This year I am embarking on a journey to more intentionally consume all forms of media. My hope is that by reducing the volume I consume along with writing some retrospectives I can begin to rekindle a passion for the hobbies that I love. While films have been my most prolific medium to write about, and music is the one I consume the most, the prospect of writing about video games has been the most exciting. I have found that after being exposed to gaming while locked in my house throughout COVID, I never really managed to reestablish my love for it as a hobby. I moved out of my parents’ house in 2022 and never really fell into a routine or workflow that worked for gaming; consequently, I felt I wasn’t engaging as much with what was once my most beloved pastime. So, after a few years of retirement, I am making my comeback!
At the very end of 2025 I moved back in with my parents in order to take some time and begin saving in order to buy a home. One of my first tasks was to buy a new TV for the spare room in their house and create my ideal set up as I hunkered down for a year of saving. As the new year began, I set out the rough goal to try and play at least one game to completion each month. January consisted of playing the Resident Evil 4 (RE4) remake as well as finally beating Death Stranding. In February I took on the challenge (and succeeded) of beating Elden Ring, then I dubbed March as Zelda month in which I attempted (and failed) to beat three isometric installments of the acclaimed series. It is March’s collection of games that will be the subject of this piece, but I absolutely will be returning to Elden Ring, Death Stranding and RE4. January and February served as a great opportunity for comparison on open world games and how they can differ by playing Death Stranding and Elden Ring, but all the while juxtaposed with one of the most revered linear story experiences in gaming with RE4. But it was the relationship between The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (ALttP) and Link’s Awakening (for the Nintendo Switch) that I will be focusing on here.
Link’s Awakening is a remake of the 1993 Game Boy classic of the same name but contains many modern comforts often found in re‑releases or remakes of classics. Anyone who has seen the art style of this game will know that visually it feels like a completely new experience for the franchise, but as you play it to completion you can certainly still feel elements of the classic formula trying their best to preserve that retro Zelda feel. However, playing this game days after completing the original Super Nintendo classic A Link to the Past, I couldn’t help wondering how much magic was lost with these newly added “modern comforts”. One huge caveat that I must state from the very beginning: the source material for this remake is a Game Boy game that was released only two years after ALttP, which was released on the much more powerful Super Nintendo (SNES) home console. So, while I did go into this game expecting less content than the SNES classic, I assumed Nintendo might inject some more life into this 2019 release as it is clearly meant to be a remake from the ground up. As I played through Link’s Awakening, I couldn’t help but come face to face with some of the macro changes in game design over the last 30 years. Despite these two games sharing so much DNA, it became very apparent where the more modern sensibilities began to creep in. They share many enemies, bosses and even locations; in fact, despite Link’s Awakening taking place on the dream island of Koholint, there are recurring dungeon names like Turtle Rock Cave. So short of playing a classic and then playing the remake of itself back‑to‑back, this felt like a great way to see how certain aspects of game design have changed over the 30 years since their release.
According to howlongtobeat.com, Link’s Awakening takes roughly 14 hours to complete and ALttP takes about 15 hours. Right off the bat I have to say this: if you play both games with no guide and no prior experience, I guarantee you will NOT complete ALttP in under 20 hours. I found myself religiously checking a walkthrough for ALttP not only to complete some of the most obtuse “puzzles” I have ever experienced in video games, but also to find as much of the side content as I could. I really found that just through exploring the world alone there were very few clues that would lead you to naturally stumbling upon secrets. I did however manage to beat the game and collect all heart pieces, weapon upgrades and armour upgrades in about 18 hours total playtime. In response to this experience and anticipating many of these more “old school” game design issues would be alleviated in the Link’s Awakening remake, I vowed to beat the game with absolutely NO googling or walkthroughs. I did this and still managed to beat the game in just under the suggested playtime at just barely over 13 hours. I missed quite a few of the seashells but by the end of the game I was only one heart short of a full health bar and had weapon and armour upgrades to boot. I can guarantee I would not have figured out how to upgrade items in ALttP and thus would have had a nightmare time in some of the final bosses, most of which I ended up cheesing via the game’s invincibility item which I had upgraded in tandem with my upgraded magic capacity. By comparison, Link’s Awakening had one boss in the entire game that killed me until the final boss fight, which admittedly did take me a few tries. The gulf in boss fight difficulty was so stark not only because of how hard the ALttP boss encounters are, but also considering the fact that I was only able to defeat the bosses of the older game thanks to items and upgrades I simply never would have gotten in a blind playthrough. I think the primary explanation for this disparity in difficulty when it comes to just finding basic items comes from people’s relationship with video games in the early 90s vs. today. In 1991 ALttP had fewer distractions to compete for the player’s attention and as such it could more easily impose progression barriers to encourage exploration. Bosses were supposed to be hard to encourage the player to leave the dungeon and explore every cave, speak to every NPC and bomb every crack in the wall. In an age where storage for games was much more restrictive, gameplay loops often relied more on reusing assets and encouraging deeper exploration of worlds.
The modern gamer is much more averse to a stark slowing of progression and has an expectation that when they enter a dungeon, it is like starting a new chapter of a book: “why would I need to go back and reread chapter 6 when I just started chapter 9?” Admittedly I am included in this cohort and at times I have felt this in other games. I am aware that this is perhaps a generalisation, but I do think that in a world where media is served to us by automated algorithms, the modern sensibilities are less likely to work through moments of friction to get to the “good stuff”. People drop TV series after a few episodes, drop books after a few chapters, and you just have to look at Steam achievements to see the effects of a hard boss fight in deterring people from continuing with a game. This isn’t necessarily meant as an indictment on the younger generation but more an acknowledgement of the consequences of a modern media diet. There are some positives of the media diet however: libraries of every song at our finger tips has led to what feels like a greater diversity in media consumption, and while you could make the point modern algorithmic recommendations serve as a purveyor of new music pipelines like record labels to large radio stations did before, there is a bustling independent machine of content recommenders in books, films, music and more. In one respect the internet as a concept has given a platform to anyone with a phone to communicate independently to the world, but then modern algorithms have served to homogenise these personal sentiments. But that’s a rant for another day; my point here is that the consumption patterns of consumers can impact the design of the very products they consume. People found the puzzles vague or obtuse, then over iterations of Zelda games, designers will adapt to the demands of the public until eventually you have a sidekick who can explain every puzzle and we look back and ask when games got so easy.
Anyone who has played a Zelda game can tell you that a large portion of the “puzzles” amount to some variation of arriving at what you have been told is your intended destination only to find out you need an item to get in… now go and find the item. This is an often‑used device in video games to encourage exploration and it can be quite effective. The major issue with these “puzzles” is it can be extremely hard to balance difficulty in order to generate that magical eureka moment for the player. Typically, a game might leave environmental clues or simply text/dialogue based clues. Then, it’s up to the player to deduce the whereabouts of these key items. Make the context too vague and you force the user to completely guess the answer, and even if they do guess it right, the payoff is minimal as they don’t feel they have really “solved” a problem as much as they have guessed it. Make a prompt too complex and you can both alienate the average player who just wants to run around fighting enemies while the more attentive player feels hard done by a “puzzle” that just felt random or could have never been organically resolved. Additionally, you then have to try and keep the level of complexity for these prompts somewhat similar throughout the game as the player will expect a consistency from act to act. If you make a fetch quest just simply asking the last person you saw on the road into town for the item, then next time you make getting the item a convoluted process of multiple side quests, the player will question if they have fallen off track and gotten on a separate quest. ALttP is guilty of having some of the most obtuse requirements for some of its quests. As I mentioned at the beginning, I think playing this game completely blind would be extremely tedious. But to my previous point on the trends of gamers in the early 1990s, this was an era where you wanted to get more time out of your games but storage for raw assets was at a premium. So, to make a game last long it either needs to be a coin‑eating arcade game, or some kind of exploration‑based RPG in which you would be happy to walk around Hyrule for hours searching for a single heart container. I found Link’s Awakening at times did a great job at alluding to the answer for a puzzle while not making it too easy. I found myself joyfully, completely puzzled and feeling a real sense of accomplishment. Don’t get me wrong, there were some disappointingly easy puzzles that resulted in anticlimactic reveals, but as a whole I felt I enjoyed the puzzles in Link’s Awakening more.
The combat however was a completely different story.
Both ALttP and Link’s Awakening use a static isometric camera, meaning you are looking down at Link from a 45‑degree angle. The principal difference between their gameplay however is that ALttP only allows you to control Link on four axis—up, down, left and right—while Link’s Awakening additionally gives the player each diagonal. This by itself does make the combat in Link’s Awakening much easier as you can position yourself to attack enemies more seamlessly, but it also highlights a crucial fact about the enemy interactions in Link’s Awakening. The original Game Boy game, much like ALttP, only had four axis, so by remastering a game using mostly the same level design, enemies and bosses, it feels like Link has adapted to these new dimensions much better than the enemies. Lanmolas, the sort of sand worm looking enemy, is a great example of this point. With your much more fluid movement abilities in Link’s Awakening it is so much easier to position yourself correctly to hit weak points. This extra movement isn’t necessarily a bad thing; in fact, I would say the limited movement in ALttP at times can feel unfair and archaic. But the enemies in the new game haven’t fully adapted to Link’s new movement tech. Other examples of how this axis limitation from ALttP affects the difficulty are simply any attacks that would come diagonally at you like the flying tiles or anti‑fairies; in Link’s Awakening it’s so much easier to either block or dodge these attacks. One final aspect of ALttP combat that adds immensely to the difficulty while also feeling outdated or archaic is the invincibility frames Link receives after being hit. So many times you will be locked in a room, get hit by an enemy and then the enemy will just walk inside of your sprite. Now you can’t hit the enemy and once your I‑frames expire you get hit again. So many times a simple enemy will catch you off guard, only to take two or three hearts from you simply by standing on top of you. Link’s Awakening resolves these by giving the player more control, resulting in a fairer combat system, but then it forgets to introduce any new complexities to accommodate these changes in movement.
As much as I could continue to harp on about the minute differences in the two games and how they result in a much less difficult experience in Link’s Awakening, I will end on this final point: the easier difficulty absolutely is more appropriate tonally for the 2019 Switch game. I invite you to sit down and watch the reveal trailer for this visually stunning remake of what was always considered a lesser companion game to a titan of the 16‑bit era. It becomes clear from the trailer alone that this game is supposed to be a cute and relaxing jaunt through a Zelda world intended for shorter, more casual handheld gaming sessions. Of course, it was released on what was technically Nintendo’s flagship home console offering, but its roots are in the handheld console scene. The game absolutely achieves this goal and it is a game I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone looking for a visually pleasing, fun time that can be beaten in a weekend. But at the same time, my own preferences would lie closer to the experience of ALttP. Yes the puzzles are infuriating at times, yes some aspects of the combat are frustrating, but I can absolutely say the thrill of beating some of the encounters in that game rivalled some of my most intense moments with the game I had played previous to it: Elden Ring. In some sort of masochistic way, I hated the moments of friction but I am able to acknowledge they exist to build tension and result in a brilliant payoff. ALttP is in essence an open world game but by being so concentrated and detailed it meant even in those moments of friction, the backtracking and repeated content was a few seconds of holding the dash button, whereas in larger open world games when the tedious moments require you to spend 30 minutes on a Skyrim dungeon fighting the same imps you have fought for 50 hours it begins to affect your spirit… Elden Ring I am looking at you!
But what of this elusive third isometric Zelda game I intended to play? My intention was then to move on to A Link Between Worlds, the 2013 3DS masterpiece, but Zelda fatigue had well and truly set in. ALttP and Link’s Awakening share A LOT of gameplay aspects and I think I was all Zelda’ed out after two weekends in March. So I will end by saying that I wholeheartedly recommend both games, but maybe don’t play them back to back.