Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

The Good
I think I applaud the development team for trying something different. The game has even more RPG elements and some of those things made their way into subsequent releases (some of the named locations, fighting a dark version of yourself, etc..) but largely the concepts and ideas in this game were forgotten.

As much as I despised the combat, I did start to get a kind of Souls-like feeling with it. I would figure out the enemy's patterns and after I had died a few dozen times, I became adept at taking them on. Then another enemy was introduced that I couldn't figure out, so rinse and repeat.

The Bad
Well, the graphics are terrible. Even if you're a retro gaming fan, there's a lot not to like about the visuals. Link's sword, for example, is the same color as his skin. So, it looks like Link has a really messed up appendage. All of the towns look exactly the same except for maybe a color palette swap or a slight shift in position. The overworld map is bland and uninteresting.

NPC dialogue is confusing and provides almost no context or information. All of the NPCs look the same.

None of this would be as bad if the gameplay was any good. After all, the Castlevania series attempted a similar shift in format with Simon's Quest and it wasn't terrible. Unfortunately, Zelda 2 doesn't fare so well. The game is unfair, way more unfair than the original. Link's sword swipe is not very long so therefore you have to be super close to the enemy to hit it. Link's movement is as if he's on ice so when you stop you kind of slide just a tiny bit, which makes platforming a bit more challenging than it needs to be.

The bosses, while visually interesting, are random and seem to have no real connection to one another.

The Bottom Line
The Adventure of Link swings for the fences, I will say that much. They tried to do something different, unfortunately it just didn't work. I don't think the game is without merit, the leveling system is interesting, and a lot of the enemies and bosses looked pretty good. Everything else though was pretty bad. The game honestly felt like it wasn't finished and needed just a little more polish and balancing.

The Good
Very, very challenging game. The side-scrolling parts make things much more difficult, especially later in the game; although, by dungeon #2, things have gotten pretty hard. This made for a very enjoyable game, especially when overcoming obstacles and accomplishing various objectives (getting items, raising levels, finishing underworld dungeons).

The Bad
Some parts of the game were just TOO difficult (i.e., Death Mountain -- getting the hammer...took me at least a week). The final dungeon (end of the game) is also very hard. By the time you get to the Thunderbird, you'll be lucky to have any life and magic left. Good luck beating him. I was never able to finish this game on the NES. It took me about 15 years from the time I bought it until the time I used cheat codes on a NES emulator to finish it. Using the original NES controller was almost impossible for this game. The NES Max helped a lot. The music is this game was also a little sub-par. Zelda 1's music was better, I thought.

The Bottom Line
A great sequel for Zelda 1. Play that game first (play it to death, since that is one of the greatest video games of all time), then get a hold of this. A step-up in challenge and graphics. Classic game.

The Good
The world is a lot smaller compared to the first Zelda game and I appreciated that. The world is a lot smaller, but also has more detail. The original had an impressive size, but everything just looked the same with only a few changes per screen. Here the screens have been removed and you just walk around Hyrule's areas, There are; swamps, forests, mountain and of course water. I'd say that sacrificing size for detail is a good thing, especially if the world is still quite huge afterwards.

The gameplay is a lot faster compared to the original Zelda, not only do you walk faster, but the fights are also a lot faster and harder. You have to duck, jump and stab in order to kill your opponent. Later on you also discover magic spells and new moves that make the fights even bigger and of course you run into new enemies with different tactics. Nearing the end of the game, each screen I left without taking damage felt just like beating the final boss.

The game has a nice balance between puzzles and fighting, for me at least, which means barely any puzzles and a lot of fighting. The only "puzzles" you do encounter are the temples which are very hard to navigate through and some areas like Death Mountain. This is the NES, so you can't really demand anything else. There are still a lot of secrets to find though and some are mandatory if you want to progress through the story.

The fact that Hyrule is at war is emphasized more in this game, in the original Zelda there weren't any villages or soldiers or anything else to give you the impression you were really saving something. The people in Zelda II beg for help when you talk to them and the soldiers try to help you by teaching you new moves. It's sad that Nintendo didn't keep using this because it's really nice to have the feeling you are doing something worth doing, Zelda games are still pretty awesome, but why say no to even more atmosphere?

The overall story is a little bit more original than in the first Zelda. In the first Zelda game all you had to do was save the princess from her captor, which wasn't really the best story ever written. Here you are trying to find the Triforce in order to wake up a Princess from a very long time ago. It's still not the most amazing story, but certainly an upgrade. Also nice is that you no longer play as a kid, but as an older Link, this way the evil that threatens to take over the kingdom seems just a little bit more threatening.

The Bad
The difficulty curve is all over the place, you start of pretty easy, aside from having to go through a tunnel which requires you to have the item you'll find in the temple on the other side, but after that there is a giant peak in the middle. After that peak (Death Mountain) it becomes easier again. The final boss is very hard, but it doesn't beat Death Mountain. A lot of people may not even make it to Death Mountain, so if you are planning to play through this, I wish you good luck.

It's you against an army of enemies and if you die three times, you are sent back to the start of the game. This is very annoying because it doesn't make the game harder at all, you just go back to what you were doing with fresh health. In the original Zelda you would just respawn at the start of the dungeon if you died, that was a good way to punish me for dying, this however is way too cruel. It's also a problem that the extra lives you find do not return after you picked them up, so if you die, that live is lost forever.

The Bottom Line
Zelda 2 is (one of) my favorite Zelda game(s) out there and for good reasons; the action is fast, the story is better and the puzzles are do-able. Aside from an unreasonably difficulty curve and some weird choices regarding lives, this is a very good game.

However the difficulty is still too much to ignore, so I have to warn people that unless they truly want to play this and know it is very hard, they might want to stay away from it. It's never fun to buy a game and feel like it wants to punish you for playing it, so if you don't want to put up with that, you might want to stick to the (not as hard) Legend of Zelda.