songs on an Ocarina. We all know how that idea took off. So rather than relying on the games that had preceded it, Link’s Awakening bravely treaded into unknown waters, just like its protagonist.

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The setting of Link’s Awakening provides moments where Link bumps into familiar faces from other Nintendo franchises: Yoshi, Wart, Kibry, Dr. Wright, Goombas, and a Chomp Chain named ‘BowWow’.

*Here’s a simple spoiler warning. True, the game has been out for over twenty years, but its narrative highly relies on a specific plot twist. I’ll still throw up minimal spoilers to highlight, but if you haven’t played Link’s Awakening, you really should. If you don’t want the plot possibly spoiled, go play it right now and then come back and finish reading! Or you could just read another review, say, for another Zelda game…
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Link’s Awakening
takes place chronologically after Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. Having defeated Ganon and his forces of darkness, the hero Link brought peace to the kingdom of Hyrule. However, the harmony and quiet was too much for the one who had fought bravely to achieve it and Link became restless. Not wanting his sword arm to grow weak, he traveled across the sea in a sailboat to seek out training and enlightenment. Unfortunately, he’s caught in a storm and a bolt of lightning struck his ship and he blacked out.

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Link is later discovered by a young girl named Marin, washed up on the shore of an unknown island. Marin takes the unconscious hero to her house and helps him recover. Link hears a girl’s voice and thinks it is the princess Zelda, but he wakes to find a stranger hovering over him. He learns from Marin that he was shipwrecked on Koholint Island, far from Hyrule. Marin wistfully wishes that she could be a seagull and leave the island herself.

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Peach thought Mario was just going on a “business trip”, but really he was just visiting his secret family on Koholint without his hat on.

The first thing he must do before returning home is to locate his lost equipment. Tarin, Marin’s father, gives Link back his shield. Link regains his sword after searching for it along the coast where his sailboat crashed. However, a mysterious owl swoops down and begins to explain Link’s plight to him.

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The hero will be unable to leave the island for some mystical reason. High atop Koholint’s mountain sits a giant egg and inside it sleeps a mysterious entity known only as the Wind Fish. The Owl (first introduced to the series here) tells Link that the Wind Fish must be woken before Link can leave the island and journey back home.

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Let’s make music together. Let’s make sweet harmony. Oh!

The only way to wake the Wind Fish is to locate the hidden Eight Instruments of the Sirens: the Full Moon Cello, Conch Horn, Sea Lily’s Bell, Surf Harp, Wind Marimba, Coral Triangle, Organ of Evening Calm, and Thunder Drum. The manual reads:

These musical instruments were once used by the band of Sirens as they sang to lure sailors to their doom. Now it is rumored that they lie in the depths of the dungeons, guarded by powerful monsters. If you obtain all of these instruments you will be able to solve the riddle of the Wind Fish.

So they’re stashed inconveniently in the island’s dungeons, of course.

Along with the Eight Instruments, another musical item is obtained by Link: a pre-iconic Ocarina. It’s later integral to waking the Wind Fish and it can be used to play a few songs taught to Link by the Koholint people.

Well on his way to completing his quest, Link suddenly learns a shocking truth about the island. A wall mural in a shrine reads:

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(spoiler: highlight to reveal) TO THE FINDER… THE ISLE OF KOHOLINT, IS BUT AN ILLUSION… HUMAN, MONSTER, SEA, SKY… A SCENE ON THE LID OF A SLEEPER’S EYE… AWAKE THE DREAMER, AND KOHOLINT WILL VANISH MUCH LIKE A BUBBLE ON A NEEDLE… CAST-AWAY, YOU SHOULD KNOW THE TRUTH!” Link now doubts whether he should awaken the Wind Fish or not, if doing so will annihilate the “lives” of everyone on the island. The Owl mutters cryptically that no one knows if the words are true or not.

When Link finally gathers the Eight Instruments and plays the Ballad of the Wind Fish before the great egg, it cracks open and he looks inside to discover a shapeshifting Nightmare that turned the Wind Fish’s paradise island into a realm of monsters and chaos. Defeating the Nightmare, Link encounters the Owl one last time. The Owl explains that he is a part of the Wind Fish’s spirit and the guardian of this dream world, that everything was peaceful until nightmares began to invade.

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“Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?” –Alfred Lord Tennyson

Now that the nightmares are gone, the Wind Fish can awake. The Owl vanishes. The Wind Fish appears. It tells Link that all dreams must eventually fade away, (spoiler: highlight to reveal) that Link had been dreaming together with the Wind Fish, and that they will both awake together. Perhaps the hero will remember Koholint in the waking world. “Are you the dreamer or merely part of someone else’s dream?” – The Mad Hatter (Batman: the Animated Series)

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Link awakens under a bright blue sky (or a gray one, if you’re on the original Game Boy). Seagulls cry overhead. The hero is floating on a wooden board out at sea. (spoiler: highlight to reveal) Koholint Island is gone. A shadow passes over him. Link looks up to see the Wind Fish flying by, off on its new journey. Link is headed toward his, too, paddling through the sea.

If you completed the game without dying, Marin can be seen flying across the water after the credits, now with a set of new wings.

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“All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream” –Edgar Allan Poe

 

 

The 8-Bit Review
visual Graphics: 9/10

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It’s monochrome but so were all the titles for the original Game Boy. Maybe that’ll come as a shock to our younger readers. Yes, there was a time when video games were in black and white. Link’s Awakening was easily one of the best looking games on the Game Boy with its cinematic opening sequence, detailed imagery and highly defined character sprites and bosses. Its use of soft and hard shadows made it pop off the Game Boy’s tiny screen. The game may not take place in Hyrule but Koholint Isle was adorable and crafted with a kind of charm that helped to define the look of the series.

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audio Audio:
8/10
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh6Rm5Jp02U&w=560&h=315]

Most of the game revolves around music and classic instruments, so we can expect the game to revolve around a kind of musical quality. This ends up being a correct assumption, Eight_Instruments_of_the_Sirenseven despite the limitations of the Game Boy’s sound quality. Restricted to buzzing and beeping even worse than the NES, the soundtrack for Link’s Awakening is surprisingly broad, including over 75 distinct tracks. Sure, most of them loop after only a few seconds, but that’s still some feat considering how tiny those old GB cartridges were! It’s an OST that includes a balance of dissonance and melody, emphasizing thematically the war between sleep and waking, dream and nightmare. Long time fans of the series will be especially delighted to hear the various renditions of the classic Zelda themes redone in different styles, as well as the little songs that Link can learn to play on his Ocarina.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h848dMB0LgU&w=560&h=315]

A survey of the audio wouldn’t be complete without the Ballad of the Wind Fish played on Link’s Ocarina!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79JCdiEQtbM&w=560&h=315]

gameplay Gameplay: 8/10
Gameplay involves both overhead-perspective and side-view-perspective areas, reminiscent of both The Legend of Zelda and the Adventure of Link. Introducing new elements can be a hit or miss with new entries in an established franchise. Link’s Awakening successfully wove in new features like jumping and learning songs, much more numerous sidequests, even taking the Chomp Chain for a walk. Handhelds are usually considered skimpy in terms of the actual bread and butter, the meat and potatoes of the game, but Link’s Awakening has polished enough gameplay, following the dungeon crawling format of its predecessors, to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest. It’s one of the best top-down action-adventures I’ve come across.

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story Narrative:
10/10
Link’s Awakening is a poignant soliloquy. “To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to Dream.” Did the Owl lie when he said nobody knew if it was true that Koholint would vanish should the Wind Fish awake? In other words, who was the real dreamer, and did the dream truly end when the game did? Interesting that the next game in the series, Ocarina of Time, opens with Link asleep. Link’s Awakening has some philosophical undertones, really a first for the series beyond the antiquated themes of good versus evil. Koholint is beautiful but there’s a bitter-sweetness to it, as well the whole game, actually. It could easily just be a footnote in the series, a “non-canonical episode”, if you like. But it doesn’t leave Link the same hero that he was at the beginning of the tale.

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accessibility Accessibility: 8/10
With several new gameplay elements, Link’s Awakening takes its time to teach you what’s up. It even invented a handy Owl friend and Granpa Ulrira to lend some aid and tips along the way. Dungeon design, as per the series norm, is geared toward teaching the player how to handle new equipment and items without being overbearing with tutorials. It’s a tried and true method characteristic of the golden age of gaming for levels to teach you intuitively how the mechanics of your abilities and limits work. Plus there were only two buttons for attacking and items (A and B) on the Game Boy. Can’t get much simpler than that. It’s a vast world on Koholint Isle with a huge overworld map. You’ll get lost but the game itself has ways to help you get back on track.

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diff Challenge: 6/10
This is no Link’s Adventure. Link’s Awakening is a slow drifting back to consciousness on a lazy Saturday morning in your late twenties. It’s hard to get out of bed, but not that hard. You’re still young and you might have a few things to get done. When you get around to it. Link’s Awakening isn’t exactly a walk in the park and there are a few challenges, like finding all those frickin’ seashells with your stupid shovel! That aside, there are a handful of puzzles that can still baffle. Not the hardest game in the series. Not the easiest either.

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unique Uniqueness: 9/10
It should already be clear how unique Link’s Awakening is with all of the distinctive features it brought into the franchise, such as music playing an integral part to the plot, for example. Truly it laid the foundation stone for Ocarina of Time, though it’s not a title that enjoyed nearly as much popularity as OoT. Second only to Majora’s Mask, Link’s Awakening may be the most unusual game in the franchise.

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pgrade My Personal Score: 10/10
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. I don’t know if any of you know this, but Link’s Awakening is actually my favorite title in the entire Zelda library. 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 A Link to the Past but it’s “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.

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“Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” –Dom Cobb (Inception)

Aggregated Score: 8.5

 

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33 thoughts on “The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (1993)

  1. My first deep dive into Zelda games back when I was still primarily a platformer or arcade-style gamer. Not my favorite Zelda game (though only after ALttP and OoT) but it will always be the one that opened up the franchise (and more games in general) for me.

    Can’t wait for the remake in only 8 days.

  2. Everything has been said already, so Lord C’ll jus add: A, I had this on my gameboy my dad gave us, & along with Cyraid & Tetris, it was all I played!!! Interesting points raised, quality stuff! & I giggled at the joke about Mario’s 2nd family! Did you notice the Frog’s chorus link to a Japanese game that I’ve only last yr been made aware of? Also the ghost side quest = amazing! & as for the seashells, even adding that in, I never took more than 5 hrs to complete the entire game. Although I have OCD so I jus do stuff without worrying bout it (altho the heart piece was nice & well needed!) & I did always havta write down the final wind maze directions as they changed! Didn’t know the Marin endin as well so thanks for that! (That wind boss was a bugger!)

  3. Superb retrospective on one of my favorite games of all time!

    “Link’s Awakening is a poignant soliloquy” – so true. It’s surprisingly deep and affecting, emotional in a way that few video games. And this was back on a tiny Game Boy cartridge in 1993!

    1. I forgot I wrote that lol! Thanks for reading our retrospective. I love this game so much. So eye-opening back in the day of what video games could achieve in terms of mystery and majesty. It’s amazing what Nintendo could achieve with such simple hardware. Thanks for leaving me a comment on this old article!

  4. I reviewed this on my site recently. How DARE you steal MY ideas!!! I jest – I have very fond memories of playing this on my original Game Boy. A stunning game. Robbing the local shop and being called THIEF by Marin for the rest of the game sticks with me decades later.

  5. I have played Link’s Awakening DX, but not the original version. I find it ironic that this article describes aspects of the game which inspired Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, as I had played a version of the game which seemed to be released to capitalise on the success of the later game (in fact, I thought some elements were added to make the game more similar to the more well-known game). I never knew how this game fitted into the series, I had just assumed it was a standalone adventure. I found the idea of Koholint Island to be quite interesting, although the ending did seem to affect the adventure slightly, and enjoyed the way different terrains were used in the design. I agree the dungeons seem to be ways of using the items collected in them and I enjoyed the different designs. I also liked the side-quests and how characters developed while completing them (like the ghost wanting to visit his old life). I enjoyed finding the photo opportunities which were introduced in the DX version of the game. One irritating part of the game is the constant switching of items between the two buttons. I agree with the statement about the music, the music was effective (despite the sound quality), particularly the dream Link enters to find the ocarina.
    What were the mystical aspects of the game? What philosophical parts were there? I was interested to see a link to Shakespeare and I never realised there was another ending.

    1. Thanks for your sizable comment! I’m happy to hear you enjoyed playing Link’s Awakening on the DX. It’s fascinating to hear about the perspective that Awakening came after Ocarina. It would seem to borrow elements that way and not the other way round. Glad you learned something reading this post! That’s what we’re here for!
      It’s my favorite Zelda game, like I mentioned. It’s a very fascinating entry in the franchise, though the unfortunate switching of items was a symptom of the early game mechanics.
      As far as the mystical aspects of the game, I was thinking of the Owl, a physical manifestation of the Wind Fish’s consciousness, which would be something like a spiritual avatar. And then there’s the Wind Fish itself, an undefined entity of some sort unlike anything we’ve seen in the franchise before or since. These quasi-religious mythical ideas are what I’d refer to as mystical, and they’re slightly different than what we’d seen so far in Zelda with fairly standard fantasy elements before then: goblins, wizards, monsters, etc.
      The philosophical parts would definitely the concepts of dream sharing or of being the only true Self and everything else is an illusion. This bridges into what’s known as Sollipsism, the idea that only your own person is sure to exist. The movie Inception played around with the idea that people in a dream world are “projections” of the unconscious mind. So in the case of Link’s Awakening, we find out that both the Wind Fish and Link are asleep. Was everyone else on the isle a projection, only Marin became real at the end? Or was the Wind Fish even sleeping at all, as we understand it, or giving Link the dream? Or at what point did Link really fall asleep? Were they sharing the same dream, and in what sense, and who was really real? Many of those step into philosophical territory, which again is different from the three games which came before that dealt primarily with simple good v evil.
      And finally, I put the Shakespeare quote there because we are supposed to be The Well-Red Mage, after all! Thanks for your thoughts!

      1. I found your arguments quite interesting. The owl does seem like a physical manifestation of the Wind Fish’s subconscious, with him leading the hero to save the Wind Fish’s mind. It is interesting that the Owl seems to be more knowledgeable about the island and recent events than any other character. It also makes me wonder what causes Animal Village to appear.
        I was also interested by the statements about the philosophical ideas that arise from the ending. How would Link enter the island after the shipwreck?
        I noticed another strange aspect of the game. The structure of the story seems to be resemble a general fantasy story. The hero having to explore dangerous dungeons to retrieve powerful items, with references to a powerful, mystical creature. Unlike many fantasy stories, there is less sense of urgency than other stories. There is no pressing need for Link to leave the island and there is no threat. For much of the game, there is no villain. There is no enemy threatening to destroy the island, so the quest seems to have a lazy and clam feel to it.

        1. The Owl actually does say he’s the Wind Fish’s spirit, part of it at least. That would explain why the Owl knows everything about the isle but seems indifferent to the people there, since it knows they’re illusions in a dream.
          We could assume that Link began dreaming shortly after the shipwreck, where we found him at the end floating on a board, waking up.
          I found your statement about the lack of a sense of urgency to be fascinating. I’d never realized that myself. This isn’t about saving the world or anything. It has the sort of aimless wandering that a dream has.

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