The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (2019)

Played on Nintendo Switch

My only history with Zelda ever was playing Wind Waker at a friends house on his gamecube for about 20 minutes maybe 15ish years ago. Other than that maybe an hour of Breath of the Wild, before I kinda just got distracted with other games at the time. So my connection with the franchise is pretty much slim to none lol. Been cleaning off the backlog and remembering that I got this from my brother a couple years ago, I figured if I was gonna give Zelda a shot, it would make sense to start with a “traditional” one.

The game has a really cute art style that is so wholesome feeling. The Toylike graphics compliment the little mini adventure that this game is, with all the quirky characters on the island. The gameplay is simple but so effective and fun, and immediately showed me why people love these games so much. The satisfaction you get after completing a dungeon or solving a puzzle is really great. Combined with the simple, but yet effective soundtrack, it only makes the experience better.

The game does have some flaws, as I ran through many frame drops in the overworld as well as some dungeons. Strange, because I never really see frame drops in first party Nintendo games. Some of the puzzles were kind of ridiculous with some of the solutions too, especially in the last 2 dungeons. I really have no idea how they expected people to figure out some of these.

Really Solid experience for my first real Zelda, and I definitely see the vision now. I think I want to try one of the older 3D ones first before BOTW, just don’t know with one yet. Really cool game and if you like short little games with puzzles, this is a dope buy.

Although I had fun playing this game, due to the fact of it being a remake, it still carries around much of the baggage of the original. Easily the most annoying parts for me were the very convoluted progression, especially regarding all the trading, and some dungeon puzzles. With a bit of external help from the internet / a bit of frustration tolerance it was more than possible.

The bosses range from neat to boring. Most of them are easy as hell and forgettable, while others are just annoying and don't feel rewarding in any way.

Now, I want to talk about the things I actually liked about this game. The remade graphics were cute as hell and the art style grew on me every minute I played this game. The story has a surprising amount of charm to it. Don't get me wrong, it's really simplistic, but the way it's told leaves just enough space for your imagination to go wild, which enhances the feeling of doing everything in this world by a tenfold. The Music also slaps, disregarding one or two of the dungeon tracks (The Face Dungeon Theme bangs while playing).

To summarize, Link's Awakening is a fun time and doesn't overstay it's welcome. If you're willing to accept some "Gameboy-Era-BS" you could easily fall in love with this tiny little adventure on Koholint Island.

Visually very appealing. Gameplay-wise, confusing, frustrating, incoherent and many times tedious or boring. This game makes the most mundane and simple tasks too tedious or confusing to follow. Without a guide or tons of memorization, this game becomes a pain, specially when it comes tu the dungeons. Most quests were hard to follow and many times I didn't know how to continue playing. Boss attacks are many times quite confusing. For instance, at a certain point in the game, you unlock a fire rod, they teach you to use it to melt frozen things yet in the next boss arena you are forced to use it defeat a fire slime. Other than that, if you don't pay much attention to its flaws its a nice game.

Although the art style, and combat was pretty great, there were too many flaws for me to keep playing. I made it about halfway through the game but eventually just felt like I was doing the same thing over and over. Go get the feather to get the ribbon to get the key etc. There wasn't much of a feeling of progression and the dungeons weren't super interesting. I didn't feel like I was saving the world or anything. The nail in the coffin was horrible performance on the switch. The game blurred the top and bottom of the screen and there was bad lag whenever entering a new area.