Zelda II The Adventure of Link is the only non handheld Zelda game I'd never played, even slightly. I had no idea what it was, only that it had a reputation as one of the worst Zelda games, even among fans. I was initially nervous because of it's reputation, but I may very well have struck gold with this entry. The previous game was a mildly puzzling dungeon crawler, but this game takes a turn for the action and basically becomes the NES Dark Souls. And I love Dark Souls.

Zelda II is the story of our old friend Link as he goes on an adventure to stop Ganon. (this time spelled correctly) Unlike Zelda 1, which was an almost entirely top-down adventure with a focus on exploration and "puzzle" solving, Zelda 2 only starts off as top-down, like a Final Fantasy or a Dragon Quest, and when you encounter enemies or go into specific areas it shifts to a side scrolling perspective. The game is also a lot more action focused, with a lot more combat and less exploration to to the game.

With this new actiony focus comes new actiony mechanics. Zelda 2 is much more of an RPG this time around, with experience, stats, and a leveling system. This is one of the main things that drew my personal comparison between this game and Dark Souls. Much like Dark Souls, death causes you to lose your experience and you feel an incredibly strong motivation to not die. The swordplay also has a similar technicality to the way it plays, where you're constantly moving to block and avoid enemy attacks and to hit them in their specific weak points. Nintendo really stepped up the combat system in this game, and it feels fantastic. The only issue I take with it is that the game is just unreasonably difficult. Everything feels too fast for you, and a lot of enemies can be hard to predict and avoid.

Nintendo also added the RPG conceit of towns to this Legend of Zelda, and while being useful for healing and restorative purposes, the towns are kind of a worthless addition. Also, the exploration feels very random, because there's no way of telling if a tile on the map will lead to an encounter or not. I had to use a guide quite a bit in my playthrough of this game, which is simply a worsening of the issue I had with the first Zelda.

Unfortunately, I wasn't a fan of this game's graphical style or music, the two things that are usually at their best in Zelda titles. The graphics just look bland, colorless, and the characters uninspired. The music's fine for setting a mood early on, but doesn't hold water later on and feels very repetitive.

Zelda II was started with the lowest of expectations, but I came out of feeling as though I'd found treasure buried deep underground. I thoroughly enjoyed the clever combat system, the interesting RPG elements, and the intricate palace desgins. Sadly, the game isn't much of a looker, the music gets boring, and the difficulty is legitimately extremely unfair. But hey, If you want a Souls fix before Dark Souls II comes out, this is certainly an interesting predecessor to the formula. 9 Out of 10