I'm presently in the process of replying the original Zelda myself to see what, if anything, keeps this game at the pinnacle of game design. I've found that it's egregiously difficult not because it was trying to achieve something but simply because there was no bar with which to measure. It lacked context as any game does until its time has passed. We thought it was good because at the time it exceeded or confounded our expectations of what an action-adventure game was. In hindsight they had a vision but little genre inspiration to draw from and the result, for me, is a game that is hard only by accident.

I have been so far unimpressed with the combat in the game. The monsters have slapped-together "powers" and appear in incoherent groups. Often just a room full of one type and little synergy with mechanics. The Darknuts that are impervious to damage from the front, for example, are tedious and frustrating because the only edge of their hitbox that will take damage from your weapon is constantly moving away from the character and you can't run and hit at the same time. Throw in their random choice about when to turn and you can spend an hour making your way back to the same room to be slaughtered over and over until you get lucky enough one time to win. That's not heroism: that's persistence.

It does have many redeeming qualities of course. I agree that the completely accessible world is certainly a wonderful design decision in the early games. It is a concept well plumbed in pioneering rogue-likes such as Moria and ToME (when it was still Tales of Middle Earth). The world is presented as is and the player is plopped into an area that is suitably dangerous and exploration outwards tends to get more difficult with distance -- the occasional high-level location not withstanding. The use of items for progression is a well-trod trope of the adventure genre and used effectively in The Legend of Zelda. It's unfortunate that the series would turn the mechanic into a lock-and-key system just as the adventure game genre did instead of taking the original game's tack and using items to add new abilities instead of more areas.

If it had followed that tack the Zelda series might've felt more like the rogue-like games did around that time with items, identification, and combination being a game unto itself.

If anything the original games gave us a set of tropes and gimmicks to build upon. Wall bombing, block pushing, gimmicky-enemies, and grids of tilemaps: all of them are practically cliché today. We make inside jokes about them and print them on t-shirts.

I'm not sure what keeps the original The Legend of Zelda up there on its pedestal. It's a frustrating game to play. Without the narrative thread of its successors it makes almost no sense. And yet it holds an allure for those of us that were there before this context existed. This game was new, fresh, and exciting. Maybe it was the potential: the lure, the promise, the hidden cave of gaming goodness that we've been stumbling after all of these years. It's not so much that The Legend of Zelda was a good game for me. It objectively wasn't a great game in some respects. But it did stake one of the early flags on the shore of an undiscovered land and set our collective sights on something.

While I've enjoyed the series, for the most part, to date I can see how it is slightly disappointing how it veered from Miyamoto's vision and forged a different path. It would be interesting to see if, like Mario did with the Lost Levels, an offshoot or side-project of the series could try and revive those early mechanisms and "save the series."