The Legend of Zelda Part 2: Okay, I saved the princess, does that mean I can stop playing now?

I could give you many excuses as to why this post has been so long in the making. I could tell you that school has been busy, or work has kept me away from Zelda. Unfortunately, none of them would be true.

I actually spent two weeks trying to finish the last two dungeons. Why did it take so long? Let me explain.

Every dungeon after about the 4th level consists of pretty much nothing except palette-swapped enemies and rooms. (Yes, you can even palette-swap a room, apparently!) Although the individual room layouts are completely identical from level to level except for the palette-swapped enemies that are in them, the layouts get increasingly more confusing and require you to bomb walls to get around a lot of the time. This is a Zelda staple and it wouldn't bother me except that there's no indication of which walls you're supposed to bomb.

As a result, every time you enter a room, you waste 2-3 bombs (of a maximum of 8, which eventually increases to 12 if you buy an upgrade) trying to find a doorway which may or may not be there, all while dodging so many enemies that they actually made my NES emulator lag. When you run out of bombs, you have to find and kill enemies which drop them, but unfortunately bomb-drops are not random like they are in the newer Zeldas and only specific enemies in a level have them. That makes working through each level pretty much the most tedious thing ever after about level 6.

The last level in the game is Ganon's Tower, just like it almost always is. This is what took the vast majority of the last two weeks. Let me show you a map of the level somebody made on Gamefaqs in a vain attempt to aid any poor sucker who feels like playing this game:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/nes/file/563433/12037

Everywhere you see those black cracked holes, you needed a bomb to get through. This was the first time in my life I experienced having to draw a little map for myself in order to remember where I was going and where each door led.

After getting through the level, I have to say that Ganon is the worst final boss ever. Besides being a blue pig, he's boring. Basically, he flies around and shoots little balls of fire at you, which if you'd made it through the game in the first place you should be able to easily dodge by now. Just to up the challenge, they made him invisible, so you have to run around like an idiot dodging the balls of fire and swinging your sword. If you hit him, he turns visible for a moment and then continues with his attack pattern.

Eventually, if you catch him enough times, he turns red and you simply shoot a Silver Arrow at him and he dies. One hit, dead. If you didn't find the Silver Arrow in the level, you cannot beat Ganon, and will have to let yourself be killed and try to find your way back all over again.

After you kill Ganon and take the Triforce of Power from his grisly remains, you head back into a modified version of the generic Triforce piece room. There, Princess Zelda is trapped behind a wall of flames (which can easily be swept away by just hitting them with your sword, so I'm not really sure what the point of putting them there in the first place was except as one last "we hate you" from the programmers? Maybe they were hoping the player would have a nervous breakdown at the idea of having to go back into the level to find yet another useless quest item? The Japanese are a mysterious people.)

Anyway, you sweep away the flames, step up to Zelda and the Princess is saved! Yay! You've beaten the game! Surely, there's a grand ending sequence waiting for you! Surely, Nintendo will be calling your home phone number at any moment to congratulate you for your tenacity!

Not exactly. To the left you can see the entirety of The Legend of Zelda's ending sequence.

"Thanks Link, You're the Hero of Hyrule"? Gee, thanks Zelda.

...Actually, now that I think about it, it was Zelda who hid the Triforce pieces in the dungeons across Hyrule, right?


That's better.