To you, Joshua Rivera, thank you for such a wonderful piece. I did exactly the same thing in this game... stopped right before the end.

Exactly! So well put!

Yeah, this one has a very special, almost nostalgic feeling to it despite it being a fundamentally different and new experience in a Zelda game. It brought me all the way back to the 1st Zelda on NES (the very game that hooked me on the medium for life) like it did for you & it was such an amazing feeling...