The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening Review: When you dream

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening was a bonafide classic 26 years ago, but will a new look with the game basically unchanged for Nintendo Switch prove that it hasn’t aged well?

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: September 20, 2019

The Legend of Zelda is my favorite Nintendo series. I have tons of shirts, sweatshirts, other various merch from the franchise and have beaten the majority of the console entries. However, for some reason, most of the handheld entries in the series just haven’t held my attention long enough to get deep into them.

There hasn’t been any particular reason as I’ve owned every Nintendo console beside the Virtual Boy, but I just never had much interest in a pocket-sized version of the grand adventures I was getting on a home console with the series. I’ve even owned the much-beloved first portable entry in the series, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening on several occasions but never gotten very far into it. Why is that?

Maybe it’s because portable is where The Legend of Zelda gets weird and experimental, and sometimes it doesn’t seem to pay off. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is no exception here.

While it doesn’t have any weird control schemes, it takes place in somewhere that isn’t Hyrule, has top-down and side-scrolling sections, and a heck of a lot of cameos from the Mario series! Many people have fond memories of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for the Nintendo Game Boy/Game Boy Color. I come to the Nintendo Switch version with a little memory of playing the game for a bit a few times over the decades, but not having any particular fondness for it, does it still hold up with what is essentially a new coat of paint for the Nintendo Switch?

As alluded to earlier, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for the Nintendo Switch is the same game it’s been for over 25 years, just with a very new and different coat of paint. The new look is more akin to a child’s playset of toys. It strikes me as a super highly detailed Playmobil set. This new look adds a lot of charm and is always delightful to wander around in and gives the game a very whimsical feel.

Which makes it all the more the shame that The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening on Nintendo Switch ,with its charming new looks, has some massive frame-rate issues that are severely noticeable. Whenever you enter a new screen or come out of a dungeon, or when there’s a lot of stuff happening at once, it’s just incredibly noticeable that the game has to “buffer” for a second and it’s incredibly jarring. Did I get used to it after several hours? Sure, but this seems like something the Switch hardware should be able to handle better and I could see how it would be something that certain people just couldn’t get used to.

The structure of the game is like pretty much any other in the series. You tackle a series of dungeons that are essentially puzzles and each one has a boss at the end.

The dungeons were well-designed back then and that hasn’t really changed with time. However, I would argue that The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening suffers from a problem many games of its era did where some solutions, how to beat certain enemies and even what you are supposed to do next or where to go can be incredibly obtuse.

I could not imagine beating this game without a walkthrough handy for tough spots or some things the game doesn’t even tell you about. Or things that seem optional, but actually aren’t. I’m not expecting my hand to be held, but an optional hint system would have been very welcome or some sort of in-game journal.

The elephant in the room should be addressed here though. This is a fully-priced $60 version game of a game that is over 25 years old and it’s not a full remake. Under those colorful playset-esque graphics and updated music is very much the exact same game. If you have a 3DS you can get this game for six bucks and it’s the same game, it just doesn’t look or sound as pretty. Is it worth the difference in price?

It’s a hard call to make. It’s obvious a lot of work went into the new look and sound and it’s still a great game. There is no straight formula for something being worth spending a certain amount of money on. For the budget-conscious, I can certainly see skipping out on this if you owned/own the original game and don’t have a huge desire to go back to it.  On the other hand, if you have never played the game and are in the mood for a (mostly) top-down Zelda adventure or it’s one of your all-time favorites and you’d love to play it again, I’d say the value is absolutely there.

As someone with no real nostalgia for the original game, I had an incredibly charming time with The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening despite some old warts due to decades-old game design and some framerate issues with the new look. It’s not overly long and everything from the look to the music and characters and monster designs is gorgeous. That’s something that remains from the original design and is only enhanced by the modern update. A lot of people hold this entry aloft as one of their favorites in the series and after playing through it, it’s easy to see why as it still registers as one of the more memorable entries in a series full of critically acclaimed ones.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments.
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