The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX Unblocked

Play The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX free online — no download, no install, playable on any Chromebook or school laptop.

Genre: Action Adventure
Release: 1998
Platforms: Game Boy Color (emulated in browser)

Instructions

Move with the arrow keys and use your two equipped items with Z and X. Unlike later Zelda games nothing is permanently bound to a button - even the sword and shield occupy item slots - so you will be opening the inventory with Enter constantly to swap things around. That friction is the one genuinely dated part of the design.

Talk to everyone, twice. Koholint is small and densely written, and the villagers give real directions rather than filler - often the only pointer you will get toward the next dungeon. Several characters change what they say after story events, so circling back through the village after a dungeon is usually worth the couple of minutes.

Each dungeon gives you the item that unlocks the next stretch of the island. If you are stuck on the overworld, the answer is nearly always something you just found - Roc's Feather to jump a gap, the Power Bracelet to shift a rock, the Flippers to cross water. Trading is also a real questline here: a long chain of villagers each swap one item for another, and it ends in something you need.

Controls

Arrow keys — move Link
Z — use the item in the A slot
X — use the item in the B slot
Enter — START - open the inventory and swap items
V — SELECT - open the map

Tips to Master The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX

Link's Awakening started as an unofficial after-hours project and it shows in the best possible way. Freed from the series' usual furniture, it fills Koholint with things that would fit nowhere else - Goombas and Piranha Plants from Mario appear as enemies, a side-scrolling section runs through several caves, and a Kirby lookalike shows up as a mini-boss. It is the strangest game in the series and, for a lot of players, the one they remember most clearly.

What the DX version added

The original was a 1993 Game Boy game in four shades of grey. The 1998 DX release for Game Boy Color added full colour, a photographer who appears throughout the island and builds an album of your journey, and an entirely new Color Dungeon that rewards you with a permanent boost to either your attack or your defence. It also runs on the original Game Boy, in black and white, which was a common courtesy at the time. This is the DX version, so the extra dungeon and the photo album are both here.

The ending people still argue about

The game tells you fairly early that waking the Wind Fish is how you leave the island, and then spends the rest of its length making you care about a place you have been told will not survive your success. It is a genuinely unusual thing for a 1993 handheld game to attempt, and it is the reason Link's Awakening gets discussed in terms usually reserved for much later games. The 2019 Switch remake reproduced the ending intact, which suggests Nintendo knew exactly what it had.

Small island, dense design

Koholint fits on a handful of screens and yet holds eight dungeons plus the Color Dungeon, a trading sequence that spans the whole map, and a set of secret seashells scattered in places you will only reach with later items. The density is deliberate: because the map is small you learn it properly, so when a new item lets you cross a gap you have walked past twenty times, you know immediately where to go. Very few open worlds since have managed that particular feeling.

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX Unblocked

Players Also Enjoy

More Free Unblocked Games