Zelda: Link's Awakening (Game Boy) Review - Classic

🐔 Introduction — Zelda in Your Pocket, and a Dream You Don’t Forget

🗡️ This review is part of our The Legend of Zelda Hub — every mainline game reviewed and rated, plus the movies and the LEGO Zelda sets, all in one place.

In 1993, the idea of a “proper” Zelda on the Game Boy seemed faintly absurd. The handheld was a green-tinted brick built for Tetris on the bus, not for the sprawling adventure of A Link to the Past. And then Link’s Awakening arrived and quietly proved everyone wrong. It was not a watered-down portable spin-off; it was a dense, inventive, genuinely strange Zelda that some fans rate above its console siblings. For the Dadnology community, this is a 9/10 — a handheld landmark, and one of the most quietly affecting games the series has ever produced.

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Link's Awakening is built into the dedicated Game & Watch handheld alongside the NES original and Zelda II — the most charming way to own the classic.

What makes it special starts with where it takes place. This is not Hyrule. There is no Princess Zelda, no Triforce, no Ganon. Shipwrecked, Link washes up on Koholint Island, a small, sun-drenched, faintly off-kilter place, and is told he can only leave by waking the Wind Fish that sleeps atop the mountain. From that simple hook unspools a quest that gets stranger, funnier and sadder the further you go — and an ending that has stayed lodged in players’ minds for three decades.

That combination — a portable, self-contained Zelda with a dream at its heart — is why this one endures. Here is how it plays.

First Impressions: A Familiar Engine, an Unfamiliar World

If you have played A Link to the Past, the controls and the top-down view feel instantly like home — and that is deliberate. Link’s Awakening runs on essentially the same engine, compressed and adapted for the Game Boy, which means the swordplay, the item logic and the dungeon rhythm all carry over. What is radically different is the tone. Koholint is whimsical and a little wrong, populated by talking animals, a memorable cast of villagers, and — bizarrely, wonderfully — cameos from the Mario series, with Goombas and Chain Chomps wandering in from another universe entirely.

That dreamlike strangeness is not just set dressing. The island feels both cosy and unsettling, like a half-remembered holiday, and the game slowly seeds the sense that something about this place is not quite real. It is a remarkable mood to sustain on 1993 handheld hardware, and it is the first sign that Link’s Awakening has ambitions well beyond “Zelda, but smaller.”

Real-World Performance: Dungeons, Items and Clever Compression

The dungeons are the headline, and they are superb. Cramming Zelda’s intricate, item-gated dungeon design onto a Game Boy was no small feat, and the team rose to it with puzzles that are inventive, satisfying and occasionally fiendish. The new items — the Roc’s Feather that lets Link jump, a genuine novelty for the top-down series — open up platforming-flavoured challenges the console games never attempted. Each dungeon introduces its idea, develops it, and pays it off with the confidence of a team working at the top of its game.

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The home of Game Boy classics via Nintendo Switch Online — and where you will find the gorgeous 2019 Link's Awakening remake.

There is real cleverness in the compression, too. Because the Game Boy screen is small, the world is built from tightly interlocking screens full of secrets, and a system lets you relocate certain obstacles to reach new areas. The famous trading sequence — passing an item from one islander to the next in a long chain of favours — gives the whole map a sense of community and consequence. It is dense in the best way: every screen earns its place, and there is almost no filler on the entire island.

How It Holds Up — and the 2019 Remake

Played today, the Game Boy original holds up better than its hardware has any right to allow. The design is timeless even if the green-screen visuals are very much of their moment, and on the Game & Watch or via Nintendo Switch Online it slots beautifully into handheld life — which is, after all, exactly how it was meant to be played. The puzzles, the pacing and the story lose nothing.

If the monochrome look is a barrier, you have an excellent alternative: the 2019 Switch remake rebuilds the entire adventure in a gorgeous toy-like art style, with quality-of-life improvements and the same beloved island intact. (We cover that version separately — it earns an even higher score.) But there is a specific magic to the original that the remake, for all its beauty, cannot fully replicate: the intimacy of a tiny screen, a pair of headphones, and a dream you are slowly unravelling on your own.

The Ending: Why Koholint Stays With You

It is impossible to talk about Link’s Awakening without touching the ending, so — gently, and without spoilers — let me just say this: very few games from any era have a conclusion that asks you to feel as much as this one does. The slow realisation of what Koholint actually is, and what waking the Wind Fish truly means, reframes the entire adventure into something wistful and surprisingly profound. It is the moment a charming handheld game reveals it has been quietly breaking your heart the whole time.

That emotional weight is the real reason the game has endured for thirty years and inspired a full remake. It proved that a portable Zelda could not only match the console games mechanically but could reach for something they rarely attempted — genuine melancholy. For a dad who grew up with it, that ending is one of gaming’s formative memories.

The Soundtrack and the Ballad of the Wind Fish

For a Game Boy game working with the console’s famously limited sound chip, Link’s Awakening is astonishingly musical. The Ballad of the Wind Fish — the melody at the centre of the whole adventure — is one of the most haunting pieces of music Nintendo has ever written, a tune that starts as a simple folk song and slowly accrues meaning until, by the end, it carries the entire emotional weight of the island. Learning to play it on instruments scattered across Koholint is one of the game’s quiet joys.

Beyond that centrepiece, the soundtrack is full of character — a jaunty overworld theme, eerie dungeon motifs, and the cheerful chaos of Mabe Village. The composers wrung remarkable expressiveness out of three sound channels, and the result is music that lodges in your memory and refuses to leave. Decades later, fans still cover the Ballad of the Wind Fish, which tells you everything about how deeply this little handheld score connected. For a game so concerned with dreams and memory, having a soundtrack you cannot forget feels entirely fitting.

Where It Ranks Among Handheld Zelda

Link’s Awakening did not just survive on the Game Boy; it set the standard that every portable Zelda after it would chase. The handheld entries that followed — the Oracle games, The Minish Cap, Phantom Hourglass, A Link Between Worlds — all owe a debt to the proof-of-concept this one delivered: that a pocket Zelda could be a full, essential, front-rank entry rather than a stopgap between console releases. It legitimised the whole idea.

Among those handheld games it remains, for many fans, the high-water mark, rivalled only by the later A Link Between Worlds. What sets it apart is not mechanical ambition but heart — the willingness to build a small, strange, self-contained world and then make you care about it deeply before pulling the rug out. Plenty of Zelda games are bigger. Very few are as personal. That is why, more than thirty years on, Koholint Island still tops “best handheld Zelda” lists and inspired a full-scale remake. It earned every bit of that devotion.

Family Fit: A Gentle, Shareable Adventure

This is a lovely game to share with an older child. It is rated E for Everyone — only mild fantasy combat, nothing to worry about — and its bite-size, handheld-friendly structure suits a child’s attention span perfectly. A single dungeon makes a satisfying evening; the trading sequence is a gentle, puzzle-flavoured treasure hunt a kid can really sink into.

The deeper themes of the ending will land differently depending on age, which is part of its charm — younger players take it as a sweet adventure, older ones feel the ache. Playing the 2019 remake with kids is the easiest entry point for its bright, approachable visuals, but introducing a child to the original on a Game & Watch is its own quiet pleasure: a little piece of gaming history, passed down on the device it belongs on. There is something fitting about handing a kid the same green-screen adventure you played at their age, headphones in, the Ballad of the Wind Fish playing them out. It is the kind of small inheritance that means more than any download ever could.

Is Link's Awakening on Game Boy still worth playing?

Absolutely. The dungeon design, charm and storytelling hold up beautifully. It is denser and stranger than you might expect from a 1993 handheld, and the bittersweet ending is unforgettable. If you prefer modern visuals, the 2019 Switch remake covers the same adventure.

Where can I play the original Link's Awakening?

The Game Boy original (and its colour update, Link’s Awakening DX) appear on Nintendo Switch Online and the dedicated Game & Watch: The Legend of Zelda handheld. A full ground-up remake was also released on Nintendo Switch in 2019.

How is Link's Awakening different from other Zelda games?

It is set on Koholint Island rather than Hyrule, with no Princess Zelda and no Triforce. It is dreamlike and oddly funny — featuring cameos from Mario enemies — and builds to one of the most melancholy, thought-provoking endings in the series.

How long does Link's Awakening take to beat?

A main playthrough runs roughly 10 to 14 hours. The optional trading sequence and collectibles add a little more. It is perfectly sized for handheld sessions, which is exactly how it was designed to be played.