Why Zelda II is never gonna be like The Beegees
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1988)
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1988)
I’ll tell you a movie scene that always struck a chord with me, shall I? It comes from Saturday Night Fever, of all things. An iconic film of course, 1977, disco, The Bee Gees, Travolta throwing shapes, you can’t not know it. It’s actually my mother’s favourite film, and the other films she likes best are usually from the Ice Age series. So you’d forgive me for thinking that Saturday Night Fever was just a silly film, a bit of a laugh.
I’m sure I’m not the only one, right? Anyone would think that the vast majority of the movie was basically a disco-themed musical, with a rudimentary love story bolted onto the front for wider appeal. You could more or less relay a synopsis of it to people using just the songs on its incredible soundtrack, I thought.
So when I watched Saturday Night Fever and saw Travolta frustrated with his dead end job, frustrated with his father and frustrated with the girls that attach themselves to his group, I was pleasantly surprised. And when Travolta then tells us that all these girls must make the decision to become “nice girls or c**ts” from an early age, well, I was amazed.
This was quite a bit grittier and downbeat then I ever would have imagined. How the director (Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird’s brother, no less) managed to make a thought-provoking, sometimes grim movie with Night Fever and You Should Be Dancing playing in the background, I’ll never know. But he did it.
And then there’s the scene I’m talking about, where Travolta’s clergyman brother comes back to his parental home, having jacked in the priesthood. Though he’s a bit ashamed of it, Travolta secretly finds himself happy about this bit of news.
It means he’s now no longer the black sheep mess-up of the family, just because he fancies a dance in the old disco every Saturday night. In fact, you almost start to see his undisputed status as King of the Disco being accepted, reluctantly, by the rest of his family. He’s great at some of the things he does, and finally he’s getting some recognition for it. I did like that angle a lot.
But that’s the thing with being a black sheep, you know. You’ll definitely get a real kick out of being different and doing your own thing, at least for a while. But while you’re out there trail-blazing, your peers take fright and begin to conform to normality instead.
That’s when the tables begin to turn on you. You begin to be seen less and less as some sort of alternative, bohemian figure and more and more as a freak. The pressure is now on you to stop doing your own thing, and be like the rest. Will you subscribe to the hive mentality?
We know that Zelda II: The Adventure of Link never did. Released in the West in 1988, this still stands out as the bona fide black sheep in the long running Legend of Zelda series. The original Zelda game laid new boundaries for gaming as a whole, and like a certain 1970s disco film, it became commercially and critically successful even beyond optimistic expectation.
Now, the Zelda series and its traits have been long established following the original game, but until the 1990s, they hadn’t been set in stone. The wriggle room was there to do something a little bit different with the inevitable Zelda sequel.
But Zelda II is so far removed from its predecessor that they might as well have thrown out the grammatically treacherous “story” they give you at the beginning of the game. Instead they should have hit you with the classic Monty Python intro, “and now for something completely different.”
With all that out of the way, I can tell you something you surely already know: the Zelda series, in 1988, looked like it was going to morph from a wide-open, top-down action-adventure, into a side-scrolling hacker with RPG elements.
Oh? Is that a snort of derision I hear? Well, it’s definitely a radical move, the biggest departure Zelda had ever taken from its usual mojo – a mojo that was criticised endlessly for being overly formulaic, until Breath of the Wild came out and turned everything upside-down.
You could draw an easy conclusion from the fact that we haven’t seen anything in the series even remotely like Zelda II since it released. That’s bad news, right? But the use of Zelda II’s town names in Ocarina of Time as sage names, and some of the moves and music in the Smash Bros games coming directly from here, suggests that this game is not an experiment that the Nintendo bigwigs are ashamed of.
The usual flow of a Zelda game is actually intact, when you look at it closely. You’ve still got dungeons to find and explore, six in total plus a final palace that’ll melt your brain. Each of the dungeons contains items, keys, bosses and such to take care of a well. It’s just… done a whole lot differently from what we’re used to.
Instead of directly fighting enemies on the overworld map, touching their icons transports Link to a little side-scrolling stage where several enemies, almost all of them cheap and far too hard-hitting, constantly harass him and fire objects at him.
Bop all of these enemies down with your cute little sword to earn experience points and level up, so that you can increase your health, attack power and magic reserves – you’ve done it all before by now, I’m sure, although never in a Zelda game.
Magic in this game comes in the form of some basic spells, like the ability to jump higher, double your defence, reflect magic attacks… or turn into a fairy. You can find extra Magic and Heart Containers, just like in the original, although there’s only four of each.
One of the more strategic elements in the game lies in how you can choose which stat to augment when you finally do spam your way to a level-up. Increasing your health and magic stats simply means you get more oomph out of whatever Heart and Magic Containers you managed to track down, a bit like making an engine more efficient.
And let me tell you, you’ll need every itty bit of experience that you can get your mitts on here, because Lord is this game tough at times. If it’s not bottomless pits, it’s enemies that take about ten thwacks of your sword to defeat. And in another unusual move, you even have limited lives in Zelda II, just three from the outset.
Lose your three lives and you go all the way back to the starting point, minus any outstanding experience points you had that didn’t quite add up to a vital level-up. That could be thousands of experience points, so this is desperately annoying – especially if you’ve fallen into lava three times in quick succession while fighting Barba, and now you’ve got to trek all the way back to the other side of Hyrule just to have another go.
What you’ll soon lament as well is that there’s no maps in the dungeons, and unlike in Zelda 1, the architect was talented enough to design these dungeons with several floors this time, making them very labyrinthine indeed. A guide is again very useful here.
The graphics of Zelda II are decent enough again, not ugly at all in comparison to hundreds of other NES games. The music and sound effects serve as well; the battle theme in particular is chirpy and catchy, a genuine winner.
It’s just a shame that the game, although rather playable, suffers from some insane difficulty at times. It usually ends up being difficult to the point of frustrating, especially the Great Palace which serves as the final dungeon, if you manage to get that far. But if you’ve got no patience, and I rarely ever do, then you’re going to get fed up of indulging this one.
But is it a game worth playing? Absolutely, even if it’s only as a curious experiment. You never know, you might even rather like it, although I suspect you’ll suffer it for about 60% of the way through at most, before sacking it off and moving on to Zelda as it should be. That’s a bit sad, but oh well. Black sheep don’t set out to be liked by everyone.
27 June 2023