Finally took the time to play it on NSO as my family never owned a copy back in the day.

I loved the free exploration, the scattered secrets and items in the overworld, as well as the music of course. I never quite realised how many staple features, iconic songs (such as Zelda’s lullaby) and enemies in the series were first introduced in this SNES game. That really surprised me and made me smile. Most of the dungeons were indeed well designed, challenging and felt mostly satisfying to solve.

However, the game shows its age somewhat in my opinion. Some of the solutions to puzzles are pretty obscure, the hitboxes of enemies felt frustratingly inconsistent at times, and there is a fair bit of backtracking involved, especially if you didn’t pick up a certain item at the right time. Honestly, I’m thrilled that I was able to use save states, so the latter point wasn’t that much of an issue in the end.

I enjoyed it overall and I’m super glad to finally have crossed off such an iconic game from my backlog.