The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening · Game Boy · 1993 · Emotional · Spoilers
The entire world of Link's Awakening — its island, its inhabitants, the girl Marin who befriended Link — is revealed to be a dream of the Wind Fish. Waking the Wind Fish ends the game and erases Koholint Island and everyone on it from existence. The player destroys the world to complete the quest.
Link's Awakening is the Zelda game that dares to make the player the agent of destruction. The island of Koholint, its talking animals, its human inhabitants, and Marin — the girl who finds Link washed ashore and becomes the game's emotional heart — all exist only within the dream of the sleeping Wind Fish. To wake the Wind Fish and return home, Link must defeat the eight nightmares and play the Ballad of the Wind Fish. Doing so wakes the dreamer, and Koholint Island dissolves into ocean. The final cutscene shows Link floating alone in the sea. A post-game image, awarded for completing the game without dying, shows Marin transformed into a seagull — the only form in which a dream character can persist in the waking world. It is among the most melancholy conclusions in any game of the era.
Link's Awakening spends its entire runtime building investment in Koholint Island and its people. Marin teaches Link the Ballad of the Wind Fish. The owl guides him through dungeons. Talking animals have problems Link can solve. The game functions as a traditional Zelda adventure, gathering items and defeating dungeons — until the final reveal makes clear that every act of progress was an act of erasure.
The revelation that the quest goal and the world's destruction are the same thing gives Link's Awakening a tragic structure unusual in video games of any era. The player must choose to end the dream to advance the story, but there is no alternative. The game offers no way to stay.
Marin tells Link early in the game that she wishes she could become a seagull and fly away from Koholint. The bonus ending — shown only to players who complete the game without a single death — shows exactly that: a seagull in the sky after the island vanishes. The game leaves open whether this represents Marin's wish being granted at the moment of dissolution, or whether it is simply a visual metaphor for loss, or whether it is something more hopeful.
The ambiguity is deliberate and rare. A mainstream Nintendo game for children ended with a question it declined to answer. The debate about Marin's seagull has continued in Zelda communities for three decades, which is itself evidence of the ending's extraordinary emotional precision.