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Spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (all versions) follow.
The new Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening remake for Switch leans hard into Nintendo's "toy box" aesthetic, and reminds us of Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto's inspiration of looking down into his desk drawer and imagining a tiny garden inside.
2016 illustration from “Zelda in Simulacra” for ZEAL.
The 1993 Game Boy title, later rereleased in vivid tones with a new, secret "color dungeon" for the Game Boy Color in 1998, seemed to have an oddly charmed development cycle that reflected on the project and the game's story and tone.
Originally envisioned as a Game Boy port of the Super Nintendo’s Zelda: A Link to the Past, it took shape with Miyamoto and his frequent collaborator Takashi Tezuka at the helm as designers. Along with the writers Yoshiaki Koizumi and Kensuke Tanabe, they crafted a sweet little game that, like its oft-cited influence of the TV show Twin Peaks, see-sawed in tone between humor and mournfulness, romanticism and anxiety.
Early in the game, the owl tells you that you must wake the mysterious Wind Fish to escape Koholint Island. You learn that the bosses are called Nightmares, and unlike most video game bosses, they're more afraid of Link, and what might happen (what, we don't know at first) when the Wind Fish awakes.
Playful references to other Nintendo series—Yoshi, Kirby, Mario 2 boss Wart, and the Goombas all make appearances—remind of the lighthearted moments of Twin Peaks, with Dale Cooper and his goofy love simple, earthly pleasures of coffee and northwestern trees. Of course, this is like Twin Peaks if you had to give a hibiscus flower to a goat to eventually gain a boomerang.
At one point, a wandering pink ghost follows Link like a bad habit. You eventually lead them to their house in Martha’s Bay, upon which they examine their things, their cozy old place. Then the ghost asks to be taken to their grave, the one with the flowers. I appreciate this approach to grief, to grieving one’s own self, which the wrenching process from childhood can be.
The developers worked late after hours on the game, describing it as feeling like an after-school club; only instead of acting as the Yearbook Committee, they made an often lighthearted, thoughtful, sometimes melancholy videogame. Link's Awakening DX, the Game Boy Color version, is available on the 3DS eShop, and while issues such as limited buttons cause issues are solved in the Switch remake, the originals hold a special place in many gamers' hearts.
Perhaps only Nintendo president Doug Bowser (yes, that’s his real name) knows if Game Boy titles will ever show up on the Switch's online service, now offering NES and Super NES games, that replaced the long-running Virtual Console market, so if you have a Nintendo 3DS to dust off, Link's Awakening DX for Game Boy Color still holds many charms.
But what of the Switch remake? To me, the Game Boy line remains the most nostalgic of the Nintendo consoles for me, and the portable Nintendo Switch seems like the ultimate Game Boy to me. (However, the upcoming Game Boy clone the Analogue Pocket might literally be the ultimate Game Boy.)
Viewing the trailers, I thought Link’s eyes looked dead. But upon downloading the game to my Switch and booted it up, I was reminded of something I’d heard somewhere; that it seemed like the anime, Ghibli-inspired Link in the intro and ending cutscenes is the “real” Link, and the “toy” Link is the Link in the dream.
Is it the Wind Fish’s dream, or is it Link’s? It’s unclear throughout the adventure. The other night, suffering from the most severe insomnia I can recall having, I played the Link’s Awakening remake on stream on my Twitch channel. Crediting this in part to playing a game I loved so dearly and felt so free playing, I felt more natural and conversational than any other time I’d been livestreaming games on Twitch beforehand. My roommate told me the next night that he had been unable to sleep too, and he turned on my stream and fell asleep. He called me “the Bob Ross of streamers,” which makes sense because I was talking softly because I didn’t want to wake anyone up!
Tom Waits “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” written by Waits and Kathleen Brennan
One of Miyamoto’s inspirations for Link, elfin and clothed in green, was Peter Pan. I think of when I drove my parents’ red 1998 Dodge Intrepid around central New Jersey with a tape of Tom Waits’ 1986 Bone Machine blasting. Could Link’s dream journey through Koholint Island reflect Peter’s flight to the island of the Lost Boys? Maybe Link’s pain of losing Marin and the rest of the inhabitants of Koholint when he awakes is the pain of growing up, the pain of losing our own fantasies at times. An artist’s way is to either keep or regain those fantasies, so for Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, composer Koji Kondo, and the rest of the team create the world of a young person’s fancies in Link’s Awakening.
The Ramones “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”