I never actually owned Zelda: A Link to the Past back during the SNES days. I played it one way or another and don't remember liking or disliking it all that much, as my memories of the game were vague. I played it recently expecting to like it; I don't encourage SNES bashing for the sole sake of SNES bashing, and I assumed the hate for the game was just a fad. Afterall, the only other bad Zelda game is Wind Waker, and that gave LttP good odds of being a great game.
It's not. Zelda 3 is a bad game. It was rushed, and it shows in more than just its simplistic graphics. At no point does the game ever give the impression that much thought was put into its design. The result: dungeons that are so boring and similar to each other that you can barely tell the difference between them. It starts off dull while hinting that it'll get better, but it never does.
The overworld is nothing to get excited about either. I'm reminded of that article over on Segabastard about the game's overworld. Although I think it exaggerated, traveling across LttP's map is still rarely fun. Though it at first appears to freely explorable in the way that every other Zelda game has been explorable, it's obvious it has specific paths it wants you to take, and these paths often require you to walk around the world in asinine ways. The dark world gimmick isn't anything special either. Because it's so similar to the Light World, it just encourages you to explore it less. It's also a cheap way to hide heart pieces by forcing you to use the mirror in obvious marked spots.
The only positive effect that could have come out of the game's sloppy overworld would be better hidden and harder to find items, and they don't even do that right--never before or since has it been so easy to find everything in a Zelda game.
I've never seen the comparison drawn before, but it's obvious to me now how Link's Awakening appears to be a similar game but is at least three times better. Although LA isn't on par with the design seen in the N64 games (no game is), it still shows a lot of thought in its design. This is most obvious in the last three dungeons, but you can still see lots of creativity in the ones preceding them. The dungeons in this game are fun to explore and solve, with all sorts of innovative concepts that you'll never find in LttP.
Explaining how LttP's map is inferior to the one in LA isn't as easy, but there's definitely a difference. If you look back to the original Zelda, you'll notice that that game was completely free-roaming; just about every screen had openings to other screens, and so you were able to walk around unconstricted and often find your destination in different ways.
Not so in LttP. This falls back to the concept of paths. LttP is constantly closing you in and forcing you to access its areas in specific ways; these ways often require you to walk around a lot of shit to get there.
Although LA has this problem to extent, it manages not to be crippled by it. To create a more involved world than the original Zelda means sacrificing some of its free-roaming design, but unlike LttP, LA gets it right. Discovering new items in dungeons means opening up multiple new areas of the map, so unlike LttP, it's not always immediately clear where to go next (it also doesn't mark your destinations for you in numerical order, as if its simple design wasn't insulting enough already). Likewise, most screens in LA open out to more screens, so you're rarely given the impression that your following a straight line to your destination. The map is bigger and more open, so you can often go off in different directions when you feel like it and see different areas of the game at different times.
Because of this, finding your next destination in LA is fun, exploring in LA is fun, and discovering new areas in LA is fun. In LttP, its just a chore.
While the Metroid games combine them, Zelda games have always divided the two: clever dungeons and an explorable engaging overworld. LttP has none of theses, and it would take a very good argument to justify how this game is somehow better than any other Zelda. For all the praise it gets, this is one SNES "classic" that just doesn't hold up well to scrutiny.
Super Metroid still rules though. I refuse to listen to anything otherwise (although I did take down my review; even I could see how flowery that thing was).
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