Okay, this one is going to be a quickie, because my hour spent with this game made me remove it from my list. There will be no "the good, the meh, the bad" segments. I couldn't find much to say in "the meh," much less "the good."
I played this game for one solid hour, and every second of it was arduous. All I accomplished was beating the first dungeon, and I probably died more times than I did in Zelda 1's dungeon 6 (read the Zelda 1 article and you'll see how bad that was). I have one problem with this game, otherwise it could have worked out fairly well.
Scaling. This game fails miserably at it. Generally in a game you find a learning curve; you start out fighting generally easy monsters and the game gradually builds up, becoming more and more challenging until you come face to face with the toughest of the tough. In many Zelda games, these toughies are the Darknuts. Zelda II completely destroys that, and those Darknuts are in the very first dungeon. These guys are nearly impossible to kill. The only way that I could get past them was to run into them and use the brief period of immortality to sprint by them and head into the next area. Those enemies do not belong in a game's first dungeon.
I don't feel bad at all not even coming close to finishing this game. Maybe someday I will, but it will probably be a long time from now. The idea is decent, put link in a Castlevania-style RPG and run with it, but the insane starting difficulty just makes this game unplayable to me.
One thing that really pissed me off was how I spawned after dying to a Darknut.
Yeah. That's fair. Spawn me with an exp stealing goblin's face up my ass. Thanks Nintendo. Great job.
Ranking
This one should be obvious.
1. The Legend of Zelda
2. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
werebear's blog
Follow
RSS
Contact
I get the feeling you were playing it with the wrong mentality. It is very old-school and challenge is the watch word. You are not supposed to kill the floating skulls, they are more like a hazard to avoid. You are not supposed to just blaze through the temples – its all about exploration, finding the power-ups, items, and spells you need to tackle an area, and patience.
But hey, different strokes for different folks. If you hated it, you hated it. But I highly recommend you give it another shot.
I understand that the difficulty requires patience, and I understand that you have to take everything slow and think things through. Believe me, I played through the first Castlevania. The problem here was that when I did kill something, it didn't feel rewarding. I probably will take another stab at it later on, and I really want to like the game, but in the time I spent with it I just wasn't feeling it.
Uh, yeah. Never mind.
AoL wasn't 'Old Skool.' It was The Phantom Menace of my childhood: Massive shoes to fill, great ideas, nice to look at, but horribly executed with little thought given to creating something its target audience would actually enjoy. And, forever entwined with a series I love whether I like it or not.
To be honest, as long as you realize it's a grind-fest (like ANY 80's RPG really) it's not that tough either, first focus on attack power, then after the first two dungeons or so you should be so powerful that you can level up your magic and health without issues concerning the enemies.
And I'm not one of them hardcore-NES guys, I fucking hate hard games, that's why I can't play Contra, Castlevania or a lot of other NES games. But Zelda II is really not too rough as long as you know how it should be played.
Sure, it'd been better if it wasn't called Zelda, sure, but by that point we didn't have established what the Zelda franchise would become. It's like with SWAT, the first SWAT was a FMV game, the second SWAT was a top-down RTS and the third and fourth were Tactical FPS games.
It is radically different from the original, which caught a lot of people off guard at the time. So if you played it in 1988 and didn't like it, that is one thing, but I hold that contemporary hate is faddish and ill-founded.