Only seven short years after acquiring it, I have finally completed the 2019 Link’s Awakening remake.
I’m a huge lifelong Zelda fan, but I’ll admit that my adventures have been primarily limited to the 3D games for the most part. I’ve only ever finished the first game with a walkthrough, and despite owning both A Link to the Past for GBA as well as the original Gameboy version of Link’s Awakening, I’ve never finished either. My heart lies with Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker. And maybe it’s for that reason that this game forced me to confront some difficult truths about myself.
To start, I did really enjoy this game for the most part. It’s gorgeous, and if you’ll excuse the cliche, it has so much heart. It’s so funny, and it gets unexpectedly emotional at times. I felt like Koholint Island is the perfect size to feel expansive and varied, but having to run from one side of the island to the other before unlocking fast travel didn’t feel like the chore I expected it to.
The combat generally felt quite easy, but it’s a kid’s game at its core, so I’m certainly not going to knock it for that. That said, the combat was at its best when it felt like a puzzle. There were more than a few bosses that had me stumped for a few minutes while I ran around aimlessly trying to dodge their attacks. Figuring out how to beat them was always satisfying!
Speaking of the puzzles, time for me to address my biggest complaint: at times, this game felt absolutely obtuse. My favorite (or least favorite, depending on your point of view) example of this is something that a lot of people probably really enjoyed, and that was the god-forsaken trading sequence quest.
I mistakenly thought that, like the Biggoron’s Sword quest in Ocarina of Time, the trading sequence was optional past giving the monkeys the bananas to get to the castle. Nothing in the game overtly indicated otherwise, and if it did, I must’ve missed it. Suffice it to say that I generally hate quests like this, so I was like “sick, the dumb monkeys have their bananas. moving on.”
I see now that that was not only ill-advised, but also locked me out of completing the game.
For the “ill-advised” piece, every time I hit a wall (frequently) and checked a walkthrough for some direction, the guide was telling me to use my boomerang to dispatch enemies, leaving me confused. “How could I have missed the boomerang? I’m in the seventh dungeon!” But I was consistently able to proceed through the game without it, and since I’m trying to get through as many games as possible this year, I just kept on trucking.
After no small amount of consternation, I’m in the final hours of the game this past weekend. My girlfriend is helping me by reading the IGN Turtle Rock walkthrough* aloud because I am hopelessly stuck. (Turns out there was a small key hidden behind a cracked wall in an incredibly dark room or something else equally annoying.) We finally get out of Turtle Rock, and then it’s on to the Wind Fish’s Egg! Wow! Exciting! I’m about to finish this game!
I proceed into the egg and immediately think “oh! it’s like the lost woods in OoT!” so I start wandering through the rooms looking for clues of how to proceed. We’re getting confused, so my girlfriend digs into the guide and laughs a bit: “have you finished the trading sequence?”
My heart sank.
I couldn’t tell if I was more annoyed at the fact that I would have to complete this stupid trading sequence after all or because I had somehow marked it as optional in my brain when the game must have told me it was required at some point. In any case, I felt pretty dumb. Not a good experience.
So we blow through the trading sequence (I finally picked up the boomerang, thank you) and I navigate the egg finishing the game. But not before fighting the most insufferable boss ever in the shape of the Ganon form of the final Nightmare. Damn thing killed me twice because I couldn’t figure out how to damage it. Drove me batty.
By this point, I’ve been stuck in the cycle of beating my head against this game before giving up and asking for the guide for two hours in this session alone and I was just ready to be done. It felt like a chore at this point. And yes, I know, if I had done the trading sequence throughout the game like I was supposed to and truly spent the time to understand the game I could’ve enjoyed it all the way through. But I think the main issue is that I kind of aged out of the target demographic for this game in some ways.
I’m not ten years old in the back of the car on a road trip with nothing to do but stare at Link’s Awakening for twelve hours anymore. I still love video games to death, but I have other hobbies, interests, and responsibilities that preclude me from dedicating every ounce of free time to exploring this game like the creators intended. And that’s decidedly a Me problem, not an issue with the game. And maybe it isn’t a problem at all! It’s just the way things are.
And that brings me to the difficult truth about myself mentioned at the beginning of this review: I don’t know that I love the 2D Zelda games, and I don’t know if I’ve ever loved the 2D Zelda games. And maybe that flies in the face of what I was just saying about “aging out” of this one, but when I look at my history of being absolutely obsessed with Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, or even Breath of the Wild in my adult years versus my relatively muted interest in the handheld Zelda games I owned, the difference seems telling.
So yeah. That’s why I call these “stream of consciousness” “reviews.” My thoughts are developing as I write and you’re just along for the ride!
Back to Link’s Awakening, again, the end felt like a slog due to the unfortunate manner in which I finished the last few required items to complete the game. But when it was all said and done and the Wind Fish was awoken and I watched Koholint disappear, I got a little teary-eyed. When I told my girlfriend that the entire game is a dream, she wasn’t very happy either. It’s really very sad to spend all this time on this island with these people and this colorful landscape that you grow to know every inch of just to watch it all disappear.
Yes, I just spent a bunch of paragraphs talking about how this game annoyed me. Yes, it doesn’t rank up there as one of my favorite Zeldas. But despite all the whining, I think this game really nails what I love about The Legend of Zelda, which is the emotional core of the series. Much like when I finish one of the 3D games, I was left sitting with a lot of feelings that span all the way from happiness to sadness, due to the the story of the game itself mixed with my own nostalgia and experiences. I mean, this game is widely regarded as a classic in one of my favorite series of all time; of course it was going to make me feel something to finish it.
I’m going to cut myself off there. I didn’t even mention the incredible music, but I have actual work to do. In summation, I complained about this game for the last two and a half hours of playtime. My girlfriend said “so you’ll never be back to this one, right?” and I said “no, I’m definitely going to play it again someday.”
Next time, I think it’s gonna be Star Wars again!
*I don’t think I’ve ever used a footnote before! No shade to the author, but the way this guide is written is infuriating. I don’t need a narrative. Just tell me what to freaking do. Jesus Christ.