Listen to the Rain

I was pretty excited to play the game. I preordered it months in advance, and the weekend it came out, I sat down and played it for hours, getting quickly through the opening and the first two dungeons. And then I didn't play it at all until this month, a casuality of my attempt to play Suikoden in Japanese to follow along with the Square Roots Podcast--a task I do intend to get back to eventually--and then my increasingly-prominent social life. When I was out doing something with people five or six nights a week, I didn't have time to play games at all!

Well, thank you for coronavirus for getting me back into gaming.

You might ask why I'm reviewing this if I already reviewed Link's Awakening, and what's more, if my review there was of the DX version and I never played the original. I've never made a distinction between the Zelda games before--I played the GameCube Zelda Collection version of Majora's Mask that allows saving at owl statues, I played the Master Quest version of Ocarina of Time, and I haven't played the HD versions of Wind Waker or Twilight Princess at all. And the simple answer is that I'm the one writing these posts and I can do what I want, but taking it more seriously, the Link's Awakening Remake makes greater gameplay changes than any of the previous enhanced versions. Master Quest changes the dungeons around a bit, Twilight Princess HD has prettier graphics and the map on the WiiU GamePad, but Link's Awakening Remake changes the presentation of the entire game. That's worth some words.


The plot and dialogue in Link's Awakening Remake are all the same as the original game, and most of my original review was about them, so I encourage you to read that because the the otherworldly mono no aware air of Link's Awakening is a major reason it's a masterpiece. And in the remake, the new graphics help with that air.

When I first saw screenshots, I wasn't sure what to think. Link's beady black eyes reminded me of the horrific soulless gaze of a Funko Pop, without pity or remorse or fear, and as I look at the amiibo on my Zelda amiibo collection I get the same feeling. But in the game, with everything in motion and a soft focus on the edges of the screen, it looks much better. The artstyle makes Link's Awakening Remake feel like a child's diorama or a puppet show, but the character's expressions bring life to what otherwise could be a very static presentation. Toon Link was one of the best Link designs because of his expressiveness, and while there aren't as many camera zooms onto Link's huge eyes here, there are plenty of situations where Link displays emotion. My favorite was definitely catching a fish during the fishing minigame, when Link turns to the camera and beams like a child given candy on their birthday, but I also liked the determined expression when he climbed to the top of Eagle's Tower to fight the albatross and the way he looked around in confusion when "Owl's Theme" kicked in and the owl messenger arrived. The other characters have less screentime, but Marin's joy at singing the Song of the Wind Fish or Tarin's panic when chased by bees were far stronger in the toyetic Remake style than they were in 8-bit graphics.

All the monsters have a similar toy-like aesthetic, as does much of the terrain. My favorite were definitely the "rocks" that require the Pegasus Boots to dash through, which now jiggle like balloons when Link touches them and pop into fragments of fabric when he dashes into them.

And the music! I'm normally a huge enthusiast for chiptunes and early VGM and after Breath of the Wild, I was worried that the Remake would be less music-forward in the way so many modern games are, and while the Remake did replace the original Game Boy tones with soft strings, it grew on me very quickly. Compare the Game Boy Overworld Theme with the Remake version, or the original Tal Tal Heights and the Remake version. They're soft, sure, and "Tal Tal Heights" has less of that driving energy that the Game Boy versions has, but they're more, if I may say it, dreamlike. They fit the odd mood that's so important to Link's Awakening.

The one loser in the Remake is the Owl's Theme, which has soft strings and horns in an attempt to recreate the discordant weirdness of the Game Boy Owl's Theme. The latter's single sound channel did a much better job of conveying the strangeness of the owl and encouraging the player to recognize that those moments were set apart; a liminal experience of contact with divinity.


The major problems with the gameplay of Link's Awakening all related to the limitations of the Game Boy. With only two buttons, every tool and item had to be bound to one of those two, and with the inclusion of active blocking, the shield was no longer a passive defense like in the original Legend of Zelda. That meant that the sword, the shield, and every single item were all competing for space, and some battles involved more time in menus than out, swapping between sword, shield, and two or three other items while fighting.

No more. In the Remake, B is assigned to the sword, R is assigned to the shield, L is assgined to the Pegasus Boots, and X and Y are freely-assignable to any other item. The Power Bracelet is now a passive boost like in A Link to the Past, so running into a heavy rock doesn't result in an informative pop-up about how it's too heavy but the Power Bracelet could lift it every single time like it used to. Fighting bosses no longer requires a jump into the menu screen whenever their weak spot is revealed to swap to the sword to damage them. It's an enormous quality-of-life improvement that makes the game so much better, and even if I basically permanently assigned the Roc-Bird's Freather to X because jumping was an amazing way to get around the game and avoid enemies, I appreciated that I could do that and still have the sword, shield, Pegasus Boots, and Power Bracelet all available too.

The other major gameplay-affecting change is that the Remake isn't bound to the strict screen-by-screen grid layout of the Game Boy, so the world is expanded. Most of the outdoors is a single continous area, and it's possible to walk from one end of the island to the other without going through a screen transition. This is true even in dungeons, and while dungeons generally maintain the one-screen-one-room rule due to the common use of "kill all monsters to get a key" or "solve this puzzle to get a key" layouts, there are occasional large rooms scattered throughout.

Also, it's possible to move and attack diagonally now, which makes a couple fights less annoying.

The original Link's Awakening designers did a great job with the hardware limitations, but the Switch's ability to have more buttons is simply better. It's more convenient, it requires less time messing around in the menu, it's less disruptive to gameplay, it's just an improvement in every way. If I never see another message about something being too heavy when I lightly brush into it, I'll be a happy man.


There are a few totally new additions in the Remake. The Color Dungeon makes its return from Link's Awakening DX, with the same simple layout and same color fairy at the end who rewards Link with his choice of the Red Tunic, to double damage done by him, or the Blue Tunic, to halve damage done to him. Unlike last time I played, I opted to do the Color Dungeon this time because I had decided to play the game on Hero Mode (about which more later), and I wanted something to even the score. That meant by the end of the game I was doing quadruple damage thanks to the Koholint Sword from collecting secret shells and the Red Tunic, but most of the hardest enemies in the game aren't vulnerable to the sword anyway, so this is less of a game-breaking advantage than it seems. It's no Quake III powerup.

There's also display stands in various houses around Mābe Village that hold figurines of Mario enemies, all available at the 今はやりゲーム (imahayari gēmu, "Popular-Now Game," Eng: "Trendy Game"). There's no reward for doing it, it just looks neat. So of course, I did it.

By far the most expansive addition is Danpei's Dungeon Maker. Danpei lives in the northern part of the island near Crazy Tracy, and when Link first talks to him, he says that he has something to show Link in his hut. This is not a bash on the head with a shovel, but a whole minigame of dungeon-building. Using various tiles from completing Link's Awakening Remake's dungeons, from amiibo, or from completing Danpei's challenges, you can build your own dungeons, store them on amiibo, and then give them to your friends to try! That's the Zelda Maker we've all wanted for some many years, right?

Well, no. Danpei's Dungeon Maker is nowhere near as versatile as Mario Maker or its sequel are. Despite their limitations, those games provide fine-grained control over the placement of platforms, tiles, monsters, coins, and every aspect of the levels. Danpei only allows the placement of pre-set rooms, which form a dungeon when combined. If a particular room has a chest or a stairway, then every time that room is used it will have a chest or a stairway. If a room has a set of enemies, or a miniboss, or a puzzle, that's an innate part of the room and it's unchangeable. The final chest Link opens will always have the nightmare key, so there's no option to allow the player a clever solution to the dungeon's puzzles. The only customization is plopping down a bunch of different rooms and calling it a dungeon, which is honestly pretty unsatisfying. There isn't even an option to reuse room tiles, and because there aren't enough rooms to build more than a smallish dungeon from a single theme, every dungeon becomes constantly-changing patchwork of styles. If you want to make a mostly-lava dungeon like Turtle Rock but include ジャッキー (jakkī, Eng: "Rover") from the Southern Face Shrine as a miniboss and ツボ魔王 (tsubo maō, "Jar Demon King," Eng: "Genie">), then there will be two bizarrely out-of-place rooms in the dungeon, and that's assuming there are enough lava tiles to use. And of course, the only bosses, tools, and items are those contained in the Remake--there's no Twilight Princess grinding on rails here.

I wonder how much of these limitations come out of tying Dungeon Maker to game progression. It's possible to beat the game without ever talking to Danpei, but he has one bottle and several heart containers as rewards for building dungeons to his specifications, and if it were possible to freely place everything in those dungeons, then it'd be easy to build minimalist dungeons and burn through them in minutes just to get those items. That's basically what I did anyway, at least for the first challenge before I realized that it was more effort than I wanted to go through.

Dungeon Maker is definitely not anything like a Zelda version of Mario Maker, and all I really saw in my brief interactions with it were the limitations. I suppose it's possible that someone could make an amazing dungeon that would blow me away, but I doubt it. The limitations simply don't allow for better dungeons than the game's designers already made.


Another major change is the addition of Hero Mode difficulty, first introduced in Wind Waker HD and basically unchanged since its first presentation there. In Hero Mode, all enemies do double damage and no hearts or fairies drop. That's it, call it a day.

My opinion of this is best summed up by Hero Mode's Japanese name: 辛いモード tsurai mōdo, "Painful Mode."

The video game difficulty discussion is long and mostly a tedious waste of time, but I think there's some value in talking about what exactly difficulty means and how it's expressed. There are several different axes under the difficulty umbrella, but the major determinant I think of is whether something requires player skill or whether it's independent of it. For example, a danmaku boss with specific attack pattern requires player skill--the player has to memorize the boss pattern or have fast enough reflexes to adapt to new waves of bullets, and if they do that, they can win. The fight is difficult. A danmaku boss that has a 10% chance to nuke the whole screen and kill the player every five seconds is also a difficult fight in that beating it is unlikely, but these are not meaningfully the same kind of difficulty.

For a real-game example, look at Patchwerk and Thaddeus in Naxxramas in World of Warcraft (yes, I'm old). Patchwerk just sits and slams the tank repeatedly while Hateful Striking the offtanks, so winning is based almost entirely on the gear the raid has--if they can put out big enough healing and DPS numbers, they win. If not, they lose. On the other hand, Thaddeus has two sub-bosses in Phase 1 that keep knocking the tanks over to each other's platforms and must be re-taunted, and Thaddeus applies a positive or negative charge to everyone in the raid, causing all players to damage anyone nearby with the opposite charge. Players need to be away of their charge and switch sides if it changes, while avoiding everyone else who has the opposite charge and is switching to their side. There's a lot more individual effort required and it doesn't just come down to Patchwerk's "Does your raid output 10,000 DPS? If so, you win."

A completely different example of good difficulty is Thief or Goldeneye, which add objectives as the difficulty level increases. On Lord Balford's Manor in Thief, Normal difficulty just requires entering and finding the sceptre. Hard also requires stealing 350 gold worth of valuables and not killing any servants, and Expert requires stealing 700 gold worth of valuables, not killing anyone, and making it back out after the job is done. A higher difficulty requires more complex actions and more long-range planning from the player.

Hero Mode doesn't do any of that, and the end result was mostly just annoyance. If I took too much damage anywhere, I'd have to leave and go get hearts, and I still never died in any boss battle. I could have beaten Link's Awakening Remake in maybe 2/3rds the time if I played on Normal Mode and I would have still had just as much fun. It's not even like a better difficulty mode couldn't be done in a Legend of Zelda game, because Breath of the Wild had Master Mode where the enemies all start at a higher tier and regenerate health, but Breath of the Wild provides enough tactical depth that the player can adapt their tactics--sneak attacks, luring enemies away, using more food buffs, and otherwise intelligently tackling the increased challenge. Link's Awakening Remake doesn't provide any of those options, and "Painful Mode" really is the best name for it.

But I beat it, so I guess I have bragging rights.


That said, all of my problems with Link's Awakening Remake are with the optional systems, and as the name implies, it's entirely possible to play the game and completely ignore both of them. Outside of those, the Remake is a masterpiece, a perfect update of a game to a modern format, that revamps all of the technical limitations of the original without changing any of what made it great. Nintendo created another Metroid: Zero Mission, where there's really no reason for the average person to play the original because the remake does everything it did and more. I'm really happy that Nintendo successfully brought an old classic forward and made it accessible to a new era, and so now I have just one question.

Oracle of Seasons when?

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