this was a perfectly serviceable 2d zelda playing off some of the ideas from a link to the past! nothing more complicated than that, I think.
having not played link to the past in quite some time, some of the nuances of the throwbacks rippling through this game are lost on me, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that it was made with slavish devotion to the source material. that's nintendo's bread and butter. for example, if I found out that most of the rifts where you can move from hyrule to lorule were based on rough locations for dark world warps in link to the past, that would be par for the course to me. this is a game meant to echo another, a reflection of a shadow of greatness so that nintendo can trace, once more, the form that made them important to generations of gamers, in hopes of replicating its power once more.
the gimmicks here are fascinating ones. for instance, where most zelda presumes you will come to own the tools of your trade by honest adventuring and dungeon-crawling, doling out new means of engagement as you need them, a link between worlds instead forces you to spend time and energy getting money before you... rent them... from the equivalent of link from another world. the inverse of courage, evidently, is being a landlord. or toollord, I suppose. he takes your house, too, though, don't get it twisted.
part of renting these tools is the fact that if you fall in battle, your rented tools are forfeit to ravio; you can eventually buy out each tool, individually, at great expense, and this is by and large the reason rupees are so plentiful, becoming the be-all-end-all reward for things outside of dungeons before long. it's good, to the point of being foundational, for ravio's business model that nobody else owns a large hammer, or a bow, or bombs, or a boomerang, or one of the myriad magical rods, because what would this cowardly little rabbit do if link was unable or unwilling to shell out fees to license usage of these tools? nothing. he'd be nothing.
coincidentally, I've been thinking, the degradation of ownership from link to the past to this entry mirrors the degradation of ownership of games in real life, amusingly. no longer do you own copies of games, but simply license the right to play them, a license that can be revoked on a whim by the platform owner. much like in discussions of this game, sure, there's a bottom line where if you're behaving within expected parameters, you shouldn't be affected, but the introduction of the potential for that bottom line to fall out from under you for no good reason is wretched. people who had trouble with link between worlds for whatever reason and are then made to grind to earn access to their tools again are not going to be happy hearing "well you should've just not died".
perhaps in another game, one I might enjoy more, you'd be able to get your tools the old-fashioned way via sidequests or exploration, as a way to sidestep the overhead costs of renting-to-own via ravio's shop. unfortunately, this is nintendo, whose real-world marketing strategy is "you don't have any other legitimate options for our games"; were ravio to discover you had sourced your tools elsewhere, it would be more on brand to hit you with a 2.4 million rupee lawsuit.
imagine working that fee off on the octoball derby field.