Retro Game SuperHyper

To follow up on my earlier post about playing Link’s Awakening, I finished the game after picking away at it for a few weeks!

Overall, I liked it quite a bit. It felt really good to play a traditional, top-down, 2D Zelda game that I wasn’t very familiar with. Games like this never feel dated to me even when I experience them for the first time, so it says a lot about its quality that it’s aged very well.

Even though the game is what, over 20 years old now, I should probably give the SPOILER ALERT warning for the rest of this post. So, SPOILER ALERT!

I did utilize a walkthrough throughout my play, and I’m not too ashamed to say it. I probably would not have figured out a lot of the puzzles on my own, to be honest. Some of them are kind of random (like the ONE time late in the game where you have to shoot an arrow at a statue to make a small key appear, with no precedent for that action up to that point). Other than that point about the puzzles, I think the action was fair, and the bosses were actually on the easy side, especially once you get the Boomerang (the Trading Sequence is soooo worth doing for that thing). The second-to-last dungeon (Eagle’s Tower) was the biggest pain in the ass, making the final dungeon (Turtle Rock), although humongous, seem easy in comparison.

The ending also sort of leaves us hanging as to Link’s ultimate fate after the adventure is over. I mean, he crashes his ship at the beginning, and if the entire thing is a dream, he never actually washed up on shore, since he’s still adrift at sea at the end, indicating that it was his dream and not that of the Wind Fish. But when he looks up and sees the Wind Fish cruising through the sky, I wondered if he shouted up and asked him for a lift. I woulda.

Anyway, thumbs up on Link’s Awakening, very glad I finally got around to filling in this missing tooth in my Zelda smile. Or whatever.

So, which retro-game-that-I-never-finished is up next? I have an idea or two. Stay tuned…