Game Blog #1 - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
I have rather mixed feelings about this game. On the one hand, the controls are so fluent and fun. The combat feels so physical and exhilarating, like no other NES game. On the other, it's the greatest epitome of bashing your head against the wall. Allow me to elaborate on that second one.
For fear of sounding like I'm 40, this game is what one could call "Nintendo hard". This would be fine if not for the life system. Usually in Zelda games, dying just means getting placed back somewhere else in the general area, like at the beginning of the dungeon you were in. That happens in this game as well, until you run out of lives, at which point the game places you at the very start. Couple that with the aforementioned difficulty, and you have that bashing your head against the wall effect. Hey, you know what I've loved about the Zelda games I've played thus far? Seeing your inventory of items grow larger and getting new, cool abilities with it. Same with getting stronger thanks to better swords and more heart containers. Technically, you could say that's present here, but I found it hard to notice. You don't get any active items, and the passive ones you do get are very situational. You do however get spells, which I actually like, but not as much as items in other Zelda games. This game also has a levelling system, but I have quiet a few gripes with it. When you game-over, you lose all of your experience. At first that's fine, but later on the EXP requirements for level-ups get so big that there's no way you would ever get to them without grinding. Thankfully, to alleviate that completing dungeons grants you a free, full level-up. So, you get more levels as the game gets harder right? Well, let me just recount how I experienced it. By the time I got to dungeon two, I'd begun struggling. So, I decided to start grinding. I got my health up to level 8 (the max level), and my damage to level 6. With this i breezed through dungeon 2 and got my damage up to 7, but you know what? The game was still really hard, and I hadn't even crossed the halfway point. It was at this point that I began playing with a walkthrough. I don't like playing games this way, and Zelda II at least on the surface level seemed to be relatively intuitive. In its seedy underbelly however dwelled dungeon maps so complex trying to memorise, or illustrate them would make one's head spin, and magic as well as items so cryptic in their methods of acquiring, that you would have no choice but to consult a guide. In my admittedly tiny amount of research I was not able to figure out of the game had a comprehensive in-manual guide like Zelda 1, but if it didn't then it was truly designed by someone very cruel...
Before I end this blog post, I want to bring up my least favourite part of the game. The Great Palace, i.e. the final dungeon of the game. It actually fixes one issue with the game, as it allows you to continue from the beginning of the dungeon after a game-over. So it can't be that bad, right? Alright, keep in mind I entered this dungeon, with every heart container, every magic capacity upgrade, every spell, every item, and all stats maxed out. I found it to be as difficult as everything else in the game thus far combined. Why? mostly due to one enemy: the Fokka. Earlier I mentioned the combat in the game, and how I really loved it. This is because it makes up for the lack of visible progress by being so skill-based. The best example I can give is the Iron Knuckle enemy. These gents are famous for being extremely difficult, and at first I agreed. They're unpredictable, and very difficult to hit. Despite that, not only did I find them fun, they ended up being super easy to me by the end of the game. Plus, they appear in almost every dungeon, creating a sort of through line. The Fokka on the other hand is the Iron Knuckle, if it jumped around with no pattern. Believe it or not, this alone would've made made the dungeon 50% of the game's difficulty in my opinion. I also hate it because it takes my favourite thing about the game, kills it, then pisses on its corpse. However, that's not it. The dungeon has two bosses at the end. For the first one, you're required to use a spell that uses up half of your spell gauge. Keep in mind that you also use a spell to heal and give yourself more defence, and you end up feeling like Spongebob in that one scene where he needs water, except the water is the Life spell (and to add insult to injury, said life spell is also really costly to use.) And then, after all that, you still need to face off against the hardest boss in the game: Dark Link... I cheesed it. Yup, I hate to say it, but I did. I actually don't know if a game-over in the Dark Link fight sends you all the way back to the start, but I assume it does.
So, that's Zelda II. I know I didn't bring it up too much, but the controls and combat are genuinely so great, it does help to alleviate the experience. Does that make it worth playing? I would say no.
