Deeper into the intricate little puzzle box which is Link’s Awakening, I’m finding myself more and more surprised and impressed by how well the game is constructed. Latter-day Zelda legends have, by and large, been rather bloated affairs. Ocarina of Time might’ve had the best story of the series, but its even with its 3D environment and targetting revolutions, its mechanics fall short of the gold-standard set by the previous flagship console instalment, A Link to the Past, while subsequent titles like Wind Waker and Twilight Princess remain merely playable, predictable and never anywhere near the creative zenith of the series. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting LA to have much of anything more than some post-modern winks here and there in terms of its contextual nature as a LoZ game about LoZ games, but in truth it might have some of the most sound demonstrations of practical gameplay. Once again, I believe a large part of this is due to the fact that it arrived on the Game Boy, rather than the Super Nintendo, wherein they learned a fundamental lesson for procedural outlining:
When it comes to game design, brevity is the soul of wit.