Link's Awakening Nightmare Diary

So, what do you do once you've finished your game of Link's Awakening? Play through it again, of course! And this time in "Hero Mode"!

Link's Awakening always has been one of the most replayable games for me. Not because it allows for so much experimentation (sadly, a lot of the ingame progress is tied to certain events), but because everything about it is so charming and enjoyable. It's also a very compact game, where you can easily complete it on a free weekend. Which is what I'm planning to do.

But this also means less blogging and more playing. My first playthrough took quite a while, because I was so invested in finding out pretty much everything there is to the remake and sharing all my thoughts here. Now I will be more focused on an efficient playthrough. I will also try to get all the new Pieces of Heart and Secret Seashells as early as possible, which makes sense in Hero Mode.

Enter Hero Mode

Well, overall this is your standard "Hero Mode" as you know it since Skyward Sword. You receive double damage and you won't find any hearts, apples or fairies (the latter only in Fairy Grottos). Well, there are still ways to get hearts and that's in the shop and the Trendy Game... You might even consider using this offer early on, but once you have access to more healing opportunities, this will be useless as ever.

But as always this whole Hero Mode thing makes the early game challenging, but then not very much... The game still has its death counter and secret ending, which doesn't go together nicely with a mode, where you might accidentally die early on. So, you want to save your game on every step and then reload, if necessary, to keep that nice 0 on your file.

(Apropos file, whenever I'm saving my game now I'm worried that I might accidentally overwrite my 100% Normal Mode file. It would have been good, if the game still shows you the file number before you confirm...)

So, I'm personally not a big fan of this mode. What they could have done is applying the "+Monsters Effect" on all the dungeons now and calling this "Nightmare Mode". At least then it would have felt somewhat more unique when compared to other Zelda games in the recent years. Plus, fighting lots of monsters at once can be lots of fun.

First Steps

I've been a little bit worried that with the updated mini-game my Mabe Village grind after the Mysterious Woods will be too lengthy. Whenever I've replayed the original GameBoy game, I didn't go straight to Level 1, I used the money from the woods to clear the fishing mini-game first and then I played the Trendy Game until I could afford the Shovel and Bombs...

So, with Hero Mode in place naturally I wanted to do the same and I was positively surprised that this went down even quicker and I got more out of it. For starters, not being told how the controls work between every single fish certainly helped. And now that I know how you do the fishing I quickly got both Heart Pieces, the middleweight lure and of course the first Fairy Bottle.

And then I got the Yoshi Doll, the CiaoCiao figurine and the Piece of Heart from the Trendy Game, as well as enough Rupees to buy the Shovel already. Bam! This is much better than in the original and it also already got me an additional Heart Container before the first dungeon. I like it!

After the first dungeon you can also neatly use that Piece of Heart surrounded by holes to heal yourself before the Moblin Hideout. At first I even thought that you might want to keep certain Heart Pieces for later strategically, so you can heal yourself with them if needs be. But of course this is negligible, since you can always heal yourself at the Great Fairy in the woods.

I was worried that the second room in the Moblin Hideout would give me trouble, but then I remembered that Link's Awakening always has been a game with powerful items other than your sword. You can just quickly burn them all up with Magic Powder for an easy solution.

Also, the Guardian Acorns feel like proper rewards in Hero Mode now. Well, I'm probably one of the few guys out there, who actually enjoy the little music of the power-ups (especially now in the remake with the boost effects), but in Hero Mode this can be very helpful. It doesn't work on holes, though. If you fall down somewhere, that's one heart gone.

Of Cream and Bottles

The Hinox again marks this point in the game, where you make it to break it. You have to play it carefully with the guy, because in the remake he loves to spam his grab attack, which is going right through all of your attacks. But at least he's now easy on the bomb spam. So, a good combo of Roc's Feather and Spin Attacks takes him out and overcomes the biggest hurdle for not dying in the game.

With the Power Bracelet in hand you can always go for the "leave Bottle Grotto in the middle to get Secret Medicine and another Heart Container" strategy, which I've done quite often on the GameBoy, because I've been afraid of the Genie boss. He isn't as scary in the remake any longer, however, especially if you use Aonuma's E3 methods, where you stay close to the boss.

But it's still a good idea to get the Secret Medicine in any case and the heal from Crazy Tracy is welcome as well, because they have removed the fairy from the pots near the end of the Bottle Grotto. They probably even have removed all fairies outside of the Fairy Fountains, so the Fairy Bottle sadly is useless up until getting the Bombs. Plus, those little fairies don't automatically heal you, you actually have to use the bottle to set them free this time, which is different from all other Zelda games, where the fairies worked exactly like the Secret Medicine in this game...

I also took BowWow for some longer walkies, where He helps traversing the Ukuku Prairie with its annoying enemies. And the scene where Kiki wants to fight with him is absolutely hilarious.

Early Chamber Dungeon

After Level 2 I wanted to try some things of what I already can do inside the Chamber Dungeon. I've saved some of my dungeons from my Normal Mode save file on various amiibo, including the infamous Labyrinth of Tourian, and I wanted to see what happens if you try to play them as early in the game...

Turns out this actually works. What the game does here is warn you that you're playing chambers you don't have yet. And it sets your inventory to whatever the creator of the Chamber Dungeon has been using. So, it looked like this:

The blue items will go away once you leave the Chamber Dungeon, but it's certainly possible to play it with them. And this is an interesting solution. I would have expected that it simply blocks you out of playing or so. But this way even online sharing of dungeons could work nicely.

Oh, but the additional tab space actually gets used for the amiibo dungeons. So, that's reserved already, but they could always make the tabs smaller or so...

Another thing that instantly caught my attention is this one:

Yes, you can still find hearts in the Chamber Dungeon. I guess, they wanted the chambers to be identical between modes. After all you can play a dungeon that was created in another mode... But then there's even less of a reason to not apply the "+Monsters Effect" for the rest of Hero Mode. The chambers you get are then the variants from Normal Mode, but you of course always add the "+Monsters Effect" yourself. (Once you got it... after the end of the game...)

Oh, and I can now indeed confirm that the first Chamber Stone from the Trendy Game gives you the three-way Genie chamber.

The Power of Color

My next goal was again an early visit to the Color Dungeon, where it really has some qualities that I'm missing from the Chamber Dungeon. The music is awesome and would fit the Chamber Dungeon very nicely. And keys falling down from the ceiling instead of the slooooow treasure chest animation really feels so good in comparison. You just pick them up, where it makes a little beeping sound and you go on. So good, so fast! Man, I wish the Chamber Dungeon would do that instead of throwing all these treasure chests at you, which wastes way too much of your time.

Anyway, it felt a little bit risky to visit the Color Dungeon so early, because its bosses can be quite dangerous, if you're not careful. Luckily, I could now get a fairy from the Fairy Grotto in Ukuku Prairie, so this helped.

But I'm not a fan that mini-bosses don't drop fairies any longer. I would be okay with Anti-Fairies or Sparks not giving any, because this trick always made the game too easy, but after a mini-boss fight you potentially want to heal up. Not getting a fairy doesn't make the game any more harder here, it just makes things more tedious. Because now I had to leave the dungeon, go down to the Ukuku Prairie and get healed by the Great Fairy... after both mini-bosses! And this sucks.

At least it was worth it... I now have the Blue Mail and from this point on Hero Mode should get a lot easier, because it negates the double damage. I also enjoy playing the game a second time with a different tunic, which I also did with Link's Awakening DX on the Virtual Console. Of course you can always change it (even back to green now), but once I've picked a tunic I usually stay with it for the rest of the game.

Hero Status:

• Secret Seashells: 15
• Pieces of Heart: 11
• Chambers: 63
• Chamber Stones: 1
• Challenges Cleared: 2