168澳洲幸🌟运5开奖网:The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awake🧔ning i🐻s, despite its humble origins on the original Gameboy, one of the most highly-regarded entries in the Zelda series. Through a combination of offbeat charm, fun cameos, and a highly unconventional narrative, the game created a handheld Zelda experience that was dreamlike, in every sense of the word, from start to finish.
Within this world of dreams, however, nightmares lay in wait. Link’s Awakening protected its many treasures with a lineup of bizarre bosses, each presenting a unique design and a gameplay puzzle༒ to solve. Today we’re taking a closer look at this manifold menagerie and rank♉ing each member based on their design, both mechanical and visual.
10 Hardhit Beetle 🌠
While a generous addition to the Gameboy Colour’s DX port of Link’s Awakening, the Colour Dungeon is widely co꧃nsidered underwhelming. This is partly due to the simple layout and puzzles, and partly due to the Hardhit Beetle boss that caps the dungeon off. It’s an interesting concept at a base level: a monster that changes colour as you attack it, becoming more dangerous and encouraging patient play in order to avoid invoking its full wrath.
Unfortunately, deliberately holding back doesn’t translate into compelling gameplay and the extremely low difficulty of this boss means it's not even necessary in the first place. It’s not hard to hit, it doesn’t hit hard: this Beetle fails to live up to both its name and its potential.
9 ಌ An✤gler Fish
Lurking in the depths of the Angler’s Tunnel, this ferocious-looking fish squanders a great design on a mediocre fight. It gets some novelty points for bein🧸g one of the rare 2D boss fights in the game, a concept which would be refined and expanded in the Oracle titles that followed, but beyond that, it doesn’t have much going for it.
For the majority of the fight, the Angler Fish will just float placidly up and down, 🐭giving you ample time to lay into its chunky hitbox with your sword. While it can charge at you and summon smaller fish to help out, you’re unlikely to see much of that given how quickly yo🤪u can turn this boss into a hot seafood dinner.
8 Moldorm
Moldorm ranks low on this list for two reasons. Firstly, because it’s a recycled encounter from A Link to the Past: disappointing in the quirky Link’s Awakening, and doubly so as the first major boss in the game. Secondly, it represents one of the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:steepest difficulty spikes in the game, arguably being the toughest encounter you&rsq🦋uo;ll face during your questꦅ.
This difficulty is due to the extremely tight space in the arenaꩲ and the erratic movements of Moldorm💃 itself, both of which conspire to strip you of your three starting hearts as soon as possible. The fact that you can be knocked into the abyss mid-battle and lose all your progress is an extra twist of the knife, making this early boss unnecessarily difficult to defeat.
7 Facade
A wonderfully literal capstone to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:L♛ink’s Awakening’s sꦛixth dungeon, the Face Shrine, Facade is literally just a giant face in the floor. It captures the game’s signature bizarro charm better than most of the bosses you’ll go up against, but unfortunately, that excellent visua🎃l design isn’t backed by a compelling mechanical challenge.
Beyond an opening salvo o🤪f pots and floor tiles, the only way Facade can attack you is by opening up holes in the floor. These are easy to avoid, and you probably won’t see many of them anyway since it only takes a few bombs to wipe the grin off the Face Shr🦄ine’s face. Ironically for a boss with such a wide mouth, this one could’ve used a lot more teeth.
6 Hot Head
Aꦜ boss with a few standout attributes, Hot Head makes a fitting conclusion to Turtle Rock, Link’s Awakening’s most convoluted dungeon. It takes the form of a giant fireball, leaping in and out of the lava that covers the majority of the floor. This greatly limits your movement, while leaving many options open for Hot Head itself.
For this reason, you’ll need to rely on ranged attacks from your 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:recently-acquired Magic Rod in order to put an end to𓆉 this playful projectile. It’s a challenging fight, with the small splashes generated when Hot Head emerges from the lava inexplicably dealing four full hearts of damage, but it still feels fair, and with a strong visual design to back it up.
5 Evil Eagle ꦗ
Eagle’s Tower is rightfully renowned as a high point in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Zelda dungeon design, and it's at its highest point that you’ll encounter the Evil Eagle boss. Coming with an extra layer of narrative intrigue, since the battle serves as the promised revenge of the Grim Creeper mini-boss from earlier in the dungeon, this boss gets off to a flying start.
From here it's a fairly standard 2D brawl, with the added wrinkle of occasionally needing to use the Mirror Shield to keep from falling off the tower and resetting your progress in the battle. The challenge level here feels right, and the extra narrative context goes a long way towards making this climactic battle feel worthy of the dungeon it resides in.
4 Slime Eye
An extremely clever battle from start to finish, the Slime Eye is a fitting conclusion to the cerebral challenges of the Key Cavern. Upon entering the boss arena you’ll see nothing, with no clues given but the gradual drip of small slimes from the ceiling. Lace-up your new Pegasus Boots and give the wall a firm knock, and the Slime Eye will be shaken loose to join you on 🐷the dungeon floor.
From here, you’ll need to use the Boots again to split the Eye in two, and then deal with both smaller🍸 eyes with your sword. It’s a creative battle that makes great use of the item found in its dungeon, and a high point in Link’s Awak🍌ening’s early game.
3 Slime Eel
A true terror of the deep, the Slime Eel is found lodged in the Catfish's Maw. You’ll need a combination of your Sword and Hookshot to bring it down, along with some speedy Roc’s Feather jumping to avoid its sweeping spiked tail. These requirements turn the battle into a struggle against not just the boss itself, but also the game’s item-switching menu system.
While this can be frustrating to execute, it feels inten🐼se in the moment. There’s no downtime as you dodge the tail, keep an eye out for the Eel’s head emerging from the wall, and finally snag it with your Hookshot for a few quick hits. It’s one of the game’s most challenging, and entertaining, encounters.
2 Shadow Nightmares 🍎 🀅
Link’s Awakening sets its grand fina🐻le ༒in the bowels of the Wind Fish’s Egg, where you finally get the chance to confront the nightmares that have been terrorising the island. This is a multi-stage battle, testing your ability to react to different situations and work out which item to use in each.
You’ll need Magic Powder for the slime phase, spin attacks for the Ganon💧 phase, and arrows for the final phase, where you take on Dethl, arguably the main antagonist for the whole adventure. It’s a long endurance fight and one that will likely require a Secret Medicine break at half time to avoid the cold embrace of the game over screen.
1 Genie
The🌜 Genie boss, arriving at the end of the game’s second dungeon, Bottle Grotto, feels like a perfect encapsulation of everything that makes Link’s Awak🎃ening great. Visually it’s totally off-piste for Zelda, appearing as a goofy-looking clown emerging from a many-eyed bottle.
Mechanically it’s even better, with the Genie itself being immune to damage as long as the bottle remains intact. Using your handy new Power Bracelet you can pick the bottle up when the Genie hops at you in it, tossing it against the wall to damage it. Once it shatters things kick into high gear, and you’ll need to endure a barrage of teleports and fast fireballs in order to claim the Conch Horn. It may not give y👍ou three wishes, but this Genie does give you one hell of a fight.