Link’s Awakening is built on a central secret that the game spends its entire runtime concealing and then explicitly reveals: Koholint Island is a dream. The Wind Fish is dreaming, and everything on the island — every NPC, every monster, every landscape — exists only within that dream. Waking the Wind Fish erases everything.
The Dream Shrine, accessible in Mabe Village, provides the game’s earliest hint of this. The villagers warn against entering it. Inside, Link finds the Ocarina — a musical instrument — and a NPC who appears only in this room and says only one line: ‘This island is your dream, not mine.’
This NPC does not appear in any other context. Their statement, in 1993, on a Game Boy cartridge with severe memory constraints, is the earliest explicit hint that the player is inside a dream and that some inhabitants know it.
Nintendo built a aware character into the dream narrative five hours before the reveal. Players who spoke to this NPC and connected the line to the game’s ending had solved the mystery early; the game is structured to make the line easy to dismiss as flavour until hindsight makes it legible.
The level of craft hidden in the background of this game is genuinely moving. They made it for someone.
Didn’t realise how much was hidden under the surface. Makes me want to replay it with fresh eyes.