#597: Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
Travel a wider world — and face legendary frustration
Initial release: January 14, 1987 (Japan)
Platform: Nintendo Famicom, NES
Developer: Nintendo
Sequels are always a tricky thing. Make it too similar to the previous thing and you run the risk of “it’s the same so it sucks.” Make it too different and you run the risk of “it’s different so it sucks.” Of course, the opposite is true too — after all, if something is good, people will want more of it, and if you change things up, you’re keeping things fresh and innovative — in theory, anyway.
And then there’s sequels to The Legend of Zelda. This is a franchise in which the sequel as we commonly understand the concept is generally irrelevant. For years fans argued where the games fell on a timeline, or if they even shared a timeline at all. Then Nintendo said “surprise! It’s three timelines!” The original game isn’t even the starting point of the story of Link and Zelda — rather, it and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link are the end point of a failed timeline. (Boy, that’s relatable!)
Of course, all this is academic. Zelda II, as one of the rare Zelda games to be a direct sequel to another Zelda game, on the one hand might just be another entry in a convoluted timeline, but on the other hand it’s one of the most experimental titles in the entire franchise — not bad for being literally the second game. The rundown goes like this: after the success of the first game, Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t want to just crank out a samey sequel, so when he’d gotten together a team to build a side-scrolling action game with a more vertically-focused combat system, they wound up developing it as a new Zelda game. The end result is one of the most unique games in the series, a side-scrolling action-adventure with RPG elements, introducing a lot of features and ideas that did not survive into later games but just as many that did.
The story is a lot like the first game’s, in that most of it is backstory relegated to the manual. It’s a few years later, and Hyrule is rebuilding, but monsters still roam the wilderness, seeking out Link as his blood was necessary for a ritual to resurrect Ganon. One day he noticed he had a mysterious Triforce-shaped mark on his hand, and visited Impa, Zelda’s nursemaid. She leads him to a secret room, where a woman who resembles Zelda lies asleep. She has apparently been there for at least a century, an ancestor of Zelda and the victim of a tragic incident involving an evil magician and the inheritance of the Triforce. Only by bringing all three parts of the Triforce together would Link have the power to awaken this ancestral Zelda, from whom all female descendants receive their name. The kingdom already has two — Wisdom and Power — but the third requires, apparently, a lengthy quest for to prove one’s worth.
So let’s get questing!
Zelda II plays out a lot like a more traditional RPG in terms of structure and story beats. It’s divided into two styles: the sidescrolling action, and a more traditional top-down view, but this time zoomed way out to present a semi-abstracted overworld. It’s a big world to explore, and at one point early on we stumble upon the area of the first game, but in this case it’s a mere few tiles wide. It really helps to give a sense of the scale of the world we’re playing in.
The top-down overworld is generally abstract — encounters are represented as monsters wandering around but contact with them warps the player into a side-scrolling scene. Likewise entering caves, towns, or other points of interest around the world map. Within these scenes, the player can run, jump, attack, or use one of a series of spells, some of which are only situationally useful. In towns you can speak to NPCs and even do little quests, which you’ll want to do as you gain access to spells and a couple new moves this way. Combat isn’t as straightforward as it is in the first game; while you can of course slash most enemies, hit them with sword beams, or whatever, you’ll all too frequently run into bad guys who stand on their own two feet and come at you in a stand-up fight. If you’re lucky, they don’t carry much more than a spear; most of the time, however, they’ll be carrying a shield, just like you, and fighting them requires finding openings. It’s a surprisingly robust combat for the era; Link’s movement is fluid and readable, and once you master the combat (which you’ll have no shortage of practice with thanks to the many armored “Darknut” knights wandering around) it’ll become clear that the combat is actually kind of genius — but that there’s something missing. Miyamoto has expressed regret that he wasn’t able to do more with the game, and it’s clear, from the less than a year’s worth of development time, that the game was kind of cranked out in a hurry. (Ordinarily, a year’s development time was almost unheard of for the mid-1980s, but for a game of this scale it really could have made a difference.)
The big problem, I think, is the pacing. Zelda II is hard. The game was designed with Zelda veterans in mind, but the difficulty curve is almost a wall and hints are even more obscure than before. The early game starts off okay, but by the time you’ve reached the first real dungeon (here represented as great Grecian-style temples, called palaces in the US translation) it becomes clear that you’re woefully unprepared and underequipped for what you’re facing. It isn’t until you’ve muddled through some of these tough early bits — including a nightmarish maze of caverns that reveals itself to be the true scope of Death Mountain — that you start to accrue the more useful spells and stuff. And even then, spells eat up a lot of mana — almost enough that it makes the spells less useful.
Zelda II is also the only game in the series to use an experience system and, paradoxically, a lives system. They work like this: kill monsters (and find “P-bags”) to earn XP. As you reach a certain threshold, you level up one of three stats: Attack, magic and defense. In the US version you can pick which one to level up, but they all have different thresholds, and you can only access the level up screen when you reach one of those thresholds. Get a game over and all your earned XP is knocked back to zero, though you’ll never lose any of your levels. (In this instance XP acts more like money that you can spend on boosting your stats.) You start out with three lives, but there are six “Link dolls” laying around the game world that you can collect to add to your lives. Unfortunately they are of limited utility, as they only apply until your next game over, at which point you’re back to three lives — and you begin back at the Northern Palace, which can be really annoying when you get a game over in the middle of the final dungeon all the way across the map!
Ultimately I think Zelda II is about 50% brilliant, 50% bullshit. It’s got one of the best soundtracks in the series, and I really appreciate its darker tone. The way the villages are in various forms of peril — missing children, monsters eating people down by the river, a new village having to be formed after Ganon’s forces destroyed the old one — gives the game a bit of an episodic feel similar to RPGs like the other big NES fantasy series, Final Fantasy. But it’s also just so damn inaccessible. Rightfully considered the hardest game in the series, Zelda II is unquestionably an artifact of a bygone era, and arguably bygone for the better.
There’s a few different ways to play Zelda II these days. Aside from the requisite ports to newer systems like the Game Boy Advance and the Switch, there’s quite a few overhaul romhacks out there to smooth out the edges. I for one use the Redux patch with some of the optional addons. It’s still hard as nails, but with the right combination of addons it takes out some of the more frustrating features of the game, and arguably is the best way to play it in the modern day, whether you’re new to the game or a hardened veteran.
I love Zelda II, warts and all, but if I’m being really real, that love — like so many things that only I seem to love — is predicated on atmosphere and tone more than anything else. Zelda II brings a sense of scale that I don’t think has ever been replicated in a Zelda game since, but in so doing, presents a harsh, cruel world that not all will appreciate existing in.
