Link’s Awakening

I tell people A Link to the Past is my favorite Zelda game because the Super Nintendo is objectively the best console ever made and there’s no argument. But in those late-night honest moments, alone with myself, I’ll admit that Majora’s Mask and Link’s Awakening sit deeper in my actual heart. The first for how dark and strange it gets. The second because it’s such a perfect, tight little game—every stone placed right, every flower, every enemy exactly where it needs to be.

The Game Boy version came out in 1993, fitting the whole world into that gray brick you could carry. You’d think the limits would break something, but the game just got tighter, more focused. Link ends up on Cocolint, an island in someone else’s dream, where the Wind Fish sleeps and Marin waits and a chatty owl exists and everyone is moving toward something sad they don’t have names for. The whole game carries this melancholy with it, the kind the bigger Zelda games never quite manage to sustain. Everything feels like it could disappear at any moment.

Nintendo remade it for Switch with cute toy-box graphics. The visuals are all bright and cheerful, which is funny because the game itself is so melancholic. Doesn’t matter though. The original’s still there, still perfect.