When the Link's Awakening remake was recently announced in a Nintendo Direct I was in. Link's Awakening was already one of the best Zelda games in the franchise and remaking it seemed like a great idea. I pre-ordered the Dreamer Edition and it finally released last Friday and I wanted to write up my first thoughts as well as recap a bit of what others are saying about it.
A Worthy Remake of a Classic Game
In a nutshell the Link's Awakening remake is a very worthy remake for one of the best video games of all time. You can tell that a lot of love and attention was poured into this game by Grezzo and Nintendo and a very keen eye was paid to recreate the original game...
A Worthy Remake of a Classic Game
In a nutshell the Link's Awakening remake is a very worthy remake for one of the best video games of all time. You can tell that a lot of love and attention was poured into this game by Grezzo and Nintendo and a very keen eye was paid to recreate the original game...
... I don't love the new combat system, but the "Classic" mode is perfect.
I finished it earlier and there just arenât enough hours in the day to list off all the ways that itâs amazing.
But one thing I will say that you didnât touch on much is the dungeon maker.
Eeeeehhhhh you know, the rest of the game doesnât suffer because of its inclusion so I donât really count this as a ding against it but, wow, this is entirely uninteresting to me. It just doesnât hit any notes for me, because itâs all stuff youâve done before, just remixed. Thereâs not a lot of room to do anything interesting there.
I had thought this was a beta test for a Zelda maker, but I read an interview where apparently the devs were asked to make something like Mario Maker for this and struggled to find a fun way to do it.
That, and the FPS dips (I think it goes well below 30), are the only complaints I have about this. The original Linkâs Awakening was a strong contender for my favorite Zelda game, and this remake pushed it just high enough so I can say yes, this is it. This is my favorite. I love the new art style. I donât think itâs necessarily better or worse than the original blocky pixels, but itâs a great modern yet simple take on it. But really, itâs the QoL updates that let you do things without so much micromanaging.
And the new score, holy cow. Yeah, the original chiptunes are great like you said, but this score feels like what the composers originally intended, even though the Gameboy couldnât quite pull it off.
I think the score is symbolic to the game as a whole: the original and the remake can coexist well. This feels like the original, so much that I still remembered where some stuff was, and the maps from the old game are still accurate (except for a few minor things). But this could also be brand new. And in this way it excels in a way most remakes donât: it almost immaculately recreates the original without being beholden to its mechanics that may have aged out.
To put it simply: this is one of my favorite games of all time, recreated to be even better than I ever remembered it.
Also Iâm not seeing a bunch of similarity with Link Between Worlds, honestly. I donât think people are talking about it much because itâs a very different visual language. Iâll give you the music a bit, but visually it seems more like an attempt to bridge the 2D and N64ish era rather than doing its own thing. It doesnât seem like just a platform limitation but a whole different set of inspirations.
Itâs somewhat subjective comparing two games but in terms of Zelda games less so maybe. The gameplay differences in Worlds and the Awakening remake are pretty stark in the Worlds is quite a bit faster and in the Awakening remake Link snaps to one of eight directions and in general feels a bit slower.
That said, Iâve played both and just played Worlds to get the feel back and they are more similar than different which is a good thing. Zelda timeline wise Awakening happens right after Link to the Past and Worlds after that so I think it makes sense that they are styled together some if contain differences enough to give them a unique voice.
Sorry the phone tapping made some of that hard to read. I still think the games feel similar but, itâs not a huge deal that everyone agrees with that.
Back in my day games ran at 15 fps and we liked it! :) It is sad to hear about the FPS issue. Do you see the same performance docked and in handheld?
I never tried it handheld, only docked. It definitely wasnât game killing and it seemed like it was mostly around transitions from inside a dungeon to outside, or after fast traveling.
Interesting analysis: https://youtu.be/UnckUk830HA
Thanks for that video Will.
PS the Gameboy games could run at 59 hz.
I had the original game on the original Gameboy (not the Color) and loved it. I forgot all about the claw machine! I'm glad it's among your favorite games. It was definitely one of my most favorite Gameboy games! I haven't seen or read much about the remake, though. I don't have a Switch yet, so it's not exactly on my radar at the moment. It does look good though!
The FPS issue sucks, but thanks to the video shared by Will_Ball, it seems the current solution is to run it from internal memory. I don't know everything about the Switch, but if you get a hard copy of the game that comes on a cartridge or card, can you install it and have it run from internal memory, or does it only run from the card? It seems that the cartridge is an SD card, is that right or is it similar? Or, are you only able to install and run it from internal memory if you purchase the digital version? I think Steam has made me quite used to digital versions of games, which I think are great, because hard copies are easy to lose or damage. But, if the place hosting the game stops operating, then you essentially lose the game, or your ability to re-install it.
You can't install the cartridge games to internal memory. Which sucks but it makes sense.
However, there are more graphically (and presumably data) intense games on the Switch that run fine, so I'm hoping this is just an optimization issue they can patch.
I have the game cart which does not need an install to play. Some games have a hefty update and they mostly run off the internal SD card but Link's Awakening runs entirely on the game cart. For now anyway.
> I think Steam has made me quite used to digital versions of games, which I think are great, because hard copies are easy to lose or damage. But, if the place hosting the game stops operating, then you essentially lose the game, or your ability to re-install it.
Yep, that's why I buy physical if I can. In the case of the Wii it's now the difference between being able to play a game and not. I bought the physical version of Tetris on Wii and can still play it whereas the download version goes with your system.
https://mobile.twitter.com/GifZelda/status/1176262465526665217
Ha, now I wish I still had a save file with Marin.