Why Zelda: A Link to the Past is Overrated (but good)

[A Black Falcon]

I can't think of anything nice to say about designers who say "instead of telling the player anything, we'll just make them find it all while randomly wandering around." That's so obnoxious! I do not want to randomly wander around in games, I want to purposefully go somewhere that I know has meaning, whether that's towards seeing somewhere in the game I haven't been, going to the next point in the story, maybe doing a quest, etc. But just... wandering around for no reason other than that the game requires me to, somewhere I've probably already been? Why?

Also recall that I have always greatly disliked grinding, which is basically the same thing as what you're talking about here, just with only the wandering part as a goal and not the 'and then you might find something' part. The two really aren't very different though, thinking about it.

But as for Zelda: BotW, I have said at some length that I don't expect to like the game all that much for a bunch of reasons, but I would think that they'd have a much better help system there than, say, LttP; it's a modern Nintendo game, I doubt that they would make it crazy-obtuse.

If you don't enjoy finding hidden items out in the world, you probably shouldn't be playing Link to the Past, or really most Zelda games (especially the early ones).

"Especially the early ones" yes, "most Zelda games" absolutely not; after LttP this stuff is almost never a problem anymore in Zelda games, they started putting almost all critical items on the main path, and giving good clues for any which are off of it. Zelda is one of my favorite videogame series for a lot of reasons, including the exploration, particularly as it is in LA, OoT, the Oracles games, TP, and such.