The Adventure of Link Part 1: I hate you.

"Burn our crops! Take our homes!
Just don't make us play Zelda II!"

When I last left off on my Zelda II play-through, my save file had been corrupted shortly into the second temple. This was annoying, as it had taken me so much time to get that far that there was no way in hell I was going to do it again.

Fortunately, my friend TheScottishAlien has been playing through the Zelda games at the same time as I have, and has recently made it to Zelda II. We agreed between ourselves that if we played it cooperatively, it would count as a play-through for both of us and we could move on to the next game. As a result, last night was spent playing a drinking game with Scottish and my fiance which involved taking a drink and passing on the controller every time you died. I'll post instructions later. I couldn't drink due to my DD status, but needless to say, headaches were abound this morning.

Anyway, with that preamble out of the way, let's talk a little bit about this game. As I recall, last year I was feeling pretty optimistic that Zelda II would be better than the first one. In fact, it's bad enough to make me wish we were just playing through the original again. Let me explain.

To recap, the point of Zelda II is to wake up the original Princess Zelda by traveling around to the temples across Hyrule and replacing gems in altars to get to the Great Palace. Apparently this Great Palace has the third piece of the triforce in it, the Triforce of Courage (which Link gets to keep in later games - good thing too, he had to slog through this piece of crap to get it.) When all the triforces are reunited, it'll wake up Zelda. Or something like that. 

Check out these sexy graphics.

Zelda II is ugly. I mean, we're talking hideous. Everything is cuboid and totally unremarkable, making dungeons almost impossible to navigate without a physical map (of which there are none in this game) and the overworld so ugly and fluorescent that it makes you want to cry every time you see it. It makes me think fondly back to the original Zelda, where at least they bothered to round things occasionally. 

The overworld itself exists only to make you wail and gnash your teeth. Unlike in the other Zelda games, there's a "life" system - you get three goes, and then it's game over. When you get a game over (roughly every three minutes,) you have to start from the North Palace where Princess Zelda is sleeping. 

I think this is supposed to be a desert.
Note the "enemies" chasing you. If you touch
one of these, you get to battle. Hooray!

A little walk. No big deal, except that the North Palace can be a five or six minute walk away from wherever you need to be. Take into account that you're often dying during boss battles, and you can add another two minutes just to get back to the boss room where you'll die after about three minutes of gameplay. As a result, most of the gameplay time comes from walking back to wherever you need to go from the North Palace. Add in the tedious and pointless random battles on the overworld, and this results in dangerously high blood pressure.

The random battles consist of Link being teleported to a side-scrolling area which can be populated either by one or two weak enemies, loads of really fucking hard enemies, or absolutely nothing. That's right - some of the random battles are literally there just to make your walk back to the temple that much slower. Thanks, Nintendo. 

This game would be cooler with lightcycles.

When you finally get to the temple (denoted on the map by those column-type buildings), the graphics don't get better. Every temple looks nearly identical on the inside, which gives the impression that you've fallen into some kind of medieval Tron. The block pattern on the walls combined with Link's bright tunic eventually gives you motion sickness, and the colors just get brighter as the temples get harder. 

The temples themselves are very difficult to navigate, as all the rooms look extremely similar and are filled with the same three or four types of generic enemies and their respective palette swaps. There are no maps or compasses in this game - you have to remember where you were going and where you are, which is difficult considering there's little in the way of landmarks to guide you.

Finally, this game is punishing. You are repeatedly killed by pits and lava - as there are only three lives before you have to start at the North Palace again, this really sucks. Everything that is not a pre-rendered background does damage. The learning curve is absurd - I can't remember how many times we saw the game over screen last night. The worst part of the game, I think, is that after all that it's really not very long - the length of the game comes solely from the amount of times you die and the length of time it takes to travel back to the dungeon you were in previously. When you actually get to the temples, they're short, totally lacking in puzzles, and genuinely boring.

There is something strangely compelling about this game, though, in that no matter how badly you get your ass kicked, there's a point where you've put so much effort into it that you can't stop. The feeling of absolute asskicking victory you get when you actually manage to do something right is awesome, and beating temples is strangely satisfying even if they are pointless, dreary and cookie-cutter.

We're hoping to finish the game tomorrow night, so I'll post the rest of my thoughts on the game and my review in the next day or so after that. Afterwards, back to Link's Awakening.

Zelda! Zeldaaaaa!!