The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening GAMEBOY

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, released in 1993, was the first Zelda game built for a handheld, and it broke from the series’ usual structure in a way that still stands out today: there’s no Princess Zelda, no Hyrule, and no Triforce. Link washes ashore on the isolated Koholint Island after a shipwreck and has to wake the Wind Fish, a giant sleeping in an egg atop the island’s mountain, to find a way home.

Development reportedly started as an after-hours side project by Nintendo staff experimenting with the Zelda engine from A Link to the Past, which explains why it feels mechanically close to that SNES game — top-down exploration, item-gated dungeons, the same core combat — while telling an entirely self-contained story with a much stranger, more melancholy tone than the series had shown before.

Its cast leans heavily on cameos from outside the Zelda universe — Chain Chomps, Goombas, and a Kirby-like enemy called Yoshi doll all appear — a detail Nintendo has never fully explained but that gives the game a distinct, dreamlike identity within the franchise.