From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - Rising Above Its Technology
Link's first portable adventure laughed in the face of technical limitations and showed me what true power really is.

Much of what constitutes my memories of video games are the events that surrounded them: the seasons in which I discovered them, the processes through which they found their way into my life, the friends with whom I played them, how my relationships with them evolved over time, and the ways in which they inspired me to think, wonder and create.

These events play an important role in shaping how I remember all of the games that I've written about.

And for the greatest, most transformational games, there was always another powerfully eye-opening element: the way in which they reframed the medium's current state, challenged my perception of how things were, and inspired me to change my way of thinking.

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was one of those games. It challenged me like no other.

Before it hit the scene, everything about my personal gaming world made perfect sense. There was a clear order to things: I had my NES, my SNES, and my Game Boy, and each one of them had its own specific role and a unique technical function.

My NES remained on the TV stand because I wanted to keep the 8-bit spirit alive. Its presence allowed me to perpetually replay old favorites; explore all of the legacy games that my brother, James, was continuing to add to my collection (and all of the games that I was renting from the local video stores); and stay up to date with all of the console's latest (and final) releases and mainly the classic-series Mega Man games.

I turned to my SNES to play technologically advanced masterworks and experience the next level of console gaming.

And I regarded my Game Boy as a device that could provide me instant entertainment, whether I was at home or on the road, with its library of simple, bite-sized action games and puzzlers. It had recently become home to a few NES-scale games, sure, but in my mind, it wasn't designed for those types of games. It didn't have the power to truly do them justice. And surely, I thought, even the most advanced of them were already pushing the platform to its absolute limits and thus showing me that it wasn't the best place for them.

The Game Boy wasn't the NES, I strongly felt, and it simply wasn't designed to provide NES-level experiences. That wasn't its role.

That was my conception of the Game Boy, and it remained so even after I played Metroid II: Return of Samus, whose impressive technical achievements still weren't enough to convince me that the Game Boy deserved to host such games. "It's just not an ideal platform for NES-level games or sequels to big franchises," I stubbornly insisted.

A little more than a year later, though, I started to feel as though my world view wasn't holding up very well. In light of certain big-name releases, the waters started to become murkier, and suddenly I was no longer able to properly define what the Game Boy was supposed to be. It began life as a platform tailor-made for simple, scaled-down games, but now, surprisingly, it was encroaching upon the NES' space and suddenly had designs on taking even slices of the SNES' pie!

The game that pioneered this new movement was Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, which was somehow able to convincingly replicate the look of Super Mario World. I was fascinated by this occurrence. I couldn't believe that the Game Boy was able to produce a game that was so visually similar to a 16-bit game!

But still, despite my considering it to be a great portable game, I couldn't deny that it obviously wasn't able to match Super Mario World's sheer size or scope. Also, I felt that it wasn't anywhere in the same galaxy in terms of quality. So ultimately I wound up settling on the opinion that this push to create graphical similarities between SNES and Game Boy games was mostly a facade. It was meant to disguise the fact that the Game Boy had already maximized its potential and simply couldn't be pushed beyond what it had already shown.

The reality, I was certain, was that old gray brick just didn't possess the capability to produce games that were truly on the level of 16-bit games.

That's why I was highly skeptical when Nintendo Power Volume 44's Pak Watch section revealed that Nintendo was working on a Game Boy-exclusive sequel to the legendary The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It was called "Zelda IV."

And much like I was with the previously released Super Mario Land 2, I was fascinated with how closely its graphics and sprite-work resembled its inspiration's. They rendered a game that looked just like A Link to the Past! "This achievement must be a product of sorcery!" I thought to myself.

But still, I simply couldn't envision a final product that would turn out to be even half as good as the game that inspired it. "There's no way that Nintendo can pull off an A Link to the Past-caliber game on the Game Boy," I continued to believe.

And having apparently forgotten what my experiences with Metroid II taught me, I was also kind of peeved that a direct sequel to one of my all-time-favorite games was coming to the Game Boy and not the platform on origin. A follow-up to the A Link to the Past, I felt, belonged on the SNES, whose power could have been used to create an even larger game world and a sequel whose action, visuals and music blew away its predecessor's!

I mean, this was, after all, a mainline Zelda entry! It wasn't like the Super Mario Land games. It wasn't the type of game that could be treated like a nebulously-related offshoot and held to a lower standard, no. It needed to be big and spectacular!

Because that's what Zelda games were supposed to be!

But it didn't seem as though this new entry was going to be capable of living up to that expectation. It looked like nothing more than a miniaturized, Game Boy-ified version of A Link to the Past, and that, I was certain, meant that its action screens would be too uncomfortably cramped, its world would be much smaller in size, and its overall quality would be far below the original work's.

So I had absolutely no expectations for Zelda IV (whose official name became "The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening"). I simply couldn't get hyped for it, nor could I bring myself to closely follow Nintendo Power's future coverage of it. I mostly ignored it.

My memories of that period are so tainted by those overpowering feelings of disinterest, in fact, that I don't even recall how I came into possession of the game. I don't remember if I got it as a birthday gift that August (which happened to be the month that it released) or if I went out and bought it at a later date.

The only thing that I remember is the sense of enlightenment I felt as I played Link's Awakening and watched on as it confidently strutted its stuff and exhibited its powerful ambition. It succeeded in teaching me a lesson and showing me that clinging to predisposed notions was an amazingly shortsighted way of viewing video games.

And it taught me that sometimes the best things come in the smallest packages.

Sadly, I don't have any clear chronological memories of my experiences with Link's Awakening. I have only scattered memories. But still, each one of them is pretty special.

I recall my earliest impressions of the game. I remember how, from the very start, I was fond of how the game looked and especially how it felt. I was taken with its unique vibe, which I could only describe as "whimsical-yet-touchingly-wistful." I was instantly enchanted with the atmosphere that it created.

I'd explored no more than ten screen's worth of overworld map, yet I could already sense that Link's Awakening was elaborate and complex in a way that other Game Boy games could only dream of being--both in its design and the manner in which it conveyed emotion. Link's Awakening was an ideal median: It possessed the powerful visual energy of A Link to the Past, and at the same time, it felt like an NES game in how it captured the simple-and-indelible spirit of the 8-bit era and thus stirred my imagination and inspired me to wonder.

The game's visuals were very evocative, yes, but it was more so the music that heavily shaped my thoughts and feelings. It had a quality to it that I couldn't describe at the time. A game's tune, on the surface, could convey anything from cheerfulness to solemnity to even ominous tones, yet it would always contain an underlying sense of sadness to its composition. This made me sense that there was a sobering undercurrent to the world that I was exploring. It made me feel as though an air of desperation was quietly seeping through its cracks.

The town theme, for instance, sounded festive and jovial, but if I listened to it for a long period of time, I'd be induced into a state of pensiveness. I'd start to think deeply about the tune's message and wonder if it was meant to belie a distressing truth.

The cave theme, too, made me feel that way. It was merely mysterious-sounding at first, but in the subsequent loops, it started to become increasingly glum in character. It was clearly telling me that this world had a dark secret.

The forest theme was similarly evocative. It was unsettling and ominous in tone, but it also a contained a hidden quality: creeping despair, whose presence would become more evident to me the longer I listened to the tune. That sense of despair was haunting this world.

But at the time, I didn't possess the literacy necessary to adequately articulate what the game's music was doing or how it was doing it. All I could say was that the music was "sad in a way."

No Zelda music ever evoked these types of feelings from me (save for A Link to the Past's credits theme, which had a similar type of energy to it).

I felt that using music this way was an interesting approach to creating atmosphere and conveying emotion, but still I was a bit unsettled by it at first. I wasn't yet ready to carry the burden of having to think deeply about my surroundings and decipher their dark secrets.

That's why it was such a relief for me--such a great moment of escape--when I retrieved my sword at the beach's quiet coastline. At that moment, an empowering fanfare jingle gave way to the classic, amazingly welcoming The Legend of Zelda overworld theme! I was so happy to hear.

Though, the feeling of relief lasted only a few moments. It ended as soon as the theme's intro finished playing, at which point the tune ("Awakening," as it's called) went in an unexpectedly different direction and started to convey the same type of sad, pessimistic undertone that all of the other tunes were conveying. On the surface, it was an uplifting theme, but the more I listened to it, the more clear it became to me that it was actually a melancholic tune whose positive energy was only a veneer.

"What is this music trying to tell me?" I continued to wonder as I moved from screen to screen. "What do all of these conflicting tones mean?"

Those were the questions that remained on my mind during the entirety of my first play-through.

In every future play-through, listening to the music and attempting to interpret its meaning was an important part of the experience. Doing so would always remind me why I loved the game and why I found it so wonderfully engrossing. And in time, its music would come to have a much greater meaning. It would come to define what the Game Boy meant to me and remind me why I considered it to be such a special gaming platform (mostly because it was home to powerfully evocative games like Link's Awakening!).

My first impressions weren't all positive, though. There were elements of the game that I didn't care for. I wasn't, for instance, a fan of how restrictive the map was in the early going. Entire sections of it were blocked off by bushes, rocks and other obstructions, and resultantly, the game's world felt disappointingly linear. And that was disappointing to me. It just wasn't what I wanted from my Zelda games. I desired to have the ability to freely explore the world and engage in a process of advancement via discovery. But Link's Awakening didn't seem interested in allowing me to have that level of freedom.

The map opened up as I obtained certain items (like the Power Bracelet, which allowed me to pick up rocks), yeah, but still it continued to feel structured and compartmentalized. At all times, I could only go where the game needed me to be at the time, and that bothered me. I wanted the game to leave me alone so that I could explore at my leisure, take in the sights, and find some secrets. But it wouldn't do that.

Also, I was aggravated by the game's constant need to display explanatory prompts. Whenever I'd make contact with any obstructive object (a pot, a cracked rock, or one of those weird crystalline protrusions), it would hit me with the same unnecessarily long, painfully slow-scrolling warning message telling me that I currently lacked the ability to clear it away.

"I know!" I'd shout while exasperatedly mashing the A and B buttons. "Stop telling me this!"

I mean, really: This game was intent on treating me like I had some type of severe short-term memory issue--particularly so whenever I'd obtain a compass, at which point it would once again hit me with same excruciatingly long thousand-word prompt I'd already seen before.

"I get it! It has a new feature that reveals the locations of treasure chests!" I'd say while madly mashing the buttons. "Please stop making me read this!"

And I also didn't like that you had to constantly pause the game to assign weapons to the two action buttons. Doing so quickly grew tiresome, and worst of all, it damaged the game's flow. It was probably the game's biggest flaw.

Still, I couldn't put too much of the blame for that on the designers, because, honestly, they were really short on input options. Considering the limitations they had to work with, theirs was a commendable effort to take A Link to the Past's multi-input control scheme and make it work with only four buttons. They did the best that they could.

It just sucked that the resulting item-switching process was so tedious and interruptive.

I also had a problem with the way that the power-ups--the guardian acorns and the Triforce pieces--were handled. They were helpful, certainly, but they were oversupplied to the point of absurdity. Every fifth or sixth defeated enemy was dropping one of them, it seemed. The problem wasn't so much the items, themselves, as much their accompanying theme: an extremely-high-pitched, ringy-sounding eight-second ditty that would loop endlessly until you sustained a certain amount of damage.

That ditty was discordant-sounding (especially in contrast to the game's normal tunes, all of which were so charming and well-composed) and unpleasantly repetitive, and it got grating real quick. That's why I was always relieved when the items' effects would finally wear off.

I found that ditty so annoying, in fact, that sometimes I'd purposely take damage or leave the area so that I could get it to stop playing as quickly as possible. "I can live with having less sword power or defense," I'd think to myself in those moments.

But otherwise, Link's Awakening was a terrific game, and it had completely absorbed me. I was firmly invested in its excellent action and its enchanting story about a mysterious island whose existence was in peril and whose every space and every habitant was apparently the product of a passing dream.

Link's Awakening was a winner, and I was having a great experience with it.

At the time, though, I wasn't ready to say that it was on par with A Link to the Past because my biases were telling me that such a thing couldn't possibly be true. "Come on now," I'd promptly respond with dismissive energy any time my subconscious voice would raise the idea that Link's Awakening was as good as its SNES inspiration. "How can a cramped-feeling, colorless Game Boy game ever compare favorably to an SNES game? It simply can't!"

Hell--even considering such an idea felt like an act of heresy.

Still, though, I couldn't deny that Link's Awakening had a next-level quality to it. It possessed an aura that was so powerful that it managed to help the game to rise above its monochrome visuals and meager sound technology and feel as though it was truly transcendent. And in impressive fashion, it was able to meet and even sometimes exceed A Link to the Past in terms of world-building, engrossing narrative structure, environmental conveyance, and the ability to use music as an atmosphere-defining storytelling device.

It felt like something far greater than just some simple 8-bit portable adventure game.

It didn't contain as many dungeons as A Link to the Past, sure, but the ones that it had were all topnotch (whereas the former had a few that felt like throwaways). I rated the majority of its grottos and shrines as some of the series' most brilliant constructions. Each one had a unique aural and visual theme, exclusive decor, and consequently a very distinct personality; and it also had an interesting sub-boss or two and some exceptional puzzles.

And my sense was that the designers put a lot of love and attention into the dungeons and strived to make each one of them feel special.

Certain dungeons had generic water and lava themes and the expected pitfalls, sure, but those qualities weren't what defined them. What made them special were the clever ideas they presented, the engrossing atmospheres they generated, and the thought-provoking stories their environmental elements told. They never allowed themselves to be bound by series conventions.

The dungeon that stood out to me the most was the Eagle's Tower, which was a memorable combination of inventive and brain-busting. In order to solve its overarching puzzle, you had to carefully and craftily maneuver both Link and an iron ball around its interior and do so with the aim of demolishing four support pillars and collapsing part of tower onto itself. That was the only way in which you could access the tower's isolated top floor.

Completing this task entailed figuring out how to transport the iron ball to places to which it seemingly couldn't reach. It was a maddening process. But it was also a very fun one, and moreover it really helped to highlight how eager the game's designers were to make their dungeons feel strikingly unique.

I had to be honest with myself and admit that not a single one of A Link to the Past's dungeons had a puzzle that was anywhere near as ingenious as Eagle Tower's.

Link's Awakening differentiated itself wherever it could. It did so most notably in the way in which it handled dungeon access: You couldn't just waltz your way into, say, the Tail Cave or the Angler's Tunnel, no. Rather, you had to earn your way in.

Basically the lead-up to a dungeon's entry, itself, was treated as a dungeon-style challenge. And usually it didn't entail something as simple as searching the nearby screens for a key, no. It was rarely conventional. And the designers' playing around with the formula in such an offbeat way created challenges and sequences that I considered to be some of my favorite in the game.

I loved, in particular, the way in which I was required to bust my way into Bottle Grotto, whose entrance was obstructed by a number of seemingly impervious swamp creatures. To do so, I had to talk to one of the villagers and take her "dog" Bow-Wow (a sharp-toothed, jerkily-moving Chain Chomp that was taken directly from the Super Mario universe) for a walk. Bow-Wow had an insatiable appetite and could chomp down any minor enemy in one bite, and it was advantageous for me to have possession of him because he was capable of eating the swamp creatures that were obstructing the grotto's entrance.

And that's how you advanced! You took a dog for a walk and let him feast on the local wildlife!

"How wonderfully original," I felt inspired to think as I engaged in this process and watched Bow-Wow do his work.

Almost all of the game's dungeon-access puzzles hit me that way.

Bravely (or perhaps "recklessly," I originally thought), the designers also incorporated a jumping mechanic via the new Roc's Feather item.

Honestly, I wasn't immediately comfortable with the idea of being able to jump in a top-down-style Zelda game because I was concerned that having such an ability would compromise the world's design and make a mockery of certain types of dungeon challenges.

However, it did nothing of the sort. Its inclusion, instead, allowed for more convenient means of exploration and the potential for new types of interesting puzzles in both the top-down and 2D areas. So it wound up adding a lot to the formula and helping the game to further establish its own unique styles of character movement and puzzle-solving.

Mainly, though, it was just a whole lot of fun to hop all over the place and soar over enemies! It made the character movement, itself, one of the game's most enjoyable aspects. And once I saw what it added to the formula, I couldn't imagine a future top-down Zelda without an item of its type.

Link's Awakening went above and beyond to prove that it wasn't some dumbed-down version of its SNES inspiration. It strived to be just as noteworthy and as special as A Link to the Past and to achieve that status not by simply iterating on the formula but by being novel and daring in a highly notable way.

At one point, I even started to think that it was created by a completely different development team and people who were purposely going out of their way to defy convention and stray as far from the blueprint as they could. (At this point, I had no knowledge of Nintendo's internal structure, and I was apt to assume that each of the company's big game series had a dedicated, largely-unchanging development team working on it.)

The only thing that was certain to me was that Link's Awakening's developers had succeeded in crafting a Zelda world that was unlike any other I'd ever visited. Koholint Island was a remarkably distinct, wonderfully enchanting place, and I loved exploring it and immersing myself in its uniquely evocative, thought-provoking environments.

In time, I formed a personal attachment to Koholint Island and its cast of curiously unaffected, amiable characters, who seemed to sense that they were doomed but still continued to live their lives with the unwavering hope that a better tomorrow was waiting for them. I always had a great time exploring every screen and examining every pixel of their fading world and spending hours joyfully jumping and dashing about its every accessible space.

And I especially enjoyed soaking in and savoring its atmosphere and doing so while letting its music--with its intrinsic, deeply nostalgic Game Boy tones--influence my thoughts.

Whenever I was in that mode, I'd always make sure to visit a villager's abode and listen to the game's soft, comforting house theme. I did so because that theme had a special power: It was able to evoke emotions and visualizations that did amazingly well to capture the moment and thus serve as the perfect expression of how I was feeling at that point in my life. I knew that I was living in a special time that was close to ending. Soon things would be changing not just for video games but for my life as well.

I wasn't sure how, exactly, so I'd park myself in one one of Mabe Village's houses and let its touching, poignant music help me to explore my thoughts and deeply ruminate on the future. "What comes next?" I'd wonder. "And how different are things going to be after the change?"

And in any play-through, I couldn't wait until it was time to visit the mountain area: Tal Tal Heights. I always looked forward to gazing upon its vertically aligned skyline and ocean backgrounds, which did such a beautiful job of defying the game's sense of flatness and giving Koholint Island a feeling of transcendent depth. Tal Tal's imagery helped me to shape my visualization of the island and give it grander scale and a wonderful richness, and that visualization, with its powerfully expressive qualities, came to form my everlasting mental image of Link's Awakening's world.

What I loved most about Tal Tal heights, though, was its musical theme. It was an emotionally complex whose separate parts had a way of evoking a different types of feelings. Its upbeat, spirited intro would fill me with wonder and inspire me to envision myself bravely scaling mountains. As I listened to it, I'd think about what it would be like to be a hero.

But as soon as the opening verse began to play, the tune would shed its cheerful cover and begin to exude a stirringly wistful energy that would cause my mood to change. Suddenly I'd become reflective and start thinking about days past and all of the experiences that brought me to this point.

The way I viewed it, the Tal Tal Heights theme spoke of a long, fruitful journey and its looming finality. It spoke of overcoming obstacles and then finding the courage to take on new challenges. It pretty much encapsulated my journey as a game enthusiast. That's why I was so moved by it.

It was pretty much the perfect tune for a mountain setting!

I was particularly obsessed with the game's 2D side-scrolling areas. I loved how they took the original Legend of Zelda's idea of switching to a front-view perspective and greatly expanded upon it. Zelda's 2D areas were comprised of single screens that merely functioned as item-holding and transitional spaces, but Link's Awakening's 2D areas were fully formed action segments and offered multiple screens of fun and memorable platforming challenges.

I loved everything about how these areas were constructed and presented--everything from their highly-nostalgic-feeling atmosphere and ambiance to the way in which they tested Link's jumping and weapon-handing skills in a front-view setting. They added some great variety to the game.

There were two integral elements to the 2D areas' makeup. The first were their curiously unique visual and aural qualities: the cavernous, dimly lit passages that formed them and the mysterious, slightly unsettling 8-note ditty that defined their atmosphere. These qualities were highly alluring and imagination-stirring, and they inspired me to wonder about how these areas looked from Link's perspective and what it might feel like to explore such spaces. They're the reason why I liked to hang around the 2D areas and spend time observing them and drinking in their atmosphere.

The second element were their exclusive residents: a specially designated group of Super Mario enemies whose members included Goombas, Piranha Plants, Cheep-Cheeps, Thwomps, Bloopers, and Podoboos All of them behaved exactly like they did in the Super Mario games, and you could engage with and manipulate them in the expected ways. You could squash Goombas by jumping on them, deter Pirhanha plants from emerging by standing next to the pipes they occupied, and evade the crushing Thwomps by swiftly dashing beneath them.

And these enemies did as much as the visual and aural qualities to help the 2D areas form their curiously unique personality and distinctly wondrous atmosphere.

My favorite of these areas was one of those that was situated in the overworld: the underground cave near Kanalet Castle. This cave was patrolled by a few oblivious Goombas, and its opening screen had what I considered to be the game's most wondrous background image: a miniaturized 2D rendering of the woodland that surrounded the castle.

It was a simple visual, but still it was powerfully evocative, and it helped me to do two things: (a) put together a strong visualization of Koholint Island's woodsy areas, (b) and imagine what the entirety of the island would look like if it could be seen from a similar 2D perspective.

It represented everything that I loved about the 2D areas.

And I was happy that the designers even went as far as to set two boss battles in 2D areas. These battles nicely integrated, and they provided some very welcome and very notable variety to the game's action.

Link's Awakening had a strong Super Mario influence in general, which made sense to me because there had always been an obvious spiritual connection between the two series (which I talked about in my previous Zelda pieces).

The game contained numerous Mario characters. There were the aforementioned cave-dwelling enemies: Goombas, Piranha Plants, Cheep-Cheeps, Thwomps, Bloopers, and Podoboos. Bob-ombs, Shy Guys and Pokeys showed up in the overworld areas. Marin's father, Tarin, was clearly designed to look like Mario. Bow-Wow was obviously a Chain Chomp. There was a Yoshi doll up for grabs in Mabe village's trendy crane game (it was there to shamelessly advertise Yoshi's new NES and SNES games). And Princess Toadstool was depicted in the photograph that Christine asked Link to deliver to Dr. Write, though I wasn't sure why (I didn't get the joke that Christine, who was an insecure goat person, was engaging in an old-fashioned form of catfishing).

Also, Wart, the would-be conqueror of Subcon--another dream world--was taking up residence on the island (he was living in the Signpost Maze area)! "That's the most appropriate connection!" I thought.

The Mario characters' appearance in the Zelda universe felt surreal but not in a distracting or intrusive way, no. Rather, it provided the game a rebellious quality and further helped it to establish a unique personality.

And, again, the two series had been intrinsically linked ever since they were conceived, and they shared a lot in the way of design philosophy, so one incorporating elements from the other didn't feel strange or incongruent. It actually felt quite natural.

(Though, I can't explain why the designers thought to have Kirby, of all characters, show up in Eagle's Tower. His series has no apparent connection to Zelda, so his appearance is contrastingly bizarre and jarring. It's interesting for a very different reason.)

More than anything, the inclusion of Mario characters (and Kirby) conveyed an important message. It informed of just how unrestrained the development team was and how willing it was to make daring creative choices.

I always wondered why the team was given such freedom. Because even back then, Nintendo was super-protective of its IPs and always made sure that they were presented only in very specific ways. "Why, suddenly, was the Zelda team's creativity so unbridled?" I would wonder as I observed what the game was doing visually, aurally and gameplay-wise.

And in the end, I was very pleased with Link's Awakening. I considered it to be a worthy sequel to A Link to the Past and a terrific series entry in general. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with it, and I had an equally great time with it in each of my many subsequent play-throughs.

I always looked forward to returning to it and enjoying all of its unique aspects.

I was especially excited to return to it after learning about some of its mind-blowing secrets in Nintendo Power. I couldn't wait to test them out!

The first secret was a game-breaking screen-wrap cheat that allowed you to magically transport to the screen that was adjacent to the one that you were currently entering. You could pull it off by pressing the Select button twice during the screen transition. It was fun to put it to use and mischievously sequence-break and enter into spaces that were typically inaccessible. Though, its novelty wore off once it became clear to me that you couldn't use it to find Metroid-style secret worlds or out-of-bounds areas. Being able to warp over to and stand on Tal Tal Mountain's 2D backgrounds just wasn't as interesting an idea to me.

The other big secret was that you could steal items from Mabe's shop by inducing the owner to face rightward with a quick circular movement and then making a dash for the door. It was a cool cheat, but I was hesitant to use it in a real play-through because I didn't like being labeled a "Thief" (to which the game would change your name if you stole an item from the shop). I didn't want that on my conscience. Also, I didn't want to be viciously electrocuted and killed by the surprisingly powerful and vengeful shop-owner when it came time for me to necessarily revisit the shop. (Seeing the owner display such immense power made me wonder why he wasn't chosen to the be the hero.)

In the years that followed, though, I didn't give Link's Awakening anywhere near as much attention as I did early on. In that period, I started putting almost of my focus on big-name SNES releases, which were now arriving at a rapid pace. So I no longer had as much time to devote to Link's Awakening or Game Boy games in general.

I didn't find the motivation to return to Link's Awakening until the summer of 1996, when the N64's game releases began to slow considerably and there simply weren't many good games to play. Link's Awakening, with its reliably fun action, was exactly what I needed to fill the void.

This was actually the period in which I formed my best memories of the game. At the time, I was in the final months of my senior year in high school and at a point in which my life was about to change significantly. And more than it had at any time in the past, Link's Awakening's powerfully evocative, perspective-providing visual and aural qualities helped me to contextualize my feelings during the transition. They were there with me, in my head, during the last few days of school, when I was free to roam about the campus and take some time to get a final look at its spaces, and they shaped my thoughts as I reflected upon my adolescent years and thought about the future and what it might hold for me.

I remember leaving school on that spring day in 1996 (after our teachers Mr. Bonano and Mr. Miller dismissed us from the library after we finished viewing The Shawshank Redemption, of all things) and walking down the front stairs of Adelphi Academy for the final time. It was quiet. The sun was shining brightly, and its warm glow was bathing every surface and every tree. There were no students in sight. The atmosphere was calm and peaceful. And all I could think about was Link's Awakening's house music. It played in my head and gave me insight into what this moment meant. It used its power of conveyance to tell me that it was now time for me to start my journey into the great unknown, just as I would if I were starting a new Zelda game.

I played through Link's Awakening that summer and did so purely for purpose of paying tribute to that moment.

Corny, huh?

As I did with everything else Game Boy-related, I lost access to Link's Awakening when my Game Boy stopped working (I stupidly left the batteries in for too long, and they corroded and thus destroyed the battery terminal) and I retired my SNES and my Super Game Boy Player along with it. It was, sadly, no longer part of my life. And I didn't see it again for 15 years.

During that time, though, my memories of it remained strong and vivid. I never forgot what it meant to me.

That's why I made sure to purchase a copy of it as soon as it became available for a platform that I owned. I picked up the colorized DX version, which I hadn't played before, when it arrived on the 3DS eShop in June of 2011. And I was very happy to once again have access to it in some form.

And even though I appreciated how Nintendo used the Game Boy Color's enhanced color-palette to brighten the game up and make it more closely match its SNES inspiration, I still preferred to play it with the old monochrome Game Boy color-scheme, which was a defining characteristic of Link's Awakening. It's what made it what it was. It conveyed the game's personality, atmosphere and nostalgic value in a way that tacked-on color enhancements never could.

It's what made the game unforgettable.

When I read the Iwata Asks interview in which Iwata spoke with Takashi Tezuka and Toshihiko Nakago about the creation of Link's Awakening, I wasn't surprised to learn that the game was the product of a non-traditional development process. It was a largely unsupervised passion project headed up by a group of young, free-spirited game developers who were eager to have fun with the series and take it to new places.

Then I finally understood why so many of Link's Awakening's aspects felt so curiously disparate. Its developers were filled with youthful exuberance and whimsical creative spirit, and thus they had no desire to be shackled by convention. They wanted to create a game that could stand on its own and dare to tell new types of stories.

And I'm happy that they got the opportunity to act on that ambition. The result was one of the best, most memorable action-adventure games in video-game history.

It's just a shame that the current development team isn't afforded the same type of freedom. The modern Legend of Zelda series has become too safe and predictable, and surely it would strongly benefit from allowing its creators to exhibit some bold, unrestrained creativity.

"So which one would you say is the better game?" you ask with great curiosity. "A Link to the Past or Link's Awakening?"

Well, that's a really tough question.

After thinking about it, I don't think that I can confidently state that I like one more than the other. I mean, it's true that I consider A Link to the Past to be the standard-bearer for top-down action-adventure games, but at the same time, I can't ignore that Link's Awakening is actually better in some ways. Also, it's certainly the more powerful of two when it comes to evoking strong feelings and emotions.

The best solution, I think, is for me to say that both are top-tier action-adventure games and that neither is better or worse than the other. They're just different from each other. And consequently I'm fond of each of them for a different reason.

Really, I love them both equally.

  
I could go on and on about why Link's Awakening resonates so strongly with me and why I'm so enamored with it. I could endlessly extol it for how it vigorously it rises above its host platform's limitations and manages to match the quality of a game that was made for a technologically advanced console and with the three-times the budget. For how it perfectly encapsulates all of the greatest things about its era. For how its wondrous visuals and music are able to evoke powerful emotions and do so well to help me to contextualize my thoughts and feelings. For how it bravely eschews established formulas and strives to create a world that feels amazingly distinct. And for how it shows itself to be an outstanding action-adventure game.

But I'll refrain from doing that. Rather, I'll let the fact that it has inspired me to produce dozens of paragraphs' worth of fond thoughts and loving praise stand as a testament to how inspirational and transcendent it is.

I can sum up my feelings on The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening by quoting a line that resonated with me as I was reading through the comments section of a YouTube video that played the game's evocative house music:

"Thank you, Nintendo, for the memories."