The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (3DS)

Like There Can Be No More Black

Continuing my Zelda Easter and in preparedness for the remake of this game I had to play through it again. Never played the original Game Boy release, but got the DX version when I bought my Game Boy Colour in red (as that was the only colour left). Like A Link to the Past this took forever to finish and I remember hardest part was the 7th dungeon, the Eagle Tower since I never got the gimmick of the place. Now I run through it in 15 minutes (that might be an exaggeration, but it at least doesn't take a month or so). Coupled with that I got the red shirt which doubled my attack, while I really needed the blue shirt for the defence bonus, but the damn rooster you have to carry around until you beat the tower makes it impossible to get hold of. Thanks game.

Playing it again I feel that the game wants you to be slow with it, explore and go around with the new items you get all over the map before continuing with the next dungeon. So there are a lot of missable things if you don't do it slowly. For example some of the photographs are locked at certain points, especially those with Marin. And when you try to get seashells for upgrading you sword you got to stop what you do and go to the seashell mansions when you acquired 5 and 10 shells respectively to get the ones  from the mansion. 

Storywise it has some interesting twists and turns, like that the island is just the imagination of the Wind Fish and the nightmares are trying to preserve it that way. But it seems like Link the one that actually pushes them to be aggressive since they didn't do much until Link landed on the shore. All in all it was fine to play again and I can't wait until the remake comes along. The artstyle already sold me on it and it's gotta be fun to see what they've kept and what they got rid of (if they got rid of anything). The biggest change will probably be the fact that you have enough buttons now to not need to equip things like the bracelet and the pegasus boots. In A Link to the Past they were used with the action button, but since the original game boy line only had an A and a B button, that would be problematic since you needed them for the sword and other items (including the shield). So I get that decision, but I hope they don't keep it since it was a lot of back and forth to go anywhere since you need to change items a lot to get around on Koholint Island.