Link to the Past is a tremendous jump forward for the series. A beautifully realized world with several memorable moments along the way, great secrets and stupid fun items. Any and all issues I have are nitpicks, but they do pile up to a point where I enjoy this title less than most. I suppose they just affected my experience more than most. I tried to do this without save states for the most part, so I felt the wrath of backtracking for each one of those small things quite a bit.

Hitboxes are very inconsistent. Slashing horizontally is perfect, but doing so vertically is not. From what I gathered, there is some blind spot on top of your model when swinging from one of the angles. This also causes some enemies to get stuck in your model to hit you multiple times while staying inside your hitbox. Best example of this is the Swamp Palace Boss. If you pull one of his balls with a hookshot from the bottom or top and don't move, you will always get hit. If you do so from the side, you won't. Yes, I have died to this many a time. Yes, it was a skill issue.

I think there's a weird choice to have the same sort of idea for progression through the overworld and the dungeons sometimes. I think there are a lot great secrets that are fun to find after going past them several times and realizing you can now interact with them. Trying to find these somewhere around these huge, scrolling screens you're seeing for the first time isn't as intuitive. Some optional secrets late into the game are much more visible than ways of progressing through the main story. Also, having the first required statue pulling puzzle over halfway into the game threw me for a loop. It was the first thing I had to look up. I know, once more, skill issue.

But that's really it. There's some small inconsistencies I noticed but they didn't really do much against my experience. Those two things led me to many a death, but even then I really enjoyed this game. The dungeons are phenomenal, I enjoyed every bit of them. Super clever design, so many fun ideas, so many cool enemies, so much color, so many excellent designs. Again, just such a huge progression for this series. It's really difficult not to appreciate, and I know because I hit my head against the wall here for a WHILE. Probably took me twice as much as beating the two previous games combined... times two.

It's weird to me that this game would get overlooked for such a long time when discussing the evolution of Zelda. A sequel from the same team as Link to the Past, bearing so many new ideas, both mechanically and story-wise.

So much of Link's Awakening is up my alley. A large chunk of the items are focused on upgrading the movement: the jump, the pegasus boots improving the jump further while also making you faster, the returning hookshot stretches through the entire screen. All these items find use in exploration and in combat.

Exploration is so smooth thanks to the map being once more split into squares, with hints being saved on it, but there are also the hint houses, working much, much, much better than the ones in LttP. The game relies a bit too much on recognizing stuff from previous games: puzzle types, ways in which items are used or even enemy names play a part in this adventure.

But this amalgamation of the three previous Zelda games with, uh, Mario, is a product of a beautiful, timeless story. Another reason why this title feels tailor made for me is how strange encountering this mish-mash is. The main path has you fight the coolest designed enemies in the series so far, no doubt. The bosses look phenomenal and super unique, and they tend to utilize the upgrades you get in their dungeon extremely well, showcasing the possible depths of combat. None of them ever really require you to combine two, which would be pretty fun I think, but maybe switching between items too much during a fight would be annoying.

The game is generally very easy, but I wouldn't say it's much easier than Link to the Past, playing which I died a LOT. I would simply say this game doesn't have any major flaw, there are no hitboxes that are off, and controlling is as snappy as it was back on the NES.

But perhaps the key to my enjoyment was the art and animations. So many phenomenal sprites and so many clever ways of utilizing the minimalistic beeps and bops of the Gameboy's soundtrack possibilities. So many secrets are elevated by, for example, finding a big, funny fish inside a cave who does a little dance, and the perspective switches between side-scrolling and top-down add so much to the world design. I adore the variety of not just the actual ways of hiding things, but, for the first time in the series, their contents. There are some caves that just have a heart piece of course, but those are usually the most fun when it comes to the process of discovering them, while most of the simpler secrets have very fun contents.

Also just the humor of the game. Zelda was always pretty funny, Link to the Past leaned into it, but this is so lighthearted. It uses sound, animations, everything it has to add to it. Oh, and the pictures are a phenomenal addition. They are so pretty that they make me question how pretty could the Gameboy Color truly be at its best.

Love this game, love that it got its second wind in the form of a remake, love the direction it took the series in, love the weirdness, love every emotional and tonal whiplash, love the story so much, love the ending, love the dungeons, love the items, love the mechanics, love the art, love the humor, love the Mario, love the Link, love the little moments of peace and quiet, the ones of joy and laughter as well as the melancholy sinking in as you move along. Gameboy's masterpiece.

My first Zelda replay is not necessarily a very successful one. With the jump to 3D, I began to examine the core mechanics of a Zelda title, and realize how weird of a relationships they have with each other.

Health system that is continually upgraded throughout the game, but is combined with puzzle-based dungeons, with occasional death pits and combat (which has a shitton of inconsistencies in its own right). If you die you get sent back to the beginning of the dungeon, but you unlock shortcuts to get back to your point faster... but you respawn with three filled hearts every time, no matter how much health you collected throughout the game. This has been a thing since Zelda 1, and it continues to be a thing during the jump to 3D. Why? Isn't being sent back the punishment? I guess it's not as big of a punishment as the originals, because here all the doors that required you to kill enemies in them stay unlocked at least, but... I just don't get it.

In general, I begin to wonder exactly what does stuff like the amount of health, arrows, bombs etc. add to the game. I am struggling to find a reason to not just have the player be able to use abilities without a limit. Not like you ever really lack them in any important moments in this game, but what if you did? Theoretically the system is there to prevent spamming them in combat, but what if you do and you just don't have the tool required to progress? What if a puzzle doesn't click with you fast enough? You're supposed to run out of the dungeon, go buy bombs or gather magic and come back?

In a lot of ways, I think these contrasting mechanics sort of add to the world of the games at large, because the game ends up placing shops in towns to make the game feel more human, and even secrets may contain additional items. And, in theory, you really do want those extra hearts for late-game dungeons, so at least on the first run you can unlock as much as possible, so secret-hunting is well incentivized.

As for specific 2D to 3D transition stuff, a lot of the snappiness is gone, replaced by more deliberate movement and combat. Oh man, do I miss the Pegasus shoes. But you do get Epona... once you become an adult at least. There's a lot gained obviously, no reason for me to get into it, you boot up the game and you hear the music, you see Hyrule Fields with your very eyes. No matter how populated it actually is, what it's populated with, or how that stuff interacts with any other systems, I don't know a person who doesn't see how certain elements of Ocarina are a grand success. Really just depends how much clicks with you and how much you're willing to look past because of it.

Myself, I end up looking past quite a bit, but I do wish I approached this replay differently. Maybe engage more with stuff I haven't before, maybe go for a 100%. Going through it casually when you remember so much, without any added challenge or anything, doesn't do it for me. Too slow for my brain which has been steadily developing more and more zoomy receptors. I could also try a randomizer next time. Nevertheless, I think the next replay some time down the line will help me fully realize my thoughts. Right now it's complicated, and the zoomy receptors wish not to wait for me to write more.