Zelda II: The Adventure of Link or how I learned to stop worrying and love the levelling system

Growing up a gamer in Europe, and even worse, in rural Ireland made it very difficult to have the same experiences I hear and read people from the US talking about on all the big gaming websites and podcasts. Even if you managed to find a place that sold games, which in my case required my Dad to drive at least an hour, the chance that they had any more games than licensed crap and the odd few famous games like Mario Bros. was extremely low, so I never played a Zelda game until the SNES era. I have some memories of being in my friends house, I don't know exactly when, we were playing Mystic Quest on his SNES, and I noticed that he had a weird coloured NES Game Pak, I don't remember the conversation we had, but the cartridge immediately captivated me. I new nothing about this game, but I suddenly had to play it, thankfully he still had his NES, so we played, and I loved it. Unfortunately, by this time I had a SNES, and thought that I could never possibly need my NES again, because I was a stupid kid and had not yet learned the concept of keeping things in good condition for later use. Needless to say, I skipped over the NES generation of Zelda games.

Leading me back to the present, I have never finished Zelda II, I have played it emulated on my PC, and when I first got the collector's edition disc for Gamecube. I just became too frustrated by it. However, this time, perhaps because I'm older now, or because I didn't play it while immersed in other games in the series, which made its differences stand out like a sore thumb, I was able to enjoy it on it's own merits.

It really is a brilliant little game, the combat, while difficult to begin with, it's extremely responsive as are the controls in general. The tools you are provided with throughout the game are not quite the same as in other games, relying on spells and sword techniques for progression rather than various gadgets and gizmos. Exploration through the world is on a different plane than dungeons and towns, but really makes the game's world feel massive. Progression through the map is measured out in such a way that feels more like later games than the first one. The inclusion of actual towns makes the world feel alive, and the game really does reward talking to all the people to get clues and hints. The levelling system is also an interesting inclusion, being able to level up in this way seems more Final Fantasy than Zelda, but it still serves a similar function as health/magic/sword upgrades in other Zelda games, being almost optional, but making the game much easier when made full use of.

It's also, as I mentioned, a deeply frustrating game, between the difficulty of some battle screens, and the amount of backtracking required because of being reset back to the beginning of the game every time you get a game over and the resetting of EXP points, there were a few occasions where I was determined to quit forever. Thankfully I did not, because once you learn to work within the limitations of this system and begin to pick up on the quirks of the combat system, the game begins to become much deeper.

Late game becomes about trading off between whether you should try to progress to the next dungeon, or getting the next item or just levelling. It's those hairy moments when you can't do any of those things, are low on magic and health and have no choice but to keep going and hope that an enemy drops a potion, or more likely, get killed and have to return to the temple. In this way, the backtracking becomes one of the game's strengths, while still frustrating, it's offers a deeply rewarding level of progression, and by the time you've done it 10 times, those mandatory battle scenes on the way to the final few dungeons become less of a hindrance. Each time you reach a new level, or find the dungeon item, or even just progress a few screens further is a great feeling. It feels almost like the time-limit in Majora's Mask, where the fun of that system is in pushing yourself to complete as much as possible with limited time and even when you can't get through, once you begin again, you are still often able to get through, or even completely skip sections once you learn a song or find the owl statues or dungeon items.

Even the limited extra lives are part of it's strengths, because you can only pick up one per game, will this be the time I take it? Is it too much of a risk? Have I already lost too many lives? If I haven't, will this one be enough for me to get through? In my case, on the second to last dungeon, I took the extra life, which allowed me to get to the Boss, however I died very quickly, but not before figuring out how to take him down. This experience alone made it worth something when I continued, as I blasted through the dungeon and took out the boss in almost no time, which was a great feeling.

Zelda II is an anomaly, it's considered by many to be the "worst" in the main series of games. It's also considered by a vocal few to be a great game hamstrung by it's name, and the legacy of The Legend of Zelda. I fall more squarely into the latter camp, but I still think it's a great Zelda game, it just goes about its business in a different way, while still making use of some of the design aspects of the previous games, and at the same time, greatly influencing the later, more traditional games. Think of how many aspects of your favourite Zelda games were lifted from or influenced by Zelda II, it's gonna be far more than you might think!

My end screen, for the sake of posterity.

Next up... Link's Awakening!