Probably the best the ghost of Zelda past has to offer.
Oracle of Ages will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has played a 2D Zelda game and the control scheme and overall gameplay is completely identical to the other Game Boy Zelda titles. Here, as always, the feel is smooth and intuitive. There are moments of frustration trying to do finely timed jumps and quick dashes but rarely will you find yourself cursing the developers for not putting in tighter controls. Part of this is because the controls are just that good but part of it is because that this is a game that focuses more on exercising your mind than it does your fingers.
The plot here is familiar for pretty much any game set in a fantasy setting. There's a bunch of objects you have to run around and collect in order to save some girl--and the world. Along the way, things try to kill you for some reason. And who can blame them? You go around to people's houses all day, stealing from treasure chests and everyone acts like your some kind of hero. In this particular quests, the challenges presented to Link, our perhaps ethically challenged hero, tend to come in the form of nifty little dungeon based puzzles or in having to piece together a multi-layered map by traveling into and out of the past.
What sets this apart from other Zelda titles is the perfect level of difficulty and the lack of "cheap" dexterity challenges to keep you from advancing in the game but, while the points where you feel stymied by your inability to thumb buttons at the proper rate of speed are few and far between, this is still a challenging and satisfying game. The player is forced to hold whole dungeons in their brain in detail in order to solve puzzles. The bosses are frequently unusual in construction and require much more effort than dodge and slash to beat. And the over-world requires almost as much puzzling as the dungeons. We have here a game here w/ only a moderate amount of action that still remains constantly engaging and engrossing.
I do not think a game that offers dozens of hours of gameplay can be perfect in every last detail any more than every single sentence in a great novel can be w/o flaw. What you can have is a game that never loses your interest and always provides fun and thought-provoking challenges. That's what Oracle of Ages is and it's about as good as it gets.