Back in 2019, I wrote a short post about how The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (the remake), was Nintendo at its best. Given my now-soured attitude towards Nintendo, I half expected my opinion on the game to change too, but no. Regardless of what its maker is doing these days, Link’s Awakening is still fantastic, and I still think it’s a shame that this style of Zelda has been eclipsed by Breath of the Wild’s open world format. But, well, what is it about it that makes the game so good even now? Perhaps you’re wondering that, yeah? Well, let’s get into it!

Compared to just about every Zelda game that came after, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is comparitively simple and even a bit short. It was an original GameBoy game after all, and so it really shouldn’t be able to compete with any of its successors. Yet, it does, and it does so through a combination of charm, mystery and the classic 1-2 combo of limitation-based creativity and ingenuity.

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening works so well precisely because it was an original Game Boy game. It’s makers couldn’t just fill it up with content, so they had to squeeze everything they could out of what little they could fit onto the cartridge. Much about Koholint Island, the Windfish, the world of the dream, Nightmare and even the island’s inhabitants is left to the player’s imagination.

All we get, in every case, is just a taste or rather a small glimpse at what the reality of the situation could be. We never get any solid answers about any of it, making the whole thing that much more compelling both while you’re playing it and after the adventure is over. Thinking about the game was just as much fun as actually playing it, and 90s-era Nintendo understood this better than most.

The remake doesn’t disturb this feeling very much if at all, which I think was a very nice bit of restraint on Nintendo’s part. They could have gone in and shoehorned-in explanations for everything, but they didn’t. They kept the mystery alive and even enhanced it in a way with the toybox aesthetic. Think about it, the whole thing is a dream, so everyone (including Link) being toys kinda makes sense in a dream logic sort of way.

As far as the gameplay goes, again, it’s very simple in both action and construction. You go from one dungeon to another, get their items and use them to defeat each boss. So far, so old Zelda, right? The difference here is in how much use you get out of each item. These aren’t one-offs like they are in later Zeldas. Nope. Here, items are perpetually useful both inside dungeons and around Koholint in general. Some are more useful than others, of course, but they all remain relevant.

This is pretty significant if you look at most of the 3D Zeldas or even something more recent like The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. In the former, due to the nature of 3D level design, it’s just plain more difficult to naturally include opportunities to use Link’s entire aresenal of gadgets. Where as in 2D, all you gotta do is put down a pit or a special tile, in 3D you’ve gotta model everything, code behaviors, enable targeting, special interactions, etc. It’s a whole thing and is probably what caused the series to start going stale around the Wii era.

Echoes of Wisdom doesn’t have that problem, but it suffers from a different, yet just as damaging, issue: M.E.T.A. Due to the sheer freedom the game gives its players there’s great temptation to just default to the most effective tactic available (META) in all cases.

Without self-imposed limitations on the part of the player, the game just devolves into throwing the most spammable mobs, objects and solutions at everything, which, as you’d expect, makes the game very boring. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom suffer from this too. It’s the issue inherent to “emergent gameplay” (i.e. having players make their own fun because you couldn’t be bothered to design any of it yourself) as a whole and is, what I think, most separates modern Zelda from the pre-Wii-era Zeldas.

I’m not saying change wasn’t needed by the time the Switch came around. Rather, I just think that Nintendo wound up trading one game design dead end for another. Given another game or two, this current iteration of Zelda will get just as stale as Skyward Sword’s version of Zelda did.

I’m still holding out hope that Nintendo is still interested in 2D Zelda, as it seems to be where it’s stilll interested in truly innovating in the series. Echoes of Wisdom was a nice experiment, but I’m really hoping they look back at the likes of Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Ages/Seasons or especially A Link Between Worlds for inspiration towards their future projects. 3D Zelda was great and all, and I still love the likes of Majora’s Mask, but 2D Zelda is still where all the magic is. It really is Nintendo at its best!

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How do you feel about 2D Zelda vs 3D Zelda? Which do you prefer? What do you want to see more of?

Image from the eShop