It was one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s right up there with other classics like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6 and Super Mario World for Nintendo’s now defunct Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES).

What’s that midget doing with that sword? Back then, I didn’t know anything about role-playing games. I thought adventure games were all side-scrollers where you had to run from left to right. When I first got Zelda, I didn’t know what to make of it. You played as an elf, who hears voices in his head, and then decides to run around in the rain one night. Certainly not your typical cartoon game hero at the time. Moreover, from how everyone treated you, you’d swear you were just a little kid. The game was played from a top down perspective giving you movement in four directions. You had a sword and shield to defend against the onscreen enemies who chases after you on sight. You could enter houses, pick up and equip items, and hack through bushes with your sword.

What’s going on really? There’s a convoluted back-story to all of this that wasn’t really explained by the game at the time. Apparently, the goddesses who created the world left three floating triangular stones (the Triforce). At some point, Ganon, the game’s main villain, got a hold of it. The stones were imbued with Power, Wisdom, and Courage. Ganon was only able to control the Power. The other two forces were somehow infused with the other main characters of the game. Link, the little midget kid, got the Triforce of Courage, and Zelda, the princess, received the Triforce of Wisdom.

The place where the Triforce was kept was called the Golden Land. Without the Triforce, this land slowly turned into the Dark World. Because of its weakening existence, when you alter something from the Dark World, sometimes it changes something in the Light World (the world you start the game in). Let’s say, there’s a pond filled with water. You can’t get a key in the pond without draining it. Fortunately, there’s a switch to drain the water in the Dark World. So you had to go there, flip the switch, and warp back into the light world where the pond would now be drained.

Some other things you could do Sometimes you had to hack a few curtains to reveal a switch. Sometimes you use a lamp to light a few torches to open a door. Sometimes you could use your shield to reflect sunlight to turn an enemy to stone. You couldn’t get through a boss fight without thinking, and the game rewards you for figuring them out. The puzzles made clever use of the environments, and most of the solutions really made sense.

This is a clever little classic that shouldn’t be missed. Now that it’s been released for the virtual console, there’s no reason not to play it.