The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening/YMMV

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• Accidental Innuendo: "Wow! This is a nice chest!"
• Non Sequitur Scene: A strange ghost begins to follow Link shortly after leaving the Angler's Tunnel. To get him to stop following you, you must take this him back to his house at Toranbo Shores, then to his grave. It is not explained who the ghost is or why he is following you. The only memory Link has of this ordeal is a picture from the Photographer (and possibly a Secret Seashell from a jar in the house).
  • This gets explored in the manga, which reveals the ghost is a former warrior of Koholint Island who wants to see his home again and lets Link take his sword as a reward.
  • The Skull sprite found in the Angler's Tunnel boss room is unique. The ghost starts following you after you beat the dungeon. Think about that for a minute.
• Demonic Spiders: The Vire enemies from the original make a return in the eighth dungeon, and their relatively powerful fireballs and stick-and-move tactics are sure to piss a lot of players off—until they find the Magic Rod, that is.
  • Same goes for those flying, bomb-tossing mushroom thingies that populate the eastern prairie. Their bombs do relatively high damage (even when you're submerged in water), they have high defense and are difficult to land a blow on. We don't want to go and spoil their hidden weakness, but it's arrows; shoot them with arrows.
• Game Breaker: The Boomerang, which is only found at the end of a long trading sidequest. It kills almost every ordinary enemy and the final boss's last form in one hit, a far cry from the other Zelda games in which it merely stuns enemies.
  • And before that, you have the wonderful, wonderful bomb arrows at your disposal (equip both and fire simultaneously), which give you an easy means to kill 90% of the enemies in the game in 1-2 shots. As mentioned in the main article, a breakable wall in the Turtle Rock dungeon located across a small pool of lava can even be broken from that side instead of the intended one and multiple keys can be found on that side, making it easier to go through a very large, confusing, and difficult dungeon.
• Good Bad Bugs: The game positively oozes them. The screenwarp glitch, for instance.^[1] Note that this was fixed in the DX version.
  • This TAS exploits every possible good bad bug for all it's worth, for the sole purpose of moving faster and bypassing any and all time-consuming events. And this is the Updated Rerelease version. Watch for the incredible diagonal superdash! Marvel at how Link manages to walk straight over pits! Gaze at the technically-impossible hookshot tricks that'll leave your brain in a seizure!
  • This TAS of the original game breaks it even further, skipping all of the dungeons and going "straight" for the Nightmare Boss.
• Tethercat Principle: The game ends with Link lost in the middle of the ocean on a single plank of wood with no food or fresh water. This incarnation of Link has never appeared in another game after this one and we don't know what happens to him afterwards. But then, maybe it's not so bad; there are seagulls flying about, and they never stray too far from land.
• That One Boss: Blaino, the birdlike, pugilistic mid-boss thingy from dungeon 8. Does 1 heart of damage per hit, is impossible to attack from the front, and has an uppercut that sends you back to the start of the dungeon. Blaino is an asshole, man.
• That One Level: Eagle's Tower included four pillars that have to be knocked down to make the upper levels crash down on the lower ones. This involves carrying around a metal ball that can be hard to move without it falling down a pit a respawning in its original room.
• Villain Has a Point: The main villain Nightmare isn't exactly unsympathetic in his motivation. While he is keeping the Wind Fish asleep in eternal torment and won't let Link leave, if Link wakes up the Wind Fish, everyone in the dream dies. So is the Nightmare keeping the Wind Fish asleep really all that morally wrong?

1. ↑ Press Select just as the screen starts to scroll when crossing from one screen to another. If done correctly, you'll end up on the opposite side of the next screen. If done improperly, ends up as a Game Breaking Bug.