You're watching a critique of the Legend of Zelda:
Link's Awakening Remake. This video will be solely focused on the remake itself, and not on any
of the base game's design. If you're new to the channel, I already have a comprehensive look
at the DX port for Game Boy Color, where I break down the story, dungeon, and overworld design in
greater detail. Nothing has changed since that initial video, or at least nothing noteworthy,
and seeing as this is a quite faithful remake, I don't see any point in retreading old ground.
When the remake was announced, I wasn't exactly thrilled. In a market already flooded with
remakes, what does a 1-1 recreation of Link's Awakening really have to offer? Shinier
visuals? Different instruments? Gameplay tweaks? Certainly it’s novel to glimpse it under
a new light, but I guess another question is: was there anything so unapproachable about
the original that warranted a ground-up, $60 remake 20 years after the fact? Especially
when that original is on the 3DS for a couple bucks. I’d like to answer those questions
throughout the video, because the answers are, as usual, not exactly clear cut. Let's look
at all of the changes made to the original, both large and small, so we can come to a
more complete understanding of what this remake offers that the original might not.
Link's Awakening is one of my favorite Zelda games, though I wouldn't say I have nostalgia for
it. My first experience with it was in December of last year, and I fell in love with it on that
first playthrough. Despite some annoying moments, frequent pausing, and intrusive text boxes,
I was captured by the world, characters, and especially that cruel punchline of an ending.
The remake doesn't really change a lot about the original on a structural level. You still visit
all the same dungeons, their layout is the same, every quest, overworld location, and character
are almost identical. What the remake actually does is add on top of that base: there are now 50
secret seashells instead of 26, 32 heart pieces as opposed to 12, and a new dungeon builder side
mode instead of the picture house. Some chests in dungeons and in the overworld have been changed
to accommodate the increase. This applies to the fishing mini-game, and the Trendy Game, which
now has figurines to collect and store in the houses of Mabe Village. As such, there are new
rewards in the seashell house on top of what was in the original. So, while most every chest,
cave, and secret room have the same layout, the rewards you find may be altered slightly.
While I do think this was a nice gesture, it also starts to make the world feel a little
overcrowded. One of my favorite aspects of the original was the relatively low amount of
secrets to find, which not only amplified their importance, but kept up with the quicker
pace of the relatively small island of Koholint. I generally prefer when Zelda games have less to
find, since it makes each secret more memorable, and often makes each upgrade feel more
substantial. While I don't necessarily have a problem with more heart pieces, adding
more seashells was a bit overkill. Heart pieces can be rewards for practically anything, and
the new ones are typically used to better flesh out the already existing secret areas or
mini-games, which I definitely approve of. What were silly distractions in the original are given
a bit more weight, and incentivize you to visit Mabe village more often. Collecting figurines
from the Trendy Game is especially rewarding, since you can't get them all at once. You unlock
more after each dungeon, which pushes you to come back periodically. Connecting with the island and
its people helps to strengthen that cruel ending; however, secret seashells were a bit different.
You would often find them in set blades of grass, or underground next to a distinct pattern. While
many of the new seashells fall in line with that idea, a few of them are slightly puzzling. One
of them has you playing the Ballad of the Wind Fish next to the water where the sleeping Walrus
was. And I mean ONE TILE AWAY from that water, because even if you think to use it two tiles
away, it won't trigger. Using the pegasus boots on trees in the original was usually obvious,
since trees that dropped items were always on their own. In the remake, there will sometimes be
trees in a set that have different collision. One tree will shake and drop an item, while the
others will have no reaction and you'll just bump into them like you would any other wall. You
almost need to have the seashell tuning fork or you won't even think to run into some of these
trees. This wasn’t a problem in the original because it was much easier to tell which trees
were part of the background and which weren’t.
There's also the question of why there
needed to be almost double the amount in the first place. Often it's just the
same idea repeated again somewhere else, and while it does fill out gaps in the world, it
usually just means double the backtracking. The warp points in the original were fine, since you
didn't strictly need to keep combing over the map again and again. You only needed 20 seashells
to get the sword upgrade, three of which were given to you by the seashell house itself. Again,
this made each seashell location more memorable, and gave you a wider margin for error since there
are 6 seashells you can miss while still getting the upgrade. All the remake does is add even
more, pushing the requirement up to 40. While that doesn't sound bad on paper, all it really does is
add unnecessary filler, especially in the case of the overworld seashells. Plus, the addition of the
tuning fork makes it feel like more of a task than a fun side objective, and ruins their location for
players who found their obscurity fun in the first place. Finding seashells in the original was a
fun side objective I could tackle at my own pace, while in the remake it feels like another
huge task that I need to complete once I have enough for the tuning fork and can
run around for a few hours digging.
This all comes to a head with the dungeon builder
side attraction. To say it's a "dungeon builder" would probably be giving it too much credit: it's
yet another side mode added into the main game, and is so tacked on that it genuinely hurts. See,
the idea of adding a dungeon builder to a remake of Link's Awakening is already a bit of an absurd
idea, but if it was its own dedicated side mode, I'd at least understand it more. It's like a
backdoor pilot for an official Zelda maker later down the line, or at least I hope it is. It would
have been the same as including Four Swords in the GBA port of A Link to the Past: a dedicated side
mode you select from the title screen. Not only is this mode baked into the main game, replacing
many of the chest and mini-game rewards with chamber stones, it is woefully underdeveloped.
You can only use tiles from dungeons that you've completed, plus any additional tiles that you
collect from chests or mini-games. Already, these dungeons are limited in the sense that you
can only really play around with the premade rooms the game selects for you. Since the dungeons in
this game are some of the best in the series, and often require you to consider their entire
layout, you'll often be uncomfortably familiar with them. This makes the collage of rooms you
explore come across as repetitive. It takes a very, very long time to actually get varied use
out of the dungeon maker, and you'll have to slog through Dampe's pre-made challenges first.
The challenges usually see you burdened with a few requirements, like chest or stair tiles. It sounds
fun, but when you realize you can take a bunch of non-threatening tiles and string together a series
of filler rooms, it quickly becomes repetitive. The three heart challenge is quickly invalidated
by the player's ability to string together the shortest amount of rooms to the boss, and add a
bunch of filler rooms afterward that the player never even needs to visit. The way it works, no
matter what, is that the last chest a player finds will contain the Nightmare Key. This happens every
single time, without fail. You quickly realize that, as long as you string together a bunch of
rooms with no chests in them, you can ignore half the dungeon you've built. After that, you just
fight the angler fish, the easiest boss in the game, and a three heart run becomes a snoozefest.
It's the same with a swordless run, it's the same with any challenge Dampe throws your way. It tries
its damndest to force the player into creating an elaborate set of difficult rooms, but the only
way it can truly do that is by placing those difficult rooms itself, and forcing the player to
go through them for a chest. Unfortunately, these restrictive and suffocating layouts are bound to
these unique challenges. Sure, you can arrange a three heart run if you want, but it will ALWAYS
be in this bottle layout. You can't do anything more than this, even if you wanted to.
Now, this would theoretically be fine if I could make creative dungeons for these challenges. Sure,
you can kinda cheese them, but I did actually try creating complex dungeons at first. I mean,
if you’ve been around the channel for a while, you would know I have a particular taste in
dungeon design that I’d love to take to a ridiculous extreme. While I did try to make some
great dungeons, I ran into a host of frustrating roadblocks. You are bound by the game itself to
a set of starting rooms that can only be placed in certain blocks, and boss rooms that can only
be entered from the bottom. You can only have one major boss, outside of collectable chambers,
you have no direct control over where your stairways will connect, you have no control
over what any of the chests will contain, how many chests will be in a room, how many exits
are in a room, how many enemies are in a room, what obstacles will be in that room, you simply
cannot place checkpoints at all, and on and on and on. This means that you are severely limited in
how you're able to stress your creative muscles. I really wanted to make a dungeon similar to Hyrule
Castle in Twilight Princess, where building up a surplus of keys could unlock an extra room
with a bunch of useful items before the boss. Imagine creating something like that here, where
careless key usage could mean losing out on that secret room. You could pack a bunch of useful
items in there that would make the boss easier, provided you were able to handicap the player by
limiting the amount of items they start with. Or better yet, imagine if you could make a dungeon
similar to that section in Skyward Sword where all of your items are stolen. Imagine creating
this HUGE dungeon, with weird twists and turns, one where you have to find every single dungeon
item in the game to bypass every obstacle and make it to the boss. The way it is now, absolutely none
of your dungeons can elicit that same feeling, since you have to go into them with your current
toolset. So many ideas that will never come to fruition in this undercooked, waste of time.
There is no online integration, meaning that you are creating dungeons to clear yourself, limiting
the type of challenges you can create. You'll likely only want to make action-focused, combat
challenges, since those will test your mettle no matter what. Creating your own puzzling layout
lacks the same bite as it would playing one, since you'll already know how to clear it. At that
point, it's just a bunch of busy work. You really need to be able to play other levels, that is
quite literally the only reason Mario Maker even functions the way it does: without the ability
to play other people's levels, or to have other people play your levels, it would be a fundamental
and critical failure. It's why I wish this was a side mode: it would still be severely limited,
and I likely wouldn't touch it all that much, but at least then it wouldn't interfere with the
main game. At least then it wouldn't hide heart pieces behind mundane dungeon arrangements, at
least then it wouldn't replace previously useful rewards with underwhelming chamber stones, at
least then I wouldn't have to play the entire game just to get the most use out of it. Really,
if you want something like this in the main game, it just needs to be built like challenges in
previous Zelda games. Have a prebuilt dungeon for the three heart challenge, have a pre-built boss
rush, have a pre-built swordless challenge. That would be a lot more satisfying all in all, since
the player would be confronted with new challenges worthy of the rewards that accompany them. You
could still use rooms from the dungeons, it would still work. The problem for player creation is
that they're too limited, but that's not a problem if the dungeons are pre-built. At that point, it
would just feel like a series of challenge rooms, and that could have been fun in its own right.
There have been other changes that affect the game in an adverse way. Movement both looks and feels
horrible. While the original did still have eight directional movement, link could only attack
in four directions. While this sounds awful, it worked surprisingly well. You could sort of
glide around the battlefield, confident in where your attacks would strike or where an enemy would
strike you. In the remake, you are locked to eight directions at all times. You snap quite awkwardly
between those directions, and it can make combat extremely frustrating. These diagonals only serve
to make combat more confusing. Holding up your shield and moving can often accidentally force
your Shield into a different position and leave you open to attack. Ranged attacks also suffer
because of this, since you have four whole new directions to contend with. Sometimes you might
want to shoot an arrow to your right, but you'll accidentally shoot it at a diagonal. It happens
so often that it can make certain encounters way more frustrating than they really need to be. This
wouldn’t be a problem if they just let Link knock an arrow and aim before firing, but the arrow
still fires off instantly at the press of a single button. If they weren't going to implement that
four directional diagonal glide of the original, they really should have just added free analog
movement. While the design of the base game is clearly on a tile grid, that also didn't stop
A Link Between Worlds from having a full range. Honestly, Link's Awakening in particular
probably could have used smoother controls considering there's actual platforming involved.
It feels like there's a lot less leeway with the bottomless pits than before: where you could
effortlessly clear these gaps in the original, and often get yourself out of a bad situation by
jumping at the very edge of a tile, the remake seems to have restricted this a great deal. This
makes platforming less fun to actually execute, especially in cases where you could skillfully
avoid Hookshot usage to nab a few secrets.
Speaking of the Hookshot, its added usage in
the river rapids mini-game kinda infuriates me. There I was, trying for literal hours to
get into this left section for the heart piece, to reach these secret areas: I just couldn't
do it. In the original, you simply picked a path of currents and let them whisk you away
somewhere. Sure, it was a bit trial and error, but it was simple fun. It's kinda like using a
pachinko machine. In the remake, you actually can't access certain areas until you have the
hookshot, which just feels like a slap in the face to long-time fans. There is literally nothing that
would indicate you need a Hookshot, not even a warning. Due to how unwieldy the currents already
feel, and how arbitrarily you end up where you do, you'd be forgiven for assuming you just have to
brute force it and hope you're lucky. Sometimes I'd make it in the top secret area, and sometimes
I wouldn't, despite performing the same inputs each time. Sometimes I'd end up in a secret area
by pure chance, sometimes I wouldn't. There are no rules, it's a madhouse, one that ultimately just
needs a hookshot so you can cheese the entire race. What was wrong with the original version
of this mini-game that it needed to be changed in this way? A lot of these additions end up
making me ask that question: why is this here?
It sucks, because everything else that's been
added genuinely improves the base game. There are no more screen transitions on the overworld,
which makes exploring it feel more seamless. I still think this art style would have worked
better in a new Zelda game that could take better advantage of it, but it still works wonders for
Link's Awakening. It's a cute, kinda wacky game, with a cute, kinda wacky art style. The Pegasus
Boots, Power Bracelet, sword, and shield are no longer equippable items. This leads to far less
frequent item switching. You no longer have to sit through that text box for simply walking into
a rock without a power bracelet. You can place markers on the map, which makes backtracking a
lot easier. Your map generally just gives you a lot more useful information than it used to,
especially in dungeons. Some bosses have been tweaked so that they're more challenging, like
Facade, whose face will now appear in different sections of the room, and will spawn holes far
more aggressively. Bombable walls, while sometimes telegraphed too obviously, will oftentimes
blend in with the new lighting and camera, in a way that makes them genuinely fun to find.
You actually need to scan your environment, while looking at your map for clues, to spot bombable
walls. It fixes that paradox of the original, where no indication would be too cryptic, but
any actual indication was too obvious.
Hero mode is selectable from the start, which
is much appreciated, and feels noticeably more difficult. I actually felt like I needed the Blue
Mail, whereas in the original I'd almost always select the Red Mail for ridiculous damage output.
Some of my deaths were due to Link's slower movement speed, or should I say, the enemy's
increased movement speed? It's actually been documented that Link moves about the same speed,
so it isn't true that he moves slower; however, I think the reason it can sometimes feel that way
is because enemies move and attack way faster than before. Bombs instantly explode when they touch
the ground, for instance. One of the mini-bosses, who will frequently throw bombs, is incredibly
hard now just because he's so much more aggressive. It sometimes feels impossible to
dodge his bombs and grabs. Other than these quirks, though, it was a refreshingly
challenging way to revisit the game.
I love how bullshit the Trendy Game is. Crane
games in real life kinda suck, and for a silly side mode, this emulates that feeling even more
realistically. I adore logging onto Twitter and watching just how many weird things can happen
to people. Since it only costs ten rupees, it's really hard to stay mad at this thing. It's
really cute. Certain cutscenes are enhanced by the rehauled visual design, adding more
detail to people's homes and expressions than ever before. It does help connect
you with everyone on a far deeper level, and adds more charm than was present even in
the original. Then again, for everything cool this remake adds, there's something else that
feels out of place. While some of the songs have been remade exceptionally well, especially the
arresting redux of the Face Shrine dungeon theme, other songs have not survived the transition
as gracefully. Angler's Tunnel was not exactly a great song in the original, but it's
made even worse in the remake. It mixes new instruments with old instruments in perhaps
the strangest and most discordant way imaginable. Moments like Marin following you to the animal
village are ruined by compositions that feel like they came out of a modern Yoshi game
because they were done on a recorder. It's a mixed bag of musical renditions for a game
that already had a fine enough soundtrack to begin with. If it just had an original soundtrack
option, none of this would even be that much of a problem. For as beautiful as the game's visuals
are, the framerate is horrendous, dropping at seemingly random intervals at a consistent
rate. It really distracts from the visual splendor when it feels so choppy to play.
That's kinda the theme of this video and this remake: for everything it adds, it removes
something else. Item management is less cumbersome, but movement makes combat more
cumbersome; secrets are still fun to collect, but there are even more of them for seemingly no
reason; some side modes have been better fleshed out, while others feel like an afterthought;
some of the new secrets are rewarding, but some have been rendered obsolete by
chamber stones; the visuals are gorgeous, and yet the soundtrack is underwhelming. It's
still Link's Awakening, and that's still fun and exciting and beautiful: but almost nothing
they added really needed to be there. It screws with the pacing of an intentionally smaller
scale Zelda title, and makes for a remake that, as is frustratingly the case most of the time, has
both meaningful and useless fixes to that core, which means: there are now two versions of the
game, each with strengths and weaknesses, and you will always need to make that painful decision
about which version to play. That decision is made exceptionally worse as the original is
nowhere to be seen on the Nintendo Switch, meaning if you want to play Link's Awakening on
Nintendo's most current hardware, you have to buy the remake. They have given many people no other
choice than to experience this flawed remake over the original. Many people are calling for Nintendo
to remake the Oracle games in a similar style, but I'm wondering what's going to happen to
those originals if they're remade. What is going to be added to them? What's going to
screw with that original design? What new content is going to mutilate the brilliance of
those games? Do we really need more? Weren't they fine as they were? Is it worth spending
time on these projects? Charging $60 for them, dedicating an entire team of people to
them? I wonder, in an alternate universe, what could we have gotten instead? Could we
have gotten an original game to stick in our hearts and minds forever, or would we be stuck
in a safe, neverending dream of the glory days?
I feel like for the few flaws that he mentions that are actually very valid and good points (such as the lone trees not being as strong an indicator for seashells anymore due to the game no longer being locked to "rooms") There are many that aren't very strong arguments for such bold statements. I think it's an exaggeration to say that the pacing is screwed, or that "for everything the game adds, it takes away".
Especially the latter point is kind of a hard thing to backup, this game adds lots more than it gets wrong, and looking at the whole picture I believe that it retains the general feeling of the original game: The adherence to cryptic bullshit!
Watching my girlfriend playthrough the first time was like watching myself play through the first time, and it was remarkable how little handholding Nintendo added to this game when, I'd argue, it is one of the most cryptic and confusing entries in the entire series (after the 1st and 2nd games of course.)
You have bosses that are vulnerable to only 1 single attack and that is often never obvious. There are areas required to explore before dungeons that you're never hinted about, you simply have to either know before hand or roam koholint. You cannot defeat the final boss unless you know your way around the egg. The boomerang is now even more powerful than ever but there is no hint or mention in regards to just how honestly game-breakingly useful it is. I absolutely love that Nintendo didn't alter the game to be too hand-holdy and, in fact, actually made many of the bosses harder with very good changes.
The level 4 and 6 dungeon bosses specifically were so comically easy before, it's very refreshing to see them actually put up some kind of a fight now
I personally was never bothered by the 8-way movement or combat as the changes they made to the sword slash (being almost 180 degree rather than just 90 degree) was a solid one. I also almost exclusively used the boomerang over the arrows because it's just that much better (could be seen as a bad thing actually). I agree not being able to back away with the shield is a shame and jumping gaps is harder, but the example he showed in the video is kinda misleading as hook shot is intended to be used there. You may argue that's a bad thing because "you could jump that gap in the original!" but strictly speaking, the original game was so broken you could jump any gap, even ones intended for the blue rooster.
I also don't fully agree with the level 4 theme. While they make a good point about it sounding somewhat discordant, I'd still argue that it is easily superior to the 12 second loop from the GB title.
KingK is the “the joystick in Mario 64 is no big deal” guy right? I find it hard to take him seriously after that.
I can't believe some of the provocative language this guy uses over such minor nits, "slap in the face", "mutilated brilliance", etc. He spends 5 minutes criticizing the dungeon building mode which is completely optional and he should have just skipped over. And then in 1 minute he brushes past the great new features they've added. I'm a fan of the original but god does it feel tedious going back to after finishing the remake.
I'm glad the remake is receiving universal praise (besides this guy) and is selling well because I would love more remakes in this style where it's essentially a from-scratch rebuild with the same content/puzzles etc.
I knew I was in for a ride with this review when the thesis he leads off with is essentially, the GBC version is already on 3DS, why do we even need a remake?
This review is very refreshing, since it doesn't conclude (as most reviews did) that just because it's "more Zelda" that it's perfect no matter how much unnecessary fluff or issues it has compared to the original. He actually calls out that the stuff added and changed doesn't really come off as necessary since the original was already such a tightly crafted masterpiece on handheld. Stuff like having eight way attack directions despite it still being designed for the four way-combat of the original for example, or the forced new OST with no "original OST" option, that remakes like Spyro had.
(in reference to the dungeon maker)
Honestly, this was only done to test waters. If Nintendo wants to expand the Maker games outside of Mario, Zelda with dungeon-maker is very likely up next.
No trap/enemy placement + not being able to level share basically shows this was a rushed mode to fill in gaps. Why spend time on an actual dungeon maker in a remake, when they could do that at a $60 pricepoint standalone instead.
That's how I see it.