Although generally considered the black sheep of the series, Zelda II has a special charm about it that many fans adore, giving it its cult status today. Many were critical of its side scroller gameplay instead of the overhead view of the first. Don't get me wrong, I get why people weren't into that, but also keep in mind that when it came out, there was only two Zelda games, so there was no real standard yet. I appreciate their attempt to do something fresh and different even if it didn't pan out. Not to mention this is one of the first games to implement RPG elements such as leveling up and RNG enemy spawns. One things for damn sure, this is the hardest Zelda game. On top of the gameplay being tricky to get used to, the difficulty balance is just off. The hardest levels are at the beginning when you're underleveled, and you pretty much have to be at max level to have any luck againist the later ones. And its not done for any sense of accomplishment, it feels like its done to be mean. The puzzles and dungeons feel very needlessley cryptic, I have no idea how anyone is able to beat this without a guide. The sense of exploration is still there however, with the addition of visiting towns, interacting with NPCs, doing side quests to get magic spells being a satisfying element to the series. Unfortunately it is hurt by an awful overworld. The theme is not as good or classic as the first, graphically its a mess, everything is a block and is unappealing as hell, and navigating some areas is very frusturating. Like yeah you're only in the overworld to get to other places so it doesn't take up that much time, but it's still easily the worst part of the game. I do think this game gets a bit too much hate, because for what it is, its still a pretty good game overall, and has its place in the Zelda series. It was an ambitious title for the franchise, and if that meant it had to be the sacrificial one to know how to improve later one, then for that alone, I salute it.

The one puzzle that no NPC gives you any hint at is how to fight Iron Knuckles. I think you're supposed to guess at the answer after having seen an entirely different trick work, one that doesn't become available until the third dungeon and is so finicky that you can easily beat the game under the impression that it doesn't work—but they're one of the most common enemies and the game can get miserable if you don't learn how to beat them. I would have said something in the manual.

Other than that Zelda II's only flaw is an overly linear overworld, which is understandable as a reaction to its overly cryptic predecessor. Its dungeon design is unmatched in the series and maybe in the genre. It takes a simple, rewarding, fast combat system and pushes you to engage some enemies while dodging others; what higher praise could I give? The magic and 1-Up systems suggest some interesting routing too.

Pros: It's really fascinating controlling Link in a sidescrolling platformer game, which are games I'm a big fan of, so I do like running and jumping in a 2D space like that, that doesn't feel bad at all, and in fact, that downward sword thrust move, feels pretty good! Some of the sword combat against enemies can be pretty engaging too, lowering and raising the shield or sword, to play offensively or defensively against certain enemy types. And even walkin around in the towns, talkin' to townsfolk, that's nice.... It's alright.

Cons: Everything else... The RPG elements, not a fan, the limited weapons (there's really only the sword, no boomerang, bombs, arrows, nothin' else fun... just magic spells which are all pretty boring), confusing layout for dungeons and the overworld map itself, not to mention the difficulty, annoying gameovers that have you starting from the beginning area on the map every time... Ugh... I don't find any of it very fun or exciting. The music isn't even that great... Just kind of a dud of a game, it's no wonder they never returned to this format... Hell, even Miyamoto considers it his biggest disappointment!

What it means to me: Just like with Donkey Kong 3, I didn't realize this game was a thing that existed at all until yeeeeears later, and then once I did find out about it, just like DK3, I was perplexed by it. I was amused by some things, mainly the 2D stuff... But overall, it's gonna be a no from me, dawg. Probably the worst Zelda game from Nintendo.

The second entries in a lot of series get a bit experimental, but usually they're not too big of a departure from what the first one does. I usually lump this game in with Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) and Fire Emblem Gaiden since they're all NES games by Nintendo that do this. But Zelda 2's so different that I would not blame someone for outright saying it's not a Zelda game. The game design has a completely different foundation, what with it being developed by a near-completely fresh team save for three members (Miyamoto, Tezuka, and Nakago). So, players picking it up later on after playing a number of the other Zelda games (themselves much more uniform with each other) likely don't agree with its very unusual structure. But hey, it was rather popular when it initially came out. It apparently sold out in many stores across the US, and critics ate it up too; praising the unique action-RPG elements. Everyone was happy then I suppose. But now, flashforward some number of years, no more than 36, and no one is happy. Zelda 2 is spooky, and Death Mountain makes everyone wet their beds. But now that I've played through it twice thrice actually, it's a little addicting, I can say for sure that I have a lot of appreciation for this game.

Said "unusual structure" does refer to a handful of things. For one, while the game does use an overworld map, it switches to 2D platformer movement for enemy encounters, towns, palaces, and the like. Just about any time you need to act on something. It's a simple idea that I don't think has really been played with in the same way outside of one of Wayforward's Adventure Time games and a few others I'm forgetting. But, it's fun! Link also has movement mechanics that manage a nice balance of technicality and simplicity. Just like in his Smash Bros. appearances, he can block most projectiles with his shield simply by facing the direction of the attack; with the option to block low by crouching on top of that. His sword doesn't have the most range to it, but the timing for the animation always feels nice and snappy. Couple that with a midair downward and upward strike you can get later on, and I'd say that the mileage from Link's melee kit is surprisingly fleshed out. This is helped by a rather hefty number of enemies with distinct and intricate movement patterns, and often, a variety of strategies needed to approach defeating them. I seem to recall Shiggy Miyamoto referring to a methodology he had once in an old interview that describes a good hand-eye-coordination feeling between what you see on the screen and controller inputs that feel natural with them. This game is awesome at doing that.

There are eight town on the map, mostly filled with numerous NPCs to give hints, but also with residents to restore Link's life and magic. The handiest thing to keep in mind is that each town has a wise elder that will teach Link a spell. Some of the spells aren't a must, like Fire, which is mostly used to kill a few enemies, but most of them can help in a pinch or be useful with some prior planning. Shield and Life are more self-explanatory, but weirder ones like Fairy turn Link into one, and let him fly freely around the screen. It's required in some parts, but also lets you fly through locked doors. Not to mention that it gives some handy bacon-saving utility if you cast it right before falling into water or lava. I say a lot of the spells are nifty in this sense since skilled and careful play lets you be very economical with them. Understandably, like health, magic is limited and though grinding refill potions from enemies is doable, it's rather time-consuming.

The leveling system is also really cool. Link gets experience points for defeating enemies, and upon leveling up has the choice to either spend them on one of his stats, or holding off the upgrade to save up for the next tier. By the end of the game, you'll likely be maxed out on levels (after which any additional levels will give you an extra life), but it's nice to have the option of prioritizing health, magic, or attack power. Especially since the former two of those refill their respective meters; good in a pinch. The implementation of this system is also a nice improvement over the original Japanese version. There are a few small regional differences between the games overall, some more jarring than others. However, leveling up was completely revised. You're able to choose whichever stat to upgrade, although when you get a game over (yes, the game has lives like-a Mario), your stats are reset to whichever the least upgraded one was, rather than being permanent upgrades. For example, ATK-8, MAG-8, and LIFE-2 would become level 2 for everything. I find this takes a lot of the strategy away in favor of a riskier format with less payoff.

I think the biggest hurdle this game has in its design is with finding out what to do at times. Yes, the game does manage to fix a lot of the cryptic nature seen in the first by making progression much more linear. Many key items are required to make progress, for example. And yes, it does also confine clues dropped to the word of NPCs found across the eight towns on the map. Though, I do think some things are left slightly obtuse. It could be worse though; I found the mirror needed to get the Life spell by accident during exploration (didn't remember it being there), and I could very easily see that being something completely confounding another player. Biggest offender of this is the whereabouts of Bagu's house I would say. But yes, seeing as how you get tips for every required item, spell, and even several magic and heart containers, it's not bad at all. The only things that are fully unguided secrets are the Link dolls which act as single-use 1-UPs that don't respawn (leave them where they are until you go to the last palace!). So, given it is a nearly forty-year-old game, I'd say patience is needed. The same can be said for combat. Most encounters require you to stop and focus on the enemy. I think this is cool in a way, but at times when I'm trying to run somewhere quickly, it requires me to mentally shift gears. Especially the case with flying fish and the wolf heads, which are plain annoying.

This is not to also mention the difficulty, which is pretty high even if you know the location of everything. A big reason for this is due to the game sending you back to North Castle (the starting location) after getting a game over. The exception to this is the last dungeon, Great Palace, which is good at least. This is definitely a symptom of the era this game was made in, and arguably the biggest justification for any sort of remake. Though, if you were just able to start back up at the room you game over-ed in, it would make the game way too easy and short in my opinion. It would also encourage more brute-force approaches to overcoming its challenges instead of having to adopt strategies to better player skill and timing. So, at the very least, game overs probably should have let you restart from palaces when you die in them. Getting back to one isn't the hard part; it just becomes a hassle after dying enough times. But again, it's a product of its time. Besides that though, palaces are rather easy to traverse. I never got lost in any of them despite the tricks they threw. Their layouts are more like tree diagrams and rarely have crossing paths and cyclical routes. Just remember that there's always an item to find outside of fighting the palace guardian.

And though this game is very linear, I do think it still encourages a little bit of experimentation. You don't have to get every item (an interesting minimum percent challenge perhaps), and you certainly don't have to place a crystal in the palaces immediately after beating their bosses. In fact, the latter's a pretty good way of farming lives in the endgame, since using the crystals always gives you a free level up. One cool thing I didn't know until recently is that you can actually bring up the save menu without a game over by hitting Up+A on the 2P controller while in the start menu. Neat if you're trying to play this as vanilla as possible.

Despite some songs being better on the FDS/Japanese version with its funky wavetable synth, this game has a great score. I usually remember Akito Nakatsuka for his wonderful compositions in Sutte Hakkun, but the songs here are great as well. Not even including the classic Temple theme, all of the other songs are pretty memorable. The battle theme in this version is also an entirely different song from the original release and I prefer it. Moreover, the angle taken with the story is cool. Having a secret, sleeping Princess Zelda that was there during the events of the first game is interesting. And for what it's worth, it lent itself pretty well to being factored into the fictional timeline.

Moreover, this game's also unintentionally funny. Supposedly the Zelda 2 Redux mod retranslated the NPC text, but I'm not too sure I would want that. I do quite like them saying "I am much too busy to talk to a stranger," before moonwalking away. It's good. Personal favorites would likely be "You are a hero for saving my child.Come" and "With boots I could walk on the water." I also really love how the developer credits use pseudonyms, as was the case with the first game. Same goes for the "Thanks a million". They give a nice arcade game-y charm to the games you don't really get much from Nintendo.

But yes, while this game is sometimes antiquated, it's often filled with forward-thinking genius. A remake of this game could make it perfect, and reusing some of its gameplay features in later Zeldas would not be a bad idea. Zelda's a very puzzle-focused series, but it does lend itself well to more diverse combat potential. Though even without that, the legacy of this game is pretty pervasive, and I think that's pretty nice.

I am so fucking close to beating this asshole of a game, even with save states. And you know what, it's pretty damn good. I don't even have any nostalgia for this and I still like it. I've never liked Zelda 1 for one straightforward reason; it controls like dog shit. Yes, it is influential and inspired perhaps the most critically acclaimed series in the industry. But personally, if it does not feel satisfying to perform basic functions (moving, turning, attacking, the god-awful shield) then I am going to struggle to care. This game, however, for all its many, many faults, controls superbly! The combat and progression system are so compelling for an NES title that I feel a real drive to get through its hilariously impossible moments. I agree with some of the cryptic parts being bullshit, but I actually managed to find most of them without a guide. I feel if you go into it knowing a few tips (do a victory lap of temples for the last level-ups, write down cryptic hints and be overly thorough, search every fucking tile) rather than outright using a guide, you CAN really enjoy this.
Currently still stuck on the approach to the final temple. Will update this when I have finally completed this wacky piece of shit that I love for some reason.

I wouldn't be opposed against Zelda trying out something like this again. From a presentation and concept standpoint, I really like Zelda II. The upgrades when you leveled up scratched the right parts of my brain, and I'm one of those weirdos that actually liked the weighty combat system. Each palace had a sizable amount of fun rooms to traverse, and I looked forward to tackling each one.

I can't deny though, without cheats, I don't think I would have appreciated this one as much. In particular, I used the Zelda II Redux hack which added a lot of QoL, most importantly better checkpoints and balancing. Without that, I have no doubt in my mind that this game is annoying as fuck.

One thing I sorely miss from Zelda 1 are maps. There are none here, and the palaces don't have enough distinct landmarks at times to prove memorable, so, online maps were in order.

My greatest mistake was heading into the final dungeon without realizing you needed the final spell to defeat the boss. Imagine doing that entire gauntlet, and then realizing you're gonna have to do it again.

The thing about Zelda II nowadays is that by itself, you're likely to play a gruellingly punishing game with dungeons that are more difficult to traverse than the likes of the first game. However, the Zelda community is lovely in this regard, as it has taken the painstaking task of providing you with many ways to fix this game into something fun. There's the aforementioned Redux hack, but there's also a fanmade PC version of the game, called "Zelda 2 Enhanced Edition" that brings similar QoL changes, among new ones such as a map system, and additional neat areas to explore. There's many good ways to play this game. But preferably, discount the original as one of them.

Playthrough was done using the Zelda Again: Link is Adventuresome PC version of the game. It could be debated how much of this could have affected my review, but at the time of deciding to play this version I didn't really think it would have such major changes as it does, but oh well.

The second entry in the Zelda series is a very rough one, with a complete change in gameplay and direction from the very first game (which was already bad, but at least it was innovative for its time), Zelda II goes out of its way to be an unforgiving, unfair and unfun sequel and while it brought some cool ideas to the table and that would be revisited in future entries, it doesn't really escape the feeling that Nintendo made this game this specific way because it was what was selling in the NES at the time with all of those side-scrolling, difficult action games such as Castlevania or Ghosts 'n Goblins, they tried to adapt a game that was already pretty repetitive into this form format, and honestly? It doesn't seem like a bad idea in paper, if anything it would've fixed some of the issues with the first Zelda... That if they did it right.

Zelda II excels at not being entirely good at anything, the exploration sense is fine but a bit cryptic, the dungeons are linear but are ultimately just enemy gauntlets without much personality, the movement and combat are just alright but they didn't need to lock so much of it to temporary ailments, and so on. A lot of the game would be so much better if only the game wasn't trying so damn hard to be so damn hard.

So, starting out with stating the obvious. The combat is fine? It functions, but it's plenty unfair when Link moves so slowly compared to his foes, while some of these (namely the Iron Knuckles) can defend themselves with a shield while you can't block any of their attacks if you aren't going around with the Reflect spell which you get a very late stage of the game. This, coupled with the fact that you get practically no margin of failure, there's practically no invincibility frame time that isn't used in your character jumping back from the attack (a la Castlevania) makes for a very unfair fencing game in which you cannot have an upper hand to your enemy, even knowing how to beat them is flimsy as they just can hit you at any time, with any projectile, and sure you can just deflect them using your shield, but doing so when there's 5 of them coming at you on screen makes it impossible to actually close in, so you just have to take the damage anyways. It doesn't help that your little dagger of a sword never gets an upgrade besides just damage amplification, (and the Magic Sword power when you have full health just disappears like three tiles ahead of you and can't damage most enemies) which is then again power crept on because every palace adds new versions of previous enemies with more damage. It sucks, and it is like this for the entire game. You don't even unlock useful attack methods such as downwards and upwards trusting until the middle point of it, which is even worse.

Zelda II's map exploration is fine, but it made up for there not being any enemies on screen with annoying random encounters, which would lead me to the enemy design in the game and the XP system. These random encounters were obviously made to keep you a bit busy and slow you down if you're travelling in the overworld but they also work as a mean of grinding experience points for your character to have more attack and magic, and honestly even if they are odd they wouldn't be such a pain if only when you depleted your lives they didn't take like 500 off of you, making you eventually have to scourge and kill enemies for experience points, then save and come back to it as to not lose your progress. The enemies shown across the entire game are just a nuisance to deal with in general, so the whole aspect of "kill enemies to upgrade your gear!" goes out the window when the gameplay cycle is just not fun at all. And don't talk to me about the bosses because they're either very simplistic and boring or straight up hell to deal with.

But I think that ultimately the part that makes me very sad about this game is that it should've worked out. With a bit of tweaking, all of this could've just been like it's predecessor, at least an unengaging repetitive slog of a game would've been better to play than a game that makes you get a strain every single time you play it from how unfair it is. Things like getting more attack options (a bow???? maybe???), getting permanent upgrades such as a permanent Shield Spell in the form of a tunic (like the first game???? maybe???????) or straight up getting stuff like a map in dungeons, things completely unheard of!

Some parts of the game as the middle point in Midoro Palace or Maze Island do utilize level and enemy design pretty well paired with the abilities you have at hand, and it was legitimately enjoyable up until the Ocean Palace which just brought everything down. The game is tedious and abandons you in many places to get lost and try stuff to actually advance and this is straight up shown in the Great Palace which is just a mess of a labyrinth of repeated rooms. It sucks bad, and it'll definitely make me appreciate that Zelda didn't go this direction at all.

i gotta apologize to my girlfriend and my friends for making them watch me play this for like three days straight it was Not Fun

"In each town in Zelda 2, there is a woman that restores your health, she invites Link inside, and you never see what's happening in there. Is she giving him a potion, is she performing a magic spell? No, we all know what's really happening. Link is, you know... getting a little of the old "In-Out-In-Out". I mean, this isn't Little Boy Link anymore, he's a grown-up now. Link deserves to get some because of all this hell he goes through, he's not gonna get any from Zelda! But then again, she was in a sleeping spell, what was Link doing there in the first place... Oh no... Link's a poon hound."
Game was decent btw.

3/10 (Bad… for me)

It’s one thing to be a hard game and it’s another to be a poorly optimized game. Despite me finishing Zelda 1 in just 3 hours this took me 3 weeks to finish due to how boring, monotonous, and downright unplayable it is despite my runtime only being around 4 hours with the game. While I think the weapons and locations are pretty cool it’s the unfair difficulty that really makes me boil due to the fact it’s not hard because it’s hard, it’s hard because of the awkward placement of enemies because their attacks have a reasonable pattern and such but they’re placed in tight places making it more difficult than it should.
The NES Zelda games aren’t a good impression for me. My friend has told me that once we get to the SNES games it gets better and boy do I hope so.