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Honestly, the music in this game is terrible so let's just dive right into our episode about Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. 

On Retronauts awhile back, someone argued that this game wastes your time a lot. I totally agree. Given that The Legend of Zelda might be the best video game ever, obviously it is going to be hard to follow up with something as good. We just discussed this in our previous episode about Final Fantasy 5 as a follow up to Final Fantasy 4. The time wasting this game does frustrated me as a kid and in my most recent play through did as well. 

Knowing now, as an adult, that Nintendo expected sequels to go in different directions than their predecessors, some of the choices made for Zelda II make more sense. This also made games like Super Mario II make a lot more sense as well, but that is for another episode. The game is a side scroller, which really threw me off after getting used to the overhead view of the Legend of Zelda. I am pretty sure this was the first game I ever had to grind in, although I don't think I would have used that term for another year or two. 

The hype on Zelda II was unbelievable. Due to the “chip shortage” at the time, the game got delayed a few times. Occasionally, I remember Nintendo Power running some screen shots and reassuring readers that the game would be coming soon. Finally, the game did come out I got it, I think, for my birthday. I think. My parents don't remember, but I definitely played Zelda II during the school year, as we will discuss in a few minutes. 

While I ended up not, even back then, liking Zelda II, it did emphasize just how good Legend of Zelda really was! See our episode about that game for more of my thoughts on it. Zelda II certainly didn't inspire me to run around in the woods pretending I was fighting alongside Link, that is for sure. 

So the plot of Zelda II goes a bit like this: Link is a little older now. Another princess named Zelda must be saved, this time from eternal slumber. There is a third triforce, the triforce of courage, and Link must travel to six palaces to set crystals into place. 

I just realized that is kind of like having to find the pieces of Dracula in Simon's Quest. Huh.

Anyway...Ganon's followers are also attempting to revive him. Link's blood sprinkled on his ashes will do the job. 

Where is the first, er, most recent, I guess, Zelda during the events of this game? 

Zelda II was also on the cover of issue #4 of Nintendo Power. The cartoon drawing of Link looked so cool to me back then. I loved the style of it and would not realize how influenced by 1980s anime it was until well into the next decade. 

Sometime that spring I got the game. It was so different from the original game and I remember kids at school not really liking it. The top down world map was confusing and so were the random battles that were hard to escape. I cried a few times while trying to get away from enemies. Having a set amount of lives hurt the mystique of the game as well because, by then, I connected that to side scrolling games like Contra and Gradius. Even back then, I knew something was off about Zelda II. 

Sometime that spring I got Zelda II. It was definitely during the school year for reasons I will explain in a minute. I struggled through the first few dungeons in the game. The first was not too bad, but the second was something I barely scraped by after many tries. The march through the mountains seemed needlessly difficult and having to go back to where Zelda, this other Zelda, not MY Zelda, slept caused my first ever toss of a controller across a room. I could not believe what they had done to my beloved Legend of Zelda. 

A few particularly insufferable issues with this game that I remember from back then come to mind: The run to get the hammer is so frustrating. Having to go back to the beginning of the game after losing all your lives killed any joy I had for the game very quickly. The farther you got in the game, the more agonizing it was to have to go back to the beginning. I realize now that Zelda II is not a HUGE game, but it still seemed pretty big to me as a kid. This is going to come up in another game we cover later this year. 

As Retronauts argued in their episode about Zelda II, this game wastes your time over and over again. The first Zelda game also made you go back to the beginning when you died, but the gameplay was so good that I was always fine to come back for more. I got sick of Zelda II rather quickly and was bummed to see it continually be highly ranked in Nintendo Power. 

Hey, does anyone know if those Nintendo Power Top 30's were based on real votes or “kayfabe only?” 

I had put a note to let the music fade here, but the music in this game is awful so why bother. 

That year, I had made two new friends in science class. I made another friend, but he mostly just stole baseball cards from me. Anyway....these two new friends were really, really, good at video games. They offered to get me to the final level of Zelda II and even said they were would write up a brief guide to how to beat the final boss. I brought my game in the next day and we made a clandestine trade of games during class. Our teacher HATED video games. I think she was one of those PMRC types looking back. I wish I could remember what game I borrowed, but it might have been Dragon Power? Did anyone else play that game??????

Around dinner time, I called their house. One of them picked up and said they had just finished getting me to the final area of the game. I honestly thought he was screwing with me, but when I got the game back the next day and went home I was there and ready to go. With a bit of help from another friend, I beat Zelda II that weekend and did not think about it again for a really long time. 

For this play through of Zelda II, I went through the game on the 3DS. I find this system to be so ideal for retro games like this. I can sit on the couch, in bed, or waiting at the doctors office and advance through the game at my own pace. The save states on the 3DS were an added bonus because, as mentioned earlier, this game wastes your time a lot. Being able to quick save...um...saved me a lot of time that would have otherwise have been wasted backtracking through the game to get to where I was beforehand. Zelda II is not an especially huge game, but nevertheless in 2017 I have no time for that nonsense. 

I did not realize it, but I ended up roughly timing this episode alongside the games 30th anniversary. That is going to happen a few times this year. 

My most recent play through of the game confirmed a lot of my previous views of it. The bottom line that this game is a huge time waster is so true. I did like, with the RPG knowledge of an adult, knowing I could hack the leveling system a bit to get the highest attack rating pretty early in the game, which makes so of the more obnoxiously hard battles in the game easier. 

The way the game bounces between easy and breezy to brutally hard at random times doesn't fit really well with a side scroller. Modern open world games often do this much more diplomatically than the arbitrary brutality of this game....

Again, the Giraffe Feels podcast is written, edited, produced, and performed by William Wend. Giraffefeelspod is the user name to follow on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. We have a Youtube page that is linked on the website.

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