Game & Watch: The Legend of Zelda Announced

Happy 35th Anniversary, The Legend of Zelda! Here's a new Game & Watch system for you! I hope you didn't expect a theme park or anything, because that's all you get. At least it's better than the one for Super Mario Bros., right...?

Well, in any case, this is not necessarily what you would have expected out of the 35th Anniversary, where this is about as interesting as getting a bunch of new amiibo five years ago. But here we go... In the least this comes with a variety of games:

• The Legend of Zelda
• Zelda II - The Adventure of Link
• Playable clock based on The Legend of Zelda
• Playable timer based on Zelda II - The Adventure of Link
• Link's Awakening (GameBoy version)
• Game & Watch: Vernim (starring Link)

Now, if you're asking, "what happened to the actual Game & Watch Zelda game?", then you probably have a better memory about this than most Nintendo employees. To be fair, it used to have two screens, like a Nintendo DS:

But this didn't stop from them adding it to the Game & Watch Gallery 4 for the GameBoy Advance (and Wii U Virtual Console), where it used a condensed layout that fits a single screen. They could have done something similar here as well.

There also used to be a "Zelda Game Watch" as a second LCD title, which would have fit the screen just fine, but this was a licensed product made by Nelsonic, where Nintendo may not really have anything available here.

Instead you will have to settle for Vernim, some whack-a-mole with Link, which isn't exactly exciting. And the rest of the games are all titles that can already played on Nintendo Switch in some form, so this shouldn't be very interesting for newcomers to the Zelda series.

But this is actually the first time they've ever re-released the GameBoy version of Link's Awakening, because there was Link's Awakening DX for the GameBoy Color available since 1998, so this was the preferred choice for the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console.

I personally always liked the classic, monochrome GameBoy version of Link's Awakening a little more, because this has been my first entry to the series and I wasn't the biggest fan of the coloring in the DX version. I'm even considering to play it one more time on this, but it might really hard to return to this game after the excellent Nintendo Switch remake.