A short time back in my trolling the web for interesting cross stitch and other crafts I came across this spectacularly excellent cross stitched map of the overworld from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening by the indomitable Cross-stitch Ninja. An impressive feat of crafting, it called to my attention just how excellent a game is Link’s Awakening. I’ve continued to think on it, from time to time, because to this day it strikes me as surprisingly wonderful.

Link’s Awakening seems to come from a foreign time and place to me. It was released in 1993 here in the United States for the Game Boy. At the time, we only had the original blocky, blurry, green-screened monstrosity as far as I can recall. I own one of the original systems on which I played a great deal of Tetris, Final Fantasy Adventure¹, and little else that I can recall. I abandoned the Game Boy as a gaming platform at some point before the release of Link’s Awakening until some years later when Pokémon fever gripped the nation.

Indeed, by 1993 I had all but given up on the console, handheld or otherwise, as a gaming system. I was still very much interested in games. Contests of chance and skill seem etched on my very DNA. An impressionable 11-year-old I begged my parents for a Sega Genesis 2 , half-heartedly collected a number of titles, none of which could be considered “classic” and roundly turned to other means of recreation. Pen-and-paper games became an obsession and a neighbor had access to a seemingly vast assortment of pirate PC games (Transported on tape drives, no less!) that satiated my desires for pixelated adventure.

As such, I almost never put my hands around a Super Nintendo controller and do not have the warm fuzzy memories many of my contemporaries have of Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III/VI, Yoshi’s Island, or Super Metroid. Nor did I play Link’s Awakening until it was re-released on the Game Boy Color in a slightly upgraded state. Indeed, my first experience with the game came from my mother’s college friend who came to visit one summer and brought a newly acquired Game Boy along as company during a long drive.

This is what I mean when I say it seems to come from a foreign time and place. Not having kept up with home and portable consoles during most of the 1990’s I find any games from the time period to be strange new relics resurrected from a time of which I was barely aware. It’s exciting, as if I had discovered a parallel universe. Or, a parallel universe’s entertainments at any rate.

So, then, back to the topic at hand. Link’s Awakening, upon final discovery in the Game Boy Color version, is a far cry different from the Legend of Zelda to which I was most intimately familiar. Keep in mind I had never seen A Link to the Past at this point even though it had been released several years earlier. While some of the elements had been teased in Zelda 2, I had not played a game in the series with such robust non-combat interaction. Here was a village of characters with whom Link could, nay must, speak. Link’s Awakening introduced, fully, the fetch-quest structure that was featured in every game hence. It also showed me a Zelda game in some semblance of 3-dimensions with hills to bound over and enemies that couldn’t be hit from below.

It was also kooky. Both the townspeople and monsters of the game’s setting Koholint Island are quirky and humorous. Many puns are used throughout the adventure. Children in the village break the fourth wall by telling you how to play the game, but claim ignorance of the meaning because they’re “just a kid!” The object of the game, though it is not immediately obvious, is to awaken the Wind Fish, a flying whale who sleeps in a giant egg atop the highest peak on the island.

Despite being a handheld game Link’s Awakening takes major steps to refining the core game play that would define the series. The items and weapons found in the game’s dungeons are essential to progress, even more so than in the NES games. More than any other early handheld game Link’s Awakening demonstrates that portable does not necessarily mean substandard. Through it we could see the first glimpse that handheld gaming could be just as significant as home console games.

Okay, so maybe A Link to the Past might have been more significant, but I played this one first, and it stuck with me. With its whimsical setting, endearing characters, and solid gameplay it has stayed one of my all-time favorite games on any platform. Honestly, I think it just might be my favorite Legend of Zelda game.

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¹ It was actually a Seiken Densetsu game, a series that would be released here some time later as Secret of Mana.

² “Sega does what Nintendon’t!”