Link's Awakening
Ugh, why. Why was item-switching in this game so tedious... Why did the Piece of Power/Guardian Acorn have such annoying text and have to overwrite the better music with a quickly-repetitive theme... And I know it's a heavy rock, dammit, you don't have to tell me every time I touch it! Man, what was Nintendo thinking when they made this game?!
... clearly good things, because Link's Awakening is one of the best games they ever made.
Those few complaints up there are really the only bad things about this game, because everything else is superbly solid. Great overworld exploration, great dungeon design, plenty of secrets, and nothing's ever unfair or too hard to find without a guide. Are there some things they could do better to improve the Link's Awakening experience? ... well, other than make item-switching less tedious, make text scroll faster, make menus appear faster, and remove those annoying heavy rock/strange rock/ice block messages from appearing more than once, no, there really isn't much they could do to improve this game.
If anyone thinks the Zelda experience is diluted in the transition to Game Boy, I'd argue the exact opposite. Link's Awakening is one of the greatest experiences in the Zelda series, and even is more enhanced than its previous three entries. It blows the first two games out of the water, and keeps even footing with A Link to the Past. Some areas it manages to surpass A Link to the Past; I feel overworld management was a touch superior, and the story... I'll talk about that more below. A Link to the Past is an overall better experience, but Link's Awakening proves it can contend with the big games to stand among the top of the crop.
I suppose there may be another weak point of the game, and that's the bosses tend to be simple and not too difficult to handle. There are a couple of exceptions, but I suppose this was one thing I could easily overlook since bosses in the Zelda series don't tend to be too difficult in general. They're at least fun, for the most part, though the Bottle Grotto boss can be irritating... and I don't mean the fight.
Link's Awakening also sports some of the best dungeons in the series. Granted, few are multifloor, in fact that might only be Eagle's Tower, but they're still great setups that are challenging, intelligent, and fun to play through. The dungeons get really good by the last two, Eagle's Tower and Turtle Rock, and serve as a far more than satisfactory ending to the game. They easily stand among the best in the series, and the overall selection is very well designed that they make every playthrough an enjoyable one.
And the story... Honestly, I feel this game has the best story in the Zelda series. It's not cut-and-dry good versus evil, it's not black-and-white morality. It takes place in the dream of a deity, and the entire world is a creation of its sleeping state. The people are fabrications, and yet they seem so real. The "evil" beings known as "Nightmares" have only one goal: To preserve the world. Killing them, and their leader, will cause it to vanish. It presents an interesting emotional dilemma, since waking the Wind Fish is the only way to escape the island, and yet waking him will eliminate the island and its inhabitants; the "bad guys" don't seem all that bad now, do they? The atmosphere and music of the quest lend so well to this that I couldn't possibly pick a greater story from the series than this game's.
There's not much left to say in conclusion. The graphics were nice, the music was wonderful, it was a solid package. I think it's definitely showing a little age, but mostly only in its tedious parts, noted above. Smooth out those kinks and the age will mostly vanish. But overall, it still stands the test of time, and I highly recommend it to anyone even slightly interested. It's still a wonderful game, and my second-favorite Zelda game. Unless Nintendo really brings out the big guns in the future, it will likely hold onto that position until the day I die.