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.

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.