I win
There, I beat the thing. The Nintendo Power maps kept me from giving up in frustration, especially by letting me know the locations of heart containers and the levels. I didn’t need the maps for the levels themselves as much, which is good, since in what I suppose was an effort to be more of a set of hints than a complete walkthrough, Nintendo Power stopped mapping the levels after 6. This wasn’t really a problem until level 9. The first quest level 9 was tough, but it wasn’t so hard to find my way around that I missed anything other than the red bracelet. In the second quest, I found myself bombing the same walls more than once because I couldn’t find anything and couldn’t remember where I’d been. The game provides two different maps: there’s the one created as you explore the rooms that includes doors but nothing else (one-way doors are shown as a half line), and there’s the one that you find in the level that only provides the locations of all the rooms. Neither map shows the various underground warps between rooms, but it’s not usually too hard to find your way around. The second quest adds that annoying walk-through-some-walls aspect, also not indicated on the maps, and I found it impossible to keep track of everything. I decided to further complicate the cartography provided by the game and make a map on paper with notes on what walls I’ve bombed and tried to walk through. I probably wouldn’t have found the silver arrow had I not done that. I still didn’t find the red bracelet, but whatever.
So I’ve finally patched that gap in my wasted youth and beaten the first Zelda game, and I did so using only period-appropriate hints. It was actually a lot of fun. I guess it’s time to take on Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, which is supposedly the sucky one. I guess I’ll find out. The game already has me pretty confused just by the story. I really hope that the manual read better in the original Japanese, but even beyond the poor wording in the translation, Zelda II has a lot more text to set itself up, and I’m not sure that it all makes sense. Like a Victorian novel, the continuing trouble in Hyrule is blamed on the bad vibrations of Ganon’s residual evil rather than the marauding bands of his leftover henchmen or the economic depression after the war that kicked off the first game. After only a very brief explanation of this motive for Link to go all hero again and a motive for everything around to attack him (every evil wizard has a ridiculous backup plan, and Ganon’s apparently was to have the blood of his killer be poured on his ashes in order to be resurrected), the story dives and twists into an explanation of why the princess is in a coma (I guess that happened between games? It makes it sound like Ganon showed up after the events leading up to the long sleep, but that wouldn’t make sense), why everything in Hyrule sucks (hiding the pieces of the spirit of the kingdom or whatever it’s supposed to be sounds like kind of a jerk thing for that dying king to do, suitable heir or not), and why Link is the only one who can help. The first game didn’t use nearly so many words or so many confusing plot elements to craft a motive, and it had eight dungeons to this game’s six. I hope the rest of the game isn’t so convoluted.