Game Over

No continue, no nothing. I can't make it to the 7th palace. There are too many enemies in between the River Demon and the 7th palace. Also, the bit where if you die then you re-start all the way back at the Princess Zelda is asinine.

So, here's my review.

I have to say that the RPG portion of this game was really good. I enjoyed looking for the hints, clues, and hidden things in the villages and I think that this is really one of the strong points of the game especially considering that this game was pre-Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Like its predecessor, you could find almost everything in the game by the clues that the villagers gave to you. Sometimes you had to search for hidden villagers and had to probe unwilling people for information by bugging them, but the entirety of the quest rested on their information.

The graphics are well done and look better than you would expect. One can definitely see how the Nintendo graphics people were trying to stretch the boundaries and make a game that looked better than 1984-85 games.

It is in "combat balance" that the game fails miserably. To begin with, the character is much too weak and the enemies much too powerful to start out. As you gain experience your skills improve, but not at a fast enough rate. If one were to make their attack skill an '8' (the maximum) then the game becomes more even in that the bosses become a more viable challenge (tough but not broken) and the palace and overworld enemies become more like they were in the first Zelda.

The end of the game is where that ends. Enemies on the way to the palace become numerous and plentiful. The arrangement of the floating eyes and the lava pitfalls are just so that treading over them becomes the hardest task in the game. This is where I died and gave up. Killing the floating eyes in this area was a mute task in that they re-generated each new platform jump. Their unpredictable up and down swagger prevented me from anticipating when they would change directions and hit me. Often I would just turn into a faerie to try to avoid them, but one can only do that so many times before running out of magic points (even with a full 8 containers).

Had this game stuck with a continue where you just re-started at the last screen/palace/town you visited, then this would be a much different review. A 'save point' area would even be nice... for even then would the combat problems would not be so bad. But re-starting from the sleeping Zelda (as lovely as she is) is just not a good penalty for dying 3 times.

If you were given the game for free, accept it kindly and enjoy it. It's a struggle, but it really does have some fun points in it. If it is ever offered on the Wii virtual console, save your $5 and purchase the first game instead.

I hate to have this game on my "Game Over" list, but there you have it. Perhaps I can come back to it after a while and try to gain an appreciation for it, but until then I have better games to play.

For giving me some good RPG play, but failing in combat I give Zelda II: Adventure of Link 2 fat Warios.

But now I can focus on the next game in the series: Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for the Super Nintendo. This game came out in 1991 and has been lauded as one of the best games not only in the Zelda series, but for the Super Nintendo.