I didnt really like my time with Zelda II. I thought the sprite work was pretty good and the soundtrack was nice. I liked how npcs in town could give you little hints and I thought the skill points were a cool concept. There were three skills you can use your experience on, those being melee attacks, magic, and health. Unfortunately, outside of those things most of the game was either just eh to straight up bad.

The items you obtain throughout the game were really lackluster, and you dont get any new weapons so the combat from the start of the game is practically the same as the end (outside of link up-air, down-air, and spells (not worth using outside of one dungeon)). I didn’t like how cryptic progression was, sometimes if you wanted to progress you had to find a random tile on the world map to continue (finding some of the key items or finding a npc). This game also has random encounters which sucks, but atleast you can dodge them sometimes if you are fast enough and sometimes you can even get a fairy which will restore your health fully.

I thought combat was alright until I started fighting enemies with shields and projectiles. Enemies with shields were very tedious to fight against since they counter your only attack. Enemies with projectiles were the WORST since you can’t really counter it effectively. Later in the game enemies would have both shields and projectiles which was abhorrent to deal with. If you are at full health and can use your blade beam, it would not help at all since most enemies were straight up immune to it which sucked. The bosses were bad but the second to last boss was TERRIBLE because it randomly shoots out a ton of projectiles that are difficult to react to and you are required to waste most of your magic so you cant heal during the boss.