Zelda II: The Adventure of Link Review
Played on NSO | Original Release Date 26 September 1988 | Review Date 4 July 2026
OVERVIEW
The second chapter of a successful first outing is going to struggle to capture the magic of the first one. I’m sure The Lost World: Jurassic Park looks at it’s big brother and thinks ‘Where did I go wrong?’. I mean, how do you wow an audience with a groundbreaking experience for a second time? As a massive fan of Jurassic Park, I wanted The Lost World to be better than the first film, but sadly, as we all know it left with a sense of disappointment. As a massive fan of The Legend of Zelda, I wanted Zelda II: The Adventure of Link to be better than the first game….you can guess how this going to pan out.
STORY
The game is a direct sequel to the original game set sixteen years later. Apparently Zelda has a brother and he’s mad at her, because she won’t reveal the secrets of the Triforce to him. In his rage he summons a magician to cast a spell on Zelda which puts her into a deep sleep. The brother realises he’s a jerk, feels bad about what he’s done, so decides to protect Zelda by placing her in a sealed temple for safety - where she sleeps, blissfully unaware that her precious Kingdom of Hyrule is overridden by monsters galore. Link, has a strange sensation on the back of his hand, and sees a mark appear. He show’s it to Impa, who recognises that he can use this mark to open the sealed temple of slumber to try and awaken Zelda. This sets Link off on his quest to find the TriForce of Courage using six crystals that Impa gave him, to open each palace where he must defeat an evil minion of Ganon’s. If Link doesn’t complete his quest and dies along the way, his blood can be used to awaken Ganon from death and Hyrule falling to his evil grip forever.
On paper all of this sound really cool. But in reality we never really discover any of this epic story while playing through the game. You get some insight into the world with cryptic messages from villagers in the town you come across, but these are in the form of convoluted gaming clues that can seem so confusing it might’ve been better to leave them out of the game. Of course there are limitations to what the NES hardware can achieve with storytelling, and most of the details are relegated to the manual for players to read over between play sessions. This approach really allowed the imagination to fill in the gaps with the first game, but for some reason, with this game I wasn’t able to fully let my imagination run wild. I think this is due to the games more ‘linear’ structure. In so much that you are guided down a path to each palace rather than discovering them in a more open-ended way in the first game. Plus the inclusion of the towns and the villagers made the world seem less apocalyptic as people where still getting on with their lives as the world was falling apart around them.
GAMEPLAY
I want to try and give the game some credit. It tried new things such as random encounters and adding a magic meter. It was also willing to forgo the main villain of Zelda universe and introduce lots of new enemies and bosses. But overall the of the changes it makes just didn’t work for me. The combat being the worst culprit.
All the combat takes place in side-scrolling plane, a change from the top-down fighting of the first game. The change in perspective isn’t the problem in and of itself, but is the way Link feels handicapped by a tiny sword and a limited range of attacks to thwart off oncoming enemies. They will swarm from both sides of the screen and force you into twitchy combat that feels cheap and challenging, even for the NES era. The combat is complicated by the fact that some enemies can only be hit in certain places and their hit box is tiny. The knights throughout the game are the worst offenders of this because Link is required to jump and attack with precision, but the knights are able to swiftly raise their shield or move away making each fight take a long time and no fun at all! And there are A LOT of knights in the game. And don’t get me started on the invisible ghosts that show up later in the game! It ultimately feels like poor game design to me. I’m okay with tough games as long as it’s designed where the player can ‘get good’, but Link’s Adventure is punishingly hard and cheap in it’s combat and makes for a really frustrating time. Also because it switches from an overhead view to a side-scrolling view with every encounter I felt discombobulated. It was a jarring choice that ultimately feels frustrating rather than immersive.
Additionally the game is full of cheap hits that make the platforming deeply unfair. Link’s jump feels stiff and can’t be controlled in the air like Mario’s can. There are sections when you have to cross over bridge’s and there are bone fish randomly jumping at you. I swear the game waits for you to attempt to cross a gap and has a fish jump at you mid attempt only for you to get hit and fall to your death. I played the game with save states and the rewind feature, so I was able to course correct and swiftly move on, but even with these features I still found myself shouting at the screen in frustration. It’s that bad.
There are also a lot of invisible walls, floors and hidden helpful items throughout the game. This early game design troupe can be fun in games like Metroid that organically build in the discovery of these things as part of the exploration. But in Link’s Adventure it’s a punishing discovery that simply ruins the game. There is no way to know if a floor or wall is invisible until you either fall through it unwillingly or spend hours upon hours pushing upon walls to discover the route through a palace. Some of the areas later in the game require you to manoeuvre around or through these walls or you can’t complete an area. I used guides to get me through most of the palaces, one because their confusing, but also because identifying how to get around the invisible walls would get so tedious, I wouldn’t have finished the game.
Lastly, the final fight against Shadow Link is really disappointing. You either use a trick where you crouch in the corner and simply attack him when he comes close, or your chaotically jump and attack at random hoping against hope that a hit will land. The only good thing about Shadow Link is that they bring him back in Ocarina of Time and redeem his inclusion with an epic setting and fight sequence.
GRAPHICS
There are some positives with the graphics in the game. Link’s design is large and detailed when in the side-scrolling sections. He looks fantastic. Gone is the chunky and blocky design from the first game and he’s now a fully realised sprite. This goes the same for the rest of the enemy and character designs throughout the game. There is an evolution to the concepts of the different enemies such as the Octoroks and Tektites having updated designs. However the NPCs in the game are very repetitive and palate swaps for the most part. The bosses are awesome looking in the game, with such great detail that seem like they’re pushing the NES to its limits. The main grip I have with the graphics is the palaces lack any creative design. Because they are complex and maze-like, I found myself getting lost without being able to distinguish where I’ve been or where I should go next. They could’ve included various different elements through each palace to give you some sense of direction. Without this the main challenge with any of the palaces is simply not loosing your mind trying to remember where you have and haven’t been.
MUSIC
The music is okay, but repetitive. There’s enough variety in the game that it never really grated on me, in the same way the first game did. There is an over-world theme, a side-scrolling theme, music for when you’re in the towns (which I quite like) and a standard theme for each of the palaces. Some of the sound effects are cool such as Ganon’s laugh when you die, or the clash of Link’s sword on an enemies’ shield. But the sound of transitioning from overhead traversal into side-scrolling combat segments gets annoying really quickly and you hear it a lot!
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
I think it’s pretty clear that I do not like Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. I didn’t find it fun to play at all. Sure it’s great to experience the games in my favourite video game series, but this one is just so bad, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. If you’re really interested in the games, my suggestion is to simply watch a play-through of it. But if you’re determined to play-through it, or foolish like me, do so with modern sensibilities of save-states and rewind features. I do appreciate that the designers and developers of the game took risks. Some of the things they introduced have found their place in games throughout the series, so all isn’t lost. However, with such a radical change in gameplay style, poor level design, and terrible combat, maybe it would’ve been better to iterate on the first game rather than attempt a whole new approach. Sadly it suffers the same fate as The Lost World: Jurassic Park does, an experience I wanted to love, but just couldn’t in the end.
OUT OF SYNC GAMING REVIEW SCORE | 2 out of 10
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