A Retrospect on Link's Awakening
This was written on January 12, 2024 and was published on April 12, 2024. It was updated with a new paragraph on April 19, 2024. Look for the Interjection below.
A lot of people have their own favourite Zelda games. Me, personally I didn't really grow up with them. The handhelds ones are the games I really played.
This has accumulated with me having very little interest in the most popular games like Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask and having rather 'controversial' opinions on other games (Link to the Past is just okay). But pissing people off aside, there are a few Zelda games I have really fond memories for. Those are the Game Boy/Colour Zelda games. (I loved Minish Cap too but that's a whole other story).
The Zelda games on the Game Boy and Colour are unique within the Zelda series as a whole. Strange plots, enemies, music, mystery and even gameplay plague the three games. Hell, in Link's Awakening half the enemies are straight up from Super Mario Bros. And the oracle games come with novels and feature interconnected password systems, animal companions (who vary depending on your own actions) and areas unique in any other Zelda games (Subrosia). It's almost as if these 3 games exist in a void unto itself.
Not to mention these games all have the same kind of fantastical atmosphere to them none of the other Zelda games have replicated. I've only found a handful of games that even have the same kind of atmosphere (more on that later).
This was intentional too. Takashi Tezuka, the project lead for Link's Awakening wanted the game to feel like Twin Peaks! I'm not sure if he got that but damn if these 3 games didn't make me feel things other games haven't.
Additionally, while Link's Awakening is steeped in mystery, both Oracle games were developed by Flagship (a subsidiary of Capcom) which allowed for a unique set of hands to work on the games.
I consider them a series. This 'series' consists of three games and one unreleased/cancelled game.
Link's Awakening (1993) - Released for Game Boy, then re-released for Game Boy Colour in 1998, remade in 2019 for the Switch, then a fan remake in 2023.
Oracle of Seasons (2001) - Released for Game Boy Colour in 2001. Later re-released for various Nintendo Virtual Consoles.
Oracle of Ages (2001) - Released for Game Boy Colour in 2001. Later re-released for various Nintendo Virtual Consoles.
Oracle of Secrets or Colours (never released) - There was apparently supposed to be a third game though it's likely this was canned, and teams moved to what became Minish Cap. Covering this game would require a whole separate article and is not the focus of this piece.
I suppose I should also include that these games are so fuddled with nostalgia for me I find it difficult to argue against them. I remember playing Oracle of Seasons on my plastic see-through Game Boy Colour, early on in the game and stepping into Tarm Ruins. You got this area of immense ominous presence with huge stone walls.
Couldn't do a single thing there but I was blown away by the atmosphere the area gave off. Like, I can't wait to come here. Shoot when doing my run of the game any time I passed by the route I always took a detour just to stand at the entrance, in awe of it and its music. I'm not even convinced that song could exude the same kind of hype if it wasn't chiptune. It's just that good.
I've played many Zelda games and never found an area that even comes close to the feelings I got from it. It left a huge impression on me.
Now, I consider both Oracle games to be perfect. Straight 10/10s in all aspects. Okay, maybe Ages could be a 9 but it's been about 10 years since I last played it.
Of the three I always found Link's Awakening to be the weakest. Note: Weakest of the three. The game is still phenomenal, like an 8-9/10. It had issues that really damaged my opinions of it. I'll compare it to Fallout 3 and New Vegas. 3 is good but New Vegas just outclasses it in every respect.
It didn't have the same kind of mystifying music the Oracle games had, no cool weapons or tools, no animal companions, areas looked just meh, extremely easy and ultimately the most plain of three. Of course, Link's Awakening was the oldest and was the subject of a lot of experimentation on the dev’s part so I can excuse a lot. I still thought the game was incredible, just not as much as the Oracle games.
The other part, the one that made me most bitter about the game was the ending and plot. So spoilers ahead, I am gonna cope.
I really really don't like media with the trope 'it was all a dream, nothing happened'. Really can't stand it. It's a big reason why I just don't care for SMB2. I don't like the idea of the protagonist going through all this journey just for it to never have happened. Just a personal thing but the way Link's Awakening pulled it off really annoyed me. I can't even list other examples off the top of my head because I actively avoid anything with this concept.
Hell, if the game was even more forward about leaving the island would kill everyone I probably would have just stopped playing. It would be like a Far Cry 4 situation, where the best ending is to not play at all.
The games I mention below have a similar kind of 'dreamy' plot but pull it off 100 times better with proper closure. More on that at the end of the article. Won't go into detail about those as I don't want to have more spoilers but if you've played them you'll get it.
I last played Link's Awakening back in 2014-15(?) along with the other two games when I used my Ouya. And while the Oracle games were still great, I didn't think much about Link's Awakening then.
I saw the remake in 2019 and didn't care much, just hoping if successful, they would remake the Oracle games. They never did and I didn't really think of the games until 2023, when some anonymous gamedev released a full remake of Link's Awakening in the Unreal Engine giving us Link's Awakening DXHD.
Hereafter I will be referring to this game as DXHD to prevent having to type it all each time.
In the brief moment the game was live I saw that DMCA coming from a mile away. It contained assets from Link's Awakening and was getting picked up by gaming media outlets. Only a matter of time. With how the creator remained anonymous I believe he saw this coming as well.
And then sure enough, the Itch.io page was taken down.
A conversation could be had about Nintendo's treatment of fan projects or how gaming media is all snitches this subject is well tread. All I can add is that if you are a fan game developer and your project starts to get articles on gaming news sites, shut the whole project down or go underground. Streamers and YouTubers covering your game is fine but once the journalists get it, the lawyers get it. Nothing but snitches in those papers.
Of course, it didn't help that the game directly used assets from the base game. This could have been avoided had the game used some kind of engine to extract all the assets from the base game (a bit like how OpenGOAL does it) then allow the game to run. It would've at least blocked Nintendo from claiming that aspect.
Or maybe not. Who knows with Nintendo? Getting that coverage was the death knell on it. That much I am sure.
Fortunately the creator also released the source code for the game, allowing anyone to build it and hopefully for someone to continue working on it.
Hell, I considered taking up the mantle. Though if I did a huge chunk of the project would have been me trying to figure out how to build that asset-extraction engine. Not to mention I am not a C# programmer. The game comes with a map editor so importing Oracle's map wouldn't be impossible. But, as I wrote earlier I am not even that much of a huge fan of Link's Awakening, okay nevermind. Let's get back on topic.
My opinion on DXHD was that of the 2019 remake. Cool but I hope someone starts work on an Oracle remake. It's been about 4 months since the takedown, and I haven't seen any public indications of a project. Oh well.
There is one GitHub repository of the code I found, though that user just posted it for archival purposes. At the time of writing there are 2 pull requests in the repo, two programmers who added some slight updates. Unfortunately they've been ignored by the original owner so ehn.
Scanning through the forks I've only found some users working on translating the game into different languages.
At the start of this year I was hanging out with my sister and saw I had a copy of the remake. Decided to let her play it. What followed was me rediscovering why I enjoyed the GB/C games so much as well as the remake changing what I initially thought about the game. It also filled me with a bit of sadness since now I really want to see the Oracle games remade in this style.
The most defining feature was widescreen. The dev removed all overworld transitions allowing Link to just move throughout. Room boundaries were still kept for enemies and compasses but otherwise moving from one area to the next was seamless. Seeing a much larger screen and NPCs doing their own thing made the game appear more lifelike and vibrant.
The game also came with a zoom function, allowing you to zoom in or out as much as you want. You could zoom out and see the entire game's overworld and everything moving within it. We stayed on default most of the time but
it was such a cool feature.
Shoot, now I'm thinking about Oracle of Seasons and how that would look with you being able to see Maple circling around the entire map! Or even a full bird's eye view of all of Subrosia.
This zoom feature also changed the core game. The room in Level 8 wherein you need to shoot out the bottom ice blocks is bypassable if you just slightly leave the room and shoot fire straight instead. The Eagle boss' dynamic changes too since he can't knock you off screen anymore.
Various rooms in dungeons were now easier to do with the added space. You could hit enemies from across rooms and open doors in others.
Anyways, this was my sister's first serious introduction to the Zelda series (excluding her briefly watching someone play Majora's Mask forever ago and a nearly completed run of Lenna's Inception). It was also my turn to sit back and watch someone else experience the game for the first time, providing guidance where necessary.
So, while messing with the dehydrator I got for Christmas (I’ve found spinach dries very good) we played.
With no updates before takedown we ran into a few glitches. The first time we ran the game the items did not appear. On the beach you could see the puddle where the sword was, but no actual sword. I changed copies of the game and it worked thereafter. Also installed one of the .NET frameworks. Never had that issue again.
The toadstool in the forest never spawned. Dunno why, it just never appeared. Fortunately it isn't important to completing the game. I now of a way to hack it in, but ehn. Not that important.
Upon coming out of Level 7 (Eagle's Tower) after the boss, the map was gone! No idea what caused it but all you'd see were the interactive sprites (enemies, bushes, doors, etc) and an endless blue where the ground was supposed to be.
This was fixed with a reboot of the game.
The biggest issue was with the instruments. After obtaining the instrument at the end of a dungeon it would hang, cycling through the animation of the instrument gaining power. This was first solved by switching the save to another copy of the game. I found a better workaround by killing the boss, leaving the dungeon and rebooting the game. It stopped happening around Level 5 or so.
Looking at the bug reports on the Itch forum some people experienced that one. I've read that modifying the save file is easy enough anyways in case you needed to cheat in the instrument.
Lastly, one constant glitch that occurred was audio distortion. We'd play the game and as the session continued audio started to get distorted and cause clipping. It didn't get louder but definitely sounded more compressed. This would occur until all audio became noise or the game crashed. No idea why that happened but it gave us an excuse to take breaks. I'd say it happened hourly. According to Playnite our run lasted about 8-10 hours (can't remember exactly atm).
Watching her play also made me re-evaluate my thoughts on the game's difficulty. I don't know if the game is harder than I remember, I'm really good at the game or she just isn't that good a player lol. She struggled with Level 2, dying upwards of 50 times (my estimate) and struggled hard with several bosses. Course idk because she did Level 3 with no problems at all, remarking for the rest of the run that Level 2 was the hardest.
While my sister played I re-read some stuff about the ending. That maybe I mis-remembered it, that I was too hard on it. Well, after re-experiencing I still agree with my previous thoughts. I don't like it. I get it, but that trope is still something I don't enjoy.
That aside, I found that the game kind of connects with Breath of the Wild, that the Wind Fish's body is in Gerudo Desert (possibly) and that Mabe Village was a real place as well. There's a lot of hearsay and hints towards a connection.
It lends the mind to think that maybe what Link experienced there was real, or that the people of Mabe Village were alive at one time, passed on and became ensnared in the Wind Fish's dreams, changing the dynamic from Link destroying the dream, to saving everyone trapped unknowingly.
I don't know. But it did make me feel better about the ending, myself convinced this retroactively changes the entire game. It no longer feels like "Link fell asleep, had a crazy dream about an adventure and woke up, the end."
Watching her play it, I missed the sheer amount of Mario things present in the game. I remember there being a few references here and there, not half the enemies being from SMB! I like it. It adds to the weirdness and uniqueness of this game across all Zeldas.
But after seeing all this game accomplished, man I want the Oracle games in this style. At the very least, I would love to see Oracle of Seasons in widescreen. The closest projects I've seen to this idea are Sameboy WideGB, a Game Boy emulator that allows for pseudo-widescreen play (though unfortunately still keeping screen transitions) and oracles-disasm, a disassembly of the two Oracle games (though this would require massive code re-writing).
Argh. I feel so spoiled by that zoomed-out map system. Even other 'Zelda-likes' feel inferior cause of this. Not gonna be touching these kinds of games till I remember how to forget this.
(that said, if they did come out with the Oracle games in the Switch style I will still play them; just won't be as hyped as if they were this engine instead)
As far as I am concerned, DXHD has become the definitive way to play Link's Awakening now. In the same way Ephraim225's Reshef of Destruction patch fixed that game, or Circle of the Moon's randomizer fixed pacing or AM2R's whole existence. DXHD is another example of a fan fixing up an older game, making an incredible version out of it, better than what the main company could've pulled off.
I mean, there's also the Switch remake but as I've implied. I really don't care for it and its Animal Crossing-looking models. Barely interests and straight up doesn't now that a superior version exists.
There's also the Second Awakening project which adds arranged music to the original Gameboy Colour game. And there's Super Awakening, which allows for 4 buttons to be used, getting rid of the constant item swapping. I'll link both below but man there are a lot of fan projects for DX out there.
I refer to these 3-4 games as the Lozgbc games, or series. Simple 8-bit graphics, plots centred around changing fate, dreams or similar philosophical subjects, lots of replayability and tons of secrets hidden throughout (both meta and lore-based). These games don't have the typical "save the princess" plot that the Zelda games are known for. That may be part of the overall story but there's a lot lurking underneath the surface. And these aren't the only Lozgbc games out there.
I've played a handful of other games that fit this aesthetic and style perfectly. In addition to the standards listed above, these games feature lots of ominous imagery, require lots of exploring and often have unusual plots with deeper meanings.
The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls (1992) - It was actually this game that inspired Link's Awakening and then got Nintendo to hire these devs to work on the games. There's a whole story that could be elaborated here but I'll skip that for now. Others have already covered this. I'd definitely recommend it. Some of the characters from this game actually appear in Link's Awakening too.
(screenshot of Anodyne)
Anodyne (2013) - A game filled with mystery and subplots and lots of things going on in the background. You play as Young, someone transported to this strange world that needs to help save the 'briar'. I won't write more than that, but it was excellent and the music incredible. There's a sequel that looks to have moved past the Zelda-influence into some insane 3D platformer. I'm gonna play it soon but upon first glance it doesn't look like it fits on this list.
Lenna's Inception (2020) - An adventure game in which you play as Lenna, an NPC who was originally tasked with guiding the hero to get the sword when things go awry. Of course, like Anodyne it spirals into this huge event regarding the fate of the planet, life and death and changing destiny. It also has multiple endings and randomization allowing for many replays.
Legend of Zelda GBC Fangame (2020) - An Oracle fangame written from scratch by Mattmd. It's meant to be a little fan game but manages to almost perfectly replicate the feeling the original games had. The only downside is that it's too short! Also the name is rather generic, making searching it a little challenging. I will include a link to that below.
Zelda's Adventure (2023) - I'm really only including this for completion. I'll link it below but beware it's utterly unplayable and the dev has vanished. It's a Game Boy-style remake of the CD-I game. In theory it should be really cool, but it still has a lot of work to be done.
Kudzu (2023) - It's a bit clunkier than the games above. Kudzu is also a Gameboy game! So it fits right at home with the Lozgbc games. I've yet to play it but I've linked Zetaplay run below in case you want some gameplay. It looks good! I'm a bit disappointed by the lack of colour but I don't mind. Gameboy colours are strangely endearing to me.
Castaway (????) - Announced in the last month or so (April 2024), this game looks to be a spiritual successor to the original Link's Awakening. It's got so many similarities that it's worth a mention. I definitely intend to play this.
Anodyne and Lenna's Inception are the two games I mentioned earlier about similar plots and proper closure. I won't go further into detail, but I much preferred how both games ended (Lenna's Inception has multiple endings btw. I'm referring to the best one) versus how Link just woke up. Those two games are the ones I consider most closely related to the series as a whole, even if visually the others above may fit better. I'll also add an offhand mention to the Survival Kids games, that while graphically similar and also really good, don't exactly meet the standard of Lozgbc games.
There are few other games still in development that, at first glance appear to fit the style but until they come out I can't definitively say if they count.
Adeona [Box Attack Studios] - possibly abandoned
Arken [Libra Bits] - looks awesome so far, still in development
Mystiqa [Julian Creutz] - still in development, creator active on Twitter
Mina the Hollower [Yacht Club Games] - coming out this year(?)
Dawnthorn [Aloft Studio] - the dev is hard at work on another game right now
There's also
Airoheart (2022) by Pixel Heart Studio but first it looks more inspired by Link to the Past than anything and second, I'm still playing it so idk if it's got some deep plot. I may have to do an article on LttP-likes eventually.
If anyone has other games they think fit this style do not hesitate to get in contact with me. I'd love to add more above.
2024-04-19 - Interjection: After posting this article around a few social media sites (Trustcafe, Kbin and Reddit) several helpful users have pointed me towards more Lozgbc games! There were a few suggestions I outright rejected (namely that I don't believe Pipistrello, and the Cursed Yoyo and Tunic are part of this style) but otherwise some here are some great additions. I'll blitz through them rapidly here.
Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden (1991) is a no-holds bar simple adventure game. Though it fits graphically its way more linear. Plus the remakes both do it way more justice.
Prodigal (2020) was described to me as "Zelda meets harvest moon". This kind of means it doesn't fit into the Lozgbc mold, but I haven't done enough research to come to a verdict. Either way, it looks glorious.
Beyond the Mountains (2023). How the hell have I not heard of this?! It fits in every aspect. As soon as I’ve completed my current runs I am so starting this. The developer has also confirmed to me that a sequel is in the works. I can't wait! And it's free too! Go give it a shot. Finally we have
Children of Tydes which has been teased across Reddit. I don't have much information on it right now, but it looks awesome so far.
Either way, while Nintendo may never remake the Oracle games and the possibility of a DXHD-style remake remains uncertain I can at least take solace in the fact that these games exist, constituting a niche style.
Further Reading...
