Sunday, September 1, 2019

Link's Awakening Remake: No Secret Bombable Walls?

The original Link's Awakening certainly had some obscure secrets here and there, where you are able to blow up a wall with bombs, but couldn't see any cracks. This is a remnant of the first Zelda game, where potentially any wall and any tree could be destroyed and you just had to try everywhere. In the least you don't have to actually use bombs everywhere in Link's Awakening, because you simply can use your sword to test walls. If they sound different, they can be blown up.

Still, it's expected that the remake adds some cracks here and there, especially with the Pieces of Hearts inside certain caves, where without any guides it's really a matter of being very thorough to find them all. However, some new footage from the dungeons on the Japanese website reveals that they went a little bit too far with that. Here's a screenshot of the Face Shrine:

screenshot of a chamber inside the Face Shrine

You can clearly see the cracks in the north wall, but in the original you couldn't see them and for very good reasons. This was part of a riddle, where the way forward wasn't supposed to be obvious. If you look on the map, there's is no room to the north here... And this dungeon's Stone Slab / Owl Beak even gave you a hint about this:

Enter the space
where the eyes
have walls...

You solve this puzzle by realizing that the dungeon map looks like a mask and the eyes on the map hold secret rooms. Given, this isn't the most difficult puzzle in the world and many might simply solve this by accident. But as a kid, when I first played this game, I was playing close by the map and this puzzle had me seriously stuck for a while.

The way it is in the remake, there is no puzzle at all. If it's the same with the room that leads to the L-2 Power Bracelet, then this dungeon will be way too easy the first time you play it in the remake. And that's a shame, because the game is already easy enough as it is.

If they do the same for Level 8, a lot of the secret shortcuts there won't really be a secret anymore as well. It kind of kills a part of the discovery for newcomers and might also make the dungeons less interesting to newcomers overall, because all these secrets will be handed to you on a silver platter.

Update: it does seem fine in the Key Cavern, as seen here. There the secret bombable walls are still a secret.

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