The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX (Game Boy Color) review "The sleep of the Wind Fish produces monsters. And dungeons. And singing girls. And..."

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX is pretty much what you would expect from an established franchise on Game Boy: a briefer, more dialed-back experience. Thankfully, by this title's initial release, Nintendo had hit their stride with the portable platform, delivering campaigns that were compact and effective. Honestly, it stood as such a well-done adventure for its time that people like me barely noticed how tiny it was in comparison to other games within the series. However, years of playing open-world adventures has taught me this one is actually quite diminutive.

...and yet, no less fantastic.

You see, this adventure doesn't send Link through a battle against Ganon. Instead, it mainly involves Link becoming stranded on the mysterious Koholint Island. Your main objective remains getting back to the sea, which you accomplish by waking up a creature sleeping in an egg—called the “Wind Fish”—at the summit of a mountain. However, ending the beast's slumber could have grave consequences for those dwelling on the island. Though the game puts the player in a position of moral gravity, it never asks you to deviate from your plan. You simply go through the motions while knowing full well you could be wiping out whole groups of sentient beings that may or may not be part of a dream.

At the same time, existential questions pop into your mind. Are the people of the island really alive? Do they actually exist or are they just facets of the Wind Fish's personality transfigured into characters he dreamt up? I mean, are the people in our dreams real? Probably not. As I indicated, they're likely either pieces of us or our mind's interpretation of fellow humans. More than the previous few Zelda, this one gets you thinking, but it doesn't pretentiously dwell on its subject like some modern games do. It remembers that it's a game first and a Philosophy 101 assignment second.

However, as a Game Boy Color title, it doesn't thrust you into a large landscape. Instead, this one presents a more down-scaled world that's compactly designed to feel fuller than it actually is. While that might sound disappointing, the truth is Nintendo didn't waste space whatsoever and pushed the original Game Boy to its limits. You don't encounter many areas that feel like filler between sections of the map, as it segues from forest to mountain to cemetery to marsh in as few screens as possible.

You'll find there's still plenty to explore here because whole sections become barred, requiring you to acquire items as you would in a Metroid title. For instance, the campaign starts off with only a small portion of real estate ripe for searching. That changes after you acquire an item called the Roc Feather, which allows you to jump over holes. Over time, you gain the means to lift objects blocking your way, cross gaps with a Hook Shot, or charge forward with a pair of Pegasus Boots. Accessing new areas grants you passage to hidden caves and cottages containing either shops or eccentric characters looking to peddle wares. On top of that, every bush your slash, rock you lift, or patch of ground you dig may hold one of twenty-six seashells, which you eventually trade in for a more powerful sword.

Despite being a smaller adventure, Awakening is a true-blue Zelda offering that wastes little time in dishing out the goods. The spaces between dungeons prove to be shorter than before, and the exploration factor on offer is very efficient. Though you know you're playing a bite-size installment, you either never feel that way or never care because the game stays wholly true to its own series' concepts and core mechanics.

Even dungeons, small they might be, pack fair amounts of challenge and adventure in tight packages. Yeah, you're looking at map layouts that come across as akin to the NES original, but with fewer rooms that exist as padding. No, not every room serves a purpose, but so many of them provide simple puzzles and secrets that you're required to uncover in order to complete your crawl. Hell, in many instances, dungeons hide their secrets behind themed challenges. One stage revolves heavily around lifting and throwing clay jars, revealing buttons hidden beneath them or using them to open doors. Another gauntlet involves a device that creates floor tiles over pits and lava, thereby allowing you to mosey across previously inaccessible environments, with a couple of segments in that dungeon requiring you to fully fill in the chamber to access a hidden chest.

Of course, dungeon crawling leads to boss encounters, which came up as a sticking point for me in the previous journey. Yeah, A Link to the Past's bosses were fun, but a few of them came across as rather cheap. This one doesn't feature as many villains with combinations of erratic motions and overly frustrating rooms filled with traps. Instead, each boss partly manifests as a problem to solve. For instance, one fight pits you against a genie inside a bottle. As long as the vessel remains intact, you cannot damage him. Your first instinct might be to slash the bottle, but you have to remember which new piece of equipment you just received and how it could be applied here. That leads you to picking up the bottle and giving it a toss. A simple throw on its own won't do, but against a hard object like the wall?

Yeah, bosses are more or less the same as everything else. They're quite easy to defeat once you figure them out, owing mostly to the game's solid mechanics that play similarly to A Link to the Past. Yet, they pack just the right amount of punch to cap off short dungeons. They never really feel overwhelming or cheap, and serve precisely the purpose they're intended.

Link's Awakening may be humble by today's standards, but it's no less a worthwhile iteration of the Zelda formula. It's shorter and more direct than its brethren, but still very much a treat that hits its franchise's notes in short order, with tiresome gaps and unnecessary spaces.

Community review by JoeTheDestroyer (December 03, 2023) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.