All the way back in Japan of 1986, the very first and original Legend of Zelda released, featuring 9 different dungeons which were spread across the land of Hyrule for the player to explore and conquer. These dungeons were mostly not referred to by any name besides “Level-X” while inside the game, but they did eventually gain names thanks to a certain easter egg to do with the maps of the dungeons. Each dungeon from the original Legend of Zelda had a map that would form a picture, such as the first dungeon showing an eagle and the second dungeon showing a crescent moon. While the two dimensional nature of Zelda dungeons is an era long past, Link’s Awakening actually continued this pattern in it’s own dungeon design, having it’s dungeon maps show pictures as well, though the dungeons in Link’s Awakening were also given their own names.
While Link’s Awakening does feature one dungeon that does not show a picture, that dungeon being Eagle’s Tower, the other 7 dungeons come out to be some simple picture. For example, the first dungeon of the game, Tail Cave, shows a simple picture of a Moldorm, fitting as the boss of the cave is a Moldorm and the dungeon heavily features Moldorms. This trend of the picture the map shows representing the dungeon in some way continues, sometimes in very obvious ways such as Bottle Grotto’s map being a Pot, Key Cavern’s map being a key, and Angler Tunnel’s map being a fish.
The trend of obvious map pictures continues with the last few dungeons, with dungeons like Turtle Rock showing a turtle and Face Shrine showing a face. As mentioned before, the only dungeon that doesn’t follow this is Eagle’s Tower which ends up more or less looking like simple square floors.
This trend of map pictures did not stop in Link’s Awakening, and would go on to influence the map design of dungeons like the Sword & Shield Maze in games like Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, but was interestingly left out of A Link to the Past, a game that deeply expanded on much of the groundwork that The Legend of Zelda laid. These easter eggs also did not appear in Minish Cap. Whether the dungeon’s include this fun easter egg or not, it’s incredible that the design quality of the dungeons remains consistently good throughout every entry in the series, regardless of whether they were trying to make the map a fun picture or not.
