Actually, since this just came up elsewhere, here's one of my biffs with M&L:SS
Look at the upper left corner. What you're intended to see is a grass plateau atop a short vertical incline, raised above the sandy ground.
What I saw on default is a grassy recession in the sandy ground. Some decent shading could've solved this, but instead I was looking at some crazy Escher-style weirdness.
In games like LttP, they were able to avoid this kind of confusion through depth-shading and careful use of context. >_>