The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening is an action-adventure game developed and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy in 1993. The first handheld entry in the Zelda series, it strands the hero Link, shipwrecked, on Koholint Island, a small, warm, dreamlike place he must explore to wake the Wind Fish and find a way home, gradually uncovering that the island itself may not be what it seems. It preserves the top-down exploration, item-gathering, and dungeon-solving of its console siblings while introducing new ideas, including a trading side-quest and cameo appearances from other Nintendo games, and its bittersweet, surreal story is among the most fondly remembered in the franchise. Being portable made it the first Zelda a player could take under a tree, on a trip, or out into the yard, folding the series' sense of adventure into the places summer actually happened. Critically acclaimed on release and later expanded into a colorized version and a full remake, it is regularly cited as one of the best games on the system and one of the finest handheld titles ever made. Its premise, an island you cannot leave, played on a machine built to go anywhere, is the essence of a summer vacation distilled into a cartridge.