Exactly. I played it early after it's original release (before the DX upgrade), and I was impressed with how big and involved it was for a handheld game at the time, so you're right that it's harder to appreciate that years after the fact. You really got your money's worth with this game, compared to many others at the time.

In any case I eventually came to respect and appreciate Link's Awakening for what it accomplished on the simplistic Game Boy. Nintendo managed to design not only a full Zelda, but a complex, deep adventure game for an 8-bit handheld with monochrome graphics and two buttons. If you look back, full-fledged adventure games and RPGs weren't common on handhelds before the GBA. Most games I remember for it were either puzzle games (a standard likely set by Tetris) and relatively simple action platformers. Link's Awakening set the mold for a few deeper adventure games during the original Game Boy's lifespan. A really underrated one in my opinion was the 1997 Game Boy 007 game. Pokemon was a major achievement in that regard too — it was pretty much the first really successful portable RPG. The Game Boy Color Metal Gear Ghost Babel is also an achievement in Game Boy software design. It's just really impressive when developers do more with less.

I haven't been impressed to that degree with handheld gaming that often since. Those kinds of deep adventures became normalized on the GBA and DS. I think the next time I was that impressed was when I played Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker on the PSP. It ended up having not only full-fledged third person shooter gameplay, but probably the most content of any Metal Gear game up to that point. I think something that would impress me to a similar degree today would be if someone made a full-blown Elder Scrolls-type game for the Vita, and I think it really would be possible.