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I played Link's Awakening with my wife and daughter. My wife was taken back at the ending (surprised, not disliking). I think she basically just assumed the whole time that it wouldn't end with everyone on Koholint basically dying, or vanishing from existence.
This got me thinking about how I played this, or watched my brother play it, when I was the same age as my daughter. None of the media she consumes challenges her with difficult endings. Everything HAS to return to the status quo at the end, because we can't risk anyone being unhappy. In Frozen, Anna is unfrozen. In Moana, even Maui gets his fucking hook back after it breaks. Fake out deaths and fake out status quo changes happen left and right, but it is really rare to see something that actually sticks.
I love downer endings, and I think it made me who I am. It makes me sad and disappointed and a little disgusted to see basically all of the media of my kids' day be bland and not challenging them to really feel something other than a vague blandly happy dance party ending. Dance party endings aren't new, but have been made ubiquitous in the past 20 years. Same with fake out deaths, and I blame Marvel for that. I guess I personally chalk this all up to the general trend towards never making anyone uncomfortable, which is tied in with the corporatization of media and corporate-memphization of media.
I remember finishing that game as a kid. Even then, I knew that 'it was all a dream' was a lazy, fakeout ending. I'd rather have a happy ending than that hackiness.
Well, they don't spell anything out for you, which is also something I like about it. But I don't think "it was all just a dream, and didn't really happen" is what was intended.
It was the dream of a deity, that link was caught up in. A god dreamed and by doing so created a realish place and realish people.
You can see that at the end, after link wakes up, he sits there thinking about whether it was all just his own dream, and is sad, but then sees the windfish flying overhead, and has some level of catharsis about the fact that it was real and worth it on some level. So the fact that the windfish comes to him at least shows that there was some magic going on, not just his own dream. Not to mention the secret ending showing that the windfish granted Marin's wish to live on in some way as a seagull.
I use the Twin Peaks filter:
It's all a dream.
That doesn't mean it's not real!
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