The Legend of Zelda; Link's Awakening (Nintendo Switch version):

While it is always nice to shake-up established franchises from time to time, a big problem with that is the fans that prefer what the IP was before it happened. This can be for any number of reasons (some debatably more valid than others), but in terms of games, a common one is the gameplay style. To me, an example of this was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and while I won't say it's a bad game, I'm personally not a fan of Open World Games like it, games that feel like giant sandboxes that try to have something resembling a story, but it's so easy to be sidetracked that you forget what the main plot was until it's over. While I don't believe Breath of the Wild is exactly like it, other games like the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, a lot of Ubisoft's generic open-world games, and other games in that vein do fall into that category. Games like that feel like they don't have a clear focus, at least to me.

So, when the next Zelda game that was revealed turned out to be more traditional, thanks to it being a remake of an older game, I was excited, especially as I'd never played the original Link's Awakening. However, one big question was hanging over it and continues to hang over it. "Is it worth the price tag?" It is, after all, a remake of a Game Boy game, a system not known for its large games. Without going further, the easiest way to answer that would be "How much do you want a traditional Zelda game?"

Starting with the plot, after being caught out in a storm, Link finds himself stranded on the mysterious Koholint Island, a peaceful place that is started to be infested with monsters, and the only way to stop the monsters is to wake up the sleeping Windfish which can be found inside of a giant egg on the Island's tallest mountain. To do this, Link must gather the eight Instruments of the Sirens from the eight main dungeons. Simple enough, and fitting for a story for a game originally made for the Gameboy, though the jump to new hardware has helped flesh out the story more thanks to better animations, and I believe more writing in the game's cutscenes. There's just enough to give you a dreamlike sense of adventure, enough to tell you what you need to do, but not being very blunt about it.

However, that can be both a blessing and a curse in the second half of the game, there were multiple times I had to do more digging outside of the game for the final few dungeons. There's a clear spike in difficulty in the second half of the game, not because the puzzles are getting harder, but because it feels like guesswork for how to get to where you want to be. In other Zelda games, I felt like I had accomplished something when I figure out the puzzle in a dungeon. Here though, it feels more like "Oh, I guess I was supposed to be here now". There were other points where the reward didn't feel satisfying, more like luck, mainly in the case of the expanded fishing minigame, and the final Secret Seashell, one of the game's collectibles, when you need to find over 50 of the things now. The claw minigame with the realistic claw physics had a similar situation, though more manageable most of the time. What does help a lot of the more frustrating elements of the game though is the jump from the Gameboy to the Switch allowing for more buttons, and access to more gear at the same time, it was the biggest problem with the Gameboy version. However, the Switch does struggle with the game, with numerous, at time obnoxious jumps between 30 and 60 FPS, something I wished they had sorted out before release, even if it meant locking the game to 30 FPS.

One part of the game I really didn't like, but love the potential it could have, is Danpe's Dungeon Maker, a limited Dungeon maker where you can create dungeons using the chamber rooms from an existing dungeon, along with other dungeons found by scanning Amiibo and finding Chamber Stones in the Overworld. Danpe himself has a series of challenges that will give you rewards, such as a bottle, more chamber stones, and a heart container, but the problem with it is that the Dungeons feel tedious to make thanks to things like not being able to control what stairs lead to where, making Dungeons that should be valid structures not work because the game decided to make two rooms right next to each other connect via stairs. There also isn't a large incentive for continuing to invest in the mode outside of the final reward, due to there being no Online uploads for the mode, meaning that if you want friends to play your creations, you have to either bring your Switch with you or save them onto an Amiibo. If they made a proper Zelda dungeon maker in the style of Super Mario Maker, I'd be all for it, but this? This feels forced in, grindy, and not necessary.

But, the be-all, end-all question. Is there enough here to justify paying for it as a full-priced game? While these changes do make it a better game then the original Gameboy release (Danpe not included), it's hard to recommend this for casual fans of the series, at least when compared to Breath of the Wild, and other games on the system. It's a lot of fun, but for those who think the longer a game is, the more it's worth a full price tag, it's hard to say it's worth the price unless you're desperate for a traditional Zelda experience on the Switch that isn't locked behind the online paywall. That being said, I'd love to see them continue to remake the Gameboy Zelda games, as I think the Switch could be great for the Oracle games, especially if they can make that third version happen.