The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (Game Boy)

My introduction to The Legend of Zelda was the debut entry all the way back in 1987. To this day, it remains one of my most beloved games and my gold standard rendition of the default “Link saves Princess Zelda from Ganon” scenario. Maybe that’s why my other favorite Zelda outings tend to be the offbeat ones that boldly shed one or more sacred cow elements and wind up better for it. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link led the way by leaving archvillain Ganon dead and Zelda unabducted. However, it wasn’t until the fourth installment, 1993’s The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for Game Boy, that Nintendo truly cut loose and got weird. In addition to being the first Zelda designed for a handheld system, Link’s Awakening was the first to completely omit Ganon, the kingdom of Hyrule, and even the title character herself!

Instead, Link finds himself shipwrecked on isolated Koholint Island, having been fished out of the sea by Marin, a friendly local girl. This lush and inviting new setting is also, ironically, a prison. But no sooner is our waterlogged hero back on his feet than a talking owl (no relation to the one seen in Ocarina of Time, oddly) swoops onto the scene and informs him that his only hope of returning to Hyrule is to wake the Wind Fish, a mysterious, semi-divine being said to slumber inside the giant egg resting on Koholint’s highest peak. Since this is a Zelda game, waking the Wind Fish requires recovering eight enchanted musical instruments sealed away inside eight perilous dungeons.

My initial impression upon revisiting Link’s Awakening after a roughly two decade hiatus is just how full-featured it is. When it came to Game Boy adaptations of established gaming properties, audience expectations tended to be, if not low, at least modest. We weren’t all that surprised when the portable Super Mario Land, for example, turned out to have nowhere near the scope of its NES inspirations. It was a mere trifle, after all. A quality one in its own right, sure, but a trifle.

In contrast, Link’s Awakening was arguably the most fully-realized Legend of Zelda experience yet, rivalling its Super Nintendo contemporary Link to the Past in the breadth and depth of its content. At 256 screens, the overworld is twice the size of Zelda 1’s. On top of that, it retains the quirky style of Link to the Past’s, being populated by a wide array of strange and memorable characters. There’s an entire village populated by talking animals, not to mention surprise cameos by a bevy of Nintendo stars. I wouldn’t want to spoil them all, so I’ll just highlight one: Prince Richard from the tragically obscure Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (aka The Frog For Whom the Bell Tolls), one of the best Game Boy originals to never leave Japan and a sister game of sorts to this one.

All that said, I think the dungeons may be awesomer still. Their intricate layouts and satisfying puzzles routinely go above and beyond what came before. Eagle’s Tower, for instance, tasks you with plotting the correct route to lug a massive wrecking ball between pits and barriers in order to use it to knock over a set of pillars and bring the otherwise inaccessible top floor crashing down. It’s more advanced in both concept and execution than anything we’d previously seen in the console Zelda releases.

Factor in the expressive pixel art and a rousing score and you really do have a total Zelda package crammed into one miniscule cartridge. Not only are there no compromises evident apart from the monochrome visuals, we can actually witness the gameplay and narrative sophistication of the series as a whole advancing along multiple fronts. Without spoiling too much, Link’s Awakening marks the franchise’s first real flirtation with moral complexity, melancholy, and angst when it becomes apparent that Link’s quest to wake the Wind Fish and escape Koholint may have unforeseen consequences. While it doesn’t push the unease nearly so hard as the downright eerie Majora’s Mask would seven years later, it paved the way to Termina nonetheless.

Impressive and important as it is, I would be remiss if I didn’t detail the handful of significant flaws that mar this initial Game Boy version of Link’s Awakening in particular. Least in the grand scheme of things is the game’s baffling tendency to interrupt the flow with explanatory text boxes each and every time you interact with something. Pick up a small key and you’ll have to sit through a detailed explanation of what it’s for. Every. Single. Time. Turns out keys open locks. Go figure! God forbid you so much as brush up against a boulder without your magic bracelet equipped. They’re heavy, you see, and can’t be budged without a certain special item. It’s a fine idea the first time. Maybe a welcome reminder the second. After that, it smacks of sadism.

Equally obnoxious is the constant pausing to change items. The designers were kind enough to let you freely map items to the Game Boy’s two action buttons however you wish. Unfortunately, they then included so many barriers that need specific items to bypass that you’re still going to be switching your gear up on what feels like every other screen. Hell, there are cases where you’ll need to swap out items more than once just to successfully traverses a single screen! I’m aware, of course, that gating some portions of a game world behind equipment is standard in the action-adventure genre. The practice itself isn’t the problem so much as the sheer redundancy of its implementation, further exacerbated by the two button limit.

Finally, and most worrisome of all, are the handful of potentially game-breaking glitches. I very nearly had my playthrough terminated for good in the home stretch when I made the “mistake” of visiting a shop and purchasing a second shovel to replace the one I’d recently traded to an NPC for a boomerang. I didn’t realize right away that I was now effectively carrying one item too many as far as the game was concerned. I eventually discovered the problem when I picked up the fire rod in the eighth dungeon, a tool required to reach the end of said dungeon, only to find that it hadn’t been added to my inventory because its intended slot was now occupied by the replacement shovel. If I had saved my progress after this point, I’d have been permanently softlocked. Fortunately, my lackadaisical approach to saving became my salvation, although I did lose around 90 minutes of progress and was forced to to repeat level seven. The scariest thing is that this isn’t some bizarre set of circumstances one wouldn’t usually encounter in the course of normal play. All I did was pop into the shop, see they were still selling shovels, and figure I may as well buy one. Yikes.

An expanded 1998 Game Boy Color revision (dubbed Link’s Awakening DX) would patch some of these nastier bugs and the 2019 Nintendo Switch remake features a dedicated sword button to cut down on the tedium of item swapping. Between such so-called quality of life changes and the obvious presentation upgrades made possible by newer hardware, it would be easy to write this vanilla Game Boy iteration off as obsolete. I can’t dispute that in any objective sense, though I can perhaps point out that in no later format is the strength of Link’s Awakening relative to practically all other handheld offerings of its time more apparent than it is here. Regardless of the version you pick up, you’re guaranteed an unforgettable adventure that ranks among the finest this most legendary of sagas has produced to date.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Super Nintendo)

Did you know that Nintendo made a third Legend of Zelda game back in 1991? I know, right? Me, neither! Apparently, it’s one of the top three Super Nintendo releases of all-time, forming a sort of first-party Holy Trinity with Super Mario World and Super Metroid, and is widely considered to be one of the greatest video games ever made. No wonder we’ve never heard of it before now!

Anyway, thanks for bearing with my usual attempt to drain some of the tension out of writing about a enduringly famous game. That’s just a me thing. But yeah, like the original 1986 Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past is one of those towering landmark works that define the hobby for many. People adore it. They get tattoos based on it. It was given its own direct sequel (A Link Between Worlds) over twenty years later. It’s important, dammit!

All this begs the question: If it’s so great, why haven’t I played it in decades? Hardly a month goes by that I don’t run through one of the two NES Zeldas (or a ROM hack or randomizer based on them), yet I don’t even think I’ve touched LttP this century. It certainly isn’t that I have no history with it. As an early Super Nintendo adopter, I was as thrilled as anyone to finally experience the next chapter in the already legendary saga as soon as it hit American shelves in 1992. I remember genuinely enjoying it, too. What gives?

Well, after my latest playthrough, I can say this much: I like Link to the Past. I like it a lot. How could I not? Nintendo pulled out all the stops to make it one intensely likable experience. Whereas 8-bit technical limitations resulted in previous iterations of the land of Hyrule looking similar throughout and populated by terse, purely utilitarian NPCs, practically every location and being depicted here is packed with personality. This newfound character is often whimsical in nature. Friends and foes alike share a cutesy art style and penchant for tongue-in-cheek dialog. Minor townsfolk all have unique sprites and charming little touches abound. Take the introduction of the now iconic cucco birds and their unlikely hidden power. These formidable fowl have no bearing on Link’s quest proper and seem to have been included for the sheer joy of it alone. This truly is where the series found its voice and began to encompass more than a mute hero wandering a trackless wilderness in single-minded pursuit of an off-screen damsel.

Now, that’s not to say that those classic action-adventure beats were neglected entirely in favor of quirky NPCs and carnival mini-games. The dungeons holding the various magic trinkets that Link inevitably needs to gather in order to save the day are generally excellent. There’s a ton of them, a dozen if you count the introductory sequence in Hyrule Castle, and they do a superb job of gradually escalating in size and complexity without ever going overboard. Furthermore, their mix of combat and puzzling is pitch-perfect across the board. Again, it’s a case of Nintendo firing on all cylinders. Quality all the way.

Alas, Link to the Past failed to win me over with its handling of most things outside the towns and dungeons. The overworld, in other words. Or should I say “overworlds?” Hopefully it’s not spoiling too much all these years on to mention that there are actually two parallel versions of Hyrule presented, dubbed the Light and Dark Worlds. The former is the “normal” setting and the latter a twisted mirror image. This is amazing conceptually and we do get a handful of cool puzzles based on transitioning between the two dimensions at select spots in order to access otherwise unreachable areas or making changes to objects in one world that are then reflected in their counterparts.

Despite such an intriguing premise, however, I really wasn’t thrilled by the exploration as a whole. For starters, it’s largely linear. Countless sections of the map are unreachable without specific items or upgrades, contributing to an on-rails, theme park ride type progression I don’t favor. I found myself missing the option to venture far afield, get lost, and maybe even get in over my head by stumbling onto tougher tiers of enemies straightaway. Do you recall how many screens of the first Zelda’s overworld were inaccessible at the start? Two. Echoes of my Super Metroid review, I suppose, but the trend of Nintendo adding rigid constraints and handholding to their previously wide-open adventure titles in the post-NES era is equally apparent here.

Nothing illustrates this shift better than the debut of one of my biggest franchise pet peeves: Bomb cracks. You know these. They’re the huge, obvious cracks running through all the spots in the walls that Link can bomb to create passages. Taking a chance on bombing a nondescript crackless wall was a gamble. If your instincts were off, you just wasted a precious resource. But when it did work, you felt awesome. You’d discovered a secret all on your own! Bombing the one section of wall with a giant visual tell pasted onto it feels like nothing at all, since you literally didn’t discover anything. I don’t see the value in a concept like non-secret secrets, outside of maybe Zen koan fodder.

Of course, I’m not about to conclude that The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is poorly made or deserving of anything less than respect and admiration. So much heart and soul was clearly poured into it and the dungeon designs alone would be worth the price of admission from a gameplay standpoint. No, I recognize that my qualms are entirely personal. Perhaps it should come as no shock that a guy who grew up making his own maps of some dauntingly open and hostile game worlds wouldn’t fully jive with a Zelda sequel where every key destination is automatically highlighted on an in-game map that’s detailed down to the level of individual buildings. I still like it. A lot. And that’s all. It was fundamentally the freedom and mystery of the earlier outings that led me to fall in love with them, though, and that particular link to the past was severed on the SNES.

Zelda II – Amida’s Curse (NES)

I’ve long wanted to showcase a quality ROM hack of one of my favorite NES classics, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Problem was, I couldn’t find one. Now, unlike some, I’ve never considered the regular game to be overly challenging or unfair. That said, it teeters right on the edge at times, and most hackers are all too eager to nudge it off into the abyss of obnoxiousness. After years of being let down by grueling Kaizo style gauntlets clearly geared toward expert speedrunners, I had almost given up. Enter Ok Impala!, who just earlier this Fall partnered with bentglasstube, Trax, and ShadowOne333 to bring us Zelda II: Amida’s Curse. What a breath of fresh air this one is! It’s less difficult than before, yet not to the degree that veterans will be bored. More importantly, it switches up the world and level design just enough to provide a new perspective on what can be accomplished within the confines of the familiar Zelda II engine.

You may be wondering who Amida is. Well, it’s a matter of where, not who. Amida is the strange world Link finds himself trapped in when he passes through an unexplained one-way portal. That’s the extent of the storyline: Explore Amida to find a way back to Hyrule. Hey, it beats another princess to save.

Given how unlikely it is that you’re reading this without knowing what Zelda II is and how it plays, you’ll forgive me if I cut to the chase. What makes Amida’s Curse such an interesting hack is its emphasis on thoughtful exploration over endless combat. It wastes no time differentiating itself with the removal of the vanilla game’s random overworld encounters. You have all the time in the world to poke around the wilds of Amida without fear of unwanted interruption.

This same approach carries over to the dungeons (or temples, as they’re called here), which have fewer monsters and a correspondingly greater focus on ferreting out hidden paths. These passages are usually hinted at in some way, either via oddities in the architecture or clues from NPCs. Later temples in particular have an entirely different feel than their base game counterparts. Think extended brain teasers as opposed to simple tests of survival. Some of the tricks they employ can throw you for a loop in the nicest way. A boss might appear at an unexpected place or time to effectively ambush you, for example.

Major changes to the baseline mechanics are few, but impactful. The extra life dolls Link acquires are now added to his starting pool of lives on every subsequent continue, turning them from one of the least essential prizes to one of the most. Further, the range of his sword beam has been doubled, although it can still only be fired off when at full health and is as useless as ever against larger foes. Oh, and the Fairy spell can now be canceled with a tap of the jump button. No more flying up to an item you can’t grab in fairy form!

I also have to mention the pleasing facelift Amida’s Curse benefits from. Link and many of his antagonists are sporting excellent revamped sprites and the overworld now includes animated water and swamp tiles. As great as these additions look, it’s the soundtrack by bentglasstube that steals the show. The adventurous tone that characterized Akito Nakatsuka’s Zelda II score gives way to one of brooding mystery, neatly mirroring the game’s overall shift from action to exploration.

In terms of negatives, Zelda II was already a significantly less freeform experience than its predecessor, and Amida’s Curse leans even harder into linearity. There’s relatively little wiggle room to complete dungeons or obtain critical items and powers out of their intended order. The quest is so enthralling that you likely won’t be put off by how strictly regimented it is the first time around. It doesn’t exactly bode well for the hack’s replay value, though.

Curse’s second problem (if you can call it that) is its lack of any truly new gameplay elements. The absolute best NES fan works all go the extra mile by including things like unique player abilities or enemies with no equivalents in the source material. This is what sets my current Holy Trinity of NES Hacks (Castlevania: The Holy Relics, Metroid: Rogue Dawn, and Super Mario Bros. 3Mix) apart from the crowd. You won’t find anything comparable to that here. Link, his gear, his spells, and his opponents are all fundamentally their old familiar selves, albeit gussied up and rearranged in novel fashion.

Make no mistake, however: Amida’s Curse is far and away the finest Zelda II ROM hack I’ve come across as of this writing. Its unparalleled inventiveness, attention to detail, and willingness to embrace a design philosophy other than “more of the same, but harder” put it in a class by itself. If you have any love for the original—hell, even if you’ve only wanted to love it—you’re in for a rare treat. May there be more like it.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES)

“Your head is, like, freaking gigantic, though. You should probably see a doctor. Still, good job with the whole hero thing.”

What a wonderful time it’s been re-playing Zelda II: The Adventure of Link! I’ve been playing a ton of NES in the past six months or so, but I’ve mostly focusing on titles that are new to me. While I haven’t played all the way through Zelda II in a few decades, it’s amazing how familiar it still feels. I wish I could be half this good at remembering other things like names, faces, people in general….

Anyway, Zelda II has developed a reputation for being a highly polarizing game that people either love or hate. This is weird to me because back when it came out, I recall encountering exactly zero players who claimed it was a “bad game” or not a “real Zelda game.” The game was just awesome and that was that. I suppose it might be because safe, iterative franchise culture was much less of a hunched gargoyle squatting on the game industry at that point. In fact, I’d wager that even trying to toss out the word franchise in conjunction with video games in 1987 would have drawn uncomprehending stares. Fewer games, even successful ones, got sequels at all and there were fewer preconceptions about what a sequel had to do. It was a new frontier and we were more open to novelty. Certainly, there were no “fandoms” yet. Ick. The original Zelda game has overhead view action? Cool! Zelda II has side view action? Cool!

So, yes, Zelda II ruled in 1987 and it still rules thirty years later.

In Zelda II, Link must track down the Triforce of Courage to awaken Zelda from a sleeping spell. He also has to avoid the literally bloodthirsty minions of the deceased Ganon who want to use him as a sacrifice to resurrect their vanquished leader. Link’s quest involves traversing the land and completing seven dungeons, each with its own boss. Along the way, Link visits several towns where he learns magic spells and new sword techniques to help out in the dungeons, usually by completing a short fetch quest for the townsfolk. The structure of the game as a whole is definitely a lot more linear than the first Legend of Zelda, which might be a sticking point for some. Exploration isn’t much of a priority here, but combing the overworld won’t go completely unrewarded, either, since there are still health and magic upgrades scattered around to find.

I already mentioned that the action is presented in a side view format this time, with Link gaining the ability to crouch and jump. What I didn’t mention is that this feels amazing! Link’s movement and attack controls are buttery smooth here and just so awesome to master. I genuinely feel that the combat in this game is one of the greatest pure play control experiences available in the NES library and that the addictive feel of the swordplay is the game’s greatest strength by far. It’s definitely what keeps me coming back.

Another plus is the score, which is phenomenal from title screen to end credits. I dare say it’s even better than than the original’s! It’s a pity these themes have been so neglected over the years while other games in the series have seen more musical callbacks in later installments. These are badass sword and sorcery adventure tunes at their finest.

There are light RPG elements in Zelda II, but they don’t ultimately do much to help or hinder the game for me. They’re sort of just there. Kill enough enemies and the game will prompt you to increase your attack strength, magic power, or health. It happens at a natural enough pace that you shouldn’t need to invest a lot of time just grinding levels, unless you want to try to offset the difficulty a little.

Which brings me to the other major gripe people have with the game other than the perspective shift: It’s more difficult to complete than other Zelda titles. This is true to a degree. The game never approaches a truly extreme level of challenge, but it does require a lot of practice and focus. Tougher enemies like the shield-toting Iron Knuckles and the axe-wielding Daira are tough, aggressive, and can deal a lot of damage unless you memorize and exploit their patterns. Link can also fall or be knocked into pits, which will instantly deplete one of his lives. That’s right: Lives. You start with three. Lose them all and you’ll continue back at the first screen of the game. Items collected, levels gained, and other progress is retained, but you lose all experience points accumulated toward your next level. If you die in a dungeon, you’ll need to trek back to the entrance to try again and non-boss enemies will have respawned. It’s not the most punishing system in the world, though it can be annoying to progress far into a dungeon only to perish and have to retrace your steps and re-kill everyone. If you’re patient and willing to work on learning your enemies’ weaknesses, however, the game is very much beatable in a reasonable amount of time.

Again I implore you: Don’t believe the negative buzz you’ll find online about this game. If you do, you’ll be missing out on one of the most stimulating and well-polished action experiences the NES has to offer, and that would be…an Error.

Get it? Like the guy in the game who’s named Error? Eh?

I’ll show myself out.

Zelda Challenge: Outlands (NES)

Finally! I just finished Zelda Challenge: Outlands, another game I picked up at Portland Retro Gaming Expo last October. This one is a fan-made hack of original Legend of Zelda’s gameplay engine by GameMakr24 with new levels, artwork, items, and story added. It’s definitely trickier, too. There’s none of that “getting your sword on the first screen” crap here. Expect to do some overworld and even dungeon exploring without it first! It really recaptures the magic of just diving in and getting lost in the original title, a feat which even its official sequels have never quite been able to replicate. Very good stuff.

I can’t emphasize enough that if you love the original Zelda and have mastered it, Outlands is the game for you. It’s more quality Zelda 1 gameplay and about as professionally made as NES fan games get. It’s fiendishly yet superbly designed in a way that reminds me of the original Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2 (The Lost Levels). Of course, the challenge here isn’t fast-paced platforming, but rather the mental effort involved in searching out and solving some of the most devious Zelda dungeons ever. Make no mistake: You’ll need to focus in and bring along every brain cell you can muster if you want to stand a chance of not getting hopelessly lost

Like most ROM hacks, this one is a secret to everybody. If this little review can help change that, I’ll be all the more pleased.

The Legend of Zelda (NES)

Shocking gamer confession: I’ve never actually played the more difficult “second quest” in the original Legend of Zelda until this week!

No more! I’m now happy to say that I’ve finally truly experienced all that this pioneering title has to offer and I did it without reference to any outside material: No maps, hints, walkthroughs, or anything else. Just pure exploration. Sure, finding dungeons six through eight was a challenge, but it was more than worth it for the awesome satisfaction of finally bombing just the right cliffside or burning just the right bush, and I wouldn’t trade that time I spent lost in Hyrule for anything. Looking at horribly misguided reviews online for this amazing masterpiece make me so glad that my old guy gaming experience has equipped me with the ability to actively enjoy not having a big glowing map marker telling me where my next objective is at all times.

I’ve also noticed people often write off the combat mechanics in the original Zelda game as overly simplistic and point to various sequels as the point where it got good, but I can tell you one thing: Being sealed inside a room full of darknuts or wizzrobes (especially the dreaded blue ones!) when you’re low on health is one pulse-pounding affair. The action here may be basic on a surface level, but it’s as tricky and compelling as it is simple.

Sometimes it really is about the journey and not the destination.