Oh yeah I'm still happy to play Link to the Past or Link's Awakening from start to finish but I just can't even tolerate most 'proper' rpg's. I think I prefer to imprint my own story on games then follow their true ones.  My fave 8-bit game is called SwitchBlade and I remember drawing a lil fan-comic of it when I was a kid and I thought I'd based it on the story of the game but it turns out I'd actually invented most of the story myself and forgotten I had, and that only the very minimal bits (hero name, big boss name, general setting) existed in the original game which is why nobody ever had a clue what i was talking about when I bring up the game even when they've played it. :P

Still really nice character designs.  I know what you mean about RPGs, too. As a child, I had the Nintendo Power Final Fantasy strategy guide long before I ever played the game, so what I imagined the game was like turned out to be very different from reality. There were countless hours of repetitive battles against the same sets of monsters standing between me and the story I'd read about already, but at the time, that's what you had to put up with in order to get anything approaching a real plot in a game. Zelda was far better in terms of gameplay, but "save the princess" was something you accomplished in the first hour of Final Fantasy.