The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, released for the Game Boy in 1993, just might be the place where you can put your finger down and definitively state “This is where Nintendo officially started whoring out its best franchises,” or “This is where the people at Nintendo officially went insane”– either one will do, and likely both of them are pretty much true. It’s a Zelda game that doesn’t star Zelda, involve the Tri-Force, Ganon or any of the Hyrulian elements we’ve come to either know and love or at least come to expect. For a long time I’d pretty much rested my memory of this game upon the vague recollections of its smooth, solid mechanics, which it certainly has and pretty impressive when you take into consideration the time and handheld hardware it was made for. To be quite honest, though, the main thing I’d forgotten about LA was how just plain weird it is. Shigeru Miyamoto’s always said he was influenced by Lewis Carrol, but most of the time it’s just something people point out whenever they want to joke about how the Super Mario games were “obviously” designed by “somebody high on something.” Playing this game again for the first time in about 13 years, I just might be agreeing with that sentiment for the first time.

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