Games like Link’s Awakening represent the handheld’s ability to get weird.
It launched the Pokemon franchise, which has since grown to massive proportions.
And all of this combined to start Nintendo’s handheld empire.
Nevertheless, the Game Boy appeared to have some drawbacks at first.
It was small, if bulky.
It was deliberately less advanced than its handheld competitors at the time.
Its limited color palette and sound board meant it had to lean on careful, deliberate abstraction.
It was an outsider.
And on the outside, strangeness flourishes.
Perhaps the best example of this weirdness is The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.
Eventually, the project flourished into a full, unique game of its own.
Director Takeshi Tezukaeven described the game as a “parody” of Zelda games proper.
That statement undersells the game’s relentless strangeness.
One of the game’s explicit inspirations was Twin Peaks, which broadcast in Japan in 1991.
Link is far away from Hyrule, having crash-landed on the mysterious island of Koholint.
But as the game continues, the darkness on its edges grows.
The whole island is a dream.
The island, and everyone he has gotten to know on it, will vanish.
It is still one of the medium’s most profound and haunting meta-narratives.
Link’s Awakening dramatizes that dynamic, making it a poignant story of enveloping loss.
In lighter terms, the game also brings in homages to a variety of other Nintendo games.
It features goombas, piranha plants, chain chomps, and a Kirby-like enemy, among others.
That statement is deliciously revealing.
It was less able to create images that would foreground marketing.
To this day, Link’s Awakening is an outlier spin-off of one of Nintendo’s core franchises.
It stands apart from every other game in the storied series.
Zelda was not the only Nintendo franchise to get this kind of gentle subversion on Game Boy.
Turning Mario into a cackling, greedy anti-hero is not blasphemous, but it is at least cheeky.
Nintendo is far from the only company whose games on the Game Boy got existential.
However, it is also bare, without party-member characters.
Its world has a long past, full of ancient civilizations and long-lost technologies.
In Saga, there is a feeling of each world being in total stasis until you arrive.
They each have their own plot that only you’ve got the option to interrupt.
Like Link’s Awakening, the world seems to be someone else’s dream that will vanish upon waking.
Saga’s tower may not have a history, but it does have a future.
Some of the limitations of the Game Boy are shown in the name itself.
Plenty of moms played Tetris and plenty of young girls played Pokemon.
The Game Boy’s simplicity was the entry point.
Since the Game Boy, the margins it represented have both expanded and shrunk.
Small, weird games are plentiful on platforms like Itch.io.
Some of these projects are even Game Boy games, meant to be played with emulators.
Link’s Awakening has its own aesthetic lineage, seen in independent games like Undertale and Anodyne.
Nintendo has only one flagship handheld/console hybrid now, and that is not likely to change in the future.
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