Finished Link's Awakening (GBC)
I finally knuckled down and played An Old-School Zelda. But instead of playing a "normal Zelda," I chose to play Link's Awakening, because everyone told me that it was the most special and strange of the older games.
I chose the GameBoy Color version, because I wanted to see COLORS, and I'm glad I did - it's got some really nice-looking moments. I played it via emulation slowly over the course of about a month.
It was a really delightful experience! Link's Awakening has so much personality - it really is as special and strange as people say. It satisfied my desire to have a "rosetta stone"-type experience with a Zelda game - I recognized so many things I've seen in the two modern open-world Zelda games on Switch.
Prior to this, those were the only two Zelda games I'd played. I was a PC gaming child; my parents considered PC games to be somehow "educational," but forbid me from owning a console or handheld device because they would "rot my brain." Frogger was okay, for some reason; Age of Empires was great; Link and his friends were forbidden. I simply do not have the kind of Zelda Knowledge possessed by many game devs. Nevertheless, I started playing Link's Awakening with the aim of looking up as few solutions to puzzles as possible. I was derailed in, I think, the second dungeon. Some of the early game dungeon puzzles require you to know the names of some of the monsters... and some of the monster names are very strange.
Monster names in particular feel like something that was covered in the game's manual, because a few of them are properly cryptic. I had no idea, for example, that "Pols Voice" was a monster when I first encountered that phrase in an owl clue stone. In the end, I probably looked up the answer to something about 6 total times while playing the game. I'm satisfied with my performance!
I really enjoyed seeing a very small, tight, respectful-of-my-time version of the kind of 'open world' plus dungeons design I've seen in so many other games. Koholint Island is just big enough to have what feels like a lot of mysteries in it, but small enough that there are a few places where you can basically run across most of it in a little over a minute. The dungeons are well-hidden, and there is just enough nonlinearity to be mentally engaging. But there is only one sidequest, really - the item trading quest - so it's not wasting your time with optional fluff.
I love how dense and constrained it is. That's something I miss from a lot of the games I've played which I now recognize as taking big inspiration from Link's Awakening... for this kind of game, I think it's preferable for the map to be small. All killer, very little filler. Great stuff.
I'd read before about how the game was apparently influenced by Twin Peaks. I'm a big Twin Peaks fan, but I found myself a bit underwhelmed by this connection for the first half of my playthrough. It wasn't until I got closer to the ending and I started to feel the impact of a lot of its little choices that I started to feel that they had done anything interesting with that inspiration.
There is a wonderful eccentricity in this game, and that small-town eccentricity is what the devs pointed to when they spoke about this stuff. I loved that Mario is a character in this game, and also dumb as rocks; I loved the kids constantly blurting out game tips and tutorial information and then expressing their surprise and shock that they'd done it. The gag that the tip line operator is accessible to you, but too anxious to speak to you outside the tip line huts, is very good. One of the item trading quest's best punchlines - the picture of Princess Peach you hand the Writer - is still pretty fucking funny. I also loved the localization's casual use of extremely 80s-90s English.
But I've seen this kind of flippant cheerfulness imitated in so many other fantasy videogames... and I've also seen the second season of Twin Peaks, which I gather that the developers had not when they took their inspiration? When I think about what I find characteristic of Twin Peaks, I definitely think a lot more about the show's darkness and bleakness than its lightness or flippancy. The light, amusing parts of the show were there to contrast with the dark parts, and to parody popular soap operas. But the story is REALLY about the dark, nasty stuff beneath the surface.
Link's Awakening has its own moments of darkness - and I found them very effective. That was the stuff that finally had me saying, "oh, I see what the inspiration was, here." It's pretty fun how often and insistently the game starts to remind you that you're in a dream - and how, at the same time, it tries to make you take some of the relationships in the world around you a lot more seriously.
The final cutscene, where you see everyone you've interacted with fading away into nothingness, was pretty great. I knew it was coming, and I was still pleased by the choreography of that ending sequence.
But I was also jumpscared by this fellow!! Yikes, dude! Who are you??
Next for me in the World Of Zelda are Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. First, however, I'm taking a detour into the world of Dragon Quest. I'm Partway into DRAGON WARRIOR I... I've killed a lot of slimes and have been having one long NeoQuest flashback. NeoQuest is better than DQ1! But I'm gonna power through it!!