PixlBit

There has been surge of fantastic Zelda II content on the internet as of late; Jeremy Parish's complete and thorough analysis of Zelda II's overall design (for better and for worse) over at Telebunny.net has been a consistently delightful read. Over at RetrowareTV.com Ben Hall (Video Game Take Out) is currently documenting his latest play-through of the game, which focuses not-so-much on the specific minutia of the game design itself, but is rather building toward a more in-depth personal critique.

When it comes to Zelda II it seems there is very little middle-ground when it comes to opinions on the game. Not very often do you hear someone say that the game is just "okay"... feelings toward the game tend to land in either the "hate" category, or the "love" category.  Some see the game as a brave step forward and an important watershed title in the maturity of the action RPG genre; a mix of ideas and concepts that would remain unpolished until the release of Ocarina of Time some 11 years later. On the other side of the coin (or rupee, as it were) you have the camp that sees Zelda II as nothing more then a misstep in the long and storied Zelda franchise; a failed experiment and little more then a mash-up of ideas far too ambitious to be properly executed.

I fall firmly into the second camp. I just do not like Zelda II very much at all. I've played it, and beaten it... but it did little else but frustrate and annoy me. You may assume my current distaste for Zelda II has something to do with the fact that I am now an adult- an adult who lacks the patience to buckle down and really get into the guts of the game. That does indeed sound like a plausible explanation...  save for the fact that I have never really liked Zelda II, even when I played it for the first time in 1990.

I remember honestly feeling kind of cheated by the game. Mega Man 2 was a huge improvement over Mega Man, but it improved on the formula without betraying it outright. By attempting to create a new, bold and experimental type of video game, the designers of Zelda II betrayed, and somewhat disrespected the integrity of the original. I am not saying that they should have copied the first game verbatim, but there was room to finely tune it; perhaps improve the graphics or even add in some of the RPG elements while at the same time keeping whole the basic style of the first game.

Its pretty difficult to analyze the second game in hindsight, because it was one of only two games in the series at the time I first played it. With only one single game as a precedent, it's much easier to look back and scream "what the hell were they thinking?!" simply because there have been so many games that have refined the basic design of the original , such as A Link to the Past, Link's Awakening, and Minish Cap. Still, I feel that Nintendo got it all wrong with Zelda II. You can praise Nintendo for implementing some innovative mechanics, their creative design and for greatly expanding the scope of the first game, but if it is not executed properly, and Zelda II certainly is not, it all falls apart. My beef with Zelda II is  that they didn't design the game tightly enough, and certainly not with the refinement and focus of first Zelda.

The groundbreaking and ambitious game play constructs within Zelda II are consistently marred and ultimately overshadowed by bizarre and unforgiving game design, a high level of difficulty and a frustrating lack of overall consistency. So many times as a kid I played up to the second or third palace, eventually growing frustrated to the point of alienation. I would usually then pop the Legend of Zelda back in to my NES and dream of the day that Nintendo would get it right, and forget all about Link and his sloppy, frustrating adventure.