Cons: Unforgiving, frustrating at times, repetitive.
The Bottom Line: If you're a die-hard Zelda fan, with dedicated patience for tedium, then go for it. If you're curious about this aged game, don't hold any expectations/comparisons to recent Zelda titles.
wsmunch's Full Review: Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for Game Boy Advan...
I remember when this game first came out and I remember the excitement I felt at trying to play for the very first time. I was pretty young, and the fun & successes of the first Zelda game were still vivid in my mind. After meddling with the game Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for awhile I ended up getting frustrated and left it alone after that. So we fast-forward over 10 years to the present day and I've brought it upon myself to challenge the game that easily defeated the younger me. I figgured that my youth and general inexperience in videogames was reason enough I was having troubles with The Adventure of Link. Now that I am quite the seasoned player, this old Nintendo game shouldn't prove too much difficulty, right?
Now that I'm done and have beaten the game, I'm still trying to decide how I feel about The Adventure of Link. I can't say that it was much fun, at least consistently. After a certain point (rather during.. during the attempt at completing the fourth dungeon) the game started to turn into a chore as opposed to a lark as I had hoped. Most people would have given up already and permanently tossed it aside to play something different. If it weren't for my steeled determination to complete the game and notch another conquest in my gamer-belt, I would have quit by the third dungeon to return to the store to demand a refund. When asked by my fiance, "well if you don't like playing it so much.. why are you still playing it?!", my reply was "..because it's p!ssing me off". Now there are those who swear by this black-sheep of a game and feel that The Adventure of Link is the greatest and most unique Zelda game there is. I'll concede that it's definitely unique, which is why it's the only Zelda title that has this particular type of gameplay. They stopped the nonsense real good for all the rest of the Zelda games. The major issue that I have with this game is it's unforgiving nature. The minor issue that I have with this game are that it feels like it was haphazardly slapped together to ride the coattails of the success of the first Zelda.
*** GAMEPLAY ***
This is a side-scrolling Zelda game. There are only two types of screens that you'll be playing on: the side-scrolling screens, and the world map screen. All you're able to do on the map screen is move Link around from place to place, and engage with monsters. Once you've engaged a monster, entered a town/place, or entered a dungeon, you'll switch to the side-scrolling adventure screen. The buttons are simple, B attacks with your sword and A jumps. You naturally block with your shield as long as you're not in mid-attack and that you're correctly blocking either high or low. The select button will cast your chosen spell, while the start button will bring up your character info. The character information shows your list of spells to choose from & their mana cost, lives left, keys available, crystals still left, and collected items. On the world map the start button pauses the game. Link starts off with 3-bar health and mana, and as he takes hits or casts magic the bars will go down. Damage done and magic used are reduced as a portion of the entire bar, so enhancements will reduce the amount taken (as opposed to losing a bar at a time). As you adventure, you will (hopefully) find heart and mana containers which will increase your respective bars by one apiece. Link only has 3 lives, and once all lives are used up then the game is over, though you can choose to continue the game or to save your progress (like you're ready to stop for now and play more later). Either option will keep the progress that you have made, with the exception of defeated enemies and the points gained toward the next powerup. As Link eliminates enemies he'll start to accrue experience points, and once enough have been acquired then you'll have the option to level up a strength. It starts off at 100 points, and each next strength takes more than the last to level it up. It starts off with health at 100, mana at 150, weapon at 200, and it keeps increasing in greater amounts after that. You can choose to skip leveling up the available strength and save the points for the next trade-in point. The benefits of the leveling up would be less damage taken, less mana used for spells, and more damage dealt with your sword. Points will stay with Link until all his lives are lost. Once you have a game-over, you lose all the current experience points and have to start back from zero (so lets say if your next target was 4000 points and you were 2 points away and had a game over, you're starting all the way back from zero to get to the 4000 again).
When you're on the world map, you'll be able to walk around for a few seconds before 3 monsters icons appear and start wiggling around with a frenzy. If you're on the main road you're safe from attacks. Otherwise, if Link bumps into one of these off the main road then you'll go to the side-scrolling mode so you can defeat or retreat. Of the icons, there will be little blob-like ones, which indicate weaker enemies, and a humanoid-like one, which indicates a stronger enemy. Sometimes you'll see fairies pop up and bumping into them will let you regain all your health back. If you manage to evade the monsters for long enough then a second set will appear and there will be 6 monster icons running around back and forth waiting for you to run into them (or vice versa). Once you enter a town or dungeon, or engage with enemies, all the current ones will disappear. Once you're in the side-scrolling screen the enemies will go through their motions of attack and it's left to you to dispose of them or to run. The screens have a predetermined length so once you've run to either end far enough then you leave the battle. The type of terrain and the area on the map will determine what type of enemies Link will encounter when you're engaging with monsters. There are towns located through the entire map, though they serve more as a resting point or a beacon of progress. The towns are side-scrolling as well and are key to getting through the game. Each town has residents that will recharge your health and mana. Some of the residents will give you obscure "hints" on how to progress through a certain area, or attempt to clue you in to treasures or abilities and stuff. What's most important is that each town will provide you with a new spell that is absolutely necessary to acquire if you want to be able to progress to/through the next dungeon.
Dungeons are located through the map and aren't necessarily close to any particular town either. The dungeons are side-scrolling like town and monster encounters, but they are multi-leveled and require thorough exploration before being able to complete it. Each dungeon has elevators that will give you access to different levels, and each dungeon has locked doors and keys that are strewn throughout to hinder your progress. Enemies defeated in a dungeon will stay gone, until you lose all your lives and have to continue. Successful navigation of each dungeon will equip Link with a new item and put him face-to-face with the dungeon's final boss. The defeat of the boss will gain a goodly amount of experience and allow Link to deposit one of his crystals there, which marks the destruction of the dungeon and puts him one step closer to accessing the final dungeon. Link starts off with 6 crystals, and each crystal is for each of the dungeons that are needed to be destroyed in order to break down each of the 6 barriers that prevent access to the final dungeon. Simple enough.
There is no enemy AI in this game. Every creature, even the bosses, will go through their motions of attack. There is no smart way of defeating the enemies. There is only the punctual timing of buttons that will let you kill creatures without taking damage in return. In many cases it's impossible to take out certain enemies without taking damage. The attack patterns are predictable to a certain extent, but there is always that little bit of variance that can throw off expectations from one encounter to the next.
*** GRAPHICS, SOUND, STORY & COPYCAT ***
It's nothing really new or revolutionary. It's all very 8-bit. The world map terrain looks like it came straight from the original Zelda with some improvements, though there seems to be less creativity when it came to designing the actual map itself. There are large stretches of plain, mountain, river, forest, etc with a lot of wasted space in the middle. There really isn't much in terms of landmarks or even points of interest. Each terrain piece is blocky and everything has that easy-made, bland, mundane feel to it. Creature translation from the original Zelda is pretty good. You kinda roam around "exploring" until some monsters bump into you. The sound is very 8-bit, though it is familiar to the Zelda series. The music has slight variation, but it's really inconsequential. It was only background noise to my intermittent cursing, really. There isn't much of a story either, except that you need to defeat Gannon and save Zelda. The NPCs in the game offer practically nothing in terms or story or environment either. You just get the offhand comments and semi-nonsensical hints for progression.
Now I DID notice elements in the game that were much too familiar to other games. Firstly, the character style and especially the sword-beam animation seems familiar to the Rambo: First Blood game that I remember playing during that time too. It's really uncanny. There are monsters in the game that act exactly like the shy-guys from Super Mario 2. I know they're supposed to be octaroks, but they hop & spit bullets just like the shy-guys. They're the same shape and size too, though I think that Mario 2 had better detail on this enemy type than The Adventure of Link does. In the dungeons, there are enemies that float through an area in a sine-wave pattern, just like the medusa heads from the Castlevania series on the Nintendo system. There is another enemy type that throws an endless amount of maces in an arc, just like the hammer brothers that are in the original Super Mario. You also have flying fish (but the ones in The Adventure of Link are usually skeleton flying fish) that you encounter when you're crossing over bridges. Sound familiar? Yup, that from the original Super Mario as well. Even some of the dungeon levels look a bit too familiar to the sewer levels from the original Super Mario. I'm sure that there are other elements in this game that "borrow" from other games, but these are the ones that immediately stood out for me. I didn't check the release dates of any of these games, so I don't know who might really be copying who. I do know that these games all came out relatively close to each other. Maybe they had the same game designers? Regardless, it just feels like a cheap rehash of something I've faced in another titles.
*** BITE YOUR LIP ***
So the game doesn't sound too bad, right? Well it takes a bit of playing before the frustration starts to settle in. There isn't really a learning curve on how to play, just a learning curve on how to stay alive and make things count. Here are reasons that I feel the game would not be fun for many people:
• Enemies will kill you easily until you've leveled up your health and sword strengths. You don't really get to relax until you're about level 4 in each of your strengths. Some have given up the game before this point, since the interest to stick it out can start to fade pretty quick. Enemies can hurt Link more than the experience gained from their disposal.
• Some enemies are relentless and make it so the only tactic available is to defeat them fast while taking the least amount of damage. There are some enemies that throw endless daggers or boomerangs to the point where you can't block everything (especially if boomerangs are coming at you from both directions both high and low). If you're playing defensive you're likely to die fast. If you're playing offensive you're likely to be hasty and miss proper timing. Timing and alacrity mean everything.
• The game doesn't get easier until Link gets the magic to heal himself, since the only other way to regain health is by a fairy or stopping in a town. Fairies and towns don't spawn when you're in the middle of a dungeon, but magic potions do. The heal spell is the third spell learned (meaning you've already completed two dungeons and learned the spells of the previous two towns), and by this time many people have already given up.
• Having only 3 lives really sucks. At higher strength levels, where you have to get thousands of points, you start to debate if you truly want to progress through the dungeon and risk losing all that experience you've gained. The safe route would be to find a town and start fighting enemies outside of the town to collect the necessary experience to gain the level, while hopping back into town to heal up. This is BORING. The first Zelda had you get better shields, armors, and swords to survive longer, but your progress was never reset due to the fact that you died.
• Hints are obscure, though what's worse is the necessity for random wandering. Certain spells cannot be learned, and certain places cannot be accessed until Link has a needed random encounter. For example (spoiler), there is a mirror that is needed to learn a spell in one of the towns, but WHO KNEW (unless you peeked at gamefaqs.com) you had to press the attack button next to a table while in one of the houses in that town to find it (or unless you just tweak the attack button everywhere)? There is an NPC that you have to talk to before you can gain access to part of the third town which you learn the healing spell from. This NPC has an unidentified spot on the map within reasonable distance from the town (if you take the entire world map into perspective). Unless you like wandering each inch of the map to see if you're missing something hidden, you'll be pretty mad if you didn't luck out and find it on accident.
• Dungeons are completed through repetition, not ingenuity. By the time you've completed a dungeon, you've done enough passes through it to have the way memorized and know what to expect. It's usually a new area in the dungeon that you go into that kills you, ends the game and makes you start all over from the beginning of the dungeon again. Some who are a bit better at getting through dungeons less-harmed might have to draw a map of the dungeon as to not keep going the same way as before. Yeah, that's right, you don't get maps or compasses in this game. Some of the later dungeons get a bit more complex, and unless you have it memorized and know where you're going AND where you've been, you're just going to spin your wheels in there not doing much.
• Each time you start the game (regardless of saving or continuing or whatnot) you always start at the beginning location of the game. If your progress is further on the world map, then you're subject to the tedium of repeating the same path to get back to the point that you need to go to, since its near-linear. Once again, this lack of diversity sucks and isn't much fun.
• If you're in too much of a rush to get where you want to be (because you don't want to deal with the stuff you've already been through), you're likely to make a mistake and take unwanted damage, or maybe even lose a life. This only compounds the frustration since you're tired of having to go through the areas that you've already been in and since you desire having as many lives as possible for the boss encounter for the dungeons.
• After playing through enough of the game, you start to feel how cheap the entire "adventure" is. The dungeons, NPCs, and world map are quite unimaginative, and the enemies lose their flavour real fast. The steps to completing the game are actually too simple: wander to town, get spell, beat enemies, find & defeat dungeons 1-6, find final dungeon, beat boss. Include "stay alive", "be patient", and "explore" in there too. Notice the lack of "secrets" and "mysteries". There are only a few heart and magic containers to collect, and you'll generally run into them anyway.
• The game is actually really short. If you cut out all the unnecessary repetition (like if they didn't have the 3-life, start-over, haha, thing going on), then you can finish this game in a matter of hours. The time sink in the game is the needless running around, needless re-starting over, and all the random enemy encounters that happen inbetween.
*** PLAY IT? OR NOT? ***
Now if this game didn't have some entertaining elements, I wouldn't have finished it. There is some satisfaction at completing each next dungeon, solving the semi-randomness of the puzzles (easter-egging), and the type of combat that The Adventure of Link offers. I like how you have to learn to block with your shield well (until the it turns ridiculous), and learn to defeat familiar enemies with an array of attacks and spells, and having to do minor technical-jumping and avoiding pitfalls. I think that my determination to beat the game drove me moreso than whatever fun I could derive from it, though. The game isn't really that hard when you break it down, and it really isn't that long either. Maybe some will say that I just "suck" for not liking it and being a "sissy" for complaining, but I'd rather be given a serious challenge. Instead, this Zelda game throws me through a gauntlet of luck and perfectly-timed button presses and calls it a challenge. Compared to the first title, this Zelda release has much less to offer in terms of exploration and plain 'ol adventuring. It's VERY linear. What happened to my bow & arrows, anyway? What happened to my bombs? What happened to rupees and buying stuff? What happened to MY BOOMERANG?!? Oh wait, they all got traded in for the ability to turn into a fairy or to jump higher, via spellcasting. The original Zelda is thrice the game The Adventure of Link is for fun, adventure, items, secrets, dungeons, and exploring. Lame. And the same goes to all the claims that this game is an RPG as well. Just because I can get crappy hints from townsfolk and I have to gain experience to make myself more powerful, doesn't mean that the game is an RPG. Is this a classic? Yes. Despite how sloppy of a game it is, yes. Do I like it? No. Do I hate it? No. Is it any good at all? My best, honest answer would be "meh".
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