Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 102: The Legend of Zelda - Link's Awakening

Episode Date: June 5, 2017

Jeremy and Bob wax rhapsodic with Henry Gilbert and Kat Bailey as they harmonize to sing the praises of the first portable Zelda: The iconoclastic and frequently surreal Link's Awakening.

This week in Retronauts, ask not for who the bell tolls, it tolls for the frog. of Retronauts. This week is going to be talking about a Zelda game because that's all anyone's talking about this week. Switch just came out. Oh, but wait, we're not talking about Breath of the Wild because that's not retro at all. Is this Nintendo Knots, Jeremy? I'm the Nintendo Nazi. That's why I wore a bowtie sometimes. Jeremy, you are awfully dapper. I know. That's telling in these times. And we're talking about a game based that that was inspired by a game about a frog. Oh, you're right. Oh, my God. This is Zelda's journey. into the alt-right. It's very sad. Anyway, no, that's terrible. I apologize for you all saying these things. Well, we just turned off half the audience. I'm sorry. I don't think so, actually. They should be on our side.

So, anyway, hi, welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish hosting this week with me this week. Let's be crazy. Let's go clockwise. So, hey, it's Henry, hi. Henry Gilbert. I'm a big Marin fanboy. I was trying to think it's something else to say. I was not ready to be called on. Hi, I'm Kat Bailey.

I host Sacks of the Blood God, and Link's Awakening was my first ever Zelda, and I cannot wait to be talking about it. Oh, wow. Awesome. I am Bob Mackey, and I know the secrets of the bucket mouse. Do you? I know the meaning of Bucket Mouse if you want to know. I read about that, too, but I'm going to let you tell the story. Right now?

No. Okay. Do you want to? Do you want to go now? There's no context for this, so no, but I'll tell it eventually. Hold on to your pants, folks. There's no real context for Bucketton Mouse. That's true.

For bucket mouse anyway. Okay, so listen, when you use the phone in the, I think it's like the hint line or whatever, you, these phones and you pick them up and sometimes it says, yes, it's the bucket mouse. And you're like, what the heck does this even mean? Apparently, there was a fishing shop called Bucketmouth in Kyoto that's what they would say when they picked up the phone. And that is who the fishing guy is based on in Link's Awakening and an Aquino time. So it's based on a Kyoto fishing store. name bucket mouth. That is how deep of a reference that is.

Wow. It took until like a few years ago for someone to discover that. That's what the bucket mouse is. It's actually bucket mouth. Right. But the way Japanese is written, like English words in Japanese are written, it's ambiguous. And I think it was like, mushy, it's bucket mouse. Bucket mouse des or whatever.

Bucket mouth this. And I'm sure the English localizers are just like, what in God's name? Okay, whatever. Yeah. So now you know, put that in your pocket and show it to no one because you will be outcast from society. For knowing the secret of Bucket Mouse. And that sets the tone for this episode of Retronauts. Because we are talking about the Legend of Zelda, links awakening, which I would go so far as to say is the weirdest and most surreal in the entire Zelda series.

I think Bob's probably going to stand up for Majora's Mask. No, I think this game established how weird and dark and creepy Zelda could get and just how not sort of, I guess, just trying to be unexpected and surprising. to you. I feel like there's some dark humor in Link to the past, but this game has a very dark and weird sense of humor that I love. I think Link's Awakening pushed the weirdness as far as it could go, and Majora's Mask

almost got there, but still wasn't as weird as Awakening can get. I was telling my friend the other day that Link to the past really established where the series would go from that point on, like the foundational aspect of it. But Link's Awakening established its personality. From like that point on, it introduced so many weird things

like Ulreira, like sitting in his little house or whatever and like the French accents and like the shopkeeper who would like electrocute you and random like Mario references like from that point forward like I felt like a lot of Link's Awakening's personality carried through into the rest of the series even if other games weren't as weird so oh sorry I was going to say in the general structure this could be getting ahead of things but I think it established the structure it would use I'm sorry can I just say this go ahead okay where you would have to do a mini challenge to get the thing to access the dungeon where I think it's set up that standard which was in place I think

until maybe Breath of the Wild I haven't played it yet so no one's telling me it's a mystery yeah it's like you need the key to the dungeon and getting the key is its own challenge and yeah okay I'm done that's great so this is a remarkable game in many ways I think we'll just jump right into it it was the first time Zelda had appeared on a handheld system the game boy was like four years old at the time this came out in 1993 and it was one of the very first games for Game Boy by Nintendo EAD and Shigeru Miyamoto's team. And that's kind of significant because, you know, if you look back at sort of the way the Game Boy developed, it was created by Nintendo R&D1, you know, by Gumpi Yokoi and Satoro Okada.

And most of the games that Nintendo published first party were overseen by Nintendo R&D1, and that includes Mario games. So, you know, R&D1 was taking. these important Nintendo franchises and working on them themselves. But for whatever reason, when it came to Zelda, that was Nintendo EAD. And that wasn't their first game project for Game Boy. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But it was their first major production.

And one of the very few that they put together. And I don't think there was prejudice involved or like chauvinism about Game Boy. like, oh, Game Boy is not worth it for us. It's just like kind of how Nintendo's divisions were assigned and the responsibilities they had because from 1989 through 1993, Nintendo EAD was really heavily invested in the Super NES. And even though they didn't develop the hardware,

it was really their responsibility to flesh out that early lineup. I mean, you look at the games that they started working on in 1988 and continue publishing through 1992 or so, and you have Super Mario World, you have Pilot Wings, you have the Nintendo version of SimCity, you have F0, you have ultimately the Legend of Zelda

a link to the past. Those are monumental games. Those are massive games. Those are huge undertakings. So EAD was really, they were really caught up and really committed to building a great start

for the Super NES. And so that left kind of responsibility and stewardship of the Game Boy, to R&D1 and the people who would design the hardware in the first place. So, you know, by 1993, EAD could finally start to look sort of a field and not focus entirely on the Super NES. And that's about the time you start to see them make games. And like I said, Link's Awakening was the second game that was really kind of a big EAD project.

The first one is a game that has a very close link and actually a direct link to Link's Awakening. Did you see what I did there by mistake? And that was, how is it, what the title is, Cairo No Tame Ni Kane-Wanaru, or for the Frog, the Bell Tolls, which is a game that only came out in Japan, and one of the characters from the game shows up in Link's Awakening, and really, like, the technology that they built for this game, the sort of game engine, would end up being used in The Legend of Zelda,

Link's Awakening. I played through this game about four years ago. Are you played all the way through it? All the way to the end. There's a fan translation. A third of it or so. It's really interesting. Like, the fights are bizarre in that it's like either you can beat the enemy or you can't.

It's like an auto battle where you approach an enemy and there's like a cloud fight and then you either beat him or you don't. So a lot of enemies are just roadblocks to get the item, like the weapon you need to pass them. So the encounters aren't all like Legend of Zelda, but it's a very puzzly, very comedic game even more so than this. It's like straight up comedy. At one point you visit, I think they call it in the game, Nintendo. It's like a game developer, and all the caricatures of the people are working there. And it's not a secret area. It's like a major area of the game going to this video game developer.

It's so weird. Like a lot of the silly, like outlandish humor and Link's Awakening is really amped up in this game. And if you can find a way to play it, there is a fan translation. It's easy to find. Please do, especially if you like Link's Awakening. There's a lot to love in this game. I had not even heard of this game until the star of it was revealed as a Smash Brothers trophy in the

Smash Brothers Wii 3DS. They announced it and that's how I think was the first time Nintendo of America gave it an official American title which is for whom the frog tolls I believe it is. And now that attack makes sense because his

the trophy attack is just if it gets on a fighter in Smash Brothers it then turns into that cloud of action. Yeah. So the when we say the the engine was kind of reused for the Link's Awakening. I think what we really, what people really mean is that this is a sort of Zelda-ish view,

even though it has this own kind of separate combat system. It has that kind of top-down three-quarters perspective. I think it even has the side-scrolling areas too, like when you go into some caves and things, there's ladders. I recall there being that element of it in the game as well. Yeah. But, you know, in terms of structure, it really, it has the sort of puzzly adventure element that would really define Link's Awakening and a lot of Zelda games after that. And you saw some of that

in a link to the past, but not nearly to the degree of Link's Awakening. So, yeah, it is really important to understand sort of the origins of this game and have as much to do with, you know, previous Zelda games as they do for the Frog the Bell Tolls. So it's kind of this little forgotten corner of Nintendo history. And I'd love to see them go back someday and provide you know, an official U.S. release for the game, but I don't think that'll ever happen. I think that chip as sale, but... You'll get Mother 3 before that, I would think. Someone has translated it.

It's a good translation, and it's like maybe five hours long. It's really fun. It's very slight, but I found it interesting as someone who loves Link's Awakening to play through. And it's always fun to find a Nintendo game you didn't know existed and play it. And there were a bunch of those on Game Boy. Like, a lot of Nintendo's first-party releases on Game Boy were pretty obscure for a long time. Like Donkey Kong 94, I don't think a lot of people knew about. Mulmenia, I don't think a lot of people knew about it.

That was a late release too. Yeah, and that was another EAD Miyamoto game. Yeah, you know, I never thought of it like that until you just said it now that the, I think Nintendo really did have their teams really siloed there of just why would EAD when they're mastering the Super NES then take time off of working to death on that to learn how to make a Game Boy game when the Super NES needed all the content it could get. But at the same time, the Game Boy, it was four years old. by that point.

And if you think about that, that's quite mature for context by like, you know, four years, by the time the Game Boy Advance was four years old, the DS had already been out for a year. So, I mean, this, so it's actually kind of crazy if you think about it, that EAD took that long to get over to the Game Boy to actually start making a game. I guess when you know, that's like saying somebody who lives to be 100, they weren't old when they were 50. It's the same deal with the GameCube.

We're like, yeah, four years wasn't old. It's going to, it's going to be around for like eight more after this. The Game Boy, like, had an absurdly long lifespan, so, I mean, it's crazy. It's really crazy if you think about, like, how long that freaking system actually lasted. Yeah, I mean, it really started to fade, like, 1995 or so. Yeah. But then Pokemon. Right.

But it was still, it was still very vital, I think, in 1993. It's still, you know, a lot happening. I feel like this was the most ambitious game of up to that point, period. Just nothing had tried to do as much. On Game Boy, yeah. It was, I think, almost the size of Link to the Past. Yeah, I think. I think the only thing that really compared to it in terms of scope was Final Fantasy Adventure,

which was also a very similar sort of action RPG game, but it didn't have anywhere near as intricate a structure as Links Awakening. All the items, all the... Yeah, well, it's not even that. It's just that, you know, if you look at Final Fantasy Adventure, it's a very straightforward action RPG. Yeah, yeah. You know, progression is pretty simple, pretty like point A to point B,

go, you know, go to this town, you know, learn this magic spell, walk a circle. eight around, or figure eight around the palm trees, whereas Link's Awakening is very, very intricate. It's like a Gordian knot of a video game, and you're constantly trying to unravel it. But they both have side quests that revolve around bananas, but one of them is not secretly heroin. That's Final Fantasy Legend 2. I keep messing that up.

I keep messing that up. I'm sorry. It's actually telling that when this game was, you know, in its heyday in like, you know, 93, 94, the fact that people were comparing it directly to link to the past, and it was a legitimate argument whether Link to the past or Link's Awakening was better and it was really a preference thing. And yeah, it is a technological marvel that they

could pull that off too on like a Game Boy is so simple. Like an original Game Boy is such a simple machine as compared to the Super NES and then they were able to also get all that with just a D-Pad into four buttons like no and no shoulder buttons. It blew my mind back in 1993 because it was like you know you start with the actual opening cutscene right and you cut to the shot of link like this beautiful art of link hanging from the ship in the middle of the storm or whatever and that looked like something that i might have seen on like a super nintendo at least in my mind uh it was it was really remarkable and this i mean the art was really vital it was really strong like everything had so much detail to it the music was really really good And it just, it did never, it did not, the technological limitations did not really occur to me.

Like, it just, it was, as you said, a technological marvel. Yeah, going back and playing through this game, I find myself surprised by some of the stuff it does on Game Boy. Like, if you bump into graves enough, you know, you bump into a grave and a poe comes out. But if you bump into them enough, eventually there's a like a giant poet. I'm like, how did they manage to make a sprite that big fly around on Game Boy? The bosses are really big too. and often have lots of moving parts to them too. Yeah, I remember the commercial

had the giant Poe flying around and I was going, whoa, that looks amazing. just a true feat on Game Boy, and by far one of the most advanced, most sophisticated, and best designed games ever to appear on the platform.

And how many of the key link to the past people were involved in this? It is a Takashi Tezakia. You know, I didn't actually think to look up the dev team. I got the answer. He's got Henry's here for us. Yeah, it was, this is something people don't maybe realize in the pre-Aunuma era

before he became the series director of it, that the Mario team and the Zelda team were the same team, or at least the same heads of it. Like Miyamoto had it. He was in charge and Takeshi Tezica was

the director of it. He was the director of this game and the director of Link to the Past. And also Kozumi worked on it as well, who would go on to run 3D Mario games. And shoot, I forget the name of it, but the director of

retro now, Bob, that you interview. Oh, Tanabe. Tanabe. He was also big in the scenario creation for that as well. So you've got those three, like, highest level EAD people working on it. And yeah, so you guys should just read the Awada Ask. It's the history of portable Zelda's they did it for Spirit Tracks, and they talked to Kozumi and Takata, sorry, Kozumi and Tizika as well as Aounuma kind of weighing in on it. and they spend the most time talking about Link's Awakening, obviously.

And they talk about how they finish Link to the past. They thought, could we make a link to the past for Game Boy? Let's try it out. And it became an after-hours project. It was not an approved project, which they also credited to why they got to do things that if it was an approved project that went through the right systems, people would have told them, you can't do that. You can't include this character.

He didn't license this from Hal. And so, yeah, it was a lot of that. And also that they got to be weird because they were just trying something out to see if they could even do it. And once they figured out they could, then they got approval to fully make it. But originally, it was just like, could we build link to the past in here? Oh, he kind of can. Let's do something special with that then. So it's the Mega Man 2 of Zelda.

Yes, it totally is. I like that. That's a good way to put it. And also that they confirm in that interview, but I'd read it elsewhere that, like, Twin Peaks was a big part of it, too. Okay. Yeah. That was what I keep wanting to say, but I wanted to let this conversation kind of take its natural course. So thank you for getting us to this point.

Yeah, Twin Peaks has been stated as an influence on this game. I have never seen Twin Peaks. That's surprising. Someone else take it away. Well, I watched the first season of Twin Peaks, which I guess is the only season you should watch. It's the only one you should. I watched it after playing Deadly Premonition to be like, what did they take for? Oh, they took everything.

So I watched Twin Peaks. It's great. Obviously, you don't need me to tell you that. But I don't see any direct links. But I think what Tezica said, that he wanted a game full of mysterious characters with unclear motivations. So you're going to meet a lot of people who are weirdos and you're not sure if they want to help you or hurt you. And that's sort of what Twin Peaks is all about. Like, who are these people?

Why are they so weird? What are they up to? Like, that's sort of what it's about. Why is there a tiny female chain shop jumping around with a boat? on her head. Exactly. She wants makeup. Just like how a detective, what's his face ends up in Twin Peaks. Link is in this weird place full of weirdos and

he needs to get out of it. Talking animals. Yeah. A stranger in town in a weird place that feels somewhat familiar and somewhat not. And there's some secrets that he has to get to, but because this is a complete game instead of a TV series David Lynch can quit after the first season,

this actually has a beginning, middle, and end. If you hadn't heard of Twin Peaks, It was prestige TV before that was a thing. Yeah, like this movie guy is going to make a TV show, and he's edgy. David Lynch, who at that point was really famous for blue velvet and making, like, edgy, R-rated films was going to make a drama for television. Like, if you watch a razor head and then be like, want to watch this guy's TV show, most people would say no. I don't want to see this.

In fact, never show it to me. But it was the hot thing in 1990 or 91, like the Simpsons, it was a contemporary of when the Simpsons, it was a contemporary of when the Simpsons. was super hot, which tells you how old that show is. And clearly it had an effect in Japan. Like, it carried over to Japan very well, at least to developers of games because, like, they

all were watching it. Like, they admitted in the article that they're like, yeah, we were all watching Twin Peaks, but they don't, like, get too much into it. They don't say, like, well, I watch this episode of Twin Peaks or whatever. It just seemed to be a thing they were watching at the time. And they're like, oh, this is a good jumping off point. But it's not, there's no

murder mystery in it. Like, it's not really about that, though maybe you kill everyone by waking up. But, I mean, if you mentioned deadly permanition, but also Alan Wake, like, is the most like, slobbering, deep kiss to Twin Peaks there ever was, I'd say.

And it's a fine game, but, yeah. So that's, I think that's really where Twin Peaks comes in there, and it also really ties it to the early 90s, too. Yeah, and the game does have a lot of sort of dream logic to it, which makes sense because it's a dream. Spoiler!

This game is 20 years old. Like, why is Mario here? What's going on? Why is Yoshi here? Like, why are Gumbas here? I think those touches are not just for fun. It's to make you feel uneasy. But it's not even, yeah.

I mean, there's that, but just the people you interact with. Yeah. Like, in this game, I can't think of any other Zelda game where you talk to an alligator who's obsessed with bananas and canned food. Can food, that's right. Or, you know, like, there are characters from other games. Yeah. You know, Dr. Wright, who is, of course, Will Wright, taken from the Super Ineas version of SimCity.

And he's being catfished by a hippo in the animal village. He's like, I'm actually a woman. Here's my picture. And it's picture of Princess Peach, which is actually in the original game. It's not one of those extra DX cutscenes. Yeah, but her name was Christine. Yeah, Christine. Not Princess Peach.

Right, Christine. I forgot about that. So that's what that was. Like, I haven't made it to that part in my replay. Yeah. So he's like a pen pal with her and in love with her. And she sends him a picture, but it's a picture of Princess Peach. But when you go visit her, she's,

She's like a hippo or a rhino or something like that in the animal village. It is weird. Link's Guide is an owl who comes down and is giving them lots of guidance. That would become a thing in Zalda. Yeah, exactly. Originally in Link's Awakening, you know, that would have been kind of an odd thing. This owl's talking to me, and we associate owls with sleep and nighttime and that kind of thing. But then, of course, in Ocarina Time, and actually quite a few things from Link's Awakening kind of transferred over to Occurine of Time.

the music being a major theme, for example, the huge, huge fetch quest that, like, had multiple connections. Fishing? Yeah, they called the straw millionaire because that's, that was in the Awadass, too, that is a Japanese fable that they all refer to. Like, oh, yeah, the straw millionaire, the guy who had a piece of straw that then traded it so many times that he eventually ended up being a millionaire. You've just explained every element of Japanese game design. That's exactly as it's like, oh, this is a cultural thing that they've all heard of, and it's why they put it in, it's why it's core to so many games. The owl stuck around.

Yeah. Still an ocarina. Yeah, as did Marin and Malin. I mean, Marin is obviously Mario. Ingo, he's in this game, too? No, he's not. There's some Luigi corollary in this game who lives in the mountains. But the mean, oh, yeah.

He's not evil. He's just a Luigi-looking guy. But, yeah, they would have Mario Luigi in this game. And, yeah. Yoshi is a toy. Kirby, yeah. Warby as an enemy, yeah. Ward as a, I don't think he's, he's an MPC, you talk to him.

Yeah, he's an MPC. Does he teach you the Mambo or whatever? I believe he is one of the music guys, yeah. But it's just the sprite, like they just took the sprite from USA and put it in there. They draw him differently. They draw him Zelda style in the instruction manual, but it's just a sprite from Super Mario, too. It's a great sprite, yeah. Yeah.

So let's talk about the story to the game. I mean, there's not that much to talk about, but I think it is an important place to kind of begin to understand the game. It does begin in a different way than any other Zelda game. It begins like an East game, actually. Link, you know, is in a storm and he is shipwrecked and he washes up on the shore and a girl finds him and takes him back to, you know, care for him and he wakes up and there's a girl and her father kind of like watching over him. That's totally like every East game. Link has become Adel Kristen.

And that's actually kind of where the game starts to get a little, you know, like, hey, this isn't the typical Zelda thing. You're not just, like, setting out in an adventure, but rather you were already on an adventure and you've been waylaid. Like, who knows what Link's actual adventure was in this game? It doesn't really, like, it gives a little bit of, you know, like, he's off to find new lands or something. This has to be in the timeline, right? Oh, yeah, it is. It's actually before the split. Well, yeah, but where they place it in the timeline now, it's right after Link to the past.

He has completed his mission and Link to the past, and it's just off to do whatever he's going to do now that he saved the world. and he gets waylaid during that. Interesting. So he washes up on those mysterious island and... Cohollent? Cohollent, yeah. And basically he's on this island and has no way off. And so this owl comes up and is like,

yo, Link, if you would like to get off this island, you need to wake up the windfish. And so his mission then becomes to wake the windfish, which he does by finding eight mystical weapons, each of which, or weapons. Instrument. Eight mystical instruments. Sorry, I was still thinking Final

Fantasy 5, which, you know, are located in dungeons all around the island. And once he has these spirit instruments, then he goes up to the windfish's egg. Because, of course, fish sleep in eggs at the top of them out. Yoshi eggs, why not? It's a very yellow-looking egg. It's a green-spotted egg. It's just a big old egg that's sitting there, and it looks like it's kind of like Death Mountain, but it's not really Death Mountain.

Right. But also, interestingly. It's also an easy trek up to the top. There's no, like, Lionels or anything like that. There's one ladder. Yeah, you just go up the ladder. But it's also reminiscent of Gannon's Pyramid from Link to the Pass, where you're like, you know, you're standing at the top and then at the end of the game, it breaks open and now you can go inside. So we're talking about the beginning of the game.

I think like Majora's Mask, it throws you a curveball, and that Major's Mask discompowers you by making you play as a decou for like three hours. But this game, you don't get a sword until you play maybe 20 minutes, 15 minutes. It's actually, it's not really that long. But you have to fight enemies with just a shield. You have to shove them out of the way and stuff. You know where that, well, I got to it in like five minutes, but I was like, well, yeah, I know where the sword is. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't spend 20 minutes walking around the town talking to everybody.

Oh, I did. But, well, that's... I thought it was a cool choice, though. You're like, you have to find your sword. You just get the shield. Yep. Go have fun. But when you get the sword, it's not the, like, the master sword that's, like, able to shoot things.

Right. And also they, right from the beginning, they're adding, like, lots of little interesting things like their guardian acorns that, like, will power up your dean. I'm not a fan of those because they change the music and I don't like the music. And the tri-d-d-di-d-di-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-tall-chunk of tri-hors. So those are interesting. When I was streaming this for Gintendo last week, I realize, like, they're called pieces of power, and they look like triforce, but they're not. The triforce of power is Gannon's tri-force piece. So what does that mean?

I wonder. That's really strange. I do like... It's all in the dream. So what does that mean, like, metaphorically, for him? What is that, why does that dream of this dream of this? Right. Am I the villain? Are we the baddies? I don't like the music changing. I like that sketch, by the way.

I don't like the music changing, but I like when you get the Triforce piece or powerpiece. It knocks enemies across the screen. It's very satisfying. And enemies who normally take two hits go flying and die in one hit. Also, the first time you get the sword is really great because Link holds it up, you know, as he does. And then after the triumphal theme is complete, he does the spin attack and like everybody on the screen dies. You know, another curveball that the game throws is, you know, you mentioned that you don't start out with a sword. You just have the shield. The shield is different.

Instead of just like walking around and automatically blocking things, you have to hold up the shield to defend with it. But because of that, it changes the dynamic of the shield. So instead of just blocking projectiles, now the shield can be used to push things. You can use it to actually physically block enemies from hitting you. And on top of that, you can actually push them. Like, invincible enemies, you can push into pits. And, like, it really opens up some new possibilities. The shield is no longer just this passive element that you're carrying.

And they want you to learn that real fast. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you have to push with the shield to get those spiky things out of the way to get to the sword. I mean, and you don't have to equip a sword or a shield. Or a sword. Like, all of a sudden, everything in your inventory becomes optional. And the game starts to, you know, to play with combinations of equipment and tools.

And, yeah, like, it's not your typical Zelda in that sense. Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of items with a lot of different utility, and I feel like they do it very well, but it does get kind of annoying when it's like, okay, there's a long jump here. I got to go to the item screen, equip the rock feather and the Pegasus boots,

do the jump, then equip what I was using before. I mean, the menus that you can just slide right in and out of them, but there's a lot of going to that menu to change items. My only problem with the menus is that I always want to hit B to exit out of a menu. But if you hit B, then that assigns that assigns that item. to the B button. But I really think that the reason that they did this

wasn't, I mean, maybe I'm just speculating, I am just speculating, maybe I'm totally wrong, but I feel like they went from a game on a system with a controller that had four face buttons and two shoulder buttons to a system that has two face buttons. And

so you could no longer have a game quite as complex as a link to the past. So instead of being able to equip a bunch of stuff all at once and have different buttons assigned to those abilities, you know, that was taken away. So they stopped and said, well, what if you could actually unassign things like the sword? What if the A button wasn't always a sword attack?

What if now the A button was the rocks feather to allow you to jump? Or what if it, you know, is a magic rod or something like that? And so while it doesn't involve some, you know, some menu juggling, it really does change up the possibilities of what you can do in the game and how you can equip yourself. And it's unique in the Zelda series in that way. Yeah, the fact that you don't always have a sword is really interesting. Yeah, I would think that would impact their design to a degree of just them thinking about, well, does the player have a sword?

I don't know if they do in this moment. Yeah. They might have to switch out to it. They won't always have a sword at hand. One more thing about items. I'm sure there's more. But, oh, yeah, you have this down here. The boomerang I thought was really cool because it's an optional item,

but you have to decide what item you want to get rid of to squeeze it into your inventory. And I think it costs like 400 rupees or something. Maybe it's my price. Also, in addition to that, you can trade away your sword to get the boomerang, which is a bad idea, but you can do it if you want. I mean, they really do have to account for the fact that maybe you don't have a sword. Maybe, you know, you've traded away your boomerang.

You know, all the strategy guides say, give them the shovel. Use the shovel for the boomerang because after you've dug up all the stuff that's hidden in the world, you don't need the shovel anymore. but you don't have to do that if you want to like go around and dig up every single damn thing on the screen go for it

can you block your way like from being able to complete the game like could you theoretically give them an item that you actually need? No because you can trade back for the original item so if you need this or a game you can't screw yourself it's not return the Zork you can just inconvenience yourself so yeah it's not like that

but in addition to the ability to switch out weapons and not necessarily equip a sword or a shield at all times, Link's Awakening was also really unique in terms of its structure. And, you know, it has eight dungeons and there's a boss at the end of

each dungeon and all the dungeons have tools inside that you need to use to beat the boss. Like, it takes that element from Link's Awakening or from a Link to the past. Like, that has, you know, it's kind of canonized here as this is how Zelda games will work. But to

me, Link's Awakening is really interesting and really unique in the Zelda series. in that pretty much every dungeon you get to involves basically a puzzle just to get to the dungeon. And there's certainly elements of that in subsequent Zelda games, but it's much more prominent here.

Like every single dungeon, just the process of getting to that dungeon, is really challenging. Some of them are locked with keys. Some of them, like, you know, there's a moat or something that you have to cross somehow, or something.

There's always something that's in the way. And sometimes the, what is it, straw millionaire comes into that. the trading chain. Yeah. And sometimes you just need to, you know, go find a plot item or something like that. But it's always very involved and you can't just go like, oh, I'm done with that dungeon. I'm going to go to the next.

You have to stop and take stock and really explore and talk to the NPCs and poke around at every screen. And I think part of that comes from the fact that this being a Game Boy game, it is a smaller world than the one in a link to the past. And there's only one world as opposed to a link to the past, which has. parallel worlds, two worlds. So, you know, because of that, they had to do more within that space. And so it becomes much more of a complex, multi-layered puzzle just to navigate the world. I was going to say that you're absolutely right. I think that's why they did that so that didn't, you know, suffer quite as much as in comparison with, say, linked to the past.

But you're saying, like, those puzzles really are involved. Like, for example, there's one that's actually you could constitute as a mini dungeon where you're going and getting the five goals. Golden Leaves, and there's actually a mini-boss that you have to fight. Like, it was a surprisingly big world, all things considered. And there were, if I recall correctly, eight full dungeons on top of that, which put it in line with the original Zelda. I think the original Zelda also had the... Yeah, eight dungeons. Well, plus Death Mountain.

Plus, yeah, Death Mountain. Yeah. I think, like, the Zelda dungeon, in my opinion, is the ideal form of gaming, the gaming experience. Just like, it has everything I like in a perfect container. And I love a link to the past dungeons, but I feel like Link's Awakening's Dungeons are more refined and more thorough. Going back to Link to the Past is like this is still like one of the best games ever. But some of the dungeons are kind of slight. Some don't develop their ideas enough.

But Link's Awakening really has really developed ideas, like a thesis to every dungeon almost. And I feel like they improve on so much. Just hearing a chime to know there's a key in a room is such a great improvement. And also I think every dungeon has a mini boss as well as a regular boss. Most of them do. Yeah. So that's something that I added as well. There were no mini-bosses.

Stalphos is a mini-boss, for example. Actually, it's funny. Like I mentioned earlier, that Link's Awakening was my very first Zelda. I mean, of course, I had played Zelda before. Like, I had played the original, but, you know, not very much. Like, I don't think I had even gone to a dungeon at that point. Like, I knew of Zelda as a thing that was very popular. And I started playing Link's Awakening, and I got to my first dungeon, and I did not understand the language of the design.

I did not understand that progression meant, Sometimes you push a block and the door opens. Sometimes you got to kill everything in the room. Sometimes you have to light all of the four things to be able to continue. Like stuff that was just second nature to people who have been playing Zelda to that point. Like I was literally calling the Nintendo helpline to be like, what do I do? And they're like, push a block. And I'm like, oh, great.

Well, that's another $40 on my phone will. Yeah, it hadn't rewired your brain for Zelda thought yet. and this one was a good training for that. I had a similar thing, too, of like, that I, I got, I played Zelda. I played Legend of Zelda, too, but I was, you know, seven or eight, and I just, my brain wasn't ready for it. I think I've even said it on this podcast before, but of just that my idea of a game was Mega Man Mario, Zelda, or Mega Man Mario, Castlevania of just, I am on this side of the

screen, I want to get to that side of the screen. Like, the idea of a top-down, it just confused me so much. And so I never really got much of anywhere in those two games. When I ran it them, I didn't even buy them. And so, yeah, and that's – I also didn't get a link to the past when it first came out, probably because I just think, like, Zelda, whatever that is, those games made no sense to me. And then Link's Awakening finally was the one that got me. Yeah, it got me in because it felt like a much more – you know, it was a story. Like, it was a much more straightforward adventure than that.

say the original Zelda where like, you know, it's just like, wander, go do things. And like a lot of people, you know, I know that Jeremy finds that extremely exciting and a lot of people do. And now I'm playing Breath of the Wild. I'm like, wow, this is like amazing. I love like just wandering around and everything. But certainly at the time, I really appreciated just the greater structure to Link's Awakening. Yeah, like you guys, I mean, I dabbled in the first two Zelda games.

I was too young. But I think in 1992, something in my brain unlocked that allowed me to play RPGs in Zelda. and that's when I really got into a link to the past. But because I bought this with my own money and I had a Gameboy, Link's Awakening, I played this probably, I don't know, 20 times through. Just as a kid, it was like one of the five games I owned. So I would just play it over and over and over again. So I have so much of this game just etched to my brain,

but I have a really strong attachment to this game for sure. I would glitch the eighth dungeon. Like there was some kind of glitch that would let you get to the item. So for the longest time, I did not know how to properly beat it because I did not know the actual puzzle. I only knew how to do the glitch that would get me onto the top of a wall and then I would jump down

and I would go and get it. Wow. Yeah, no, I played this quite a lot over a summer or two. I think I probably played around the same time. I played Donkey Kong 94 more than this, but this was my, this was the first Zelda I could just take my time in. I think it also was the first Zelda I own, so maybe that's too.

When I was playing Zelda, one and two as rentals. I was just like, well, I got to speed through this. It's got to go back to pick and save next Monday. And this was back when there were only, what, four Zelda's? I mean, one, two, links to past, links awakening. So, like, a new Zelda was like

a big deal, right? Like Akron and a time was the next one after this. So, I mean, we didn't exactly have a lot of Zelda to choose from at the time. In five years, you get another one. But I just remember this game is so etched in my mind. I remember buying it at the software, et cetera. I would later work at, which still exist and has never changed

their carpet. And going to McDonald's, I went there in last August, and they still have the same filthy carpet, by the way. And I went to McDonald's after my mom, and I was just, I remember eating chicken nuggets, looking at the instructor book, oh, my God, a new zeal, oh, look at all there's an owl. My manual is so greasy. Yes. I was, I was fastidious then, during me. I was wiping my hands down. But, um, but yeah, but I just, I don't know why. It just hit me at the right time. And, um, I got to replay it so much in it. And I, I guess I didn't mind it being green and and fuzzy, you know. This is the game that I bought a super Game Boy for.

I never heard of Game Boy originally. And sometimes friends would let me borrow their Game Boys. And so I played, you know, Gargoyle's Quest and Tetris and Metroid 2 even. Like, I played all the way through those games on someone else's Game Boy. Sometimes my brother would let me borrow his, not very often. But this game, you know, came along and I didn't really have access to a Game Boy. And I was like, I'm going to need more time with this one. So, you know, the Super Game Boy came out like the next Jeep.

and I bought it, and this was the game that I bought for Super Game Boy and played through it. I played a lot of this on Super Game Boy years later, and then I beat it like five more times, so it was good. It had no special border, though, or anything. It was made before. No, it was before that. They'd had a custom or like a built-in palette assignment, but that was pretty much it. Yeah. But yeah, I've never actually played this on original Game Boy hardware.

I've played it on Super Game Boy. I've played it on Game Boy, in the remake. You probably don't want to. No, probably not. I had my old vacuum tube game board. Yes. Vacuum tube. Back in two Game Boy without the battery cover.

Yeah, you lose that battery. A hand-cranked one. Children lose that battery cover too easily. Yeah. But it didn't look fuzzy to me. Only when I saw a Game Boy pocket was like, oh, the regular Game Boy looks like crap. The thing was that at that time I had a Game Boy and I could play on a PC or something. I did not have a Super Nintendo.

I would not get one for years. And I really, you know, it was a point where. I kind of had to use my imagination. And, like, when I was looking at these games, it was not thinking in terms of graphical fidelity. I was thinking, wow, this game looks really good for a Game Boy game. Like, I was picking out kind of the positive details rather than focusing on the negative. So, yeah, no, of course, I didn't look as good as linked to the past. But I'm, like, going, wow, look at all that really detailed art.

Look at, like, that really complicated animation. Look at how big these bosses are. This is really impressive. And as a game gear owner at that point, I knew, like, I shouldn't even care that this is in color, because then it'll eat all my batteries. Six AA batteries for an hour. The worst. The worst.

Yeah, I think, too. Yeah, I think, too, design-wise, you think about that they had to. to make all these traditional, all the things, without having color to indicate anything. Like, they couldn't specialize things with the colors. They had to redraw an item or give it a slightly different shade of puke

than if they wanted to make this. No, this is the blue wand versus the red one. Like the crystal ball switch. Like, I didn't even realize that those were crystal balls in the original game because they were just like this monochrome thing. I thought that I was hitting like this little guy and like a cloak.

That's what it always looked like to me. So somewhere between a, to the past and Link's Awakening, Link washed the pink out of his hair. Is that in the timeline as well? Because his hair is no longer pink. Yeah, he finally got out of his punk phase. Nintendo are pink hair deniers,

even though I hate that. His hair is pink right there. It's pink for the entire game. And then when you beat that game, he's such a disgusting range of purple and yellow and red and orange and pink. I remember when Link Between Worlds was announced, I asked Bill Trinand like, hey, why isn't his hair pink?

He's like, Link's hair was never pink. I don't know why you guys are talking about it. Then you put a rag over your mouth and dragged your way. No, that happened when I asked about a Mother 3 port after. He really wasn't happy to hear that question. All right. So one of the things I really love about this game is the way it combines elements of so many other games, including some of the early Zelda games.

Like, Bob, you mentioned the Gumba passages. So one of the kind of odd quirks of this game is that when you go into Underground passages beneath dungeons or even into caves, it becomes a side-scroller and it works like a Mario game up to and including the fact that there are Gumbas and you can jump on them and squish

them. And if you jump on Gumbas, you always get a heart. Yep. Yep. Which is just ridiculous. Like, why is that in Zelda? But if you look back, if you look back at the original The Legend of Zelda when you go into the passages underneath a dungeon to get weapons or just like to move to another part of the dungeon,

they do have this kind of like a change in perspective where it's side-scrolling. And then, of course, Zelda 2 was a side-scroller. But now you've got you have a top-down Zelda game that has proper side-scrolling capabilities

like, well, it doesn't actually scroll, but you know, like the side-scrolling mechanics, the platformer mechanics, where you can jump, thanks to the rocks feathers. I feel like they really, you know, the new things that they put into this game, they really stopped and said, like, how can we make the game even more Zelda? Like, how can we

follow up on crazy ideas from the past and explore them to the full extent. And so you have, you know, Link doing the Mario and squishing things and there's piranha plants coming out of pipes. Swimming around sheep, cheeps, things like that. Yeah, it's bonkers. And Link being able to jump is a fairly rare thing, like,

for the most part. Like, Link's jumps have always been. But it's old just now. Not anymore. Now we're in the world of Link jumping. Oh, yeah. The sexy link jumping around. Link's jumps have always been so limited for the most part.

Like, not always, but for the most part. So to have an actual item where he would be able to jump and have that be a large part of the puzzles was really interesting. Like, I always had that feather equipped. Like, I never equipped the shield. Yeah, the Rock's Feather is basically to the Zelda series, what the feather in Super Mario Card is, to that series. Like, it showed up once the Rocks feather. Well, actually, no, it did show up in one of the Oracle's games. But, yeah, they just recycled the game.

Yeah, that's because Oracle was just half of this game. And then they made a really cool thing with that. But it started with this. I mean, by the next game, Ocarina would just be like, go to an edge of a thing and you will jump, but we're not giving you a button for it. All this talk makes me sad that Zelda cannot be this weird again because, frankly, I think people take Zelda way too seriously.

And I mainly talk about the timeline, but it's like, no, this is a serious adventure and it's epic. And it's about a beautiful man who does amazing things. And it's like, but it can be weird. I like the weird stuff. But every Zelda has like that weird thing. Like the weird shop owner is like, ah! I feel like now it's like now.

just like a little drop of weirdness. I don't know. They, Wien Waker did, was probably the kind of resurgence of this sort of weirdness, but it's still stuck to

Zelda style rules, I think. Yeah, I mean, they really went over the top with like Skyward Sword's villagers, actually. Especially if you look at Hyrule Historia,

like you see sort of the iterative processes that helped them come up with the final villagers in Skyward Sword. And you're just like, man, they were really spitballing in this one.

And there's, there's plenty of kind of wacky goofiness in Breath of the Wild that I've seen so far, which is not that much. Right. Yeah, there's, I'll refer back to that, I want to ask again, that Aluma is in it too, and he credits Link's Awakening for giving them permission to be weird as the saying goes. They said if Link to the Past was the only, was the last Zelda game before they made Ocarina, Ocarina would have been very different because they had the permission to get weird

because they could just say, well, Awakening was weird so we can have these other weird moments in there. And also because they really love Link's Awakening on the team. So they wanted to emulate that. I just feel that there are unspoken rules like Link cannot appear anywhere else. They broke that with Mario Kart 8, though. And also, nothing can appear in a Link game that is not from High Rule or from the series. I feel like there's an unspoken rule. But Mario Card 8 was like, okay, we need to sell Wii use.

We need to sell Mario Kart. Here's Link. Here's a Link course. That Mario Card 8 moment was like, I don't know. It felt wrong to me. It's like, oh, really? You're going to, you're, yeah. I was talking to somebody and they were like, oh, I was like, oh, a high rule course is in Mario Kart 8.

And I was like, oh, what, Liz Lincoln and drive around? I'm like, yes, on a horse motorcycle. Yep. And they were like, what? It's a fun stage. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's bizarre. It's anything now.

There's no, like, this room my childhood. Like, that's, that is a bullshit thing to say. But it was, like, a moment, it crossed the line you can't uncross. You feel like, well, now he's here. Like, even more so than Breath of the Wild has a season pass. How dare they? Yeah. Like, they already sold out.

Like, he was in Mario Card. I mean, but, like, Link was in Smash Brothers from the very start, and it did not. Well, those are toys fighting each other. It made total sense to me that Link would be fighting Samis. And I was like, oh, great. Now I can finally find out who's going to win, Link or Samis. But I feel like if Link were to touch. Mario and Mario Card 8, they'd just timecop each other and melt because they're not allowed to occupy the same space.

Time pop is a verb, by the way. I love that some of the kind of like odd or out-of-place elements in this game went on to sort of sow the seeds for not just Zelda games, but other games. Like if you look at the chain chomp, you know, in Super Mario Brothers 3, you had chain choms, but they were just kind of like these static objects that would sort of defend a small space. and occasionally you got into an area where they kind of moved around freely. But here you have chain choms more as like a pet. And that thing is still empowering. It getting away from you is, getting away from its post is a huge story element.

And to me, that reminds me of Super Mario 64 in the first stage where you have to like free the chain chomp while it's trying to hurt you. And that, you know, once it's free, then it bounds away and it breaks a gate. And all of a sudden you get access to a star that you needed to close. collect. And on top of that, like the idea of a chain chomp as a pet shows up again in the most recent Paper Mario game Color Splash. Oh, really? Okay. There's an entire section like around an archaeological excavation where you're like trying to track down this, you know, this escaped pet chain chomp. And it's not that hard to, you know, kind of see where it's been

because it makes a mess of the, the scenery, like tears up the paper and the cardboard everywhere. But like that is straight out of Link's Awakening. Yeah. Yeah. Personify. You chain choms more than they had way more they had been in Super Mario 3 like they were just

they were an enemy like any other and I think you get a little more hint of their personality in their appearances in Yoshi's Island

but 64 is really where they become a thing and you know the kind of legend behind chain chomps is that they were designed because Shigero Miyamoto

was like definitely afraid of this chained up dog when he was a kid so I kind of wonder if the fact that a big part of this game

early on involves you carrying around a chain chomp as a pet is like trolling Miyamoto or something. They're just like, eating enemies alive. Check this out, Shigero. Look what we did. And the chain chom can do a lot. Like, aside more than, like, you can take it to the monkey

and like the monkey and the dog will fight. Right. And if you take it to Richard's Villa, he's like, get that thing out of here. There's like, you know, there's variable dialogue if you're carrying nothing around. Yeah, the writing in it is they didn't have to do any of that. Like, they didn't have to put that work in there.

Nobody expected lots of dialogue from a Zelda game at that point. We should take a break soon. But when you go, when you take Marin to the Animal Village, when you get her in your party, you lift her up, like your kid, like you got an item. And then she yells at you if you go into people's drawers and stuff, and she chastises you for things. And you can fall on her and she'll yell at you. So I love all that little incidental dialogue that they didn't need to put in.

But can we just really talk quickly, talk about the fact that if you can steal, you can steal in this game. And not only if you steal from there, you can never go in the shop again because he will kill you. And not only that, but it'll change your name to thief. And everybody will call you thief from that point on.

They did that again in Twilight Princess, right? I don't remember. I don't know. But I think, like, the only thing you need to buy in this game is the bow, right? It's what the entire world's economy is based around in Link's Awakening. The bow costs a thousand rupees and that's all you can carry.

And that's basically the one thing you need to buy, I think. You have to buy it because you need it for the full. final boss. Oh, yeah, yeah, that too. But, yeah, one thing that I didn't even realize when I started replaying it is that you can go and buy bombs at the very beginning of the game. Like, I kept walking around waiting to find bombs, and I finally, finally an enemy dropped a bomb, and I was like, yes.

And then I went back, you know, an hour later to the village and went to the shop because I was going to buy a shovel. And there's bombs. Ten rupees for ten bombs. I'm like, they're giving these away. I'm such a idiot. Twilight Princess would make you wait eight hours for those bombs. and you'd like it.

I feel like more recent Zelda's actually do like actually have the bombs in the shop that you can just buy and now you got them. Well, Breath of the Wild is very unpressuous about bombs. Yeah.

Well, they literally give them to you for like you don't run out of them. You can just like set them and you can remotely detonate them. It's so great. What a future to be. I could be playing this right now, you guys. I know.

We should be playing this game. Let's take a break and go play some Zelda. Woohoo. And caller number nine for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer.

Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones.

Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. Hey, it's John Horn here. I'm the host of the new podcast that you need to subscribe to right now. It's called Geffen Playhouse Unscripted. And every week I chat about the creative process with stars who have roots and ties to theater. Who so far would you ask? Well, let me tell you. We have Rain Wilson, Neil Patrick Harris, Josh Gadd, Dana Delaney, Brian Cranston, David Copperfield, Matt Walsh, and so many more yet to come. It's called Geffen Playhouse Unscripted with me, John Horn. You can download it on the Podcast One app, or you can subscribe now on iTunes or at podcast1.com. Hey, everybody, Bob here, and you might be wondering why a guy who gave up driving five years ago has any business at all reading an ad for something like True Car.

Well, I know firsthand all the baggage that comes from owning a car, the insurance, the maintenance, gas money, and choosing the perfect bumper sticker to sum up your complex belief systems. And before all that, there's figuring out which car to buy in the first place. So if you're in the market for a new ride, consider turning to True Car. With True Car, you can see what other people in your local market paid for the car you want. Information that empowers you to feel confident. Once you register with True Car, you can connect with a certified local dealer and see real pricing on our car. actual inventory. And with over 13,000 certified true car dealers nationwide and over 3 million cars sold by true car dealers, you can rest assured that TrueCar has a history of happy

customers. Customers who, on average, save $3,000 off the MSRP. So when you're ready to buy, visit TrueCar to enjoy a more confident car buying experience. Some features are not available in all states. So let me tell you the craziest thing about Link's Awakening. There's no Gannon in this game. There's like a little pig dude geophyte, and there's the little piece of power. But there's no Gannon. Isn't one of the versions of Nightmare or the final boss, like a shadow of Gannon or like an image of Gannon?

It's not really Gannon. It's your illusion. Right, but I mean, there's a tiny bit of him, but not really. A little bit, but not that really counts. He's dead. He's gone. It's been taken away from this reality. I mean, that is also what they wanted, a clean slate. They talk about that, too, in the interview that they really, they didn't want to worry about all that stuff.

They didn't want to think about making a new story in Hyrule with Zelda and Gannon. It's like, no, we need a little corner we can paint in ourselves. I think that's why it is a dream, just because this really doesn't matter to whatever Zelda's story that's being told. It's its own thing. That's a very Japanese game design thing that way predates awakening of just like, this is a guideant. It doesn't count. Yeah. Like this is, if something counts, this doesn't count so our boss won't be mad that we change something that counts in it.

And a dream is always the way or a dumb time travel thing at the end. Some other reset button hit to make all your. progress not really happen. Phantom hourglass is also a dream. It's an entire dream. Yeah, I really, I don't like that as somebody who grew up on comic books and wanting

everything to count all the time and want to catalog where everything in Spider-Man ever happened and why it all must matter. It is a major reaction I have. It's just like, oh, so you told me a story that doesn't even matter. I can't carry this information to another game. Like, F off.

Truth be told, like, Gannon, I mean, I mean, Gannon's fine. I suppose he's like a good villain and everything, but I mean, I actually find a lot of the villains in a lot of the other Zelda games, like more interesting. Like the bird. I like the bird in Wienwaker. I like the Lord of the Twilight Realm who was working with Gannon and Twilight Princess. The one in Skyward Sword was dumb, though. It's like their gender is ambiguous.

Isn't that scary? I'm saying. You know, I actually thought he was okay. Like he's not my favorite, but he was like a good. test most of the time I like that Gannondorf got to have the like personality that Gannon

never got to have. Gannon doesn't have a personality anymore. It's just an evil pig man. I mean you just look at linked between worlds like Gannon's like oh and I guess you got to fight Gannon at the end. It's the same as Spirit Tracks. Yeah and also the Oracle's games. I mean that's just pretty standard. I was kind of surprised to see

on the back of Breath of the Wild help Link fight Calamity Gannon or whatever. Like they just flat out tell I mean, Gannon's in the game. Yeah. Like, there's no secret. When you wake up, it's like, oh, check it out. There's climbing to come in a Gannon.

I think it's a way just to reassure people because they want that to be part of Zelda. But if Link's Awakening came out today, like, I guarantee that you would have fought the shadow things. And then it would have been like, oh, and look, Gannon's here. I was the one who wrecked your ship. It was me. Yeah, I was always a little disappointed that Windwaker did such a good job of giving Gannon a personality and giving him, you know, even some great. Ravitas. Like in the final battle when you stab his face, he's like

he's kind of wistful about having become evil. And then, you know, they're like, okay, well, time to go find a new high rule. I thought, oh, this is going to be a clean slate. They're going to, you know, future Zelda games are going to be different. But no, no, future Zelda games take place in

the old high rule and they come up with a ridiculous timeline convolution so that you can keep fighting Gannon. And it's kind of interesting, but also like, I wonder how much more interesting Breath of the Wild might be if you weren't going to

go fight Gannon and didn't have Princess Zelda in there somewhere. I mean, it's the legend of Zelda, so I guess you've got to. In the meantime, so go ahead. Well, that's why Awakening is so special because they just are like, no, we don't got to. We don't have to. We will have a

character that looks like Zelda and we will have things that like call back to it, but we don't have to do any of this stuff. In the meantime, Link's fighting kind of his own, like the nightmares of the past, right? Like the final boss, like I said, it's basically a boss rush and enemies that you have fought in the past start to appear.

Like, I think one of them is actually a ghanem where, like, it's shooting the orb. And I hadn't played Link to the Past at that point. So that was where I totally learned how to, like, do that and stuff like that. And, you know, they were kind of recycling boss designs, but whatever. Like, thematically, it was appropriate. I forgive it. Just to get some more stuff in there. I forgive repeating boss.

There were a lot of cool bosses in this game. I remember, like, the genie. You have to pick up his bottle and throw it. Oh, right. Yeah, that was a good one. This guy who, like, keeps shoving this log at you from, like, back and forth across the room. You have to jump over the log and hit them. And there's, like, a lot of really cool ideas.

There's two bosses per dungeon. So they have to have a lot of ideas to make them interesting. Yeah, you fight the mini boss usually right before the main boss, and it gives you the warp back to the beginning of the dungeon. Which is another advancement on Link to the Past Dungeons, so that shortcut. I don't think there was any kind of shortcut kind of thing in Link to the past. Talking about the bosses. in the Eagles Tower, when we were talking about side-scrolling and stuff like that, that is actually a side-scrolling battle that takes place in Link's Awakening because you have to climb to the top of the tower and you have to actually like jump over him when he's attacking.

And it's actually a really hard boss battle because he keeps knocking you off the top of the tower and you have to kind of get back up to him. And I think the fight resets, if I recall correctly. I'm not sure. But I remember that fight really kicked my ass in a lot of respects. This game in general is very tough. I think it's because you collect fewer hearts throughout the game. And the enemies don't hit any less hard than in other games. You don't have like four bottles or anything like that like you did. Are there any – I forget if there's any sort of health item you carry around.

So you can go talk to Crazy Tracy. And she's like, hey, big guy, I'm going to rub you down. And that'll give you one resurrection. But every time you go, it becomes more expensive. So you can't really abuse that. So you can't break out the bottles like you can in other Zelda's. Yeah. And, you know, when you beat a mini boss and get the warp, you always get a fairy,

which actually looks more like a flying worm. Kind of weird. But, yeah, like it's, it definitely is less lenient than other Zelda games. It's just as tough as any other Zelda, but it doesn't give you as many advantages in a lot of ways. So it's, it can be pretty tough. I've died a lot more playing this game in this replay than I do in other Zelda games. Yeah, well, I'm dying all the time of breath of wild. Yeah, well, that's different.

It does seem like the hardest Zelda game to date, at least in a long time. I'm just seeing death gifts on Twitter of people dying and interesting ways in the game. I just got set on fire by a laser statue, so yeah. You got to watch out for those guys. But enough about it. But the Link's Awakening, it's, yeah, it was really hard. I was surprised how hard it was as a kid and also that I wonder how much their design depended on the, like how much they thought about it being a portable game in the design of it.

Like did they make dungeon, they structured dungeons differently and your ability to save and that fast travel within the dungeons thinking about now someone turned off their Game Boy and is coming back to it or their mom told them you have to do homework now, put that away. It has like an instant save feature, right? Like, hold and start and select. And it saves automatically last doorway, I think, you enter. Yeah, so, yeah, it does work around that. I forgot those kids tell you that right at the beginning.

And they're like, I don't know why I said that. Yeah. I love those kids. Yeah, they're great. Like, I'm just a kid. I don't know why I know this. Yeah. Another thing, this is, I think this is the only Zelda game that has a narrator.

Like, it tells you a lot about what Link is thinking. So, like, when you come out of the first dungeon and those kids are freaking out and they're just, like, rambling about how Chompchomp or Bow Wow or whatever was kidnapped. They go on for a while and then it's like dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. They're kind of rambling. So maybe it's faster just for you to go have a look around yourself. And you see a lot of that. Like, it's kind of, you know, like someone's talking to you about the adventure.

Someone's telling you about it. They're narrated. There's a little comical aside. Like, you can look at every dresser or whatever, but there's nothing in it. Wow, that's a nice chest. Yeah, I just like, there's no, I mean, that's, I guess it's a joke, but there's nothing to it. You don't find anything. It's just like, wow, this is nice.

Like, that's basically it. It ends, yeah. But as always, the comedy accentuates the sadness, and, of course, at the end of the game. I was just going to say, like, the fact that this game is a dream, like, that's normally a cheap cop-out. But in this case, it's more poignant. Yeah, you become much more attached to all of the characters. Like, you get to, because it's such a small island, you're not roaming around all of Hyrule. You get to know everybody really well because characters like Taryn are kind of wandering.

around like the entire game, like there's a whole bit with a beehive, for example. Oh, right. He's shrewing. Yes, exactly. When you go to the Animal Village and you see Marin singing the song for the first time, and it's a really nice song. And then, of course, when that music is playing at the end and everything's fading away, like, it actually does give me goosebumps. Speaking of music, whenever you find those instruments, I always found it interesting, like, you're, this Game Boy made them sound similar to what they're supposed to be. I mean, they're a little off because it is a Game Boy sound chip or whatever, but they're pretty convincing.

And that always surprised me, like, replaying it again, like, wow, that really sounds like the whatever. Absolutely. Yeah, you have, like, the drums and you have the harp and everything. You're running around with an entire pipework in my backpack. Sure, why not. but there's like a moment the first time you discover that is actually a dream because you have to go through a dungeon and there are like some dark nuts that you have to fight and then you finally illuminate the cave painting and you see the windfish there and the owl

and then you realize at that moment that it is in fact all a dream and it becomes a question of do you wake up do you remove this like this island do you effectively like consign it to to memory and it's a moment actually. Yeah, like, and then of course the first time you go into the final dungeon and it's really dark and you can

feel the shadows kind of pressing around you in a way that's actually really remarkable for a Game Boy game. Yeah, I think this might have been the, me and my brother were playing it at the same time as kids and I think we it's when we realize we both, he caught it first

and said, I think he's asleep the whole time. like, oh, it was all a dream? It's going to end with it. It was all a dream. And, you know, and now we talked about Tanabe working on this. Oh, you're right. Super Mario Brothers, she would say, there you go. That's another, he's into that.

Well, I like that trope. He watched a lot of Roseanne, I guess. I don't think they were that sly about it because I'm pretty sure her character's like, what if we're all in a dream? Well, anyway, later. I mean, they probably weren't if, like, 11-year-olds were saying, and I think it's all a dream. Like, it was probably projected very easily, obviously, yeah.

So let's see, some other things to talk about before we kind of wrap this up. The hidden seashells, I feel like those are, I can't decide if they're like a nod or a troll toward everyone who got the shovel and a link to the past. It was like, I have to dig everywhere. I want to see what's out there because here is a game where you can actually dig up places and find something hidden. As a kid without the internet or like game facts, I found all the seashells. And I feel like when you have to dig from them, it's pretty obvious where you do. Yeah, and you can also carry bow-wow around

and he'll freak out whenever you come onto a screen that has a hidden seashell. But when you go to that house, the seashell house, you just walk in and a meter fills up a little bit and it's like maybe if you collect enough seashell, something good will happen. And it's like, what am I even doing this for? You have no idea what the goal is at first.

And then it turns out that's the only good sword in the game if you turn in all the seashells. So it's worth doing. What does that sword do, just hits for more damage? Doesn't it shoot a beam also? It's been a long, it's like a, too, too, true. Well, the two things on this. First of all, it's pretty true to the whole original Zelda, bomb every wall, burn every bush.

But also, like, collectibles just became more and more of a thing as we got more and more to more Zelda's. Like, for example, in Twilight Princess getting all the bugs. Ocura in a time had a ton of stuff to collect. Scultulas. Yes, exactly. So having seashells kind of reflected the trend of the series, I think. That was way more reasonable than scultulas. It's like, well, they're only out at a certain time of the day

and good luck finding them all. Yeah, and Thin Breath of a Watt, the Wild has the Korok acorns or whatever. Corrox C.E. And supposedly those, there's like 900 of those in the game or something. Oh, my Lord. I don't know how there can be that many, but I've just, I've stumbled upon so many without even looking for them, but you just come to an area that like, oh, one of these things is not like the other.

Maybe if I move this rock and then a dude pops up like, oh, okay, hey. I did one where I just I bumped in, I rolled a rock off of a perch but then nothing happened and I was like, I guess I'll just go and I like take about 12 steps and then it cuts to a coroc saying like, hey, you found me,

here's your corks. He was like, oh like, I guess I did something. Yay! I spent a lot of time looking for pieces of heart in that game and Link's Awakening and it was a point of pride to get all of them and I think that might be the first time that I really felt a lot of pride in collecting all of the things in a video game.

And that's where it began. Yes. It's hard to be a completionist with this game, though. One thing that always annoyed me was, like, I don't know, maybe a fifth of the map is this river-rafting minigame. And in order to uncolor every colored and block of the map, you need to hit every one of those, like, little pieces of river. And it's hard to figure that out. Like, you have to be strategic, and I can never do it. Or I could do it, but that was just too much time.

So we touched on this a little bit, but I really feel like we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about, like, just, what a role music actually plays in this game and how that really informed so much of what came after that. Aside from the fact that you're collecting all eight of the instruments, you also get the ocarina. And we were talking about whether or not it was like a flute or actually an

ocarina of Link to the Past. But in Link to the Past, if I recall correctly, there's a story beat about it, and then you use it to summon well, I always thought it was a duck, but that flies you around. It's very duck-like. It is very duck-like, yeah. But in Link's Awakening, like, you can get three different songs from a

a little, a big fish guy named Mambo. And interestingly enough, I think Shovel Knight actually tipped a hat to that because they have the trouple pond where you can go and get your fishing rod and it'll do a little dance for you and everything. So it is localized as flute in Link to the Past, but it is literally the blue ocarina, like the exact same thing. So it's not a flute. So, and of course, you are playing a duet with Marin with the song because she teaches you the ballad of the windfish.

and you have to use it to awaken the windfish at the end of the game. And then that, of course, carries on into Ocarina of Time as your primary means of transporting through time and then you had the baton and wind waker and in the spirit tracks, you had the flute that you actually blew.

So, like, that just became such a major thing and that really owes a lot to links away. I believe in Ocarine of Time, thinking back to our episode about that, that they were going to make the Ocarina a system much like this where you select from a menu. But Miyamoto was like, no, playing this is fun. Let's make the players play it every time.

So I feel like that was something that they were more thoughtful about. Or maybe Miyamoto was more involved in that game. So, I mean, Miyamoto, did he touch this at all? I mean, he talks about that he was really just like, okay. Like he was, he was very busy with other things. Oh, yeah, for sure. But he definitely, he approved things. But I think that's also why they were able to sneak in stuff.

He probably would have told them, don't put Mario in here like, hey. that Yoshi, there's a Yoshi blush in this? What are you doing? I love when you get the Yoshi plush, it says, he sure is popping up in a lot of places these days, commenting on Yoshi Mania. Yoshi cookie, like stuff like Yoshi's cookie was definitely coming up by that time. Yeah, Mario Kart, like, yeah, he's in a lot of stuff.

He was definitely their new guy. But I also, I want to talk about DX because that was. That is the final point to hit, yes. Yeah. So go for it. Oh, okay. Well, I didn't. Fast forward to 1999.

I didn't play DX until. just now. Really? I was a version. I was re-plan. 2013 is when I played it. Because I didn't re-buy it in my house. You owned a Game Boy Color, right? My brother owned a Game Boy Color.

I owned a Game Boy Pocket. Because that was the game to buy when the Game Boy Color came out. It really was. So, yeah, the Game Boy, as we hit it to do earlier, the Game Boy outlived its usefulness, but the Virtual Boy didn't replace it, so they had to have something.

Pokemon reinvigorated it. And so they're like, well, we could finally have colors on this thing. So many people bought a Game Boy Color just to play Pokemon, which hilariously, Pokemon was not compatible with it. Yeah. Well, compatible, but it didn't have any... Right. It didn't have any colors, right? But then, of course, Link's

Awakening DX came out, and oh my God, like, playing that game in color for the first time was like revelatory. Yeah, that was the second Game Boy game that Nintendo gave a color overhaul to. The first was Wario Land 2. But the difference is that Wario Land 2 came out like six months

before the Game Boy Color. So, it was pretty much just to like, well, let's just take this game that we just made and, you know, beef it up for color. And it didn't really add that much in terms of, you know, content. It was just more colorful. But Link's Awakening did, you know, it added color, but it also added content. I should add that I have my original cartridge still of Link's Awakening DX. But it has, it had the, it was compatible with the Game Boy printer, and you could go around and you could get pictures taken of you. and you had this really cool little like Zelda art.

So if you were a fan of Zelda, like that was really cool, even if you didn't have the printer just being able to go around and do the little photo thing. So what is it with the weird Nintendo games and photographers who capture your journey? Because that's straight out of earthbound. Like it's like earthbound the next step. Now you can print out these photos of your trip. I don't know. Maybe they think a serious, like, I mean, you know, photography.

especially when you're on a vacation photography is kind of, or when you're on a trip is kind of a trope with Japanese stuff. Yeah, that was like the stereotype in the 80s. I don't want to say it's, yeah, that was the American stereotype. Yeah, like, oh, those Japanese tourists have their cameras and whatever. How do you know this Asian, these stereotypical Asians in this comedy, and this 80s comedy are supposed to be Japanese? Well, they have eight cameras around their now.

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, maybe that those come from the same place. I feel like I'm making a broad general. You know, I watched the second Jurassic Park movie. What was it? The Lost World. Oh, God. I watched that with some Japanese exchange students.

And when it gets to the end and you see, like, the Japanese tourist all photographing the T-Rex. And I was like, oh, my God. But they were all like, yeah, yeah. I was like, well, okay. Like, I guess that's not some kind of demeaning stereotype after all. I forgot he used that stereotype as late as 1997. It felt like a real thing from the 80s. I mean, it was very, it was very directly a Godzilla reference, not even making fun of the Japanese, but saying like this.

I mean, they also are running from it. They run from the T-Rex. I mean, that was the jump-the-shark moment of Jurassic Park. Well, okay, the gymnastics come before that. So, so Link's Awakening, I was looking through the notes. I had totally forgotten that there even was a color-specific dungeon. And now it's all coming back to me. but is that a mandatory dungeon or is it optional?

It's optional. Okay. Yeah, I haven't, my replay hasn't gotten that far in. But I do remember it being extremely slight. It's not very good. Did the Tosei make this remake? I don't think so. Okay, because the color dungeon is optional.

But it does kind of remind you of Metal Gear Solid's color dungeon. A little bit, yeah. And that was a Tosea game. Yeah. Oh, it was? Yeah. Okay, I forgot about that. Yeah, Tose developed that.

When you finish that dungeon, I think you either can choose between a colored shield or a colored sword. It's like one item nor the other. One is red and one is blue. One gives you more attack. One gives you more defense. But I forget what the actual rewards are. But it's completely optional. It's just like do you want do you want this extra item? But it's nowhere near the level of quality as the other dungeons in the game.

Well, and Link's Awakening DX is the one that is bound to be remembered by everybody because that is the one that you can get in the 3DSC shop. Yep. And I own it. I have not opened it since, but you know, like I keep looking, I often look at it and think, I should play this again. This is such a good game. I really love it.

I had completely forgot I even bought it. It's one of those. I go through my multiple folders of old games on my 3D. I was like, oh, yeah, I bought that. I bought that, too. I bought that, too. Like, the only one I played to completion that I purchased on there was was Donkey Kong 94. Mm-hmm.

I think we've pretty much said our, had our say about this game. Can I point out the only thing that I'm ambivalent about? Okay. Making the big, what we were calling it, the straw millionaire quest, making that mandatory. I don't know. Because a lot of the time it works really well with the main quest. and, like, slots in neatly. But there are other times when it feels like you're going on, like, kind of, like, way off the beaten path.

And also, like, I mean, some of those things are really not intuitive. Like, you have to go around and ask everybody, like, what the heck do I do with this thing? And it doesn't, it's not clear that this thing is mandatory. So at the very end, like, you, like, can go into the windfish's egg and, like, you're in this dark area. You don't know where to go. And you don't realize that you have to get the stupid magnifying glass to, to look at the stupid library book and you get the magnifying last

by doing the huge quest so that was like I don't know how I figured it out then as a kid maybe just having played length of the past did you really not do without a guide I had to guide as well I finished it without a guide yeah but like making it

making that the straw millionaire quest like optional and awkward enough time to get the big Goron sword was I think the correct move And, you know, them making DX, that was the other thing I wanted them, with them making DX, that I think, if they hadn't redone it, they, I don't think the Capcom games would have happened because I think redoing it made them say, well, we could make another Zelda game boy game, but they weren't, like, they didn't want to do themselves. It's still shocking to think that they let, I mean, it's portable, it's not a console Zolte game, but still letting a Zelda game be made by, non-Nintendo people is a big change, even though the people they got to Capcom, A, AAA developers.

And they are also, it sounded like from more than an interview I read that Capcom was on a short leash. They were not, they couldn't do whatever they felt like with Zelda. Those are incredibly good games, though. So good. Super, super ambitious.

Still, I guess, using the Links Awakening Engine or at least assets, but, like, seasons is like, every screen potentially has four seasons of environment to it and it just makes so many cool puzzles. We'll hit those in their own episode because they definitely deserve it. Yeah, please and ignore those.

But yeah, so to wrap up, I'd like to spend, we got so many letters about this that I cannot, I would be remiss not to read some of them. It holds a special place in a lot of people's hearts. It does.

So I'm going to give it like 10 minutes and we're going to see how many letters we can work through in 10 minutes. All right. So from Doug Welker, Link's Awakening DX is a game I've only recently played in part

because I needed a Zelda fix while waiting for Breath of the Wild. I was blown away. It's amazing how great it looks and how smoothly it plays. While I've never played it on a standard Game Boy proper, my recent jaunt through the game on my new 3Ds, 3DS, looks astounding. It's amazing how emotive and full of life the game is. But when you look at it with the limitations of the original system,

it's sort of mind-blowing how they pulled this off. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find something doing more with less than Link's Awakening. Michael Stopp says, Link's Awakening is such a cool offshoot of the Zelda series. I preferred the era where there was no timeline and Nintendo could have fun making interesting stuff. Yeah. I'm on your side, bro.

Links Awakening was definitely one of those games where Nintendo gave us something somewhat unique. Most interesting was how Nintendo added platforming elements to the series with items like Rock's Feather. I'll always be thrown off a little bit by the Super Mario Rooms in Link's Awakening, but the game is so self-referential

for Nintendo that it's a bit refreshing. Stephen Constantine, or Constantine, Link's Awakening was the first time a story in a video game touched me. I first played it when I was five years old, Armed with a handful of Nintendo Power tips in a child's brain, the adventure took me months to complete. The strange inhabitants and sometimes unsettling atmosphere

made me feel as uncomfortable as Link must have felt being marooned on a strange island. Realizing what the windfish was and what fighting it meant, it was very emotional for me to see the game through to the end. By the time the credits rolled, I had a very good understanding of the word bittersweet. Wow, at five. I know, right? That's impressive.

I was like 15. And it took me months. I was figuring out Super Mario Brothers at age five. From Nate Lynch. Hey there, Retronauts. Link's Awakening was my first Zelda, and I still regularly replay it, usually once every year or so. It's got my favorite 2D Zelda mechanics. The sword feels better in this game than any other 2D Zelda due to the angle at which Link swings it.

It's hard to describe with the arc of the swing, starting on Link's right side, parallel to his midsection, to directly in front of him, ending there on his left side, just feels right. It totally does. It's like that arc really works well for being able to take out a lot of different enemies. I love Link to the past, but its sword mechanics always felt slightly wonky to me. And don't get me started on the first Zelda's sword going straight out in front of Link only. Anyway, I love that Nintendo doubled down on the puzzle-centric dungeons that started in Link to the past, making the puzzles pretty much the entire point of the dungeons. In fact, I think the dungeon design is some of the best in the series,

besides Turtle Rock with those stupid block-pushing puzzles where you have to cover up lava or pits, which just get tedious as you move from room to room. Eagle's Tower is not an easy dungeon, but I remember figuring it out when I was eight years old and feeling like a genius. It was probably the most complex puzzle I had solved in my life by that point. Eagles Tower, for my money, is probably one of the best Zelda dungeons ever made. It has the complex, like, abstract thinking that is required that you find in the water temple in Akrona of Time, but it's not tedious. But Oracle of Ages, like, complicates it almost too much. It's just like these are, those dungeons were way too complex for me.

And I had to, I had to game fact a couple of them. There's definitely a happy medium to be struck there. And while I did, in fact, use guides to beat a lot of Link's Awakening's dungeons the first time, I felt like for the most part, I really respect the design sense that went into like, into Eagles, Tower's designs. Because, I mean, up to that point, like, thinking about like stuff like removing the pillars to make the levels come down and everything. Having to carry the ball around

and it has its own rules as to where it can and can't go. Really cool. So from Jonathan Weinhold. What I always remembered about Link's Awakening was how it was the first game to really expand on the formula laid out by the original Legend of Zelda. Links Awakening expanded on the idea of the side quest so far beyond what Link to the Past did

with things like hunting golden leaves or tending to bow-wow or finding Marin by the beach. This game put life into characters in a Zelda game like no other game before had. And it was the Game Boy that expanded the Zelda formula this much, not the NES or Super NES. Completely true. From Brian Easton.

As someone whose only tattoo is that of a Triforce, it's fairly ironic that my absolute favorite Zelda game is Link's Awakening, a game that doesn't feature the Triforce at all, unless you count those little piece of the power. With cameos by chain chomps and Yoshi dolls, and is that Mario moonlighting as Terran? Link's Awakening doesn't take itself too seriously.

Yet despite the goofy facade, Link's Awakening is one of the more touching games in the series. Where all their winking nods, the characters, especially Marin, feel like they have lives of their own, making finishing the game even more bittersweet. There's that word again. Yeah, that's a good point because in High Rule, in Link to the Past, you get a feeling of like, these people don't do anything until I talk to them and then they go away. There's no implication that they're living their lives other than their service of you. Yeah.

Well, here's a difference between Link's Awakening, Link to the Past. At the end of Link to the Past, you are restoring everything because you're bringing like your dad back, dad, uncle, whatever, bracked it back to life, things like that. You see everybody like living happily. It's all great. And Link's Awakening, you make them go away. They're gone. Except or is it a dream because a bird flies away and it could be Marion, who knows, at the end. You're literally sitting on a log and you're awake.

It's not like you're asleep and you watch the island disappear. And I always thought, what? What's going on here? So was he literally dreaming or was this some kind of illusion? I don't know. I'll never know. I think you get a better ending with zero deaths, though. Something extra happens at the end.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure. I think when it gets to the end, like something happens. Yeah, yeah. Sorry for being so vague, but someone can look that up. I have two bits of trivia if we're done with letters or? We're not. Okay.

We've got a lot of letters. Let me spit this out whenever you're done. There were so many letters. I know. I'm barely touching the surface here. People feel like... I mean, look at this one from Andrew Osborne. My God, I'm not really good.

Let's tell people write in a hundred words. I appreciate the passion. No, I'm just taking it. All these have just been like partial reads. Okay. From Andrew Osborne. I love the melancholy soundtrack, which holds up surprisingly well. After conquering a dungeon, Link received a musical instrument instead of a Triforce,

and the victory music would prominently feature the latest instrument. Yeah. When played together to finally wake the windfish, the music sounds especially beautiful and makes for an unforgettable and emotional ending. The game, especially the first play-through, was difficult in a good way. The secret seashells were hard to find, the trading sequence baffling,

and the second boss, the genie, cost me many frustrating lies. The book hidden in the library needed the Pegasus boots to knock it off. I still remember my surprise of this detail. The puzzles were tricky, and when solved, felt satisfying in a way never quite matched since.

J.C. King says, the game had a whimsicality and dreamlike quality that the series up until that point sorely lacked. The stakes weren't anywhere near as high. No princesses to save or evil shape-shifting wizards to defeat. Just an open-ended stroll with sword in hand through a world of comic characters. The dungeon puzzles were challenging without being unfair.

The graphics and gameplay were impressive, especially considering the decidedly low-powered Game Boy Hardware versus the Super Neoscelda game which preceded it. The best mechanics from a link to the past, such as the dash and spin attack, as well as novel moves such as jumping and active use of the shield, made links awakening a game that kept you beckoning to spin-es and just a few more minutes or hours, trying new things.

Flying rooster plus boomerang equals spinning hover deck. Oh, I forgot about the flying rooster. Arrows plus bombs equals a rocket-powered grenade, et cetera. Exploding bombs. Exploding arrows. That was such a cool find. That was really neat. It was a cool, cool little gimmick.

So the answer to the zero-death question is if you beat the game with zero debts, both in the original version and the DX version, after the credit, you will see a picture of Marin in the sky. And she's saying, thank you. That is the little extra thing you get. And it seems to imply that she will, her life does go on. And she became a seagull. Well, you see the seagull in the regular ending.

And then this one after the credits, you see. How very anime. It looks like her senior picture. So Juan Guateras says, I've always preferred portable gaming over consoles since the Game Boy was introduced. So I always tend to favor portable games. The Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening was the third Zelda game that I ever played. played. Until now, it is still my second favorite game of the series, above a link to the

past, among others. I can't forget to emphasize the musical aspect. Frankly, I think it has a better musical style and selection than many other Zelda games. There is Monbo's Mambo, the Owls theme, Richard DeVilla, Toototka Song, Southern Face Shrine, and of course, the many depictions of the Ballot of the Windfish, a very melancholic melody. A very important part of why Ballot of the Windfish is so relevant is because how entrenched it is with the story of the game. far more important than in any other melody in a Zelda game. All right. Tal Talhites is another great song from Netflix's Awakening.

I think of that. I hear that one remixed a lot. It was the first time that, I mean, it was the first game to kind of really acknowledge that the music in Zelda had always really been kind of catchy and good. And there was always an instrument in Zelda. Yeah. But it was always just like not played for any musical reasons, really. So it kind of became part of the series DNA from Links Awakening on. It's also an interesting thing that, like, Awakening.

with the music, that Awakening until Majors' mask was the last game to have the field theme. Like, it's not Ian Ocarina, and so it was a big deal that it got put back in Majors' mask. I also want to point out that somebody was mentioning how beautiful it is when the full Ballot of the Windfish is playing with all eight of the instruments that you got. Yeah, that is, like, really amazing, and it meant basically that playing Link's Awakening with headphones was mandatory for me. It was a real payoff for what you've been doing for dozens of hours. So here's a great letter from Ronnie Martinson. By 1999, I started working in a games retailer, and in the Windows 3.X logistics system,

someone had entered as a comment on this item as essential as batteries. I still work in retail, and I've never seen a better description since. Wow. That's great. I would agree if you're a Game Boy owner. You should play this game. I mean, I would contend that it's the best Game Boy game, period. and so if you have a Game Boy, you should own it. That's a tough.

It's a tough. It's a tough one, but... I mean, Game Boy has many, many amazing games, but when I think of the Game Boy, like, that is certainly one of the first that comes to mind. And finally, the last letter I'll read is from Jay U. Banks.

Link's Awakening probably isn't the best Zelda game, but it's my sentimental favorite. I got it along with two other Game Boy games for my 13th birthday. The games were a gift for my dad, who I later learned had narrowed it down to either three Game Boy games

or a virtual boy, and ultimately he deferred to my brother's judgment. Good call, little brother. I hadn't played many RPGs or adventure games to that point, so Link's Awakening was the first time I really got attached to a game world. And when I beat it and watched the island fade away, it was the first time a game made me cry. To me, they'll always be Marin and Taryn, not Malin and Tallin. I've beaten Links Awakening more times than any other Zelda before or since.

And the only reason I don't cry now when I beat it is because I'm on my guard and I catch myself. You know, these letters really speak to how much Link's Awakening means to people, and, you know, like, game rankings are kind of arbitrary, but like Kotaku called it, like, number two when their rankings, U.S. Gamer called it number five, and it really speaks to the quality of this game. All of all Zelda games. It really speaks to the quality of this game that it stands up with these games that are remembered as the best, like, pretty much ever made. Like, people think, people don't think, oh, and there was also the Game Boy one, and it was pretty limited. And no, they're thinking, like, no, Link's Awakening, like, as I said earlier, stands right up there with Link to the Past and even an Occurant of Time because they pushed that system to the max. The puzzles were so intricate and the story's so emotional. Links Awakening, unlike the other Zelda games, that tended to be canonized of the very top, didn't create a new genre or define how the genre works.

I mean, you look at the Legend of Zelda. That basically created the top-down action RPG. You look at a Link's Awakening, or I'm sorry, a link to the past, and that is how basically action RPGs work now, like the idea of, you know, these items that you collect and the, using these things to kind of break through bosses, defenses, and so forth. Ocarine of Time said, this is how these games should work in 3D. Link's Awakening didn't do any of that, but it's just such a well-crafted game. There's so much heart and so much just genuine, there's so much of the creators in it that, you know, it really does stand apart as something special. You don't have to create a revolutionized video gaming in order to create a masterpiece.

And this is a great example of that. I think it's telling that I think actually no portable Zelda to this point has actually managed to surpass it. I really like Link Between Worlds. I want to say link between worlds is amazing, but it owes such a huge debt to link to the past. True, true. Or Link's Awakening is like its whole thing. It has some flaws too, much more so than Link's Awakening. I have some interesting trivia, which I find interesting, which I actually didn't know the Japanese name of this game, and it took me like five wiki searches to find it.

But apparently the subtitle is Yumeo Miru Shima, which means Dreaming Island, which that's a pretty good adapt. Yeah, it kind of gives away the story right there. Yes, Dreaming Island. Wow, the links of awakening also does. Yeah, well, not immediately. I mean, he wakes up in the first like minutes. The beginning of the game. Oh, there you woke up.

Okay, game's over. And there are also two instances of censorship for some pretty racy jokes. And I want to point them out because they're funny that they would be in a Zelda game. So when you go to Animal Village, there's a painter painting a hippo. And in the Japanese version, before you walk in or before you walk up to her, she's holding a towel down and her giant bosoms are exposed. But then when you walk up to her, she pulls the towel up. So apparently the artist is painting her nude. and in the Japanese version

in the mermaid quest you have to find her pearl necklace which is also disgusting but in the Japanese version you have to find her top and she says in the Japanese version the translation is when I was swimming in the bay

the waves swept away by swimsuit if you find it I'll give you my censored so who knows what's going on there oh sounds like a puff puff I mean it is Link's dream so yeah and if you dive near he's a growing boy Link's really into hippopotamus ladies, you know.

He's drawing a lot of good fan art at that age. And also, if you dive near the mermaid when you're looking for her top, in Japanese, she calls you a pervert. And in English, she just says, I've already looked around here. So there you go. Wow. So there are some racy boob jokes in Link's Awakening, which is why it's my lock of the Zelda week. All right.

So I think that wraps it up. That's a heck of an episode. It's a spicy meatball. Thanks to everyone who wrote in about the game. Sorry if I didn't get to read your letter. There were a lot to work through. Let's say next time, 150 words, maybe. I appreciate the passion.

I have written way too long letters to podcast, and they never get read. It's okay. I'm, I can, I can edit. Here's the thing is that I love reading them, like, just as, like, somebody who's comments. Yeah, but then you got to cut them down. Yeah, there were a few of these that were, like, people's life stories, and I couldn't read that all. I was born. But thanks, everyone, for sharing your enthusiasm for the game.

Anyway, this has been a great episode of Retronaut. That's about a great game. Thanks for listening. And let's go through the table and see who's who. As I awaken from this dream, I pray to tell you that I'm H-E-N-E-R-E-G on Twitter. Follow me there for all my information and musings on the world of today. And also, you can find my written work about video games on fandom.com. And more importantly, you can also listen to me and Bob, a podcast,

on Talking Simpsons, the podcast where we go through every episode of The Simpsons from the beginning, one episode at a time. We just had a landmark episode with one of the writers on the series, Bill Oakley. It's always fun and is part of the Lasertime Network, and you can also support that through the Patreon of patreon.com slash Lasertime, TalkingSimpsons.com. Check it out. Kat. Hi, I'm Kat Bailey. You can follow me on Twitter at the underscore Capod. I am the host of RPG podcast, Axe of the Blood God, along with my co-host, Nadia Oxford.

And by the time you listen to this episode, we should be on episode 100, which is quite. Wow, way to go. All done. Quite the milestone for Axel of the Blugged. Call me when you get to 300K. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Are you not affiliating yourself with the U.S. Gamer?

Well, we're still a growing podcast. And I also wanted to say that I run a little website called U.S. Gamer. And if you are a fan of retronauts, well, you should come check us out because I think that we are all retro-transes. Sensitive, I suppose. Like, we have a good... Retro sensitive. We have a good perspective on history. Nadia, in particular, really loves writing about game history.

So, yeah, come on by. Like, you're going to... You'll never see us slagging on handhelds or anything. Hi, it's Bob. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. Henry has already talked about Talking Simpsons, but I must reiterate. You must listen to it. It's so good.

Cat, please give us your endorsement of Talking Simpsons live on the air. Holy crap. Talking Simpsons is an amazing podcast. I didn't think she'd actually do it. Wow. I don't know. I really love it. Bob and Henry and Chris and all of them are hilarious.

Like, they do a great job of capturing the spirit of the show, and they are so knowledgeable. Please listen to the talking Simpsons. It's almost embarrassing how much we've devoted our lives to knowing things about the Simpsons. Oh, God. So, yes, find me on Twitter as Bob Serbo. I also write for fandom.com alongside Henry. And I write for Somethingawful.com every other Thursday, a new comedy article. And that's it for me.

And finally, I, Jeremy Parrish, will knock you all down. unless you come to Retronauts.com and read the site. And, of course, download the show through iTunes or your other choices. I think you can get it directly from Podcast 1 now. We are, of course, supported through Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts. And there is no G.H. in that. It's just like Astronaut, but with retro, you know, old astronauts. That's basically it.

We're also ad-supported, as you've noticed. But if you subscribe to us through Patreon, $3. a month gets you and a one week early access to each episode and also an ad-free version. So if you're one of those people who's like stupid advertisements, how dare people support their existence by making me listen to ads in their free things? Well, if you don't want it to be annoying, you can always pay a little bit of money and get the annoyance out. So I give $6 a month. My goodness. And I want to tell people, this is not just us showing up and talking about stuff on top of our heads.

We do a lot of work beforehand. Jeremy's squinting at me. No. It's not a squint. It's a look of exhaustion. This is not a guilt trip. I just spent the last 20 hours of work after work all last week doing research. In between your full-time job.

Your daddy works hard for you kids. Your podcast daddy. Plus, you know, it also pays for the site and other things. Yeah. So for us to go out and do live events this year. So, yes, thanks for your support. It's really cool. Also, you can follow me on Twitter as game spite.

I'm not actually that spiteful. The guy who created the Lego dimensions disagrees, but he's a minority of one. Everyone else thinks I'm lovable and cuddly. Did you debate him yet? I didn't. Okay. I just, I muted him. Good.

Anyway. So, that wraps it up for this fine episode of Retronauts. Thanks again for listening. Thanks again for supporting us. We'll be back next week with... Probably a Retronauts Radio is my guess, so look forward to it. takes a real beating from the constant wear and tear and overcrowding of weeds leading to weak, thin grass.

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The Mueller report. I'm Edonoghue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine, Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today

at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police, they acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.