That would be cool!
More crossover cameos. Expanded Animal Village with… you guessed it - Animal Crossing characters! A few more houses and an extra side quest within.
Remix the dungeons to be familiar but twist expectations for returning players
Heck a whole second quest with entirely new dungeons?
And as mentioned above, a Zero Mission style epilogue could reframe the entire game while fully maintaining, even enhancing, the original whimsy.
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The animal village is ripe for expansion, did notice how oddly underutilized it was in my last run of the game last year. Good call on that.
Personally though I really really really don’t like the thought of an epilogue, or one with any kind of “return” to the island. That dream is gone, …much like a bubble on a needle… existing only in our memories. Much of the emotional significance of the game for me is tied to that.
Brilliant… This would make the game playable for me.
I’m tempted to run through the original this year but I’m not sure if that would ruin the “freshness” of the new version coming out. I haven’t played LA for about 5-6 years now at least.
I agree it’s my favorite 2D Zelda. I played it before LTTP and thought LTTP was great but lacked the charm and wit of LA.
Totally forgot I had found a guide for this. I played it a few years back but I’m in the mood to replay it! Time for a 100% run.
I just finished the first dungeon and I forgot how much I enjoyed this game. It’s like Earthbound meets Zelda!
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Personally for me the new art style is a big enough change. Nothing else needed. That being said I’m sure they’re gonna add stuff.
Looks awesome! I should finish DX, I forget which dungeon I was at.
I’ve been thinking about the art style again and yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there.
The art style of the remake appears to be illustrating the raw in-game Game Boy visuals much like the photographs in the game were.
Like I posted the other day, the GB visuals were recreating the original illustrations in as detailed and as aesthetically pleasing way as they could be given the limitations of the display and GB CPU. Your imagination filled in the gaps. Those sprites and tiles didn’t look like raw sprites and tiles when we played the game.
The remake is taking the GB’s translation of the illustrations - those sprites and tiles - and mostly seems to just be HD-i-fying them, which makes us now take them for what they are, rather than the illustrations they were based on.
I do wonder, though, if it would have been possible to remake the visuals in a style similar to the illustrations seen in the game manual, without the tile- and grid-based world design sticking out so much. That was a big issue with Pokemon Let’s Go - despite being technically superior to Sun and Moon, the latter looks better since the world design complemented the improvement in technology. There weren’t grids of identikit tree models and tall grass planted in plots of squares, and world features weren’t mimicking the tile size on the Game Boy.
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I think people have the idea a bit backward.
Did the Game Boy’s limitations lead to them choosing to make a highly stylised, cute, minimalist graphical style? Absolutely. It almost looks like Link is desktop icon he’s made of so few pixels, and as such is completely chibi.
But then IMO they then made a game to match that style. They knew it looked chibi and a bit silly, so they made the game lighter tone and somewhat comedic to play up to the style they had. Who remembers this classic parody of getting an item:
After stealing
And little details like this:
It’s one of the reasons it hits harder emotionally when you know the characters will no longer exist at the end - it’s a juxtaposition of a cute, childlike world and dark existential themes.
So now, it comes to a remake. How do you remake a game which, partly due to system limitations, is cute and funny to its core?
Even though you can choose any art style, something which doesn’t look like Sanrio made it will lose something. So that’s why I’m on board with it looking toylike.
I would also have enjoyed something resembling Wind Waker, but that wouldn’t be as unique and as seen in Phantom Hourglass, doesn’t look as dynamic in mostly 2D.
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My Link’s Awakening DX box is one of the boxes that I’ve some how lost over the years. Though while I don’t have the original Link’s Awakening release (I borrowed a friend’s copy and played through it) I some how have a complete box for it. I really need to pick up a copy of the original release one of these days.
I agree with you, but couldn’t they have accomplished that without making the game look like plastic and clay?
It’s a cool art style, but it looks more like what I hoped a modern Earthbound game would look like rather than Zelda.
That said, I’m going to play and enjoy the crap out of this game. And I think the art style is incredibly strong. I just wish it were used for a new game instead.
I didn’t own an SNES as a kid, so I was very psyched to get a new Zelda game that was closer to ALTTP–both stylistically and gameplay-wise. I recall being blown away with the fidelity of the graphics in Link’s Awakening. They managed to perfectly translate the look of ALTTP to the smaller, grayscale platform. I remember wishing for Nintendo to release a third NES Zelda game after seeing what they had did on the Gameboy.
I’m very pumped for this remake. I love the tilt-shift perspective and tactile art direction. Zelda is one of the few franchises that can successfully support varying “looks” across entries and platforms, and still translate to a cohesive body of media.
Excellent post. I’d forgotten about those moments.
That’s why I’m torn really, like I mentioned earlier Pokemon Let’s Go just looks wrong given the proportions of the assets have changed yet the tile-based game world has remained. Dungeons look like comically basic and empty square grids with the odd ladder when before they had a unique and detailed charm to them.
With Link’s Awakening’s remake I have no problem with them continuing to keep the world as proportioned as before - I think ALBW looked pretty good on 3DS.
The materials used in the Link’s Awakening remake are what don’t sit quite right to me - it’s almost like everything is plastic figurines.
New trailer!
I got goosebumps from the music. Great stuff, I’m sure Ryo Nagamatsu, who did a great job with A Link Between Worlds, is back in the composer’s chair for this one.
Despite having played the game on GB Pocket in March I was pleased to have recognised every screen from the game that was shown in the trailer, so the visuals are on point as far as communicating the original game’s environment designs.
It seems like the sword is now permanently mapped to either the A or B button, and you can assign up to two items to X and Y. There are also 20 heart containers instead of 14, so I’m guessing there’s more secrets hidden across the world.
As expected from Nintendo the new content is a surprise - you assemble your own dungeons using screens or pieces that you collect(?) during your adventure. This seems like a novel idea, and should provide a lot of replay value if you can share dungeons with other people. The 3DS had a camera with QR code support for sharing creations, the Switch doesn’t so I suspect this means some sort of online functionality in there if it happens.
What isn’t so good is how the game still looks rather unpolished. There are still framerate drops which I’m sure will be ironed out before launch (though the 30fps target is disappointing given the GB original was 60), but there are a few things which make me believe the developers aren’t using a homegrown engine and are getting to grips with something like Unreal 4, like how the camera looks incredibly rigid whenever it zooms in or pans around the world, and how the menus just look functional at best (check out the dungeon building segment). A far cry from the bespoke slickness of A Link Between World’s interface which fills me with joy whenever I drag and drop items and pins around with my thumb.
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Treehouse recap just posted
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