This was the first Zelda game I ever beat way back when. I remembered so little of it that I couldn't even remember how much I liked it or not, so this was less of a "does it still hold up" and more of a "was it even good?". Turns out, it's very good.
I love the art style of this game, it's so vibrant and colourful. The shrinking mechanic also leads to some incredible pixel art when you end up in "close up" view so regular items are drawn as towering over you. Even when not in a close up view, I love how Link is just a few pixels on the screen, with the indicator of where he is by a speech bubble with Links head in it.
It's a relatively small world, but it's packed with so much content, so many secrets, so many reasons to re-explore old areas with new items that it doesn't waste a single bit of the small size.
I'm a big fan of the dungeons and item selection in this game too.
My only real issue with the game is that they didn't let you assign an item to the L button, meaning you have exactly 2 buttons for all of your items - one of which is your sword so realistically you're working with only 1 spare button most of the time. Luckily switching items from the menu is very fast and it never felt pace-breaking to me; I just find it weird they had an entire other button to use and just ignored it.
Some of the things for 100% are also tedious. The figurine "quest" is a very slow, very grindy process. Then there's the Kinstone fusions, an idea I love with how they can give you more heart pieces, expand the world by adding characters to areas, or even progress little plotlines of their own. But they stuffed too many of them in, and as a result a lot of kinstone fusions just lead to more kinstones which is like the epitome of padding.
I love the art style of this game, it's so vibrant and colourful. The shrinking mechanic also leads to some incredible pixel art when you end up in "close up" view so regular items are drawn as towering over you. Even when not in a close up view, I love how Link is just a few pixels on the screen, with the indicator of where he is by a speech bubble with Links head in it.
It's a relatively small world, but it's packed with so much content, so many secrets, so many reasons to re-explore old areas with new items that it doesn't waste a single bit of the small size.
I'm a big fan of the dungeons and item selection in this game too.
My only real issue with the game is that they didn't let you assign an item to the L button, meaning you have exactly 2 buttons for all of your items - one of which is your sword so realistically you're working with only 1 spare button most of the time. Luckily switching items from the menu is very fast and it never felt pace-breaking to me; I just find it weird they had an entire other button to use and just ignored it.
Some of the things for 100% are also tedious. The figurine "quest" is a very slow, very grindy process. Then there's the Kinstone fusions, an idea I love with how they can give you more heart pieces, expand the world by adding characters to areas, or even progress little plotlines of their own. But they stuffed too many of them in, and as a result a lot of kinstone fusions just lead to more kinstones which is like the epitome of padding.