During my fifteenth birthday party, my parents offered me a choice between two video games: Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX for the Game Boy Color. We weren’t well off so they were going to return the game I didn’t pick, putting some extra pressure on me. In the end, the choice was simple: my friends were over and I had already played Link’s Awakening on the original Game Boy; Super Smash Bros. please, mom and dad. This bit of nostalgia isn’t about that game though, we’re here to revisit the colorized Zelda classic.
I first played Link’s Awakening in a Walmart in 1993 and then received it for Christmas. The top-down action adventure was hot on the heels of the Super Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, an incredible feat of game and level design. The shrunk down Awakening goes toe-to-toe with any 2D Zelda game, with a suite of weapons and tools along with the full complement of dungeons, it’s still a fantastic game! Unfortunately, my Game Boy cartridge stopped working after a few years, which put the parental offer for the DX upgrade on the table back in 1999.
With a broken cartridge and no DX version in hand, it wasn’t until 2019 that I played Link’s Awakening again, this time on the Switch in developer Grezzo’s remake. The tilt-shift filter was beautiful but the performance of the game was a bit lackluster, featuring way too many frame drops for comfort (the remake runs great on Switch 2 now though, but I don’t think a remake should run worse than the original game). Something feels just slightly off playing Link’s Awakening on the big screen though, it’s a title that was built around rooms on a simple 10x8 grid; it works perfect on a Game Boy but its small screen game design principles are magnified in high definition.
I was recently setting up Argosy on my Ayn Thor, an emulator front-end for RomM – this is a fancy way to say I can now easily access my game collection anywhere in the world – and was looking for a game to try out to make sure everything worked. Link’s Awakening DX jumped out and I booted it up, grabbed the sword, beat the first dungeon… and just kept going. The game goes down so smooth, and I could remember at least the first hour of it like the back of my hand. I even hooked up Retro Achievements and got little dopamine bursts from things in the game that already give dopamine bursts, not sure how I feel about this aspect but it was fun to try.
The DX version’s coloring is simple but well done, bringing it a bit closer to the Super Nintendo’s A Link to the Past. The Wind Fish itself is quite beautiful in some of the added shots, but it’s kind of crazy to think that the Game Boy Advance was still two years away at this point. In retrospect, the Game Boy Color was such a stop-gap portable, and yet my family owned three of them! This is a complaint for another day, but the fact that the GBA didn’t have four face buttons is so ridiculous to me. Link’s Awakening DX suffers so much from the frequent pausing required to manage your inventory with only two available buttons for action.
I think the DX version may be the best edition of Link’s Awakening, I’m a fan of the Switch game but this just works perfectly on the very small screen. The extra bit of color, while obviously not necessary from the success of the original Game Boy game, absolutely doesn’t hurt it at all. Now I’m wondering what I should play next on my handheld? It’s been a long time since I explored Minish Cap.
A few years ago I popped in my supposedly broken original Link’s Awakening cartridge into my Super Game Boy, only to be stunned that it worked! I played the first dungeon, saved and quit, and came back the next day to continue only to find that the game’s battery was now dead. Some games are just meant to stay asleep, like our Wind Fish.
Header art by Katsuya Terada, scanned and maintained by Melora Hart of History of Hyrule.
