Plenty of fans would still argue that A Link to the Past is the best Zelda game of all time, but the developers at Nintendo weren't even able to squeeze all of their ideas into the SNES classic. In fact, Shigeru Miyamoto specifically requested that one radical idea be left on the cutting room floor, and the team would oblige – at least until Link's Awakening came around a few years later.
"At the start of development, we wanted players to be able to freely choose which weapons to hold, not just the sword and shield," director Takashi Tezuka said in an interview for the March 2017 issue of Retro Gamer magazine. We republished that feature on the making of A Link to the Past in 2023, and portions of the interview were included in the Mini SNES Companion book bundled with Retro Gamer #287.
