Links Awakening is stunning. To imagine this game coming out on the Game Boy blows my mind. Back when I was a kid I had a grab bag of all kinds of Game Boy games that I’d haul with me everywhere, so I’m fairly familiar with the limitations, tropes, and patterns that era of gaming emits. Around every corner of Links Awakening I was surprised at the level of detail, the depth of the mechanics, the sounds, the sprites, the MINIGAMES. It is beyond impressive to me that this pocket-sized RPG was able to fit on a Game Boy cartridge all those years ago. The “adventure” that I had here, rivals every other Game Boy experience I have ever had. I’ve got a soft spot for Pokemon Yellow as my favorite game for the Game Boy (it was my first portable game EVER), but after playing Links Awakening, I have to say… it has been dethroned.

It’s incredible how Nintendo was able to pull me in so quickly to the world with their brief animation of Link in a storm, then waking up on the beach. From there, you’re let loose on the island of Koholint, where you eventually begin on your quest to wake the Wind Fish. No Gannon, no Triforce pieces, no Zelda… As a fan of the Zelda games that I have played… Ocarina, Link to the Past, Ocarina 3D, Breath of the Wild, and The Original on NES… it was kinda fun to not see some of the major defining tropes. To me, that made it immediately interesting, as I couldn’t predict where I’d go or what I would do. Even still, its identity still felt like a Zelda title through its gameplay and execution. Was absolutely hooked from the beginning to the end.

Along your journey, you’ll find that you won’t be able to progress to other areas of the map which require certain items, almost in a Metroidvania kind of way. Totally different thoughts here but uh. Were original Zelda games just top-down Metroid games with a fantasy setting? Or are Metroid games just side-scrolling Zelda games with a sci-fi setting? Huh… Maybe the defining difference beyond the setting and perspective is not having to fumble with so many items in Metroid. Weird thought. Anyway.

The game world is so perfectly designed that the items you need and the activities you do have to be pretty linear in order to get to the finish line. But if you’re stuck and don’t know what to do, you can check in at these locations with a phone in them where an NPC will give you a really on-the-nose hint about what to do. This was honestly such a nice inclusion, as sometimes I’d completely forget what I was doing before I had to turn the game off. So I’d come back, feel completely lost, find a phone booth and get back on track. I suppose they acted like a modern quest log more than anything. A nice, creative way to give you clairvoyance no matter how confused you might be on the road. I liked it.

I really enjoyed the dungeons. I think some of the early dungeons were a bit simple in their designs and puzzles, but near the end in the final 3 dungeons, I had some genuine moments of complete confusion about how to proceed. Had some real head-scratchers in there, and I really appreciated that! It’s not a super difficult game, but I was happy to experience something a little harder in the end, truly testing how well I knew the mechanics and my gear.

Definitely a huge fan of all the items, and the clever boss combat puzzles. Big fan of the incredible sound work on display here as well the music was lovely, and the sounds were perfect as far as GameBoy standards go. I also think it’s really fun to see the Mario enemies visit this world (not to mention a surprise appearance of Kirby). It’s just such a fun, cute game, everywhere you go on Koholint, every NPC you talk to, every little secret seashell you find, you can just tell that the team who worked on Links Awakening put their heart and soul into every tile of every screen. It is incredibly well done and it was impossible to not feel that as I played through the game.

I still don’t think it can beat a Link to the Past as my favorite 2D Zelda. At least… not yet. After this, I can’t help but be interested in the faithful remake of Links Awakening that they released for Switch a year or two ago. I would love to jump back into this game with its fresh coat of paint (and the DX inclusions). I would love to experience it all over again. I think that’s just a testament to how incredibly rich of an experience it is. Sure, it might not have the scope or scale of future Zelda games. But that’s only because of the limitations of the hardware. They crammed everything they could into this original game cartridge and it shows.

I would wholeheartedly recommend The Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening to anybody! I think this is the perfect 2D Zelda game for anyone to jump into because I feel like it’s a jam-packed game full of incredible moments, and your journey is excellently paced. You may start on the beaches of Koholint lost, dazed, and confused. But by the end of your journey, you’ll feel like you’re truly well-equipped to complete your quest, even if you’re not emotionally prepared to do so.

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Let's keep it short. It's cute. It's charming. The overworld is an exhausting navigational nightmare. There are mandatory doors that open when you throw pots at them, and there are no hints toward this. There are mandatory areas in dungeons as well as optional areas with heart pieces that are behind completely unmarked, unhinted bombable walls that even Zelda 1 would have pointed out. Having like five sentences of text pop up every time the player brushes up against a bombable rock, a pot, or a crystal is excruciating. Sword powerups and defense acorns ruin the music for extended periods of time so I just avoid them both. Dungeons send the player running around in circles because so many areas are only accessible through sidescroller tunnels that aren't on the map.

The Switch remake fixes pretty much all of this, and is the better way to play. Even with that being the case, I would still rather play Seasons, Ages, Link Between Worlds, or Link to the Past.

This is the second LoZ game I've completed after the NES original. I didn't like this one as much! I'd heard really good things but I actually prefer the original to this one. A lot more open-endedness and non-linearity. The sequence of events in Link's Awakening is very linear by default. Every item you get allows you to progress in each successive dungeon. Some people might like that constant upgrade drip feed, slowly building an arsenal of helpful tools and gadgets to solve more and more puzzles – I wasn't feeling it here.

For the first few hours I was really into it. The monochromatic, hazy Gameboy visuals really do contribute to the surreal, dreamlike feeling of playing the game, to great effect. The Overworld theme is legendary, genuinely surprised at the quality of music in a Gameboy game of all things.

There was a few dead ends, at first; then, even as I started to make progress through some dungeons, I started running into more and more dead ends. More and more areas where progress would be halted by items I didn't have yet (hundreds of textboxes worth of "come back when you find this item, idiot"). This wasn't annoying until I'd walk into a dungeon or something only to learn that I needed another item that I didn't have yet. Don't even get me started on the trading sequence. It's relatively inoffensive if you complete it in the right order, but if you don't, you're kinda left traveling across the world map to figure out who needs what and where and it was very tedious.

Probably not a terrible experience if you're playing with a walkthrough pulled up, but like, where's the fun in that?

I spent weeks, sometimes months, where I wouldn't pick this game up, and by the time I'd get back to it, the whole island was completely foreign to me again. There's a map that helps sometimes, and Ulrira's hints do give you some direction as the story continues, but...

For me, and what I believe is the main problem, is that Link's Awakening doesn't play like a Gameboy game, for better or for worse. It's not a pick-up-and-play experience. It's a long, sprawling adventure across an island! This one took me forever. By the time I was finished, I was more than ready to put it down.

There are a hundred little gripes I have with this game. Gripes like, for instance, how many times I softlocked myself by picking up an object too fast (playing this on the original Gameboy, I expected some amount of glitches but this was always so annoying); the bow and arrow becoming useless as soon as you get boomerang; there's a boss that sends you back to the start of the dungeon when he hits you once (!!!); and a hundred even more granular little gripes that are neither here nor there but, at the end of the day, man, I guess this just wasn't for me.

Extremely ambitious in terms of size, storytelling and aesthetics. It is indeed a significant achievement in software development and game design that something like that even existed on the Game Boy so early in its lifespan. The black and white graphics are absolutely gorgeous--they fit the "dream" aesthetic wonderfully and leave a lot to be imagined by the player. Dungeons get extremely complex and labyrinthine near the end of the game, and the final boss fight is one of the coolest and most difficult I've ever experienced in retro gaming. Really well encapsulates the quintessential "frustrating and confusing, but satisfying and engaging"

Some of its structure frustrated me a bit; the overworld is filled with random cul-de-sacs and can be extremely frustrating to navigate even w/ the map and warps. Imagine Dark World in ALTTP but twice as difficult to navigate. At times this made me disconnect from the game and brought me significant frustration as there is so much backtracking and getting lost. Some puzzles in the dungeons are pretty dumb too, i.e. there is some Zelda 1-esque "go bomb this random wall that has no cracks" bullshit in some dungeons, which is unforgiveable in my mind for a game released after ALTTP.

Yet, Link's Awakening is indeed a statement in story telling for Zelda, it's difficult, and it's one of the most beautiful Game Boy games I've seen. It's a great game in many regards, and I definitlely want to try playing the remaster in the future.

I liked this one feeling more compacted in comparison to Link to the Past still had lots of depth to it and the story it had from the few lines and little cutscene is cute and compelling. I liked how this one has Mario and to an extent Kirby's enemies and had similar functionality in the gameplay like jumping on Goombas to get hearts like hey that's pretty neat also new power-ups and items were cool the roc feather was great, my boy Link got hops now. In conclusion, the Ballad of the Wing Fish song is goated.