I never beat it as a kid either. I barely played it. I thought it was cryptic and punishing, although 9-year-old me wouldn’t have used those words. Just a simple “This game is dumb.” worked.

In fact, I thought it was pretty universally reviled. I’ve since learned that this is due the to fact that a child’s gaming social-sphere in the 90s could be quite limited.

About 5 years ago, glancing across a bookshelf, a certain game cart happened to catch my eye. I couldn’t tell you why it was this particular game cart that my attention ;) but I really started to think about it. I don’t actually know anything about Zelda 2 (other than “This game is dumb.”). So then I thought, maybe it wasn’t for kids. Nine-year-olds are pretty ego-centric. The NES was one of our toys. No adults were playing these things. Did I mention my social-sphere?

It then occured to me: I’m a blank slate. I know next to nothing about the progression, the map, or anything. Of course along the way, I found things familiar, and I knew things like >!Shadow Link was the final boss!< but I didn’t know >!how to cheese the Shadow Link fight!<.

So I gave it an honest, no-help-other-than-the-game’s-original-manual playthrough. Yadda-yadda-yadda, Zelda 2 is one of the best games on the NES, and in my book, that makes it one of the best games ever.

In hindsight, Zelda 1 is cryptic af. “The 10th enemy has the bomb”, “gumble gumble”, “shaka when the walls fell”, wtf? If you’d like to know what the 10th enemy thing is: >!hopefully someone below explains drop counts because I’m sure as fuck not going to!<. How was a kid or adult going to figure that out?

My Z2 playthrough took days, maybe 10, but my memory is fuzzy. I got pretty stuck >!looking for the mirror!< and I wondered around for a full day with no progress although I felt like I understood where the game wanted me to go. About halfway through the next day, I read the manual. I didn’t actually think when I started that I was going to do a no-help-other-than-the-manual playthrough. I thought of as a no-internet-on-an-80s-game playthrough. After the realization that the manual wasn’t outside help, I did use the internet for that. Well as soon as I learned >!hammers can chop down trees!<, I was on my way. The rest of the playthrough went smoothly, apart from being hard as fuck.