498 Words About: The Racoon(Tanuki?) in Legend of Zelda-Link’s Awakening
In Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, while Link is searching the woods for the key to Tail Cave the player will find a grove and a dancing raccoon. This is perplexing given the fact all the inhabitants of the forest are monsters that attack Link, but confusion turns to madness as soon as I move Link to the top of the screen.
The racoon stops dancing and begins to laugh.
In real life racoons are frightening animals, and if one laughed at me I would question my sanity more than I already do.
Still laughing, the raccoon tells me I’m “going to be lost thanks to me.” I keep walking, and immediately discover I have been transported to the opposite side of the forest.
I tried passing the racoon eight more times, and then I gave up.
I was nine years old when I played Link’s Awakening, but I was schooled enough in the Metroidvania mechanics of Zelda games to know this was a puzzle that I had to find a solution to. Solutions in Zelda games involved finding an item that would neutralize the puzzle. I explored every square of the map that I could, testing every boundary in the knowledge that these were barriers designed to keep me on a particular path. Eventually I discovered a mushroom, and since I’d played A Link to the Past, I knew this meant magic powder.
Once I had that I knew that racoons laughing ass was grass, and I was gonna mow it.
The powder caused the raccoon to stop laughing, bounce around the map, and transform into Tarin, the Mario look-alike from the start of the game. Turns out, Tarin took a bite of a magic mushroom and was transformed.
The puzzle was solved, and I was able to move to the next square and acquire the key.
In this post-Breath of the Wild universe, early Legend of Zelda games are frequently criticized for their “limitations” and formulaic structures. I find this rhetoric is often employed for the sake of quick, shallow content creation. I understand that moving Link up the sides of mountains, and fighting Lynels is objectively fun, more so than sprinkling magic dust on a racoon. But, Link’s Awakening is a puzzle-adventure videogame, whereas Breath of the Wild is a sandbox.
This is to say the aesthetic goals are different.
Both games encourage exploration, but Link’s Awakening was designed to facilitate solving puzzles over exploration for its own sake. And the raccoon exemplifies this. Link is exploring Koholint Island ultimately to escape and return to Hyrule, and so the player experiences limitations to help reinforce this narrative structure. Limitations can be frustrating, but they foster analysis and creative thinking. If a magic raccoon is blocking my path it must mean this is either the wrong way, or I need something to move past this obstacle.
Though now I have to ask, was it a raccoon or a Tanuki?
And now I’m left with more questions.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
3.10.2025
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