Ongoing review of Link's Awakening for Switch

[A Black Falcon]

Your review covers a lot of stuff that's very interesting, I bought the Switch remake of LA some time ago but never did play much of it, sadly.  Honestly, my main "problem" with this game is that Link's Awakening, the original black and white version for Game Boy, is a game I loved a LOT back when it was new.  I played that game endlessly, and probably beat the game four or five times that decade and it is, of course, my favorite handheld game ever.  I've never beaten any other Zelda game more than once.  So when I think of LA I think of the original, and in a lot of little ways the newer versions, first the DX version and now this... in some ways they're better but in others they never match up to the original.  I know that my nostalgia for the original version is probably the issue here much more so than any actual differences between the versions so this is just me, though...

Responses to a few of the points you raise in your review.

Hero mode - I love the idea of a harder difficulty; LA was a pretty challenging game, but it's always nice to have a harder mode, particularly for those good at the game now.  However, "no hearts drop at all", I know this is what they've done before in Hero mode, but that seems like too much.  Can't you make it harder without having no hearts drop at all?  I'm sure the normal difficulty would be easy, but no hearts dropping at all sounds just obnoxious and I don't know if I'd want to play that.

Too many hints - I get why they do it, LA has dramatically more hints than any Zelda game before it (and a much more linear quest as well!) but there are still things you need to figure out, and some people today don't want to deal with that at all.  I remember LA taking me three months to finish as a kid... but seriously, the number of clues in the original was pretty much balanced perfectly.  The only thing that even maybe could have used more hints about what to do for the trading game, but even there there aren't that many people to talk to so it worked.  So yeah, the added hints should have been optional and not mandatory.