I love the minimalist icons in the Igavania games, they do such a great job communicating what something is at a glance with the smallest number of pixels.
As @Peltz mentioned, handheld kept this sort of design alive (and fittingly, the GBA and DS handheld Castlevania games).
The first game to come to mind is Golden Sun, now the GBA has half the effective screen resolution of TV consoles similar to it (240 x 160 against 320 x 240), so designers often had to be very very smart using that space.
Golden Sun had a limited inventory - three pages of inventory space per character, but you could shuffle stuff between them. The use of tiny sprites for each icon to communicate what something was had to have been effective as I can easily glance at a character and know what items they are holding, or what Psynergy they have equipped:
Even if it’s full on 40k hours that’s still really good. That thing should last a while.
It’s why I’m constantly worried about mine and wish I put more effort into getting them when it wasn’t so known, but that’s a common regret for most of my retro stuff.
