The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - 1/1 - Henry Arrambide
What I miss the most with this new generation of hand-held gaming tech is the originality. Before the GBA hit the market with its flagship Super Mario Advance titles which were direct ports of the SNES counterparts, or the release of the DS with its total conversion of titles such as Resident Evil and Super Mario 64, developers had to get really creative due to technological limitations. Rather than Super Mario World getting a straight port, we received the Super Mario Land games - Six Golden Coins in particular took Mario straight out of any familiar element any ‘hardcore’ Nintendo fan today would recognize and placed him in a land where what Mario still did was jump; boy did those jumps get complex and fun as hell...they are lost now, drowned out by the familiar cult of Bowser and the Koopa troop - please don’t bring up New Super Mario Bros DS whose sole focus was the cutesy Mario atmosphere rather than the meat which makes the game run.
Link’s Awakening is possibly the best 2D Zelda game and second best Zelda game (best is Majora’s Mask you see; I’ll cover it one day when you’re older). Due to handheld limitations of the time, everything clicks, everything must absolutely work. There is no dungeon consisting of point-a-to-point-b-just-keep-on-clawshotting ‘puzzles’ and there are no items as isolated to a single dungeon as the top-thingamajig from Twilight Princess. Everything in the game needed to fulfill multiple roles and be used throughout the game to optimize space on the cart - what you get is a game in which every item has a purpose on almost every screen, every screen is filled with interesting little details and secrets, and every piece of information must work towards the overall flow of the game; there is no excess, there is no fat.
It’s great. Unlike say, Phantom Hourglass or Minish Cap in which the game is compartmentalized and sequenced with ‘modern’ set pieces and sidequests which ultimately render the game a mess of concepts tied together by some semblance of plotting, everything in Link’s Awakening had to be tied together out of necessity that the developers couldn’t put everything they wanted into the game, and so they had to slim down everything. There are still problems: the game has tedious warnings and reminders (boy this pot is heavy! is one that never fails to annoy), but it is nowhere near as bad as modern Nintendo with their constant handholding (I was surprised the game does not tell you how most of the items work beyond a single descriptive sentence - ever since the 3D era most Zelda games tend to drop whole text tutorials on you with every object, and don’t get me started on Twilight Princess’s constant reminders when it came to rupees).
What you get is a world that is fun to explore, despite it’s forced organization in which the geography or common sense of design is thrown out for videogame-y progression, and it works - discovering new outlandish areas and advancing to new locales on the island feels rewarding to the player, who gives a damn about it making sense. It’s all a dream anyway.
Which brings me to the aesthetics of the piece. Yeah, I can’t say much more about the mechanics. There are certain conditions under which the games, all the games I would consider ‘works of art’, are made. Link’s Awakening is not what I would call art, but it was made under the right circumstances. Everything had to count in this game, and so the visual and musical style had to be exaggerated and eye-catching. Ballad of the Windfish is still with me because of that blunt approach. Zelda had yet to develop a cult of Link and Ganon and Trifoce fever and all that crap, and so what we get instead is a nice Dunsinian fable - fantasy is a genre which I believe videogames can honestly pull off better than film and maybe even literature, if done right. What Link’s Awakening offers is a fantasy tale that draws from the most basic pre-Lord of the Rings stories, much like the original Legend of Zelda on the NES and modern works such as Shadow of the Colossus. There was no cult of Zelda to drown in (sadly, Skyward Sword looks like the ultimate tipping point - a game made solely to appease the fans and lacking any love in it’s production), and so it echoes real basic themes which one would find in the poetry of Yeats and early Lovecraft, or the tales of Lord Dunsany or the Brothers Grimm; you’re working with real basic and raw fantasy concepts, and they hit the player much harder than any convoluted mythology made solely for the sake of depth. These themes are expressed through blunt means due to size limitations, and so the effect is that much more powerful.
It’s a hell of a thing going back to those things which you cherished during your childhood and having to re-evaluate them, too many times you fear you loved something out of base ignorance or undeveloped tastes (recently I went back to listen to Ride the Lightining after so many years of expanding my musical tastes; what a BORING album aside from Creeping Death) and so you don’t replay and re-examine; you place those things you cherished on a pedestal and never look back. Luckily Link’s Awakening was made with some intent to make a good product rather than an economically appeasing product, and so despite some minor awkward aging problems, the game is still golden. Experience it.
Last note:
ReplyDeleteIt strikes me that the small, odd, compact structure of the game lends it even more similarities to old fantasy poems.