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| Link embarks on his quest to wake the comatose Princess Zelda. |
Original Release: Jan. 14, 1987, Famicom Disc System. Version Reviewed: NES Classics, 1987. Platform Used: Nintendo 3DS.
THE PLOT:
As with the first game, the plot basically resides in the instruction manual...
It's been a year since Link saved Hyrule from the evil Ganon. The wise Impa shows Link the kingdom's greatest secret: Zelda, the original princess whose name has been passed down to all of Hyrule's princesses, still lives - slumbering in a magically sealed chamber as a result of a long-ago curse. Impa tells Link that he must wake the princess by placing six crystals within statues at the centers of palaces located throughout the kingdom.
Unfortunately, Link's task will not be easy. Ganon may be dead, but his followers remain. They are now hunting Link, plotting to thwart his quest and to use his blood to revive their fallen leader!
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| An early enemy encounter. You'll spend a lot of time with these... |
GAMEPLAY:
Zelda II is so regularly referred to as "the black sheep" of the Zelda series, it feels like a cliché to repeat it... but that doesn't make it any less true.
For the series' second entry, the guiding principle seemed to be to make it as different as possible from the original. While combat was a large part of The Legend of Zelda, here it's pretty much everything. When Link isn't simply traveling from place to place, he will be battling enemies, many of whom can only be damaged by jumping and slashing at roughly the same time... or by using a spell to jump over the enemy's head and thrust downward, which is satisfyingly devastating but limited by the extremely small amount of magic Link is able to use.
The game utilizes RPG elements. Link gains experience for killing monsters and for completing palaces, allowing him to level up his attack, magic, and health - one change of which I wholeheartedly approve. However, the trade-off is that there are far fewer health drops than in the first game, which immediately makes it more difficult. I found The Legend of Zelda to be hard; Zelda II is much harder, often to (and past) the point of frustration, and I doubt I would have finished it without the Virtual Console's save state functions.
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| NPCs not only exist, they're actually somewhat helpful. |
IMPROVEMENTS OVER THE ORIGINAL:
There are many things to admire about Zelda II. Graphically, I think it makes significant improvements over the original. By separating the action into side-scrolling "events," all the settings are more detailed. The forests have trees that actually look like trees. Caves feel suitably subterranean. The palaces have doors and elevators.
There is also more variety in the monster designs than in the original, and Link is allowed a greater range of attacks. This can sometimes be quite satisfying, such as when I was able to annihilate the game's third boss simply by casting the "Jump" spell and using downward thrust to obliterate his entire health bar in seconds. The boss fights are a lot of fun in general, with each one requiring a different strategy to beat.
Goals and navigation are less obtuse than The Legend of Zelda. I have no idea how anyone ever completed the first game without a guide, as there was often no in-game way of knowing where to go or what to do to advance the story. In this game, dialogue cues from villagers are genuinely helpful, and objectives are more straightforward.
There's only one serious problem. Unfortunately, it's a big one - and yes, I'm aware that other views are available, but in my personal opinion the majority of the game is...
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| Link fights his way through enemies to reach the Palace Boss. The boss fights are fun. Getting to them... not so much. |
EXTREMELY AGGRAVATING AND NOT AT ALL FUN!
For my first couple of hours with Zelda II, I thought I was in for a treat. I liked the look of the game, I liked the RPG elements, I enjoyed exploring the first couple of palaces and figuring out how to defeat the first couple of bosses. In contrast to most player comments that I've encountered, I didn't even mind the Death Mountain maze - Yes, I got killed off a couple times; but Death Mountain is located very close to the game's starting point, so in my opinion the aggravation of pushing through the maze has been substantially overstated.
But somewhere between the second and third palaces, the fun just drained away. By the end of the game, even sitting down to play felt like a particularly unpleasant chore.
The game is extremely repetitive: Find the next town, learn a new skill, find the next palace, defeat the boss, repeat several times until the end. In fairness, much the same could be said of the original game (find dungeon, defeat boss, collect TriForce piece)... but somehow, the original didn't feel repetitive. Though it was visually cruder, the dungeons in the first game felt different from each other, while all of this game's palaces gradually blended together.
I played on the 3DS, so my second complaint may be a function of that platform. Still, I found the controls to be often clunky and unresponsive. Combat is highly dependent on Jump + Slash, which for whatever reason I could only make work about 50% of the time, leaving the results of many battles feeling like a matter of luck. That said, this issue might not apply to the NES, Gameboy Advance, or Switch versions.
Then there's the "unidentifiable extra" quality that the original had. The Legend of Zelda is clearly an old game - it looks and plays and even sounds like it - but it's absolutely charming and addictive throughout. Zelda II, though technically superior in most respects, doesn't have that quality. There's more detail, and some interesting new gameplay mechanics. However, I found very little charm, and I got very tired of it a fair bit before the end... A fair bit before the midpoint, really.
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| Link makes his way across the World Map in a Hyrule that looks far better populated than it did before. |
OVERALL:
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is an admirable effort in many respects. It introduces new gameplay mechanics, adding RPG elements to the mix. Graphics are more detailed than in the original game, Link has a greater variety of spells and attacks to use, and he even has (limited) interaction with NPCs who aren't shopkeepers! The story background detailed in the game's manual also begins to add some detail to Hyrule, which I fully expect future games to build upon.
As a game to actually play... Well, I enjoyed it initially, but I grew weary of the side-scrolling combat/platform combination as it wore on. Boss fights were fun - but it became a trial to get to each one. As for the game's ending? Well, the less said about that the better.
I give the game points for being willing to experiment. It's just a shame I didn't end up enjoying it very much.
Overall Rating: 4/10.
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Next Game: A Link to the Past
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