Zelda: Link’s Awakening review: This beach adventure looks 2019, feels 1993
Enlarge / Welcome back to Koholint Island, the world of Link's Awakening, newly reborn as a lively, plasticky world of toys. (credit: Nintendo)
What can you expect from an official remake of a Nintendo classic? For nearly three decades, the answer has been all over the map. Sometimes, the company serves a graphical touch-up and nothing more. Sometimes, we get a full redo of a classic with new controls, mechanics, and plot. There's also an in-between zone where a classic returns more-or-less authentically but with clear "quality-of-life" changes and other surprise twists.
This year's remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, which debuted on the original Game Boy in 1993, stands alone in the company's re-release pantheon. No Nintendo game has ever returned with this much of a luxurious, jaw-dropping coat of audio-visual paint-while also gripping so fiercely to its original gameplay. As a result, you may not find a more polarizing first-party game on the Nintendo Switch.
Spoiler alert: It's pretty much the same
The steps you'll take to reclaim your sword on Koholint Island's beach are identical to the Game Boy original.
Let's be frank: You can spoil most of the new Link's Awakening by watching an existing YouTube playthrough of the Game Boy original. It's that allegiant to the source material, right down to the placement of terrain, enemies, and doorways. Need to solve a puzzle? Wondering where one of the game's "seashell" collectibles is hiding? Stuck on a boss's weak point? Go ahead, read an ASCII-formatted, decades-old walkthrough on a site like GameFAQs. It'll work.
Nintendo has rewound to a very specific adventure design era, somewhere between 1986's Legend of Zelda and 1991's Link to the Past, by re-releasing its final 8-bit Zelda game in such authentic fashion. What does that mean, exactly? On a basic level, this is top-down Zelda adventuring of old. You play as Link, an adventuring child in a green tunic who wakes up under mysterious circumstances. You proceed through a large overworld and its many dungeons to acquire keys and items while battling monsters and bosses. And many of the world's puzzles hinge on finding and using brand-new items.
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