Zelda 2

For the last few weeks I have been on a Zelda kick. First I beat the Super Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda:A Link To The Past. I last played it in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and ninety eight. I remember my baby sister at the time whining that I had traded in a Mickey Mouse game and Cool Spot. I still rub this in to this day.

It is still a great game, even though I was playing it wrong. See after I beat Link to the Past, I played the original Zelda for the NES. Honestly I had never completed the original Zelda. I made a few false starts over the years. I remember playing it over a weekend in 1999 when my sister was in the Birmingham Hospital. I got to the fifth dungeon and gave up for some reason.

So I started the original Zelda right after I beat Link to The Past. Searching for the second dungeon I had a revelation. I had been playing Zelda games wrong. I was playing Zelda like it was Mario or Megaman or Ninja Gaiden. Zelda is more about the journey than the actual boss.

I had a grand old time exploring southern Hyrule and discovering all of its secrets. Eventually it was time to enter the final level to battle GANON. Let me tell you something, Ganon does not want to be found.

That is one of the hardest levels, I have ever encountered on a video game. I can think of one or two stages more difficult, but not by a large margin. So I killed Ganon and started on Zelda 2:The Adventure of Link.

Zelda 2 is a game I rented once or twice as a boy and could make no headway in the game. I never beat the first dungeon until I was seventeen. I had this beat up copy of it. It so beat up the front of the cart was broken off. But I abandoned Zelda 2 again quickly enough.

I finally beat it in the year of our lord two thousand and seven. It was on my wonderful NES emulator disc for my old Dreamcast. But to get thru the game, I admit to a shameful amount of cheating to get past Death Mountain.

My past as a cheater haunted me and Zelda 2 sat on my Wii shaming me by its mere presence. But I started on it and completed the first palace quickly enough.


I encountered some problems in the second palace. Mainly getting thru the swamp it was located in with my three lives in tact. But after some training in the field, I skipped ahead to Death Mountain, got the hammer and whipped some ass.

After that I got through the game fairly uneventfully. The thing with Zelda 2 is it stands alone. Nintendo never used the engine again and half assed research tells me they deemed it a failure creatively. But through out the game I kept thinking of how much potential the Zelda 2 engine had. If they had added more weapons, made the long range attacks more effective. In ways it feels like the best Sega Master System game.

From a dramatic stand point, I think Ganon should have been resurrected somehow so Link could kill him again.

In the end it is a very fun game once you gain more experience and attacks. It just leaves you wanting more.