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.

Now, it bears noting that I’m not one-hundred percent sure that LA falls under Miyamoto’s true authorship, here. Game Boy titles were usually delegated, it seems, either to Gunpei Yokoi’s research and development teams or given to smaller directors to handle while the bigwigs like Shigeru handled higher profile games on their flagship console, the SNES. During the early mid-90’s, however, it seemed that Miyamoto was exerting a bit more control over his properties, as one can possibly see in the difference between 1989’s Super Mario Land, one of the Game Boy’s inaugural titles and a game which by and large bears almost no resemblance to what people tend to think of as a “Mario” game, and 1992’s Super Mario Land 2: The 6 Golden Coins. True, Yokoi’s still given credit for that game, but the addition of traditional graphics and mechanics from the SNES title Super Mario World seem to suggest that Nintendo wanted a title that better reflected the main product they were selling to the market, and it would be hard to imagine Miyamoto being totally removed from that kind of decision. Perhaps it just shows, once more, that Zelda is much closer to Shigeru’s heart than the Mario games ever were, just as feature length movies like Snow White were what Disney favored over Mickey Mouse cartoons– both were and are more demanding in control over their art than mascots, so it shouldn’t surprise us that the Game Boy incarnation of Zelda is immediately more faithful to its homespun roots than its sidescroller cousin’s portable outings were.

If that’s the case, then, why is Link’s Awakening so goddamn weird? First, this is partly what portable gaming was about in early days. Handheld incarnations of games had to set themselves apart from their big brothers at home because they didn’t have the same quality of graphics, couldn’t allow their peripheral nature to threaten the canon-integrity of the “official” series and were mostly being created by assistants rather than the head visionaries– the strangeness of games like Mario Land and LA was as much due to finding ways to impress gamers (and other designers) in black and white as it was from corporate fickleness about the threat seemingly less expensive and less reliable sources of income would pose to their greater cash cows if they didn’t undercut their grace with something a little self-effacing in the meantime. In the case of Link’s Awakening there’s a whole lot of that going on, but the narrative and presentation focus everything in such a way that it becomes satisfying from all sorts of angles, not because the game’s creators (whoever they were, exactly) didn’t try to avoid the idiosyncrasies imposed upon them by the Game Boy, but instead embraced them. How did they do this? In two ways:

First of all, they structured the game as a dream. That’s pretty obvious, as the title is fairly suggestive in that direction. The game’s story revolves around Link washing up on Koholnit Island, which none of the inhabitants have ever been off of in their entire lives, and where the only way to leave is to first wake the mysterious Wind Fish, which slumbers in a huge egg on a mountain top. Even when I was playing this the first time, at age 9, I’d already figured out the “surprise ending” pretty much by the second time the Owl showed up (more on him later). Suffice to say, though, that the dream structure allows for a lot of play with the village inhabitants, all of whom can give you instructions on the game’s controls, all while confusedly stating that they have no idea what they’re talking about. People will warn you about how you’ll have to save them later on, in that same way that Merlin knew-and-didn’t-know know what was going to happen to him/already happened to him in Once and Future King. Also, and perhaps most obviously, the dream structure allows for the game to indulge upon its second example of weirdness: its super-self-referentiality not only towards itself as a game, but towards Nintendo itself.

Specifically, I’m talking about Mario. In side-scrolling portions of dungeons (itself a reference to similar moments from the first Zelda and the entirety of its sequel) where you fight goombas and piranha plants. I’m talking about the chained up BowWow from Super Mario Bros. 3. I’m talking about the Shy-Guys, which is especially ironic considering they themselves come from the dream narrative of Super Mario Bros. 2 / Doki Doki Panic. I’m talking about the guy with a big nose and mustache with a taste for mushrooms getting turned into a raccoon in the forest. I’m talking not just about the Yoshi doll in the chain-quest, but the giant egg ontop of the island that looks like it came out of that damn dinosaur’s backside. Perhaps most of all, so far, I’m talking about the magic feather Link gets in the first dungeon, the one that lets him do something he’d never done since Link’s Adventure, and something he’s never really done since: JUMP. A feather let Mario fly, and it lets Link defy gravity in his own way. This is the only top-down Zelda game (or at least the only one I’m familiar with) in which our hero is able to jump over obstacles, which is so insanely weird there aren’t even ways to properly measure it. It turns parts of this game into an anti-Zelda, because even the 3D games don’t include jumping in them!

But then– this is a dream. We know it’s a dream. Therefore, it’s okay for it to break one of its own rules, just as long as it was one that didn’t formally exist in the first place. Perhaps this was Miyamoto & Co. testing the limits of what players were comfortable with Link being able to do, as plenty of other elements introduced here became staples in future games. The plot involves collecting musical instruments, like the LttP flute, the Ocarina and the magic baton from Wind-Waker. The Owl guide here later was featured prominently in Ocarina of Time (can’t tell you how happy I was to see him come back– I love that fucking owl), trading has reappered in recent titles, as well as something else I’d forgotten started here: the fishing mini-game. Perhaps this is emblematic of the whole nature of the portable market as a way to test the waters for ideas and characters– Wario started out mainly as a new antagonist from Bowser in Super Mario Land 2, and now look at what he’s turned into!

Anyway, that’s as far as I got in this outing, played for about an hour and a half in bed– a subject I’ll get into next time, as something uniquely possible to portable games. Until then, pleasant dreamers, you’ll have to wake the wind fish without me…