The Nintendo Switch remake of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which releases on September 20th, is for the most part simply a graphical overhaul of an otherwise faithful recreation of the original Link’s Awakening for the Game Boy (or, more specifically, a remake of the re-release of Link’s Awakening, subtitled DX, for the Game Boy Color, as the new version includes the earlier re-release’s added Color Dungeon). Its one, major new addition is the Chamber Dungeon Editor, which allows players to create original dungeons out of (sometimes slightly modified) individual rooms from any of the dungeons they’ve completed.
Most likely due to the success of Super Mario Maker, Nintendo seems to have decided to use its newest Zelda project as a trial run for a “Zelda Maker” of sorts. Unfortunately for the prospect of a future, more fully fleshed-out Zelda Maker game, reactions from those who have tried out the Chamber Dungeon Editor are middling. However, while this is the first time Nintendo has officially let players customize Zelda dungeons, this isn’t the first, nor even the most intricate instance of a customizable Zelda. That honor belongs to randomizers.
The original Zelda randomizer, which is a hacked ROM file of the NES Legend of Zelda, shuffles items, such that item locations are the same, but where a heart piece is normally located, the candle could be, for example. It also randomizes enemy types so that the hardest enemy types could potentially appear in the earlier portions of the game, switches the contents of caves so that the entrances remain the same, but within could be any one of the game’s caves’ contents, and more. This ensured that each individual playthrough was essentially a unique experience.
The Legend of Zelda randomizer was developed with speedrunners in mind. In order to speedrun competitively, players ultimately end up with a encyclopedic knowledge of the game they’re running. Randomizers allow speedrunners the chance to apply that knowledge to a new sort of challenge: rather than presenting a fixed route as the vanilla version of the game does, randomizers require players to apply their deep familiarity with the game to a set of parameters that changes every time, which means knowing how to progress optimally hinges upon adapting to each variable on the fly.
Since then, randomizers have been created for A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, and other games, both Zelda and non-Zelda, due to the popularity of the original randomizer in the speedrunning community. There’s even a mash-up randomizer that merges A Link to the Past and Super Metroid. It’s as weird and wonderful as it sounds.
Most often, randomizers are used in live competition between two (or more) runners. Both due to random item placement and the player’s lack of knowledge as to where each item is, the spectacle of a randomizer run isn’t in shaving a few seconds off of a previous run, as it is in traditional speedrunning, but rather in making the best of an unknown situation. Top players still know plenty of tricks that will make any two runs resemble one another to some extent, but one player discovering a key item in an early location versus another player going out of their way only to discover a heart piece or a similarly ‘useless’ item can result in a small but significant competitive edge. Put more simply, randomizers are thrilling in a way that’s hard to otherwise approximate.
When Link’s Awakening releases for the Switch later this week, players will very likely come up with their own unique and innovative dungeons, despite the Chamber Dungeon Editor’s limitations, as those hardly ever get in the way of the gaming community’s creativity. Yet, it’s hard to imagine a player created dungeon getting anywhere close to as wild and crazy as the weird world of randomizers.
