Yes, i am positive that Link's Awakening had a hard-save. A blessing and a curse because i would occasionally mentally swap positions of the "Power" and "Start" buttons, and turn off the console forcing me to go back to my last save-state
Perhaps its like on the Wii Virtual Console, where they treat the matter of save-states differently depending on the console (like N64 games lacking soft-states that every other console had). GBA games all having the ability to save in-game could be the reason against that. Or just because Link's Awakening was early on and Nintendo didn't really know what they wanted to do yet
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.