A look at the Game & Watch: The Legend of Zelda and its secrets

by Daniel VuckovicNovember 12, 2021

The Game & Watch: The Legend of Zelda system hit store shelves today bringing another well packaged little Zelda treat – the only real celebration of the Zelda 35th anniversary.

The system has three The Legend of Zelda games included and a version of the Game & Watch game Vermin featuring Link. If you were worried about the original Zelda games maybe being a bit too hard or not being able to save in them – Nintendo’s thought of it all.

If you were worried about spoilers for any of these secrets and wish to discover them yourselves – hit back.

All three games have the same cheat code, but they do different things in each game. When you’re on the file select screen or Game Over screens of either The Legend of Zelda, The Legend of Zelda 2 or Link’s Awakening. If you hold down A for 5 seconds, you’ll get the following;

The Legend of Zelda
- Max hearts. If you quit the game, you’ll return to 3 hearts filled, but do the cheat again to fill it back up.
The Legend of Zelda II
- Start the game full magic and life.
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
- Start the game with max hearts, and unlock the Level 2 sword when you collect it from the beach.
- When you do the cheat, you’ll hear the sound, but you’ll need to leave the house to get the hearts

Link’s Awakening is also the only game you can change the aspect ratio of. You can have it stretched or retain the original 4:3 square of the Game Boy.

While the Game & Watch will remember where you are in specific games, you can still use the old A + B + Start + Select to save at any time or return to the title screen.

There’s even a hidden mode in the Vermin game. If you hold A for 5 seconds on the title screen, you’ll unlock a Game C mode, it gets faster quicker, and you only have one shot at it.

Also if you leave a game for 3 minutes, there will be a sleep screen displayed. It’ll change depending on what game you’re playing. If you’re playing Link’s Awakening, there are 11 different sleep screens to see, and it’ll change depending on what you’re doing in the game at the time.

The coolest secret, isn’t even in the console (it’s not even really a secret). It’s on the console. When you’re playing it, the Triforce on the back glows. It’s the backlight bleeding through the plastic! Nifty!