When I first acquired this Nintendo Switch, my game choices were dictated by what my local friend had for me to borrow and when I saw he had multiple Zelda games, I asked him to give me the most simple one. After having completed Link's Awakening in less than a week I can say for certain that this game is definitely that, and for many it might be a bit too simple.
As I mentioned many times before, this is a re-release of the same game that was released initially on Game Boy to much critical acclaim. The graphical changes are a definitive plus and it must have taken some time.
I enjoy graphics like this with simple games but I am aware of the fact that this might not have the same appeal with younger gamers. To me, this is what would have absolutely blown our minds in the early 90's because the graphics on the left were impressive to us back then. Despite it's intentionally cartoonish nature, the graphics on the right are just so crisp that those of us that were alive and gaming back in the 90's this is a wonderful throwback to good times early in gaming but with graphics and sound that nobody could even conceive of at the time. For the nostalgic reason alone, I think this game is worth playing. However, I believe that younger gamers who have always had graphics and sound of this magnitude that the game might seem too simplistic or dare i say, even boring.
The next aspect of the game that I enjoyed but others, especially younger players, might not enjoy, would be the difficultly level: This game is exceptionally easy. I only died on maybe 6 occasions and half of those were because I didn't have the right gear and the game was attempting to make this evident to me by kicking my ass in a fight that I am not supposed to win.
In what is meant to be considered the most difficult dungeon of the game where you revisit and have to fight multiple sub-bosses that you have already faced, I easily swept through all of them while taking minimal damage. At no point in time did I feel as though I was in danger of dying.
src
While this might have taken you a bit by surprise the first time you encountered it, it is remarkably simple the 2nd time
This appealed to me because I was looking for something casual to play but for others, especially the people that are really into games by companies such as FromSoft, this will seem like a game for kids and will be quite boring to them because honestly, there isn't a great deal of challenge here.
I feel as though the dungeons are well-designed in a sense that they were simply a more advanced version of late 80's and early 90's maps. None of these dungeons are particularly difficult to navigate except for one of them which has many switches and blocks that would be activated accordingly throughout sections of the map that you aren't able to look at while you are hitting the switches.
This wasn't "difficult per se, but it was more tedious and annoying to hit a switch and then realize after you walked 10 rooms away that you hit the wrong one. I suppose they needed to kill some time because without this delay the game is actually quite short. It's quite short even with it built in actually. It may sound like I am complaining about this but that's not really the case, I enjoyed it but understand that others might just walk away in frustration because this is the only really "difficult" aspect of the game. You aren't going to die because of it, it is just going to involve a ton of walking around over and over again.
One thing that took me a second to figure out was these chess pieces that you encounter in the dungeons. They are knights and I think that most people already understand how the knight moves in a chess game.
The reason why all of this didn't make sense to me when I was playing it is because even though I know how a knight works in chess, the game has them moving 3 places forward and one place to the side, which if you play chess you know that it is only 2 forward and 1 to the side. No matter though, because I eventually accidentally tried it in a way that I though was wrong but it turned out to be right.
Now I want to talk about the one and really only thing that I really didn't like about this game. It is called the "Trading Sequence" and it involves running into random NPC's around the board and having some sort of item that they are interested in. They will then give you something in return for that item and you continue to trade it up and up until eventually you end up with an item that is essential and required for you to complete the game.
The above is a small spoiler and sorry about that but trust me when I say that this sequence moves on MUCH further than just the 3 trades. There is only one point in the game until the end that it seems as though it is required for you to do this. Then, I think most people likely forgot about it and just moved on. If we didn't have the internet, and they didn't for the most part when this game was released in the early 90's, this must have been absolutely maddening to the people that were playing the game. The people or creatures that you need to bring the various items to are located all over the map and very forgettable. They do prompt you when you encounter them about needing a specific item, but since you haven't yet encountered said item by the time you do, if you do, you have likely forgotten about where that person was on the map. This results in potentially a TON of otherwise pointless exploration and if you are like me you just stopped fighting anything and were just running around.
The end result of all of this trading is to acquire the magical looking glass that as far as I remember was never mentioned at any point in the game and once you have it, the reason for having it is so that you can go to a room that I'm pretty sure that nobody that played the game ever even considered revisiting and finding a book there that you couldn't see before. Without reading this book the game is impossible to complete since it give you a random set of directions to use in the final dungeon. I wonder how many people just aimlessly wandered this dungeon in the 90's for hours on end and then just gave up on the game because the internet was not an option for them.
Again, I think that Nintendo stuck this in there in order to give the game the appearance of being much longer than it is when in reality the entire island map is quite small in comparison to other games. I will admit that despite the fact that the actual combat of this game is very simplistic, I think that most people would experience great frustration in completing the game since when you are at the final chapter, it give you no indication of what it is that you are missing to complete it. The magical looking glass isn't so much as even mentioned at any point in the game by anyone, so attempting to go after it is something that you couldn't possibly know about.
There are a lot of hidden things in this game for completionists out there but since I had already run around the map so many times by the time I achieved the only ending I have seen (I don't know if there are more of them) I wasn't going to wander aimlessly looking for the collectible shells that are sometimes hidden in really odd locations.
For casual players, and I think that Switch is definitely geared intentionally towards such an audience, this game is brilliant especially if you are an older gamer like I am that remembers how wonderful the NES, Super Nintendo, and Game Boy were back in the day. I will reiterate what I have said before though and say that I do not think it is worth what they are charging.
Nintendo is probably the only company that can get away with prices like this on a very short game and this is especially true with Zelda that manages to sell a ton of copies of just anything that they make. I do not think this game is worth the $60 they are charging for it so if you want to play it, and I think you should, find a friend that already owns it and borrow it.