I AM ERROR
I’ve beaten the first level of Zelda II, the castle in Parapa the Rappa desert, so I feel qualified now to form sweeping opinions on the game. It’s different, but I like it. I don’t like it as much as other Zelda games, for reasons I’ll elaborate, but it still has some fine qualities.
Zelda II is different from all the other Zeldas in that it’s basically a side-scroller. There’s still a top-down overworld map, but, much like Final Fantasy, you don’t do anything in it; the battles and levels are all handled in the side-view environment. That’s not bad, of course—we all liked Metroid and Castlevania—but it’s a major shift in gameplay from the original. One of the things that made the first Zelda so great was that it stood more or less alone in a world of platformers. This return to basic form is fun, but it isn’t as interesting. There’s no innovation like there was before. The new gameplay isn’t bad, but it’s a little disappointing.
This sequel adds the concept of experience points, to some extent taking teh place of money, which is absent. I don’t like the experience system. While the first Zelda game had a certain amount of tedium in finding rubies (retranslated as rupees in later games, turning precious gems into any of a variety of currencies worth less than the Mexican peso), the money was more manageable than Zelda II’s experience points. Firstly, money in the original Zelda game was saved across sessions, whereas experience points are not. Secondly, there wasn’t as much need for money for advancement purposes. You needed to buy the candle, the arrow, the fancy shield and the red bracelet, but that was about it. For the most part it was possible to earn enough cash at the appropriate points simply by playing the game without worrying about buying the next big thing. Zelda II has seven possible advancements across three different axes, and, unless you want to spend all day trying to beat the horse-headed guy with no defense or attack multipliers, it’s necessary to wander around in the woods for a while to kill monsters and rack up points. This really isn’t fun. Wandering off the road opens you up to something similar to the random encounters in Final Fantasy, but now you have to seek these out by choice instead of just passing through each new annoyance as part of the normal path through the game, forcing you to ask for your own annoyances. I think the experience system was a mistake, and I don’t believe it appeared in any later sequels.
Health is kind of weird in this game. While in the first game, and other Zelda games, you got a certain number of hearts and maybe some life potions and nothing else, Zelda II gives you both a life meter and lives. The initial number is three lives, and if you empty your health meter, you restart on the same screen sans one life. If you lose all three lives, you restart back at the beginning of the game with all your items but no experience points, just as if you had saved the game. This is similar to how arcade games handle health and lives. I don’t think it’s appropriate for an RPG, but it does fit with a side-scrolling action game. I have mixed feelings about the life system, in part because since the interaction with the save system is somewhat interesting. Like the first game, Zelda II keeps a count of how many times you’ve died (with death in this one being the loss of your last life), but in this game a save also counts as a death. This feature rankles with the perfectionist in me (I beat the first Zelda with a zero death count by using save games as an escape mechanism), but it also both reduces the importance of the death counter and changes the way I handles saves. Saving the game after reaching a milestone no longer holds any advantage, so I’m more willing to simply play until I die and only save when I want to quit. This is an important detail for getting me to actually use the three-life system; I’m not sure that restarting on the same screen would be enough to keep me from hitting reset every time I lost a life. I’m not even sure if the death counter is around anymore (Link’s Awakening had it, and that’s about all else I have to go on), but I think the game would be best served by a removal of this arbitrary indicator of how badly you’re doing. Since the death counter is my primary motivation to use the multiple lives, I think the lives, too, should go; the game could be better without this extra and somewhat confusing strategic element.
The health meter in Zelda II is a bar rather than the familiar heart containers. The effect is about the same, but the hearts had a certain aesthetic appeal, and the lack of granularity on the heart meter (you could only lose half a heart at a time, even if the bracelets allowed you to effectively take quarter hearts in damage) made it easier to quickly figure out how many more whacks you had before you died. The bars have discrete units, but the partial units allowed are too fine. The hearts at the very least made the health meter something special to the game, and I’m glad that they were brought back in the sequels.
The use of magic points is new, and I don’t think it’s either good or bad. It adds a new element to battles beyond the usual hack and slash, and, regardless of whether the sequels needed it, this game needs it since it lost the panoply of equipable items found in the first one. Wiki says that all sequels except Twilight Princess use a similar magic system, which I know to be false, since Link’s Awakening had no such thing, but I don’t want to break my streak of creative vandalisms, so I’ll leave fixing the page to someone else. The magic seems like a good idea, but its implementation is a bit weird and annoying. You can’t use magic until you select it, which resets every time you use magic, producing unneeded interruptions in gameplay, and you use magic by hitting Select, which is hard to reach. I guess they just ran out of buttons on the original NES, so that particular problem is solved with later systems and better controllers, but the implementation of magic in Zelda II isn’t frequent or diverse enough to replace the variety of b-button items available in the first.
You can’t return to finished levels in this game, which makes me worry that it’s possible to get stuck without a necessary item. The first Zelda game let you wander through any level you wanted after beating it, which was quite often useful or even necessary. The second quest had at least one item on the other side of the triforce room, and there were a couple cases where you could go back to get previously inaccessible items, like returning to level 3 or whatever it was to get a key on the other side of a lava river only crossable using the ladder you get in level 5. Maybe the Zelda II level layouts are more simple (I don’t even know yet if there any secrets to be had at all), but the finality of beating a level removes at least that safety net of knowing that the parts parts besides the boss can still be replayed.
Non-player character interaction makes its first appearance here, and I wholeheartedly support that. Talking to NPCs can do a lot to further a story and provide hints, but, unfortunately, Zelda II did not use this to its fullest potential. Link’s Awakening is the best example I know of nearly any genre or series of using the NPCs to develop the story: the manual tells you that you’re shipwrecked on some island, and that’s it. Figure the rest out from there, chief. The rest eventually became a gut-wrenching realization around level 6 or so that the people you’ve gotten to know so well are going to cease to exist if you continue playing the game. It was one of the most moving and well-developed video game stories I’ve ever played. Zelda II, on the other hand, provides eleven pages of text to explain why you’re here and what you’re doing, and the people in the towns mostly take the place of the old man in the first game in providing nonsensical hints. Baby steps, I guess.
In all, I think that Zelda II is a decent side-scroller, but it fails in that it can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be. A lot of new ideas were thrown at this sequel, and some of them stuck, but a good number of them didn’t work out. Maybe the designers should have taken more time to figure their stuff out, or maybe the radical elements in this game were important to pioneer future development. I don’t know. Either way, this is an ok game, but it’s not a good Zelda game, and I think that’s what makes some people bristle at its name. The first game managed to be fun with hardly a semblance of a story, but this game tries to construct an entire world I don’t care about. All I’m doing is fighting some monsters Metroid-style so I can get to the seventh level. The music, too, is below the standards of the first game, which removes that epic spirit found in the original. Zelda II has a different composer, but, looking at some of the other entries on Koji Kondo’s résumé, I wonder if in that aspect they simply set the bar too high in the first game. I dare you start humming the themes to Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Brothers in public and see how many people join along by the fifth note.