I Finally Played Link’s Awakening
Link’s Awakening is a muddled adventure painted over with a pleasing chibi aesthetic.
Three years after its release, I finally played Link’s Awakening for the Nintendo Switch, a remake that proved mostly favorable despite its aesthetic controversies. Getting a 9.4/10 from IGN and an 87% on Metacritic, the game has a positive reputation amongst fans, and although I wish I could say I thoroughly enjoyed this adorable adventure, Link’s Awakening was somewhat underwhelming rather than a dream come true.
The adventure begins with a beautiful 2D animated cutscene depicting Link crashing onto the shores of Koholint island, a setting completely unique from other Zelda games. This is no Hyrule field with your Octoroks and medieval towns amplified by a pinch of mysticism, rather anything and everything goes in the land of dreams. Mario enemies, Kirby, and strange bosses dominate the world; even by Zelda standards. I believe that the chibi, toy like art direction chosen for this game perfectly compliments this more unnatural tone. Not only that, but I’m of the opinion that the style is simply beautiful. I’ve seen complaints regarding the chibi style acting as an excuse for Nintendo to not put as much detail and effort into the game’s visuals, but I never found this to be true. The lighting reflects off the characters and landscape in a style reminiscent of plastic, the water flows in a beautiful motion, and the entire world is treated with a serious amount of detail, all of which demonstrate a strict reliance to and belief in the chosen art style. To me, the direction Nintendo decided upon for this game’s style is a breath of fresh air for the series and perfectly reflects the more abstract nature of this game. It looks and feels like a dream, and for that along with the sheer pleasure gained from watching this game work more than validates the decision Nintendo made.
However, I found this game to be an example of style over substance. While I never found the gameplay particularly unenjoyable, by the end of my adventure I wasn’t playing to explore the world like I did in Breath of the Wild or complete extraneous quests for the fun of it as I did in Wind Waker, but simply just to beat it and free myself from the shackles of this game.
I have to give credit where credit is due, the environment is both beautiful and well designed. With a densely populated world of treasures, collectables, enemies, dungeons, side quests, unique areas and more, there is never a dull moment as a result of the design of the world map. Rather, the playable area becomes unenjoyable by its means of traversal. There were moments that genuinely confused me as to why Link had to interact with the world in the way he does with tedious backtracking and confusing means to reach dungeons that, without a consistent mode of fast travel for the majority of the game, left me unexcited to explore a world that is worth exploring. Even worse, Link is limited to eight directions, making the game that much slower and tedious to maneuver. As a result, I found no motivation to truly interact with the side quests or explore the world more than a few hours of messing around. The best comparison I can make is a plastic slide on a summer day, a fun promise that is painful to pursue.
Other parts of this game are similarly hard to endure, specifically the combat. Rather than carefully placing enemies that make for a thoughtfully difficult combination of goons to handle all at once, Link’s Awakening rather creates artificial difficulty by throwing as many annoying enemies at the player at once. This “game design” is used throughout the entire game and never becomes any less frustrating.
The annoyance continues with the means of progression. The game strikes zero balance in terms of guiding the player with sometimes easily understandable directions from NPC’s being countered by vague clues and hidden passageways with zero indication on how to progress. I’m not the biggest fan of using guides, especially for puzzle oriented games like the Zelda franchise, but I had to delve in a walkthrough multiple times throughout my journey, and the result was never “I see where I went wrong,” but rather “this still doesn’t make sense.” This confusing progression works well with the tedious layout in creating a game that is sometimes simply unenjoyable to play.
Luckily, the dungeons are enjoyable more often than not, but are still plagued with the inconsistency seen in the game’s progression. Some dungeons felt far too simple while others, again, required a guide. I appreciated some of the dungeon’s unique designs, while others left me underwhelmed at the simplicity in terms of direction, items, and aesthetics. However, these lackluster dungeon’s are few and far between, making for an overall solid group of levels for Link to explore.
And while the Zelda series is not known for its plot, I have to appreciate the melancholic tone the game creates that strangely goes well with the innocent aesthetics. From bosses claiming Link is doing the wrong thing and will destroy the island if he wakes the fish to one on one moments with Marin, this story gave me a feeling one wouldn’t expect from a Zelda game. By no means a masterpiece, the story is at least more unique than others in the series, which gives Link’s Awakening some points.
Meaning, Link’s Awakening was a mixed bag. At some points I loved the chibi art style paired with the heartfelt story, and at others I found myself playing just to beat the game. The combat was frustrating. The world, while dense with activities, is a hassle to explore to even reach said activities. The dungeons were at some points great and others simplistic. The progression was either explained far too much or far too little. Essentially, Link’s Awakening is a simple Zelda game with some great visuals, but nothing groundbreaking in the gameplay department.