Soft piano music is playing. We see wide beaches with palm trees and seagulls flying around. A dark and mysterious forest. An area full of water rapids. Treacherous mountains. A castle behind a wide prairie. It all feels familiar, yet different.
Wake up, Link...
A thunderstorm. A mechanical beast, similar to a Guardian, is shown running over a graveyard. Other dark monsters appear. The camera pans over the lands, revealing an island with a large mountain in the center. On top of the mountain resides a dark cocoon.
Wake up, Link...
Links looks in the eyes of a young woman. Her face looks very similar to that of Princess Zelda, but she has red hair with a hibiscus in it.
My name's Marin. You're on Koholint Island!
The trailer gains momentum. A piano variant of the main theme of Link's Awakening is played. We see Link traveling various places by horse, bike and even a boat. We see pieces of dungeon gameplay. We see action scenes with Link fighting against different monsters, including the mechanical beasts.
We call them "nightmares".
The trailer blends to other characters, familiar faces, yet distinctively different. We see Daruk as the leader of the Goron tribe. He's wearing an eye patch and raises a crusher, while speaking to a Goron crowd.
We Gorons ain't afraid of nothing!!
We see Revali flying in an updraft towards the top of what appears to be the Eagle's Tower.
No one ever dared to take this challenge!
We see Mipha riding down a waterfall that splits in half.
These waters have been our home for as long as I can remember.
We see Urbosa riding a Sand Seal through the desert.
Nothing keeps me awake like the feeling of uncertainty.
We can hear Kass playing a familiar tune on the accordion, in view of the large mountain at the center of the island.
This is an ancient verse passed down on this island called The Ballad of the Wind Fish... Would you like to hear it?
The game's title is revealed to be "The Legend of Zelda: Song of the Island". And we hear Marin one last time.
In the end, it all might be just a dream, right...?
...
Yes, we can still dream. I admit that this reads like a glorified piece of fan service fiction, but this is a vision I had earlier this week, after I finally had completed my first playthrough of Breath of the Wild and also faced my 20th Anniversary with Link's Awakening. So, I had this epiphany of combining them both and I decided to record this idea here.
In general I would like for Breath of the Wild to receive a sequel on the same lines as Link's Awakening or Majora's Mask, where Link sets out to explore a new land and faces a certain darkness. And the idea of remaking Link's Awakening as a true 3D Zelda game is as old as it gets, probably the most common hope for a Zelda remake there is. You can't blame the fans here really, because who wouldn't want to experience the island of Koholint from a 3D perspective?
Breath of the Wild essentially had a nod to this with its Eventide Island. And I loved that part of the game, where I could imagine a full blown sequel with Link being stranded on some mysterious island. He loses all of his equipment, but also part of his memories, which you can recall in certain places. This way you will learn about what happened in Hyrule, after Calamity Ganon was defeated, about Link's adventures with Zelda and how he ended up on the island in the first place. It also might reveal new memories about his past 100 years ago, where we learn even more about the old Hyrule before its destruction and the Champions.
Apropos Champions, with the game being set in a dream world, which also was shaped by Link's personal memories, it would allow to use familiar characters again, even characters that already died. It would be similar to Termina, where you could meet the characters from Ocarina of Time in different roles. Zelda will be Marin, King Rhoam might become the new Tarin and we would be able to see the Champion characters in new roles as well. Aonuma already said in an interview that he would like to use the Champions again (source), where something tells me that this won't be restricted to Hyrule Warriors 2.
Of course Koholint would be much larger than in the GameBoy original and you might even be able to explore the oceans around the island per boat. The "nightmares" would represent the corrupted technology and Calamity Ganon, while the whole game would be about Link's personal journey to process the past...
Nintendo normally doesn't do this level of fan service, but it would serve both as a worthy sequel to Breath of the Wild and as a "remake" of Link's Awakening at the same time. And I would be really hyped for that.
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