Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES Review) Includes Review of Quality of Life ROM Hack

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released January 14, 1987 (JPN) December 1, 1988* (US)
Directed by Tadashi Sugiyama & Yasuhisa Yamamura
Developed by Nintendo
Available with a Switch Online Subscription

*The release window of this one is, ahem, weird.

Originally, I planned to only play a quality of life ROM hack of Zelda II and make that my final word on the game, but after I beat Zelda 2 Redux and started writing up my review, this niggling little voice in my head said “Cathy, you know damn well Zelda fans are going to play tetherball with your immortal soul if you don’t do the original game too.” And now the original game is the main review and the ROM hack is the tacked-on bonus, go figure. Still, I’m actually happy that I did it this way. I’d previously tried Zelda II a couple times in my teens and didn’t like it at all. If I didn’t have this blog, I likely never would have played it again.

But I do have this blog, and people seemed to like my Zelda 1 review. Of course, that’s a universally beloved game and I didn’t have any controversial opinions on it. Meanwhile, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is probably the single most polarizing 8-bit game ever. Its biggest fans really like it, while many Zelda fans call it easily the worst game in the franchise. I’m somehow between them AND also on the “worst Zelda game” boat. Well maybe not on THE boat. More like I’m being tugged on a dingy behind it while holding up flags that say “DON’T FORGET ABOUT PHANTOM HOURGLASS!” and “DON’T FORGET ABOUT SPIRIT TRACKS” and the name of the dingy is the USS F*CK TOUCH CONTROLS.

For some franchises, there’s usually a debate on which game in the series would wear the title of “the weird one.” Not with Zelda. The only way that happens is if some insufferably smug jackass waves the three CD-i games that were not published by Nintendo, made by non-Nintendo-approved studios, and only exist as an IOU to Phillips after Nintendo decided to cancel their partnership with them for the SNES CD-ROM. As far as Nintendo-made Zeldas go, the only real options for “the weird one” are this, the Game & Watch (which I gave a NO! to) the GameCube-to-GBA “Connectivity” release Four Sword Adventures and its Nintendo DS sibling Tri-Force Heroes, the latter two of which I’ve never really played. Except the Game & Watch is non-canon and the other two have mechanics that are unmistakably Zelda-like. Meanwhile, Zelda II was apparently never even meant to be a mainline Zelda game.

Miyamoto wanted a game where you used UP and DOWN on the D-Pad for offense and defense, which wouldn’t really work in a top-down game and required a genre swap. Releasing Adventure of Link not as a spinoff but as a direct sequel Zelda 1 was made after production had already started, likely as a last second decision made once they knew the first game was a hit and they wanted to hedge their bets. Hilariously, at the time they had no clue that North America was not going to be getting the actual Super Mario 2 and instead would be getting that silly game they made with Fuji Television with a festival’s Arabian-themed characters replaced with Mario ones. I’m trying to imagine the complete shock early NES owners must have felt when the sequels to the two most popular games bore little resemblance to the games they fell in love with. It would be like making a sequel to Joker as a musical with Lady Gaga. For a lot of people, Adventure of Link is that Joker sequel: nothing like they hoped for and a complete disaster.

Despite having Link, similarly-themed enemies, items, and even the laser sword at full health, Adventure of Link never feels like a Zelda game. Not even a little bit. Its closest kin up to this point? Actually, it’s probably Urban Champion, the staple of “worst Nintendo game” lists that I genuinely don’t think is that bad. Take Urban Champion’s high/low combat, significantly speed it up, and replace the bare fists with a dagger. Oh, they can call it a “sword” all they want, but again, it never feels like a sword. It has too limited range for that. Not that it’s bad or anything. Combat carries the day in Zelda II, feeling very violent, painful, and impactful thanks to excellent sound design. I dare say there’s an almost slasher-movie quality to the combat of Zelda II. They could have called this Stabby McStabface The Stab-Happy Stabber’s Adventures in Stabland because God DAMN the combat is so satisfying, and that’s before I get to the defensive side of things.

I put a LOT of stock in an action game’s defensive equation. Any studio can make a game where hitting things is satisfying and there’s plenty of bad games that do just that. Keeping players honest with well-designed attack patterns and defensive maneuvers is often what separates the good from the bad. Defense actually does matter in Zelda II. By golly, your shield is an actual shield that requires timing and positioning, but it does work. Blocking a projectile that’s about to hit you from behind with a well-timed pivot is as satisfying as the stabs are. Then there’s the combat against any of the soldier-type of enemies, whether they’re knights, skeletons, lizards, or bird creatures. It could take a lot of effort to land a shot, lending the resulting fights a cinematic quality that reminded my father of the skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts. The fact that I even have to think about whether or not I like Zelda II as a whole speaks volumes to how good the combat is, because literally every other aspect of the game fails in some way.

Zelda II’s structure is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Right from the start, the pacing is spectacularly off. There’s a massive gap between the first and second dungeons that includes the Death Mountain cavern maze. A maze of this type is usually a late-game trope, and while I do appreciate any game that experiments with convention, it’s just so wrongly out of place this early in the game and saps all the excitement that Zelda II had built-up to this point. As if Zelda II doesn’t already hurt badly enough for having to manually exit every single cave you enter even though big enemies don’t respawn. I think the idea is that it’s supposed to make the game more immersive because if you explore a cave in real life, you don’t just magically teleport out when you’re done. Yeah? Cool, which is why I don’t explore caves in real life and instead spend my free time playing FANTASY video games.

And it’s not like the level one-to-level two structure was a one-off blip. The stuff you must do between each of the remaining dungeons is equally nonsensically paced-out. Sometimes the next step after beating one dungeon is making your way directly to the next one. For sh*ts and giggles, I’ll just count the steps in StrategyWiki’s Zelda II walkthrough. While there’s some wiggle room in specific steps, this still gives a fairly accurate snapshot of Zelda II’s one-game crusade against the concept of game flow.

• Starting the game to (#1) Parapa Palace: 3 steps split into 5 parts.
• Parapa Palace to (#2) Midoro Palace: 8 steps split into 21 parts.
• Midoro Palace to (#3) Island Palace: 1 step split into 3 parts.
• Island Palace to (#4) Maze Palace: 7 steps split into 12 parts.
• Maze Palace to (#5) Ocean Palace: 1 step split into 2 parts.
• Ocean Palace to (#6) Hidden Palace: 5 steps split into 12 parts.
• Hidden Palace to (#7) Great Palace: 1 step divided into 2 parts.

Update: Yes, you don’t have to go through Death Mountain between levels 1 and 2. I assume the guide I used put the highest premium on building up your life/magic. As I noted, there’s some wiggle room, and regardless, other palaces will have inconsistent spacing.

So even if you ignore the change in genre and the tacked-on experience system, Zelda II is deeply problematic just in terms of spacing-out the big, key moments. And then there’s the actual design of the dungeons, which doesn’t do a lot to alleviate the tedium. Although Zelda II’s dungeons are better than the mansions in Simon’s Quest, the two share a lot in common in that the format is too limited. Most of the rooms are just corridors, and the enemy placement becomes predictable. There’s not a lot in the way of clever structural design. You walk to the end of one hallway until you find a key, a lock, or a dead end, then you find an elevator and do it all over again. Besides the ramped-up final dungeon, only level six (Hidden Palace) really stood out as “strongly designed” in terms of layout because exploration leaned heavier into trying things the other dungeons didn’t do, including a clever bit where you have to quickly cast a spell as soon as you enter a room that works because there’s no tangible penalty for not figuring it out immediately.

Otherwise, there’s just too many flat rooms and dead ends. The good news is that enemies in the dungeons are typically the strongest in terms of design and threat. BUT, just like the caves in the overworld, major enemies don’t respawn unless you leave the dungeon entirely, which wasn’t wise given the amount of backtracking that finding your way through a dungeon can require. This is no doubt tied to the level-up system that adds absolutely nothing to the game. The enemies that are the most fun to fight also pay-off the highest, and even by 1987, Nintendo knew they had to prevent grinding. Zelda II was released in the wake of Dragon Quest blowing up the Famicom scene, and Nintendo wanted some of that chowder. They should have recognized that there’s a big difference between turn-based games and action-oriented ones. There’s no excuse either, because the entire stated point of the gameplay was the combat, but the steps taken to prevent grinding also assured that a LOT of combat would be removed. The better answer would have been to just drastically reduce the value of enemies. Did the knights really need to pay between 50XP and 150XP? And it’s all for naught as the system is easy to exploit anyway. It was a BAD idea to automatically grant you the next level up when you finish a level and it’s SO easy to abuse.

And that brings me to the biggest problem of Zelda II: too much of it feels like it’s trying to please fans of all games at the expense of the core concept. The platforming is there for Super Mario fans. The XP system is there for Dragon Quest fans. What’s there for Zelda fans? Well, sprites that are based on enemies from that game, but no actual gameplay of substance. It didn’t have to be that way, either. Instead of an XP system, I would have easily preferred finding upgrades to your sword, shield, and armor through items found via exploration. One thing about RPGs is that leveling up isn’t an event in the same way an item find, a boss battle, or a new area opening up to exploration is. In Zelda 1, getting the White Sword and Magic Sword are big deals. That’s out the window here. The attempts at replacing those situations with things like the lost child, the water of life, etc, fall flat because those are one-off fetch quests. You don’t know you’re getting the fairy spell when you get the water of life. It’s sprung on you after the fact. Instead of taking the water back to the village, following clues that takes you to an item that gives you that ability would have been SO much cooler.

There’s plenty of other examples of pacing opportunities that were sacrificed to the experience system. Late in the game, enemies start spitting fireballs at you that your shield can’t block natively. You have to cast the REFLECT spell, which literally makes no sense since you’re not actually reflecting those types of shots. The only REFLECTing happens in the fourth level (and a couple rooms in the sixth level), where the magic waves shot by Wizzrobes and the giant wizard boss Carock must be used against them. They could have easily hid a fire shield somewhere in the gigantic but mostly barren overworld that protects against fireballs, which would be a big item for the final level where seemingly everything spits fire instead of laser balls, but nope. That’s what really gets me most of all: Zelda 1 is overflowing with hidden stuff. In Zelda II, what little hidden stuff there is feels samey and underwhelming. The only upgrades happen via leveling-up, and you never know when that’ll happen. It’s out of the design’s hands, which is why the pacing is so awful.

As a sequel to Legend of Zelda, the stuff added like the level system, magic spells, and random encounters are so underwhelming in comparison to the things that define Zelda that aren’t here, like bombs, arrows, rupee collecting, and in-game items. Every item you get in Zelda II is passive, or used only in the overworld. Only the magic spells buff combat, and they only work for the specific screen you’re on. Like, you can’t kill the spiders or the things that I literally just found out at this moment are Zoras without the fire magic. But there’s only a couple enemies you need the fire magic to kill per screen, then you have to cast it all over again. They fixed this with A Link to the Past, removing the middleman and just having every magic item take a tiny bit of magic to use, but that doesn’t really help Zelda II’s experience, does it?

Now that I’ve finished some version of Zelda II three times (I beat the ROM hack I’m about to review a few years ago), I’ve come to the conclusion that the majority of the hatred for Zelda II wouldn’t exist if this was anything but the sequel to The Legend of Zelda. Had they ditched Link, Zelda, and the Triforce and called this anything else, I think it would be remembered as an average early NES adventure. One that was made too early in the genre to fully understand how to implement things like XP systems or how to properly craft the world of an adventure of this scale. Instead of being the red-headed stepchild of Zelda, it would instead be more like Kid Icarus or Metroid. A worthy experiment that didn’t age well, and certainly not some kind of instant masterpiece like Nintendo’s best work up to this point, but not a disaster.

Even Miyamoto himself calls Zelda II a “sort of failure” and one of the few games Nintendo did that didn’t get better and better as development went along. I’m not going to argue with him so I’m giving Adventure of Link a NO!, but it was closer than I expected. I’m always fascinated by those kinds of opinions from legendary media figures, like how Spielberg hated Hook or how Walt Disney said Alice in Wonderland had no heart. My film buff sister said “the funny thing about both of those? If you had to pick which film from their bodies of work those quotes would be about, I think most people would pick the right ones even without knowing the context.” Neither Hook nor Alice in Wonderland are bad. Zelda II is to Nintendo’s library what those films are to their respective creators. It’s not actively bad so much as it makes too many fatal mistakes that make a potentially good game boring.

As cathartic as the dagger is (I still refuse to call it a sword), it can’t carry a game of this size and this structure over the finish line by itself. I realized this because eventually I did reach the point where I avoided enemies and random encounters because I just wanted to get it over with. I didn’t enjoy the overworld, the towns, the magic, or really even the dungeons at all. Honestly, the verdict should never have even been up for debate. The combat wasn’t so much the saving grace as it was the life support machine that kept the body fresh while it awaited organ harvesting for better games yet to come. That’s why there’s a tragedy to Zelda II. It was made early enough in the action-RPG genre that it was certainly a game that led to many valuable lessons on what NOT to do that made future games better. But for Nintendo, this was it. They never really did another game like it. Had Adventure of Link been an entirely new IP, a sequel based on it that applied all the lessons they learned making it could have been truly outstanding. But, because they tied the Zelda brand to it, the only lesson they learned was to never do that again. I’m not a fan of any studio taking that lesson from a worthy experiment.
Verdict: NO!

If you’re wondering why I didn’t talk about the legendary difficulty of Zelda II, it’s because this review isn’t over.

BONUS: QUALITY OF LIFE ROM HACK REVIEW

Zelda 2: Redux
Released December 14, 2021 and updated July 25, 2023
Unauthorized Quality of Life ROM hack of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
Remaster designed by ShadowOne333
Link to Patch at ROMHacking.Net
I use THIS tool to apply patches.

In side-by-side comparisons, the original Zelda II is always on the left while Zelda 2 Redux is always on the right.

The first time I beat Zelda II, it wasn’t THE Zelda II my readers grew up with. It was this ROM hack that contains over forty changes. So many changes great and small that are made to improve the experience that I can’t even list them all, but I’ll talk about the big ones. In addition to a better sprite for Link, the HUD is much more Zelda-like. The health bar is replaced with the traditional Zelda hearts, and your upgrades are better represented. The names of those upgrades, along with the “SPELL” spell are changed to be better reflective of what they do. Now SPELL is instead ENIGMA, and the level-up screen looks like this:

The next biggest change is that every enemy grants XP. Endlessly-respawning enemies like Moblins that you see in random encounters provide no XP. Now, they give 2 points a piece and allow players to grind to their heart’s content. The little jumping kangaroo guys in the dungeons (apparently they’re lions) also pay off 2XP each. In the original build of Zelda II, this isn’t a big deal after the opening twenty to thirty minutes, but it does allow players to power-up a little stronger than natural for the first dungeon. XP payouts have been adjusted too, so like those floating, spongy-ass unicorn heads now pay out 30XP instead of 20XP. Enemies that stole XP when you got hit by them no longer do.

The most important change for most players will be toning back the difficulty. Enemies have been rebalanced, but that might have been a slight overkill since just changing the cost of performing magic was lowered. That should be helpful enough because using the healing spell doesn’t take half your magic supply. The fireballs from the FIRE spell have been sped-up, a subtle change that yields big results in both gameplay and satisfaction. Enemies also drop more magic bottles, which I found annoying in the main game AND the ROM hack, as ideally that would stop if you already had a full bar. Also the floating unicorn heads and especially the bubbles have had their health reduced. I personally think their XP should have been lowered significantly (I feel that way about all XP) but it is what it is.

For those players from the 80s and early 90s who think Zelda II was too hard, first off, did you have a good strategy guide? Because I found that the walkthrough at StrategyWiki was nearly as effective as this ROM hack. If you did have a guide and it didn’t help, set your expectations accordingly and give Zelda 2 Redux a try, especially if your biggest problem with the design was the difficulty. Like I did with the Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest ROM hack in that review, I’m giving Zelda 2 Redux an honorary YES! for the patch even if the game gets a NO! It’s not a miracle worker, but it does address the most common complaint about Zelda II in a way that I think works as an effective “easy mode.” Like with Simon’s Quest, I’m grateful for the ROM hack because it exposed that Zelda II’s biggest problems have nothing to do with the main thing people have complained about for years. With Simon’s Quest, it was the vagueness, translation, and clunky interface, and the game was still bad when those things (and more) were fixed. Zelda II’s biggest complaint is the brutal difficulty, and it IS a hard game. I think at times Redux goes too far, but I always prefer a game to be too easy instead of too hard because at least with too easy, EVERYONE can experience the game in its entirety.

But Redux’s fixes also prove that Zelda II is just a deeply flawed game in ways a quality of life ROM hack could never fix. Turning Zelda II into an outright good game would require radical changes that go against developer intent. The historically God-awful pacing? That’s still a problem, obviously. So is the boring level design, the foolish XP system, the dullness of the return trip through any cave, the poor ordering of levels, the lack of things to “solve” in a way that feels true to the Zelda brand, and even the structure of the game flow itself. Unless ShadowOne333 was somehow able to stick the Death Mountain maze as the finale before the Great Palace or change the order of the dungeons, this was just going to be a bad game.

The only reason Zelda II isn’t worse, and actually the only reason it’s not in the discussion for Nintendo’s worst action-adventure game, is because it has some very, very good combat. Combat that holds up almost forty years later. While I ultimately gave Zelda II: The Adventure of Link a NO!, I actually had to think about it for quite a while. That’s how good the offensive/defensive system is. It’s a system that could be built off of. Gaming has come so far over the last four decades. A game like this now would be paced much better. Developers would know to play test it extensively, measure the gaps between levels, and adjust accordingly. They were probably just happy to have the thing up and running. Really, a lot of Zelda II’s problems are a product of when it was made. Zelda II is a trailblazer, and one of the drawbacks to that is that it doesn’t have much in the way of a roadmap for what to do and what NOT to do. Instead, it IS the roadmap, and while I didn’t have more fun than not (which is the only thing a game needs to do to get a YES! at IGC), I think Zelda II did leave gaming better than it found it. So, cheers to you, Zelda II and to the whole community that tried hard to make it better. But, there’s really only one way to do that: a direct sequel. I’m guessing that’ll never happen but I’ll cross my fingers, just in case.