I finished Zelda II the other day and ended up falling in love with it! The first time I tried playing it around a year ago or so, I found it way too harsh and frustrating. This time it clicked with me though, and now I’m convinced that this game has been unfairly maligned. The combat is definitely very hard, but once I got used to it, I thought it actually felt great and is mostly fair. You often can run away from troublesome fights too, especially once you unlock the down thrust and can bounce over enemies heads, which I appreciate. Pretty much every enemy has a strategy around how to fight them, and I thought it was fun to figure them out. Magic feels the most impactful out of any Zelda game I’ve played, and I thought that it made for interesting dilemmas with how careful you have to be with spending it. Resource management in games has always been fun to me, but a lot of Zelda games make managing your resources irrelevant because they throw way too many refills your way. Finding the magic refills in this game was such a relief specifically because it is so sparse.

I was really wary of the XP loss and respawning in Zelda’s room when you game over at first, but I was surprised to find both of those mechanics actually grew on me, especially the XP loss. There was one point about halfway through the game where I was deep in a dungeon, with low health, no magic, on my last life, and sitting on a few thousand XP, close to a level up but not close enough that I could safely level off of the enemies around me. So I decided, fuck it, I’m probably gonna die down here and lose it all if I continue, so let’s try and make it back to town so I can heal. I carefully crept back through the dungeon, nervously sweating and biting my lip, and just barely made it out and back to town before farming a level up real quick, and at that moment I became convinced that the risk-reward around losing your XP made the game more exciting and interesting. Getting game over and having to walk back across the overworld to the dungeon I also ended up somewhat liking, since the items you find in the dungeons can make shortcuts for the trek back. It felt like a good way to make getting the items and then losing sting a bit less. It’s not as cool for me as the XP loss thing, but in the end I was surprised to find an appreciation for something that just seemed annoying at first.

I will admit that the Great Palace is a nightmare hell dungeon. Even with the map I was drawing for myself, it was really hard to keep track of where I was. Some of the rooms are just downright cruel too. I could not figure out a way to consistently fight the Fokkas (the jumping bird knights) and I found it really frustrating, not to even get into the final bosses. I can’t quite bring myself to call it a badly designed dungeon because the labyrinthine nature isn’t really unfair, it’s just kind of a lot, and I feel like if I were a better player it wouldn’t have been so painful dealing with the enemies, but shit, that was too much for me.

If you are interested in trying this game yourself, here’s some advice:

• If you are playing the NES rom on an emulator, PLEASE use a hack to remove the rapid color flashing when you die. This effect is awful and very aggressive, like I would not be even a little surprised if it has killed people in real life. By far the worst part of the game, and it has been patched out in every official re-release for good reason.

• Any time an NPC tells you something meaningful or you see something you might want to remember, write it down. This game is way less cryptic than people sometimes make it out to be, but that’s only if you listen carefully to the hints and keep note of them.

• Similarly, when you go into the dungeons, get a few sheets of paper and draw a basic map for yourself as you go. People complain a lot about the dungeons being confusing and difficult to navigate and this completely negates that problem. It only takes a little time and, in my opinion, is actually pretty fun.

• If you struggle with fighting the Iron Knuckles (the knight guys with the shields), you should know that you can hit their head even when they have the shield held high. Jump next to/towards them, and slash in the air while you are falling next to them. If you do it right, you can hit them consistently and it makes fighting these guys way less frustrating.