The game wants you to aimlessly search for things that are necessary to progress, and I didn't care for it either. There are a handful of hard barriers to progression in the game until you find the one thing they wanted you to find at some odd corner of the map, and it sucked the fun out of the game that I was having with the dungeons. It feels designed to make you break out a guide, and given that hint hotlines and Nintendo Power were other revenue streams for them at the time, I'm not surprised.