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| Link tries to remember which one is "fore" and which one is "aft." |
Unlike the three previous games, Link's Awakening introduces a land outside of Hyrule, away from Princess Zelda and Ganon. Instead, it takes place entirely on an island known as Koholint.
The game opens with a short scene of Link fighting against a storm on a little sail boat. Apparently, being the hero of Hyrule, he thinks a bit of experience with a raft in the Legend of Zelda is more than enough for some seafaring excitement.
He's wrong. The next scene shows Link alone on a beach, sans equipment or raft, with a girl leaning over him in concern. Link wakes up in the girl's house, and she introduces herself as Marin. She lives with a man, Tarin, and although their relationship is never explicitly stated, both characters come back in the Ocarina of Time as Malon and Talon (alternate romanizations of the Japanese names,) a father-daughter duo who run Lon Lon Ranch in the centre of Hyrule.
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| Marin checks to see if Link has anything good on him. |
Marin tells Link that he should go down to the beach where he shipwrecked if he wants to try to salvage anything he might have lost, and Tarin gives him a shield which he says must be Link's because it has his name on it. (I guess Link has a label gun back at home.)
After Link recovers his sword from the beach (which also has his name on it, proving the label gun theory,) the adventure begins in earnest.
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| Must be part Rottweiler. |
There are several unique features of this game which become immediately apparent after you explore a little bit. Link's jumps are now much more acrobatic; he does a little flip in the air during each one, just like in Majora's Mask. Exciting stuff. Something else which you quickly discover by wandering around the island is that stuff here is weird. For example, there's a lady with a pet chain chomp tethered outside her house (which tries to eat you,) but she's convinced it's a dog and has named it BowWow.
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| Kaepora Gaebora |
Once you start heading in the right direction, you meet another familiar face from the later Zelda games - Kaepora Gaebora, the helpful (?) owl sage from Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. He serves the same purpose in this game as he did in OoT - he guides you to the right places. Kaepora Gaebora tells you that the only way to get off the island is to wake up something he calls the Wind Fish, or else you'll be stuck here forever. The Wind Fish is sleeping in an egg on top of Mt. Tamaranch in the north. In order to do wake him up, you have to enter the dungeons and collect eight magical instruments, which together play
The Ballad of the Wind Fish, which is supposed to wake the Wind Fish up. Makes sense, I guess.
An interesting gameplay element which Nintendo decided to add to this game is the presence of random power-ups which drop from enemies a very small percentage of the time. One of these is called the Guardian Acorn, and it halves the amount of damage you take for a limited period of time. The other is called the Piece of Power (which looks exactly like a piece of the Triforce - I was pretty confused the first time an enemy dropped one,) which doubles your attack damage for a limited period of time. This game can get a little bit hard, so both power-ups are very useful when they come up.
Another interesting addition in this game is the necessity of finding keys to the respective dungeons before you can enter them. The first dungeon is called Tail Dungeon, and inside you receive the most useful item in Zelda history - the Roc's Feather. It lets Link jump on demand for the very first time, which is awesome. The bosses of this game are called Nightmares and the first of these looks very much like the third boss of a Link to the Past, the crazy caterpillar thing that you have to hit the tail of to kill it. Easy.
When you win, you receive the first instrument, called the Full Moon Cello.
That's it for my brief introduction to Link's Awakening! I hope to have another one up in the next couple of days or so.
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