Choosing to follow the original Zelda's play style rather than making another Link's Adventure worked incredibly well here. Indeed, A Link to the Past builds on the concepts that were tried out with Zelda 1 and makes just about everything better. The controls are satisfying and there is a huge variety of items are your disposal to try and figure out what the next step is. It just tickles the brain in a certain way that is so satisying; you'll get to a screen where you will have no idea what to do, and you will progressively get more and more of an idea what to do to progress until you actually manage to logically figure it out by yourself. It also shows how desperately top-down Zelda needed a more proper map system than the NES's very primitive one. Everything just works perfectly, it's incredibly difficult, has you thinking a lot, and just feels amazing to progress in. However, some of the puzzles near the end of the game did push my patience in terms of how cryptic they were a bit further than what I was comfortable with; I did use the help of the internet a handful of times for the very rare occasions where this game tries to pull some NES Zelda-type cryptic secret that is required to progress through the game. Furthermore, some of the game design did lead to a fair bit of backtracking and mindless exploration of the overworld with no idea what to do next (even though the hints given by the psychic dude worked pretty well for the most part in figuring out what to do next). My complaints are few and scarce though, this is indeed an amazing SNES game and it makes me excited to play the following installments in the series.