By the way, fans of Zelda 2 may well adore Star Tropics. it has a similar feel. Although it’s prettier, linear, and has more story, it also has challenging, rewarding combat. Your movement (and some but not all enemy movement) is on a grid and you can only move up/down/left/right and you can only face in those directions too, enemies deal contact damage, and you have mostly melee attacks so combat is a question of mastering a grid-based dance as you attack whilst avoiding damage. The soundtrack is wonderful too.

“explaining”… lol… I know what you mean but I have to laugh a little at that :P

It’s pretty useless info even if you do understand it IMO.

These hint texts are definitely a flaw. https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-legend-of-zelda/ has some interesting discussion of how in several instances basically useful hint text got mangled into madness in translation.

Edit: specific link https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-legend-of-zelda/first-quest/#insane-old-man says that this isn’t a translation, it’s the tanslators freestyling for some reason, so it’s a mystery why the text is so cryptic

You’re gitting gud. Keep going!

It’s obviously nothing like a modern title but I don’t think that’s quite fair - it holds up in the sense that it’s fun, it has good combat challenge and exploration, honestly it does. You do have to overlook lack of QoL features and the fact that you basically have to read the manual, but I don’t think it’s fair to mark a game down for lacking those things. It lacks the puzzles, NPCs and stories of later Zeldas but it doesn’t try to have those.

Zelda 2 siimilarly lacks QoL features but it has excellent combat that’s actually challenging, but fair, so yeah if you’re open to it you could have a good gaming experience there.

I did this too, on the GameCube collector’s edition. It’s hard but the difficulty didn’t feel unfair! It was so satisfying when I made progress. Honestly this is such an excellent game.

I did this - on the Zelda Collectors’ Edition on GameCube, so save States weren’t available. I did have to use an emulator to practice the final boss without the 10 min runback 🙄 , but after practicing I repeated the feat back on the official hardware.

I did the whole game without any guide. It was SO satisfying. On both the NES games, if you can read the context clues, every required secret is fairly clear. And the game is really fair! It is hard, it’s true, but it’s very fair! It felt very good to master the combat. This was a great gaming experience.

Later in life I felt that Dark Souls had very similar vibes except in 3D (and except for a bad feeling from having a heavy story that it’s hostile to telling you what it is 🙄)

On the remote chance you don’t already know - definitely check out Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages. They have the same engine but have much cleverer gameplay and dungeons and much deeper stories.