If You Can't Spetum, Join 'Em

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (1993)

Rating ... A- (88)

The advent of the Gameboy supplied Nintendo with the opportunity to reimagine many of its signature series in smaller, simpler, and/or younger dimensions, and no game employed the latter of such back-to-basics conceits more gracefully than Link's Awakening, a superlative installment of a uniformly superlative franchise. Though the elements that comprise a video game are purveyed here with considerable imbalance - the game is roughly 99% gameplay, 1% narrative - Link's Awakening remains one of the finest examples of superb mechanics and level design elevated to excellence via the designers' surprisingly lyrical storytelling chops.



Minimalism is not a hindrance to Link's Awakening, whose unadorned story begins with our hero stranded at sea on a piece of flotsam before shifting to a younger version of the warrior waking up in Koholint, an experience outed by the first scene as the delusions of a dehydrated sailor, immediately indicative of the game's intentions to employ such an illusion not to pull the third-act rug out from beneath the player (it was all a dream!) but instead to function as an evocative metaphor on age and maturity. Though predominantly a tale of psychological implications, Awakening's heft is curiously an affair of additive deduction. The relevant gist of the inhabitants of Mabe Village is how their maturity is oddly unrelated to their age. Adults are often eccentric in every sense of the euphemism, culminating with Tarin's single-minded desire for magic mushrooms, while the handful of children enunciate dialogue with jarring tact. Link accepts advice from hilarious kids who offer expert opinions before second guessing themselves on account of their youth - "Well I dunno, I'm just a kid!" - but it's Marin who lets the cat out of the bag when her beachfront confession of jumbled emotions and wistful aspirations betrays her as the the only native with any real concern for the future. With that in mind, we move along to fact number two; namely, that as Link endeavors to break the spell of the snoozing Wind Fish, a canny doppleganger for his childish id, it soon becomes apparent his dream prison will not simply vanish with time, but actually requires the efforts of you, the player. In other words, the significance of Link's Awakening is practically 2 + 2, yet regardless of whether you interpret this expression as simplistic or elegant, the game's wisdom is evident: maturity is not simply a matter of age, but rather one of choice.