The Zelda franchise is perhaps one of the most respected and well known in the video game industry. Everyone has played at least one Zelda game, and they are often the benchmark of quality for a generation of gamers. Zelda II is a bit of an odd bird though. It doesn't fit the mold of the top down, exploration friendly aspects of its brethren. Zelda fans often denounce this one as rubbish and not part of the Zelda they know. And while I agree that it's a radical departure from the tried and true Zelda formula, that doesn't make it a bad game. In the same way that DK Country would be remembered as 10x worse than it was if it didn't have the DK license, Zelda II would have been more highly regarded if it wasn't a Zelda game.
Story
As is the case with most NES games, the story is told almost entirely in the manual and very little happens in game. Here's the gist - Ganon is dead after the first game, but Zelda is in a deep sleep and you need to go outand find the Triforce again to wake her up. But the story isn't purely about exposition - it's also place and atmosphere. Zelda has always been about exploration. Miyamoto even said that the area around the first temple in the original Zelda game was modeled around an area he used to explore as a kid. Even though the method of seeking out treasures and secrets is slightly different in this game, you still feel that sense of adventure and exploration throughout.
Like the first game, you meet people who give you help and clues as to some of the secrets in the world, but they are no longer cave dwellers - people now live in towns scattered throughout Hyrule. And while the writer of this dialogue isn't gonna win the nobel prize for literature, the limited text that was uttered from the townspeople was efficient and memorable. Who can forget "I AM ERROR" or "WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS USE FIRE"?
Like most NES games, the story isn't super important to the overall experience but Nintendo did an admirable job of making the world of Hyrule feel like a real place inhabited by real people.
Design
Zelda II is one of the more unique games in the NES library in that it borrows elements from a lot of different sources. The overworld is structured like a Final Fantasy game where you fight battles on a separate screen from the map itself. Battles take place as side scrolling sword fights, combining elements of Mario Bros and Ninja Gaiden. The tiered temple structure is the one big similarity to the original game and to the games that followed it. And finally, you can level up your attack, life and magic power using experience points like other RPGs of the time.
Now, that sounds like a mess, but it all fits together so perfectly that the experience just sings this beautiful four part harmony of game design. Most of the time. There are a few flat notes and missed cues to deal with as well.
The beginning. Get used to this screen. You'll see it a lot.
As you probably know, the difficulty is insane - or at least the perception is that its insane. One of the most controversial elements of Zelda II is the fact that you only have three lives, and once you lose all three - you go all the way back to the beginning. Screw you. No mercy. Start over. Now, your progress isn't lost however. You retain all the items and spells that you've acquired, but you just have to walk all the way back to what you were doing. And while there are parts that are really challenging, I think the perception is that the game is much harder than it is, when in fact it's actually just annoying and monotonous.
The other unnecessary and awful element was the bottomless pits. A bane on the design of almost every NES game, the bottomless pit spells instant death, and it was the worst part of Zelda II. Couple the threat of instantly losing one of your precious lives to a stupid hole with the stupid "get hit and get knocked back a foot" mechanic, and you have a controller spiking problem.
As was already stated though, the sense of exploration and the feeling of place was absolutely perfect. One of my favorite things about video games is their ability to take you to a different world. I would love a version of this game where your only objective was to explore Hyrule. No fighting, no boss battles, just find everything you can. The exploration of the overworld and each of the seven temples was by far my favorite aspect of the game.
The design may seem like a crockpot full of mis-matched ingredients, but even though there are annoying and frustrating elements, when the credits roll, you feel like you felled a monstrous beast, designed by gods.
Gameplay
The gameplay is the most interesting and unique element of the game. The main mechanic revolves around stabbing with your sword and blocking with your shield. By standing up or ducking, you can adjust the position of your sword and shield and the developers really optimized this aspect of the game by throwing tons of different enemies at you that both attack and block the high and low positions. The knights in the temples are the most well known and battles with certain types of enemies that took advantage of the high low mechanic could sometimes take an upwards of one or two minutes.
Sword fight.
In addition to stabbing high and low, you also gain access to an up thrust and down thrust later in the game. These allow you to attack directly above and beneath you and the attacks are extremely helpful in certain situations. And finally, your magic spells are the last part of your arsenal. You learn magic like SHIELD which reduces damage, FIRE which allows you to shoot fire from your sword, and LIFE which will restore a portion of your health along with a handful of others. And while you do acquire gadgets and gizmos throughout your journey like the raft and the power glove, they are used more automatically, becoming more of an upgrade to your character than a tangible, usable piece of equipment. The spells are where you will find yourself relying most heavily on. In the final temple, I was casting different spells in every room. Although I wish that some of the spells became permanent upgrades later in the game. The REFLECT spell particularly, which allowed you to bounce projectiles back at enemies, would have been a nice permanent upgrade to your shield. Otherwise in temples with a lot of projectile based enemies, you would constantly have to cast REFLECT in every room.
The best thing about it though was when you were surrounded by enemies all launching projectiles at you from opposite directions, and you were able to take all of them out without sustaining a single scratch. It's the same thing I liked about Final Fantasy XIII - fighting is a skill at which you actually improve as you play. Your character not only gets stronger, but you get better and faster as you practice. It's a great sense of triumph when you take out a bunch of enemies, because you feel like you alone are responsible for their demise.
Presentation
When this game was released, graphics were pretty much the biggest selling point of a game. No matter how great the game or story was, if the graphics were muddy or unimpressive, chances are people probably weren't going to buy it. I think the intention then, of making a side scrolling Zelda game was to give Link a larger sprite model which allowed the designers to give him a little more detail and make boss characters larger than life.
And as far as NES games go, the graphics hold up fairly well. The animations are smooth and consistent. The enemies are well designed and extremely varied - to the point where each new region on the map had a different enemy type, which really added to the sense of place that's so important. But as good as the graphics were, the music is the real standout in this game.
As with other Zelda games, the music is fantastic. But it's also a bit of an odd bird in the mix. The music from Zelda games have a consistent feel. A kind of woodsy, organic, exploration feel to them, but Adventure of Link had a completely different tone altogether. The midi instrument that was used in the composition of most of the songs is so distinctive that I can't hear that tone without thinking of this game. It's sort of a Middle East high pitched flute kind of sound that's hard to describe, but again - this distinguishes it from the first game and gives, yet again, a very strong sense of place to this other area of Hyrule. In fact if you look at this picture, you can see that the southern most tip of the Zelda II Hyrule is the entire Zelda I map:
Notice the graveyard on the left and the shape and position of the lakes in the middle.
All in all, this is certainly a strange Zelda game. It doesn't hold your hand the way other Zelda games do. The combat is fast and frantic and the lives system is strange and seemingly unnecessary, but if you play thing thing through from beginning to end, without comparing it to the other games in the Zelda pedigree, you will enjoy it. I promise.
Review in Ten Words or Less
Not quite Zelda enough, but definitely good enough.
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