Brief Thoughts on Link's Awakening DX

In advance of the Switch remake coming out this week, I played through Link's Awakening DX over the weekend in two 8-hour sessions. I won't go too in-depth since the game is almost as old as I am, but I wanted to share some things I liked, things I didn't, and how I hope the remake improves on it.

-= WHAT I LIKED =-
- The visuals. The entire game was gorgeous and important details were almost always readily apparent. I imagine a lot of this had to do with the original game needing to emphasize the same details without color and the color of DX made accentuating those details even easier.
- The music. I need to mod every game with a magic mirror equivalent to play Manbo's Mambo from now on.
- The dungeons. The theming for every dungeon was spot-on and engaging, even if a few of the gimmicks were a bit tedious. The liked how the hint system was incorporated into each dungeon's design while still being cryptic enough to respect the player's intelligence.

-= WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE=-
- The obvious. An overabundance of repeat text boxes, excessive menuing for what should be passive items, you've heard all of this before.
- Arbitrary and unexplained overworld progression. This runs deeper than a seemingly unrelated trade quest being required at multiple points. You're given no lead on what to do with those items, where their recipients moved to or when, or why they would need those items. The game all but expects you to fumble around the overworld for tens of minutes between dungeons until you stumble across something you had no way of knowing was available then and only then. The fact that this came up on a regular basis soured the entire experience for me.
- Inconsistency in boss complexity and difficulty. Some early bosses were remarkably challenging or difficult to understand while most of late-game bosses were laughably easy or simple.
- Gotcha! traps and unnecessary "puzzles". While few and far between, back-to-start traps and one-time solutions that go against everything the game has taught up to that point have and will always irritate me.

-= IDEAL REMAKE IMPROVEMENTS =-
- The obvious. Don't repeat text boxes, visual indicators for power-ups, make abilities like strength passive by mapping additional actions to newly available buttons, etc.
- Streamline overworld progression. Explanatory text descriptions to trade quest items, NPC dialogue pointing you in the right direction, anything to help connect seemingly innocuous tasks to the required progression they lock. I know overly simplified hints are the standard for Nintendo these days, but something akin to the dungeon hint system or the owl's advice would be perfect.

After having a day to reflect on my experience, I've come to respect the dungeons a lot more than I did during my playthrough. It's just unfortunate that the obtuseness of how to access each dungeon made the game an overall frustrating experience for me.

I have no doubt the Switch remake will fix a lot of what I didn't like about LADX, I just can't see myself committing $60 to it.