After my lukewarm enjoyment of A Link to the past, I was seriously doubting if I even liked 2D Zelda. Luckily, this game changed that.

Link's awakening is a true journey. The premise is captivating, the music is unique for most zones so you don't just hear the same 4 songs every time, and the enemies you face are weird and interesting. Dungeons, bosses and enemies are all excellently designed, but that goes without saying. I want to focus more on what makes Links awakening so unique. ...It's mostly the story. I love the story.

It struck all the right chords for me. While comparatively simple, heck, some may go as far as call it "cheap" (which I strongly disagree with), the story holds emotional weight in a way that no other Zelda game does. I don't want to spoil it just in case you don't know what's going on, but I knew the premise and the turning point in the plot still hit surprisingly hard. You can credit this to the incredible atmosphere and music. It's hard to describe why I liked it so much, maybe it's the characters and the focus on the little things. There's a few meaningful interactions with the NPCs and the camera feature helps highlight everything pleasant on your journey. I want everyone to experience the story even if they feel only a fraction of the enjoyment I did.

The one real shortcoming of this game is the item management, which can become clunky with only two buttons. You can blame gameboy limitations for the bulk of it, but lifting rocks should be a passive ability at the very least. My other issue is how cramped the world can feel. The lack of shortcuts and limited fast travel options make Koholint a bit of a hassle to explore if you want to go for the extras. My third issue is just a nitpick, really. Why does the tutorial pop up every time you find a piece of power or an acorn? I straight up ignored the power-ups so I wouldn't have to stay still for two seconds.

The DX port is the greatest way to experience Link's awakening if you don't want to go the full remake route. Highly recommended, this game made me a 2D Zelda fan

Eu amo Zelda como uma marca, mas não muito como jogo... Eu joguei um pouco de cada, mas acho que só completei dois jogos, esse e o original no NES porque deu na telha.
Acredito muito que hoje em dia nós estamos com o tempo muito curto em nossas mãos, é difícil parar num jogo e ficar meses nele descobrindo seus segredos, que nem uma criança em 1998.

Por isso que quando decidi completar esse jogo, não pensei duas vezes antes de abrir um guia gigante na net pra... me fazer companhia, nera pra mais nada não :3

Nesse jogo, Temos Link desbravando os mares de Wind Waker pra ir comprar pão, se pá, mas Zeus não aprovou e fritou Link na base do raio. Fim

Não mentira, ele só perdeu um coração e deu respawn na praia mais próxima.

Nesta nova ilha, Link precisa achar um jeito de retornar para casa, e um passarinho conta que se ele tocar Raça Negra pro ovo da montanha, uma parada louca vai acontecer, confia.

Então o jogo é o clássico dos Zelda 2D, explorar umas 8 dungeons, resgatar seu tesouro, e ver o que ganha com tudo isso. Originalmente lançado pro Game Boy original, a versão DX traz cores para todos e torna o jogo muito lindo de se ver. A ilha que você explora é um grande labirinto com caminhos bloqueados por puzzles, tipo logo no início, um Tanooki te proíbe de explorar a floresta, fazendo você sempre se perder quando você passa por ele, precisando se livrar dele primeiro, coisas do tipo, que você vai descobrindo explorando cada canto do mapa, vendo quem pode te ajudar, achar cavernas secretas, roubar a loja de itens, pisar em Goombas, tirar foto com um rato, imprimir as fotos, colar na geladeira, ver seu pai perguntando por que tem um papel com um gnomo correndo de uma bola com dentes lá, tentar roubar a loja de novo e levar um jumpscare, enfim, o básico, pra no fim perguntar pro ovo de jamanta lá no topo se ele gosta de Raça Negra.

Jogo é bão, muito bom, pó jogá

The Legend of Zelda has a strong case as the greatest overall gaming franchise, so much so that its a victim of suffering from success at times. That is to say, this series has so many incredible games that even a great classic entry like Link's Awakening can easily go overlooked, in part due to its advanced age, but also on account of at least a handful of Zelda games considered even better still. In a vacuum from the greater franchise however, what we have here is one of the very few remaining Game Boy games that still holds up well in the present day, a remarkable feat.

The most striking aspect of Link's Awakening to me is just how impressive it is for a game of such high quality to exist on limited and primitive hardware. In development, this game began as a side project to port A Link to the Past to the handheld Game Boy, but soon grew into its own unique game with an island setting completely independent of the Hyrule we'd come to know. While measuring up to its legendary console predecessor may have been an impossible task, Link's Awakening carved itself a distinct identity all its own, even introducing some series staples that would carry over into the N64-era 3D games to follow.

Link washes up on the shore of Koholint Island, and is informed by an owl that in order to return home, he must awaken the Wind Fish, encased in a massive egg atop Mt. Tamaranch. This entails an Earthbound-style quest of collecting eight melodies, or in this case eight magic instruments, needed to play the song to awaken this mythical creature. This island setting is of a smaller scale than usual, but the classic Zelda dungeons are here, and they're mostly pretty good. The only dungeon I found to be especially annoying/confusing was The Eagle's Tower. Collapsing pillars of the dungeon to render higher areas accessible is a cool dungeon concept, but in practice its convoluted to understand just how the dungeon changes each time, and lugging around iron balls to accomplish this is pretty tedious in itself. The typical Zelda gameplay loop of finding a new item in each dungeon that must be used to solve puzzles within returns, and while most of this equipment existed in A Link to the Past, jumping around with the new Roc's Feather is really fun. Combining this with the Pegasus Boots allows Link to travel super quickly across the small screen.

Koholint Island itself is lighthearted and cozy, also notable for the unexpected presence of Mario enemies like Chain Chomps and Goombas. It's fun to see this rare crossover, but these guys don't seem like they belong in the Zelda universe at all. And that is because they aren't. Yes, as Link collects more instruments it is progressively revealed that Koholint Island and everyone on it is actually a dream. The "it was all just a dream" ending is typically a cheap narrative no-no, but in Link's Awakening its framed in a bittersweet way, the player burdened with this knowledge ahead of time means that by completing their quest they'll also be essentially removing the Koholint community they've come to know from existence. Realistically though, the only character that will truly be missed is Marin, she's the sweet and spunky girl who initially finds Link shipwrecked, and helps on his quest several times throughout the game. My favorite of these is easily her journey to the Animal Village. Featuring all-stars including the Chef Bear and the Sleepy Walrus that only Marin can sing to wake up, this is an all-time Zelda location just for how delightfully cartoony it is alone.

There are other quirky product-of-the-time things with Link's Awakening, like taking in-game pictures meant to be printed out with the Game Boy Printer, kinda wish I was there to experience that when it was new and cool. Any further complaints with the game are fairly nitpicky and fall under the subjectivity of puzzle-type games being either too cryptic at times to figure out how to progress, or merely the player's fault for being unable to solve it. There's an old man Link can phone for hints, but sometimes his advice basically just amounts to "idk just figure it out yourself lol." I found the final boss underwhelming as well for what its worth, and deciphering the path to reach this final confrontation felt unnecessarily obtuse.

The Game Boy was surely bursting at the seams trying to fit a substantial full-length adventure in that clunky cartridge, but Link's Awakening found a way. Even the music is pleasant, despite playing from speakers that often were a headache simulator, "Tal Tal Heights" and "Ballad of the Windfish" stand out especially. This game has a strong case for the best on the original Game Boy (Color), and holds up better compared to the rest of its franchise than I ever could have expected, an exception where it's okay to be just a dream.

4.0/5.0

My desire for more 2D Zelda goodness was not fulfilled by completing LTTP last weekend, so I picked up Link's Awaking DX on my Japanese 3DS eShop for the super good price of 600 yen (seriously the eShop has a lot of really good deals on Gameboy games even when they aren't on sale, certainly compared to a physical cart that may have a dead save battery, anyhow). As with LTTP, I played this one a LOT growing up, so I could basically go through most of it by memory and didn't need to fumble through the Japanese too much to figure out where to go, and could mostly just sit back and enjoy the original version's dialogue. It took me about 7.5 hours over the course of a few days, and I got all but 3 heart pieces as well as the ultimate sword (which I didn't even need a guide to find all the shells for, and I was very proud of myself :b ).

Given that I started it the evening after I finished LTTP, the first thing I noticed was just how much easier this game is than that one. Most enemies, even bosses, don't do THAT much damage, certainly not compared to the heavy hitters in LTTP, and the combat overall just felt a lot more easy and forgiving. Especially in the DX version, where you can do the
bonus color dungeon after the 3rd main dungeon to get a tunic that either doubles your damage or defense permanently (and you can go back to swap between them whenever), the boss battles almost become trivial at a point when you kill them in like 5 or 6 sword hits. Especially when you get the ultimate sword (so you're dealing 4 normal sword hits-worth of damage per attack), anything that can be killed with a sword dies REALLY fast XD. That said, around the 5th dungeon, most bosses and mini-bosses aren't even attacked with the sword, and are often hit with either bombs or by throwing things at them, so they clearly anticipated you wrecking things with your ultra sword at least a littttle bit XD.

The world and map design are things I'm kinda torn on. On one hand, if you know what you're doing, the world map and dungeon design are super fun to navigate and conquer over and over, and have a good blend between feeling like something you're naturally constantly wanting to explore and simple puzzles to navigate. On the other hand, if you DON'T know what your doing or where to go, you can wander around for AGES trying to find the ONE bit of the map where the area you can progress through is. Especially once you get to around the 6th and 7th dungeons, the game can be pretty unforgiving in expecting you to basically remember the entire map and what bits contain elements you couldn't get past before, and even then the ways you get to those places aren't always very intuitive glares angrily at Flying Rooster.

Dungeon maps aren't super detailed, but they often get the job done. The real stumbling block they hit is that there are a lot of staircases that lead to 2D platforming sections which will wrap you around to other areas of the dungeon. These staircases nor their 2D sections are shown nowhere on your map, so again, the game really expects you to have a keen memory for how a dungeon is laid out or you're gonna spend a LOT of time lost. Especially in the 8th dungeon, which has a much more non-linear design than the others in the game, and I can specifically remember I just got so lost and confused in that dungeon I gave up on it on two separate playthroughs growing up (and the gimmick to finish the 7th dungeon is also one that stumped me a lot as a kid, and I had to look that up eventually too).

This is really Link's Awakening's biggest problem. The limited graphical hardware of the GameBoy made it so a lot of important map details couldn't really easily be made to the player, and outside of remembering what the Owl tells you when you beat a dungeon (that makes sense in context I promise), you often have very little clue of where to go next or what to do it outside of remembering where you have or haven't been. Most areas of the map are visually distinct enough that you'll remember them, at least, but there aren't enough tile sets in the game to keep that from happening EVER, and there are fields I frequently confuse the locations of still to this day despite how many times I've played through this game. The overworld map is almost comically useless with how unspecific and vague it is about the locations of things, so while you can kinda use it for the general location of things, it's useless for actual navigation (in stark contrast to the map in LTTP which had basically EVERYTHING on the map which you could see on it).

Verdict: Recommended. The bad signposting is really the only thing keeping me from giving this game a whole-hearted highly recommended mark. Losing where you're supposed to can be SO frustrating that it really just makes it feel like the game isn't respecting the player's time. This wouldn't be something I'd complain much about if this where any other game, as that bad navigation that expected a lot of the player was very common in old action/adventure games. But Link's Awakening unlearns so many good design lessons from LTTP that I cannot leave it unpenalized in good conscience. This is a great game, but do be expecting to use a guide to get through some of the later (or even quite early) overworld sections if you do decide to pick it up and don't want to spend ages wandering around the overworld trying to remember where to go (or if you like making really meticulous maps with notes for your retro adventure games, then I suppose you'd probably love this game).

To be honest, I wasn't expecting too much from this. I figured because it's on the Game Boy and has all the Mario enemies that I wouldn't like it, but it was honestly a lot better than I expected. To clarify on the Mario enemies thing, I thought it would be something that would take me out of the game, and it kind of does, but at the same time, this game never really felt super immersive, rather just trying to tell a simple but lighthearted story. The story is serviceable, definitely better than A Link to the Past's but that both games have the bare minimum, which is fine for its time. Anyway, the main meat of the game comes from the dungeons and exploration, which are both fine but if I'm being honest, I definitely enjoyed myself playing A Link to the Past and A Link Between Worlds a lot more. This game doesn't feel clunky, but some parts feel more obscure than in the other two, especially the former. Some dungeons like Key Cavern, Eagle's Tower, and Turtle Rock felt really confusing and had a lot of backtracking, though there are some great dungeons in here as well, mainly Angler's Tunnel, Catfish's Maw, and Face Shrine. As such I would definitely say the middle of the game is the best part easily, though the beginning is fine too. I think one thing that mainly holds this game back for me compared to the other two (even though I still really enjoyed this one) is how much you have to open the menu. Some items feel like they should've just been a passive thing and not something I have to constantly switch buttons for, especially the Power Bracelet, which ends up really killing the flow of the game. DX also has the Color Dungeon which as far as I know is one of the only differences in DX outside of adding color itself, and that dungeon, while short, was actually really good as well, and I had a ton of fun with that and other parts of the game. The 2D platforming sections aren't bad but they definitely feel a bit clunk and always having to use the Roc's Feather is a little annoying, though understandable. Lastly, running into blocks and having slow text pop up also really kills the flow of the game, though that's a more minor complaint. Regardless, I still had a ton of fun with this one and I do plan on getting to the remake one day, which will hopefully fix a lot of my issues and make this game one I like even more. Overall, very enjoyable game that has some issues due to its hardware that can really slow the pace.

The tone of Link's Awakening is delightful, but I felt that the actual game was much too willing to waste time.
The cramped overworld, and meandering winding paths throughout, made navigating Koholint feel like an absolute slog to trudge through. At least the dungeons were solid.
Completing the Trading Sequence is mandatory for finishing the game, and I wasted several hours wandering around too prideful to simply look up that I should bring the pineapple to Papahl, whom I had embarrassingly found earlier and forgotten about.

Having been introduced to the Redux patch I don't think I can go back. Brushing against rocks and being bombarded with vacuous text about how you can't lift them is asinine.
Honestly even with Redux the entire game suffers due to absurd amounts of menu-ing being mandatory due to how the developers implemented the power bracelet as an active rather than passive item.

Props for introducing the recurring series motif of perpetual Best-Girl in the form of Link's anima: M. The Girl With Red Hair.

Veredito: Continua sendo o pior Zelda, mas mesmo assim é ótimo.

Link's Awakening está num momento curioso da história da franquia: saiu pouco depois do Zelda de Super Nintendo, 5 anos antes de Ocarina, foi o 1º Zelda portátil e - talvez o mais importante - foi um projeto paralelo de seus criadores, iniciado quase que só pela zuera da coisa, sem praticamente nenhum envolvimento do cara que inventou Zelda.

Link's Awakening é um Zelda descompromissado e despretensioso.

Essa é de longe sua maior qualidade, mas também é de onde surge a maioria dos seus problemas: várias armadilhas são baratas, alguns puzzles forçam um pouco a barra, e uma ou duas vezes eu corri o risco de me travar e quase precisei recomeçar tudo do zero. Sem contar que você não é exatamente um herói numa aventura épica pra salvar o reino, tu é só um náufrago preso numa ilha e tentando sair. E o mapa é consideravelmente pequeno. Jogo bem bacana como qualquer Zelda, mas comparando com o resto da série este é um dos mais fraquinhos.

Ao mesmo tempo, essa liberdade é justo o que dá o charme de LA, é justo de onde saem suas ideias mais legais. Ele faz umas coisas que (quase?) nenhum outro Zelda faz. Por que todo jogo precisa ser uma jornada épica? Por que todo mapa precisa ser imenso? Esquece isso, coloca aí animais falantes, personagens hilários e situações inusitadas no jogo. Por que tem aparições aleatórias de um monte de outras franquias da Nintendo, especialmente Mario, algumas necessárias pra avançar na história? Por que tem uma sidequest de tirar fotos divertidas? Porque sim, oras.

É essa lógica que permite você combinar itens para ter efeitos novos, que trouxe o primeiro (e mais divertido até agora) minijogo de pesca em Zelda, e que traz uma história meio melancólica e pessoal pra franquia pela 1ª vez. Alguns labirintos e chefes são ruins sim, mas quando eles são bons, eles são REALMENTE bons.

Nem todas as ideias novas deram certo, mas pelo menos eles puderam ter ideias novas. Não precisaram passar pela aprovação de 20 supervisores e ler 50 documentos só pra botar uma ideia legal num jogo legal.

É difícil de imaginar meia dúzia de gato pingado na Nintendo pegar hoje uma de suas franquias mais renomadas e fazer o que quiser com ela, sem levar nada muito a sério e sem ninguém ficar se metendo. Mas é uma pena. Por mais problemas que tenha, Link's Awakening experimentou coisas novas e muitas delas são super maneiras. E parece que isso só foi possível ali naquele momento: quando a galera tava fazendo o que queria, criando o jogo que estavam a fim, sem se preocupar com os milhões de dólares que precisam ser investidos nos mínimos detalhes pra botar qualquer coisa em prática.