Tendo City

It's a ROM hack of Link's Awakening, converting the base concepts of the worst of the three CD-I Zelda games (the one with the live action cutscenes and rotoscoped sprites) into what appears to be a competent Gameboy game.  The modder promises it's designed with original hardware in mind rather than emulators, which means it should run well on both.  I think some Zelda II rom hacks of the other two CD-i games may be in order next, if this one turns out to actually be fun.

Historically, the CD-i was the first time Zelda was playable in a Zelda game (Hyrule Warriors is the first time Nintendo made her playable), but not the first time a female PC was put in a Zelda game.  That honor goes to the Satellaview BS Zelda games on Super Famicom.  Instead of Link, the player used their own Satellaview town avatar to play the game, which could be male or female.  It was sort of a predecessor to later "Miis" come to think of it, and also allowed voice acting via radio broadcasts.  The games also have the benefit of actually being good and have themselves since been translated and modded to no longer require radio broadcast.  I intend to play them on original hardware soon as I get a FX Pak Pro.

So here it is:

https://john-lay.itch.io/zeldas-adventure

It looks like the screens have been replicated impressively well, that's really cool!  Making it into a game with Link's Awakening graphics removes a lot of its uniqueness, of course, since we already had three games with those graphics, but still this is a super cool thing I'll definitely have to play and hadn't heard about.

I've downloaded the game, stuck it on my Everdrive, and played it on my Gameboy.

Frankly, it's not very good...  Don't get me wrong, it's a fine little amateur project, but the game isn't a mod of Link's Awakening, it's an attempt to recode something like Link's Awakening from scratch.  In one way, that makes it more impressive, but the controls are very stiff and awkward.  Hit detection is basically nonexistent too.  It's perhaps unfair of me to judge it compared to a professionally made legend of a game, but I'm forced to when it reuses sprite assets from it.  It isn't very fun and feels more like some of the worse games that the angry nerd has reviewed.  Right now, I'd recommend not bothering.  Perhaps if the developer keeps working on it, it'll become something truly great but not in it's current form.

Yeah, the attacks and hit detection are quite poor, with your weapon and such... the original CDI game is flawed, but unfortunately the gameplay here is probably even worse.  The original game has a normal sword-swing attack, not the weird, not very good thing you find in this game...