The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX

Title: The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX
Platform Played On: Gameboy Emulator on PC
Release Date: June 6, 1993 (Dec 1, 1998 for DX version)
Date Played: Winter 1999
Time Played: 10 hours
Completed (Y/N): Yes
Score: 5/5




Opinion:
Link's Awakening was the first Zelda game I have ever played.  It was introduced to me by my friend David (the same one that introduced me to Diablo).

Neither one of us had a Gameboy at the time, but he had either played it somewhere or saw someone playing it somewhere, and so when he told me how awesome it was we plugged in my AOL 56k connection and scoured the web for the ROM and an emulator.

I didn't know what Hyrule, Triforce or Zelda were at the time since this was my first Zelda game. But surprisingly Links Awakening is missing all of those elements.  Its just a story of Link and his quest for musical instruments to wake up a fish god.  May sound cheesy, but that premise is backed by solid controls, interesting world layout and great game mechanics.  I am just going to come out and say it, this is probably my favorite Zelda game of all time.  Overall gameplay wise its similar to Link To The Past, but on a handheld with awesome monochrome graphics.

Speaking of monochrome, the original Link's Awakening came out in 1993, but in 1998 it was re-released for gameboy color with full on color palette, the game looked better than ever before.  I believe we dabbled a bit into the monochrome version, but most of our gameplay was on this color (DX) version.

Having only one computer, we did some crazy stuff with the GameBoy emulator. We would get two instances of the game running side by side, with left side of the keyboard controlling the left instance and numpad controlling the right instance and we would play Links Awakening side by side on the same monitor with the same keyboard. Not really sure how that worked, since the controls generally only get passed to the active window, but it worked.

I also seem to remember a weird mod that changed everything in the game to sexual items. That was weird, and surprisingly funny to a 13 year old.

Links Awakening is a an amazingly good Zelda game, and with its color version's re-release on 3DS's e-shop I would recommend it to anyone who likes SNES's Link to The Past. This is a very good Zelda game, and I feel that a lot of people dismiss it because it is on a handheld.