The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (Game Boy) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
1,683A playthrough of Nintendo's 1993 adventure game for the Nintendo Game Boy, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.
I do get the optional items (L2. Sword, Boomerang, Heart containers, etc) in this playthrough. I am also super-excited at how this recording went: it is the first time I've ever managed to finish the game without any deaths, so I was able to show the bonus "seagull" scene during the ending. I had never seen it before this playthrough!
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was released in the summer of 1993 to a pretty massive fanfare of hype - does anyone else remember the special 50th issue gold-cover Nintendo Power that featured the game on the cover?
*If you're looking for the other versions of the game, here are my playthroughs of those:
Game Boy Color remake: https://youtu.be/0wqmgE39nps
Switch remake: https://youtu.be/Rr5hyKLgknc
To me, Link's Awakening represented a new "era" in Game Boy titles. Of course there had been tons of excellent Game Boy software released in the years the system had been on the market already, but I always viewed Zelda as being the final bit of "glue" that held together the Game Boy's earliest attempts at providing games that could match the NES in terms of complexity and depth, the other two being Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins and Metroid II: The Return of Samus. Link's Awakening was total proof that, monochrome screen be damned, the Game Boy was capable of not just matching but even exceeding what had been done on the beloved NES.
It plays a lot like A Link to the Past: the top-down view, the overworld loaded with secrets, and the general flow balancing exploration with dungeon crawling are all here. Link's Awakening didn't merely settle on being a clone, however. It greatly expanded on many facets of the SNES title. There is a far heavier emphasis on story, and it was the text-heaviest Zelda game yet by a wide margin. There were a number of optional side-quests available beyond the "You found a piece of a heart container!" variety, and it introduced some cool new ideas with its items that would be seen again later on in the series. I mean, custom songs played on your ocarina to bring about some sort of change? Yeah, Ocarina of Time was certainly not the first to pull that trick. Nor was it the first to have a fishing mini-game.
The graphics and sound on this are also pretty amazing by Game Boy standards. I remember being thoroughly blown away by it when I played it way back as a middle schooler on the original Game Boy. There's an insane amount of detail packed in here - the flowers on the ground move with the wind, swinging your sword in a patch of weeds will send blades of grass slowly drifting to the ground - even Link himself has more detail than you'd expect. Equip him with a sword and a shield, and then make him face left and right - notice how it's not the same sprite being mirrored? The graphic actually reflects what he's holding. It might sound like a stupid, insignificant detail now, but touches like these - on a Game Boy game - really show just how determined they were to provide a top-tier console experience on the go.
The writing also helped a great deal in selling the experience. Zelda to this point had never been big on expository text and dialogue. Most people would give you a text-box or two's worth of information, written in fairly dry, awkwardly concrete English. This one is loaded with text, and much of it carries a distinct, hilariously cheeky tone. In fact, this is the first time I ever remember humor being actively incorporated in a Zelda game, and let me tell you - it does wonders for immersion. And for genuine laughs, there are some fairly twisted jokes going that give the world so much more personality than it had ever had before.
Just go and try to stab a chicken enough times while Marin is following. She'll eventually start cheering you on, screaming "Kill it!" :D
I adored it, no question. I think - and please, put down the torches! - this is probably my favorite game in the series. A Link to the Past is a close second, but for me Link's Awakening took everything about the phenomenal SNES game and polished it to a blinding finish. The mechanics had all been super-refined, the world felt alive and inhabited (now by more than six people!), and the entire experience came together to create something pretty damned magical.
And yeah, I know that there was a color version released years later, but this was the version I had and played, and besides a couple of extras, the two are virtually identical. I think the green graphics on this game give it quite a bit of charm, anyway.
[Recorded in Retroarch, Gambatte core using the DMG shader for that hyper-nostalgic simulated dot-matrix display!]
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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