Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone says Link's Awakening is his favorite Zelda game because it has an "indie" feel: "It was creative and unique in a way that seems harder to find in modern triple-A games"

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Eric Barone’s genre-defining farming sim Stardew Valley is most obviously inspired by Harvest Moon, but it also has plenty of The Legend of Zelda’s DNA buried beneath the surface. That makes sense considering Barone’s long history with the Zelda series, and now we can point to a specific game that made him fall in love in the first place: Link’s Awakening, specifically the Game Boy version.

Talking to Game Informer for a story celebrating ’40 years of Zelda’s Legend’, Barone named Link’s Awakening his all-time favorite Zelda game. It’s not necessarily a controversial pick, but it is fairly uncommon. We ranked Link’s Awakening at number four, behind Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, and A Link to the Past, in our ranking of the best Zelda games, and even that feels a little high compared to general public opinion.

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Link’s Awakening was definitely a major departure for the Zelda series when it launched in 1993, being the first game in the series not to be based in Hyrule as well as the first not to include Zelda or the Triforce. Director Takashi Tezuka has said David Lynch’s groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks was a major story inspiration for Link’s Awakening, which definitely explains its somewhat fuzzy, dreamlike qualities.

Link charts down a gravel path as a Chain Chomp looks menacingly his way

“One thing about Zelda games that has influenced me is the sense of exploration and foreshadowing. You’ll see an area that you can’t currently access,” he says. “But you know that, eventually, when you find the right items, you will be able to get there. That’s an exciting feeling that makes you want to continue playing.

“The more I think about it, there are a lot of little things in Zelda that have influenced my game design approach… from the menus, to the little bushes you can cut, to the idea of finding ‘special items’ that grant new abilities. It’s kind of basic stuff, but it just shows how important Zelda has been for influencing all of gaming.”

It’s interesting how these realizations seem to trickle into Barone’s consciousness as he talks, and he’s absolutely right that it just goes to show how influential Zelda is across all sorts of genres. Come to think of it, there are probably elements in games that were inspired by Zelda without their developers even being aware, simply because the series has been informing action-adventure design for so long.