Honestly I’m not much of a Zelda guy. I’ve tried a few games in the series here and there and ultimately came to the conclusion that the series is just not for me. However, I find that I’m pretty good at telling if I’ll like a game just by watching a few minutes of footage. For the past few years, I would watch Vinny Vinesauce do his traditional Thanksgiving Zelda II playthrough and every year, I found the gameplay pretty interesting. This year I finally gave it a shot.

In the end, I kind of liked it! It’s kinda-sorta-somewhat like a Metroidvania? I like the side-scrolling approach, I like the transition to the overworld, I like the level-up system, and I mostly like the combat. Frankly, everything I don’t like about this game can be chalked up to Classic NES Bullshit. I don’t really care for cryptic solutions and I think the temples could use maps. Those are things I’d have no issues with if some of the enemies weren’t annoying as hell to fight, though. Generally the game is slow paced, so being killed or falling into a pit and losing tons of progress gets annoying quickly. I played this on Switch, so I used the rewind feature quite liberally, but it does take away a little satisfaction in the end. I know there are some hacks that make this game easier in some aspects, so I’ll probably check those out at some point. But yeah, this might be my favorite Zelda game, weirdly enough. Zelda II definitely has something going on that'd like to see more of.