Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

Is this fair? I mean are they allowed to do this? Switch genres mid-franchise? Okay, I get it if you're doing a handheld version or something and you decide to mix things up a bit. But this was a direct sequel. There's a "II" right in the title. And yet Zelda II plays like a completely different game.

Story-wise, you start off right where the original ended. Even though Ganon is dead, his henchmen are still roaming around causing trouble. Specifically, they want to snatch Link and make him a human sacrifice to bring Ganon back to life. Meanwhile, Link notices a weird crest developing on his hand. He shows it to Impa, Zelda's nurse, and she takes him to the castle to show him that Zelda is lazily sleeping the day away. Impa then proceeds to tell Link the "Legend of Zelda" which you'd think might have been in the first game. This legend has something to do with a king and a prince and a wizard and a spell that put Zelda to sleep even though she seemed pretty awake when we saw her last. It all boils down to six crystals that need to be planted in six guarded palaces to open up the path to the Triforce of Courage which Link can use to wake up Zelda and restore peace.

Multiple enemies will often try to swarm you from all sides. This was fine in LoZ where you had eight directions of movement at your disposal and a shield that would block anything in front of you. But in Zelda II, you can only move left or right and must constantly stop to block low attacks or duck high ones. Some enemies are capable of switching between high and low attacks. Combine this with a shield and you have enemies that are only susceptible to damage when they are jamming a sword in your face. It's a real pain in the ass. This might have been mediated by giving you a reasonably long sword, but your weapon could hardly be called a letter opener. You'll need to level it up significantly before it deals respectable damage, and its reach is so short that you'll still have to hop inside your sparring partner's long johns to be close enough to land a hit.

Speaking of leveling up, let's take a lot at that aspect of the game. As is RPG law, you gain points for each slain foe and at certain milestones you cash your points in toward increasing your life, attack, or magic. The enemies in even the first palace will be quite a challenge for you initially, so you're supposed to increase your stats in the Overworld by fighting low level monsters. Can you SEE these low level monsters and avoid them if you don't feel like a fight? Of course not. This is Random Encounter country.

Granted, you don't lose your progress or levels, but you do have to walk all the way back to whatever palace you were working on. And as I said, this involves a hell of a lot of unnecessary fighting that will likely rob you of one of your lives before you can get there. Recall that in the original Zelda, dying in a dungeon just started you back at the beginning of that dungeon. Also, if you needed to get somewhere in the Overworld, you could take your chances and run right past any enemies you met along the way. No such luck in Zelda II.

In LoZ, it became second nature to stun an enemy first with the boomerang and then go in for the kill with the sword. A complimentary weapon like this would have come in very handy here, especially considering your sword's pitiful reach. But as far as I can tell, no other weapons exist. Because of this, the game puts a huge emphasis on magic. You are much more likely to run across magic potion than point bags or health fairies. I'm sure this is useful later in the game when you get some spells that are worth a damn. But after two towns and a palace, the only spells I had were Shield and Jump, neither of which is offensive. If I had found half as much health as I did magic, I might have beaten this game.

Zelda II often gets credit for increasing your interaction with non-player characters. This is true and a welcome addition. Townspeople can heal you, teach you new spells, and send you on side quests. But, like in LoZ, their clues are so cryptic, that they'll often do more to confuse than help you. I even once completed a mission without realizing I'd done anything. More on-screen information would have been much obliged.

The problem is that all of my complaints with this game stem from staples of the genre that are accepted or even enjoyed by its followers. I'm not into this type of RPG and normally, neither is Zelda. This is the only Zelda title that is a pure RPG, and frankly the genre doesn't quite fit our green-cloaked hero. I seriously gave this game a chance, spending hours and hours on it over the last few months, but I never got into it. In the interest of fairness, though, I admit that I know plenty of people who can't get enough of this stuff.