Closing in on the end of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, and I've really enjoyed it — quite possibly more than A Link to the Past, which was previously one of my favourite Zelda games alongside Majora's Mask.
I haven't quite finished it yet so I'm not sure of the complete "truth" behind everything, but I'll comment on what I have seen so far, which is up to about halfway through the eighth dungeon, Turtle Rock.
One of the things I like a lot about Link's Awakening is its strange blend of melancholy and silly humour. This is something that Nintendo has been quite good at with the Zelda series in particular, but it's particularly pronounced in Link's Awakening. The frequent suggestion that everything that is going on is a dream of the "Wind Fish" — and whether or not this is the case is yet to be revealed to me, so no spoilers, please! — allows the game to throw in peculiar and unconventional things along the way, as well as cameos from numerous other Nintendo characters.
Pleasingly, these cameos don't feel overly forced and, in most cases, aren't shoehorned in — they're just there. For example, there are characters who look like Mario and Luigi, but they're never referred to as such. There's a Yoshi doll in one of the shops that kicks off one of the major sidequests in the game. Mr Write from the SNES version of SimCity is there, indulging in a romantic, long-distance letter-writing relationship with a young goat-woman, who is misrepresenting herself using a photograph of Princess Peach. Goombas show up in several dungeons as enemies, as does a monsters that looks and acts remarkably like Kirby. The list goes on.
Another thing I like is how the game blends elements of the original Legend of Zelda and A Link to the Past. There's the stronger sense of narrative from the latter coupled with the challenging but satisfying exploration of the former. Dungeons incorporate the side-view "cellars" from the original Legend of Zelda, but in a more fleshed-out manner — rather than simply being somewhere that you either get an item or find a route to another part of the dungeon, these cellars are often mini platforming challenges in their own right that make use of the "Roc Feather" item that allows Link to jump manually for, so far as I can remember, the only time in the series.
The dungeons are beautifully designed, too. While their layout is simpler than their counterparts in A Link to the Past, being single-screen rooms rather than larger, scrolling rooms, navigating them is a pleasure, and very often the game rewards experimentation with its mechanics, and even demands it in places. This is not a game that holds your hand in the slightest, which I appreciate, but I also very much appreciate that the game does have the facility for you to get a hint or two to nudge you in the right direction if you're really struggling.
For me, the only slightly underwhelming part has been the bosses, which, although decent enough, don't seem to be quite as interesting and challenging as those seen in some other Zelda games, and several of them are reused once or twice in later dungeons. At least they're better than the ones from the original Legend of Zelda, mind, and there are a few interesting mechanics to play with on some of them. I also like the use of "mid-bosses" in dungeons as well as the big bosses at the end; I'm a fan of boss fights in general, so getting more than one per dungeon is something I enjoy.
Anyway. I'm hoping I finally beat the game this evening, because when I get home from holiday, it's going to be Xenoblade Chronicles X time for the foreseeable future, and I'd just feel bad if I got this far in Link's Awakening and didn't see it all through until the end!
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This has been one of my favorites. As you mentioned, it felt like this has better characters and story than their preceding game, Link to the Past. So while technically speaking it's weaker in some areas, I feel like they pushed the series forward with this entry. Sadly I feel like this game often gets overshadowed by Link to the Past, so I think many players haven't played it.
Back when I first got it I didn't like Link's Awakening as much as the console games. I go to Zelda for epic adventures and the portable games didn't feel all that epic. Maybe it was because the first version I got was the DX version for Game Boy Color and I didn't like the color palette all that much.
In any case I eventually came to respect and appreciate Link's Awakening for what it accomplished on the simplistic Game Boy. Nintendo managed to design not only a full Zelda, but a complex, deep adventure game for an 8-bit handheld with monochrome graphics and two buttons. If you look back, full-fledged adventure games and RPGs weren't common on handhelds before the GBA. Most games I remember for it were either puzzle games (a standard likely set by Tetris) and relatively simple action platformers. Link's Awakening set the mold for a few deeper adventure games during the original Game Boy's lifespan. A really underrated one in my opinion was the 1997 Game Boy 007 game. Pokemon was a major achievement in that regard too — it was pretty much the first really successful portable RPG. The Game Boy Color Metal Gear Ghost Babel is also an achievement in Game Boy software design. It's just really impressive when developers do more with less.
I haven't been impressed to that degree with handheld gaming that often since. Those kinds of deep adventures became normalized on the GBA and DS. I think the next time I was that impressed was when I played Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker on the PSP. It ended up having not only full-fledged third person shooter gameplay, but probably the most content of any Metal Gear game up to that point. I think something that would impress me to a similar degree today would be if someone made a full-blown Elder Scrolls-type game for the Vita, and I think it really would be possible.
Exactly. I played it early after it's original release (before the DX upgrade), and I was impressed with how big and involved it was for a handheld game at the time, so you're right that it's harder to appreciate that years after the fact. You really got your money's worth with this game, compared to many others at the time.