Crystalis basically draws on the traditions that had been brewing in Japanese PC action RPGs for some years by that point(e.g. Ys, Hydlide). If you had been pla

Crystalis basically draws on the traditions that had been brewing in Japanese PC action RPGs for some years by that point(e.g. Ys, Hydlide). If you had been playing a lot of PC-88 games this would be one more like those, just on Famicom. Zelda is doing something different from these games in a macro sense since it combines both an open world and gradual unlocking, rather than either treating each new area as effectively "level 1, level 2, etc." or letting the player go anywhere but gating with power progression(i.e. the enemies instantly kill you). And it engages a little more with puzzles and item reuse than most of these games, though I would not say it's far beyond other examples in that respect. Zelda 2 is particularly interesting in this light because it's so clearly following with the trend to tack on a grind for power progression and to use side view to expand the combat's moment-to-moment with more physics behaviors. IIRC Miyamoto said something about this game to the effect of "everything went exactly as planned so nothing interesting was discovered."