I had a lot of fun with this one. Sure, the game can be a bit punishing on game over, and the grind to level up is real, but honestly I was enjoying myself playing this more often than I wasn't. I enjoyed the sidescrolling platforming and I also enjoyed the RPG elements thrown in. The secrets also were somewhat obtuse but not as bad as the first game imo. Still a guide game, there's no way you are gonna comfortably clear this blind. This is definitely the black sheep in the series given the fact that no zelda game like it was ever made since, but I think people are a bit overly harsh on it.

Beat the second temple and realized the game wasn't really gonna change much. To be fair, it's an NES game and there's only so much it can do. But man, when the game feels tedious even with the "cheat code" version that Nintendo put up on NSO, then you messed up somewhere. I think if they reduced battle encounters by like 50% the entire game would be smoother.

That being said, it is a creative idea for a Zelda game, an idea that hasn't been touched on outside of the brief 2D segments in the GB Zelda games. Perhaps one day we'd get a proper remake or a new game that takes Zelda 2's ideas and executes them properly.

Minha experiência com esse jogo pode ser resumida em:

- Comecinho: "Ué, não entendo por que todos falam tão mal desse jogo, mó gostosinho".
- Algumas dungeons depois: "Tá, é realmente o pior Zelda, por mais que não esteja achando tão ruim. Mas... Será que eu estou me divertindo mesmo?".
- Death Mountain: "Ok, não consigo terminar isso".

Não consegui terminar, vi o restinho pelo YouTube e é isso... Não é só a dificuldade, simplesmente não é mais divertido depois de certo tempo. Ainda bem que a Nintendo não desistiu da franquia aqui, insistiu e criou verdadeiras obras de arte posteriormente.

Mesmo com o desastre que é o jogo, a trilha sonora é MUITO boa, especialmente o Hyrule Temple Theme!

Castlevania is one of my favorite series of all time, and I was honestly looking forward to playing the black sheep, weird side-scrolling Zelda after I beat the first one. However, where I found the original game had excellent arcade combat, this game fails hard in that respect, making enemy encounters a grueling chore; I don't really like saying this about a game, but the design feels outright bad. Often the game will spawn enemies in places where it is impossible to dodge them, and getting hit (and killed) in this game is really punishing. Some enemies are fun to fight, and like in Castlevania, the best fights feel like a duel, or like you've solved a puzzle. Hopping and down attacking on the bouncing balls never got old. But some enemies, mostly the humanoid enemies like the Acheman, the Goriya, or the Fokka, Link feels wildly unequipped to fight, and there are some places where you are unable to use the strategies the games want you to use to beat them (mostly hopping forward and attacking as you come down). I found myself tediously save-stating throughout the game just to make it through some fights.

The RPG element is interesting, but underbaked. You level up from experience points gained from killing enemies, but you don't have any choice on how to build Link. The stats are strength, magic, and life, and all of the points are legitimately felt. It reminded me a bit of Breath of the Wild, where the experience points analogue in that game goes directly towards your mechanical experience of the game, which is something I love about that game. In the version of Zelda 2 I played, Link's stats went up in step with one another; I heard that there is another version of the game where you can choose which stat to place your experience point in, but that if you die then this gets reset to the lowest stat—so if you have a Strength at 9, and your lowest stat is a Magic at 5, then when you die your Strength gets reset to 5.

Like the first game, I played this game with a walkthrough. There's no guidance, and some parts can feel as hostile as the first game—to discover a town in this one, you have to use your hammer to cut down forests in the overworld until you find it. This game has all of the weaknesses of the first, but none of the strengths. Without a walkthrough, and without my incredibly stupid tendency to want to play series in chronological order, I can't imagine there being a great reason for playing this game. It's interesting to see how The Legend of Zelda evolves as a console RPG, alongside the contemporary Dragon Quest games, but it isn't fun, because these games are at their core action games, and the action here is awful.