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Great Game Stories, No. 13: The Island That Was Only a Dream (The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening)

Marcel Pflug

18 hours ago

4 min read

Once upon a time, a young hero was lost at sea. A storm smashed his little boat to splinters, and when the waves had finished with him he washed up, half-drowned, on the shore of an island he had never meant to find. This is the strangest and most tender tale the little grey cartridge ever told, and it begins not with a quest but with a boy waking in a stranger's house, a long way from home.

There is no Princess Zelda to rescue here, and no kingdom of Hyrule to save. This adventure belongs to the island alone, and to a secret so gentle and so sad that players have been turning it over, fondly, for more than thirty years. So settle in, because this is really a story about waking up.

Front of the gold box of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Dutch Game Boy edition (DMG-ZL-HOL) — The dream of Koholint, boxed in gold: the Dutch edition of Link's Awakening

The Characters

Our hero is Link, washed up on the sand with his sword lost to the surf, and the little grey cartridge that carries him is labelled The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. He is the brave, silent adventurer you know, but here he is a castaway with no kingdom behind him and no memory of how he came to be here, only a strange compulsion to find a way back to the sea.

The girl who finds him on the beach is Marin, and she is the heart of the whole tale. She looks a little like Princess Zelda, but she is entirely her own person: warm, funny, forever singing, and quietly aching to leave the small island she has always known and see the wider world. Her father is Tarin, a kindly, bumbling man with a thick moustache and a weakness for mushrooms, whose round face is a gentle wink at a certain plumber. And at the centre of everything sleeps the Wind Fish, an enormous whale-like being curled inside a giant egg on the island's highest peak, dreaming.

Back of the Dutch Link's Awakening Game Boy box, with Dutch text and two printed in-game screenshots. — The back of the box, where Koholint is described in Dutch and glimpsed in two small screenshots.

Against them stand the Nightmares, shifting shadow-creatures who want one thing above all: for the Wind Fish never to wake, and for the dream to go on forever.

The World

The island is called Koholint, and it is a whole little world folded into a single cartridge: the cosy houses of Mabe Village, the sweep of Toronbo Shores, the tangle of the Mysterious Forest, the swamps and the high, windswept Tal Tal Mountains. It is dotted with faces that have wandered in from other games, hopping Goombas, a rattling Chain Chomp, even a frog prince, all of them reframed as the furniture of a dream. To leave the island, Link is told, he must wake the Wind Fish, and to do that he must gather the eight Instruments of the Sirens, hidden deep in eight dungeons, and play them together.

The Adventure

A helpful owl appears at the turning points of the journey, nudging Link onward from dungeon to dungeon, each one guarded by a Nightmare and holding one of the eight instruments. Between the dungeons the island simply lives around him: there is a long chain of trades to untangle, telephone booths manned by a helpful walrus of a man, a beach where Marin walks with Link and sings, and a hundred small kindnesses and jokes that make Koholint feel like somewhere real and worth saving.

Complete boxed set of the Dutch Link's Awakening (DMG-ZL-HOL), showing the box from front, back and sides with the cartridge, plastic tray and manuals. — A complete Dutch copy: box, cartridge, tray and manuals, seen from every angle.

And that is exactly where the sadness creeps in. The deeper Link goes, the more the island itself seems to whisper the truth. The owl grows cryptic, the monsters taunt him, and a slow, dawning unease settles over the adventure: this beautiful place may not be real at all, and waking the Wind Fish may cost more than Link ever meant to pay.

Spoiler Alert: How It Ends

With all eight instruments gathered, Link climbs to the top of Mt. Tamaranch and plays the Ballad of the Wind Fish before the great egg. It cracks open, and inside waits the last and worst of the Nightmares, a shape-shifting shadow that becomes monster after monster before Link finally strikes it down.

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening Game Boy cartridge with its clear protective case, from the Game Boy Museum collection. — The cartridge that holds the whole dream, beside its clear case.

Then the Wind Fish tells him the truth. Koholint Island is a dream, the Wind Fish's own dream, and everyone on it, Marin most of all, exists only for as long as that dream lasts. To wake is to make the whole island, and everyone he has come to love, simply vanish. Link plays the final notes anyway, because it is the only way home. The island dissolves, and he wakes adrift on the open sea, clinging to a piece of driftwood under a clear sky, with the Wind Fish wheeling overhead and Koholint gone as if it had never been. Players who finish without ever falling are given one last gift: a glimpse of a seagull rising into the sky, and the quiet suggestion that Marin, who always longed to fly, got her wish after all. It is the most bittersweet ending the Game Boy ever offered.

If you would like to meet the cartridge that holds this dream, you can find Link's Awakening in the collection. Come and see it at the Game Boy Museum.