After Tears of the Kingdom, give me Link’s Awakening 2

destructoid.com:

Originally, this piece was going to be called “Animal Crossing on the GameCube is blatantly better than Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom“. My plan was to take a 4/7th serious stance on the topic, not unlike this old essay on why I prefer Advance Wars to Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

It’s an apples-to-oranges comparison and inherently farcical, but the sincere truth is that many of the things I grew up loving about Zelda (particularly its first 3 sequels) were best translated to polygons in the original Animal Crossing title. The grid segmented map, the feeling that every screen might have a simple-to-find secret hidden in a tree or behind a rock, the small but versatile set of tools, the inviting villages, the simplicity; they’re all  key aspects to what made Adventures of Link, Link to the Past, and Link’s Awakening so great.

Perhaps most importantly, the original Animal Crossing kept things cozy. There’s no complex crafting system, no massive world that takes hours to traverse, no broken weapons (except the axe, but getting a golden one is easy enough), and never the feeling that you have a big, difficult job to do. In fact, the first thing that happens in the game is you get fired from your job. It’s a full escape from the “civilized’ world. And maybe you have to be there at the time to feel this way, but when the first Animal Crossing came out, it came off like a direct sequel to the Animal Village section of Link’s Awakening. If you’ve played them both, then you know the similarities between them are about as subtle as a talking bear asking you to arm wrestle.

Since Link’s Awakening and the first Animal Crossing , both the Zelda and Animal Crossing franchises have blown up in a big way, in terms of both