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.

The Game Boy, even in its modern-day Advanced stage of evolution and its dual-personality offspring, has always been a smaller canvas than the bigger consoles Nintendo puts out. This is a fundamental truth for all portable systems– you can take it with you, but you can’t take everything. Designing for games on the go, you’ve got to be more selective and economic about what elements you can and can’t include. Last time I talked about how the black-and-white restrictions of the context’s aesthetics led to much flashier, surreal subject matters for the game’s content. To better understand this, take a look at the SNES title, ALttP, and you’ll find a much more subdued affair. Sure, there’s plenty of monsters, magic and parallel worlds, but that’s merely par-for-the-course in Zelda games. You expect Ganon, Aghanim and their minions to be monstrous, but you don’t expect them to come in the form of goombas, koopas and other baddies from a non-Hyrulian Nintendo series. You don’t expect to find telephone booths, villages filled with friendly creatures (was Animal Village the precursor to Animal Crossing?) or characters who seem to freely admit not only that they’re inside of a dream narrative, but a game itself– Kojima’s characters may crack the fourth wall, occasionally, but only to the player, never to themselves. Here, there are instances in which the villagers and enemies seem to almost conduct dialogues with one another on their fictionality– Link practically needs to suspend his own disbelief just to keep soldiering on his adventure, with all this sleepwalking nonsense about the Wind Fish.

While all these questions arise aesthetically out of the system’s monochromatic limitations, the prohibitions laid down by the 8-bit processing power also places limitations on the game’s mechanical capabilities– not only does the Game Boy restrict what a game can show, but also what it can do. Getting around this can be a fairly tricky question, especially for an LoZ title, which by its very definition must be an expansive, epic game with as many time consuming quests and activities as possible. Think about how costly an open-ended overworld can be on the hardware of a system, and how demanding it can be to cram as much of that non-linear experience into even smaller sets of software. Frankly, it would’ve been impressive enough if they’d merely been able to port a hue-less adaptation of the original NES title to the Game Boy back in the day, but by 1993 it seems they’d figured out enough of the ins and outs of their handheld system to know exactly how much of the classic action-adventure experience into technology small enough to fit in your pocket. One of the ways they thought their way through the problems, it seems, was to model the success of the Game Boy’s compromises and map them onto their game– if the system has to be more compact, then so too does the game itself, and one of the first things this game compacts is the overworld itself.

I’d like to be able to compare the size of Koholnit Island with that of Hyrule from ALttP, but even without checking I’m almost certain that the former would be positively dwarfed by the latter. Now, it’s been a few years since I played the SNES game, and while I maintain that it’s likely the pinacle of overall design in LoZ games, at this moment LA feels like it has the best physical map, partly due to the fact that it’s smaller, and therefore more concentrated. Large portions of ALttP‘s overworld always strike me as somewhat unnecessary– between the different environments there’d be pretty big stretches which composed of nothing but roads and paths. This is probably more realistic– between the castle, town and outlying forests, deserts and mountains it makes perfect sense for there to be highways and byways connecting you from place to place. The problem there (and right now I’m mostly going on memory– until I replay it anybody feel free to correct me) is the near-uniformity of the terrain those connections occupy– whenever you’re on the road, it’s the same grass-mowed environment. Sure, the entrances to every ecosystem usually were long enough to pose significant challenges as you made your way into the dungeon, but before that all you’d be doing is cycling through the same-old-same-old of grassy knolls. Furthermore, aside from being peppered with oddball characters and occasional secrets here and there there usually wouldn’t be much in the way to populate these empty spaces.

Granted, a good amount of this design was likely dictated by the whole parallel-worlds set-up of the mechanics, helping to facilitate puzzles in simultaneous existences by giving those timelines plenty of elbow room with which to make the switch-a-roos work. This is a good way of using the physical map in ways that encourage lateral thinking, but it’s something you wouldn’t really have open as an option for a Game Boy title, which wouldn’t have the hardware or software capacity, most likely, to work with two overworld maps at once. Therefore, instead of building a game based on cleverly using the map tradition in a new way, Nintendo had to focus on perfecting the map itself, especially keeping the technological limitations in mind. What followed was something rather brilliant in its own way– all of the environments are grouped together, clustered so that one stands after the other. True, all of the dungeon environments are mostly on the edges, just as in ALttP, but between them are all kinds of varied terrains. Obstacles blocking the way can only be eliminated after completing tasks and collecting items in respective dungeons, as in all well designed Zelda games, only here there’s a well-deserved emphasis placed upon this sequence-by-procedure aspect, since there’s nothing else in the overworld to get in the way. Furthermore, placing all the areas next to each other heightens the tension of not being able to access them until you’ve found the proper instrument with which to remove your impediments, and as those impediments are as varied as the tools you use it never feels stale– pits, stones, cracked walls and waterways all make excellent locks for the keys which are the jump feather, the lifting bracelet, bombs and swimming flippers, to say nothing of how these can all be combined and calibrated for hook-shot chasms. Even the sword becomes a tool for getting past shrubbery, as Link can’t lift mere bushes, adding a machete-like jungle influence to the exploration of the island. So much of this is built upon the foundations of the Law of Miyamoto (lock before key) that it turns the game’s map into one which demands constant interaction just to navigate from place to place. The map might be small, but the fact that you’re always doing something makes it seem big enough for the well-placed warp-zones to feel like a blessing, rather than an easy-way-out.

Another aspect in which the focused map design really shines is the way in which the chain-quest is implemented, which I just finished this morning on the train. According to Wikipedia this is the first LoZ title to include what it calls a “Trading System,” and while I’m really hesitant to believe that right away (my memory of ALttP ought to be better) it would certainly bolster my assertion that LA stands as the testing ground for so many articles of gameplay we nowadays take for granted as foundation staples. While I’ve often found the chain-quests in other titles to be really bloated and unnecessary (I particularly dislike the one from the opening of TP— somehow an appropriate acronym), the Link’s Awakening one represents one of the best examples of how the game’s oddball aesthetic and tight-as-a-drum mechanics combine to some incredibly satisfying arbitrariness. The cause-and-effect-leading-to-cause-and-effect-etc. structure makes for very entertaining scenes in which we see the fruit of following arcane orders– this is a great way to reward players for going along with chain-quests, as the stranger the article you’re taking from person to person, the stranger the task it’s being used for. What’s even more satisfying is how, at times, merely accomplishing the errand requires the use of your other items, making it feel like more of an actual sub-quest and less of a mindless chore. This is stuff that keeps you busy, but doesn’t feel like busywork, and might even prove essentially useful as the game progresses. I especially like the end result of the magnifying glass, as it provides an answer to something bugging you from the start of the game– the fine-print book in the library.

Well, that’s all for now. It looks like I’ll be able to finish it for next time, at which point I’ll really get in deep with the actual portable experience of taking this game on my commute and to bed, and when I’ll finally offer some thoughts as to the substance of the Owl’s role in the LoZ franchise from this point. Until then, pleasant dreamers, don’t let the bed bugs bite (unless it turns out to be one of those fairies in disguise!)…