The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening was released in the 1993 for Game Boy and it was the fourth game of the serie Zelda. It’s considered, therefore, one of the best games for the platform at that time, but many things changed since that 1993.
Link’s Awakening was released in black and white and only a remake of the 1998 shows it coloured, where, it was added, even, another dungeon, dedicated, rightly, to the colours.
Let’s arrive, finally, to nowadays, with a new remake of the fourth chapter of the saga that, this time, arrives on another between the best consoles realized by Nintendo: the Switch and the Switch Lite.
The remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
Nintendo realizes so a new version of the chapter Link’s Awakening of the Zelda saga, in cooperation with Grezzo. It isn’t the first remake of videogames born by this cooperation. Before of this chapter even Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, always of the Zelda’s saga, had a new life thanks to them.
The game was faithfully reproduced, by passing from an obsolete and surely minimalist console of 26 years ago, although always remained in the heart of all the videogamers, to one with the potentialities of the Switch.
This means that, while opening The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, we will find it small, compact and with a graphic style substantially basic. But don’t forget that it is a remake of a videogames which dates back on the 1993. No one at that time thought it was small. Actually, probably it was the largest world that a videogamer could find on a console, which was therefore even portable!
The decision took was the one to stay as much as possible faithful to the original and, if from one side who doesn’t met the videogames’ world of the first ’90s, will find it too much compact and essential, from the other side, who at that time there was and already played, will just love an incredible jump into the past.
The story of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
Probably the last Zeldas got us used to travel in really big worlds, to explore an incredible quantity of islands or to ride from the snowy mountains to the most torrid deserts. But in Link’s Awakening it won’t be like that, the whole story takes place on the island Koholint. Right here Link arrived after a shipwreck and here he was looked after until he woke up by Marin.
Our adventure starts in the moment when Link wakes up and, as first duty, we will have to go looking for our sword, lost in the shipwreck on the seashore. After that, followed by our mentor, an owl, we will undertake our battle for Koholint, to save the island from the monsters and not only.
The graphic and the game’s style
Incredibly the remake from one console to another, with up to twenty years of difference, works in a surprisingly way.
The visual effect that we will have while living this remake is the one of a delicious diorama populated by plasticine’s figures. The whole adventure for Game Boy was divided in dials, here the effect remained only in the dungeons. However the game is still incredibly well organized and linear, always full of exploration and riddles, ancestors of the whole saga.
The main events must be followed chronologically and the secondary missions are mostly released by the time element. Accessible places at the wrong moment and missions that don’t seem important but that in reality they are. There are all the elements that like always characterized and go on to characterize the whole saga.
The controls
The controls of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remake are really faithful to the original too. Even though they are a little bit softer, the character movements are still limited to eight directions. By the way we can’t forget that, during the remake, entered a console much more full of bottons, so, some functions were implemented.
For example, it’s possible now to carry more objects, while before they were exclusively limited to two of them (sword and shield).
Unless the playability, the story wasn’t touch too much, unless some dungeons and riddles which were lightly changed.
Without any doubt a great jump in the past for the most nostalgic ones and the better way to spend some months while waiting for the long-awaited sequel of Breath of the Wild.
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