Zelda 2 is great, and you should try it on the Switch
This week, Nintendo is adding Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link to Nintendo Switch Online's digital NES library. But maybe you do not want to try Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link. You don't even want to give it a chance. Maybe you heard it's a "controversial" and "divisive" episode in The Legend of Zelda series, or maybe you heard how Miyamoto himself considers it his "bad game". But what you probably do not know is that Zelda 2 is great. It's flawed, it's different, but it's great. And it's very, very weird.
Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link has a top-down overworld where Link is shown with exaggerated proportions (at the time, Nintendo was probably influenced by Dragon Quest and Ultima). But it transitions to a side-scrolling action game with a dedicated jump button when you enter a town, a cave, a dungeon (here called "Palaces") or a random encounter with enemies - because Zelda 2 has something like random encounters. And it has RPG elements, too: it has levels, experience points and stats.
Doesn't sound very Zelda-ish, right? Well, defining a Zelda game is easy to do today. But at the time of Zelda 2's release there was not no easy answer, because there had been only one other episode. For example, the standard structure of The Legend of Zelda dungeons, where Link must acquire a main item to complete a puzzle-filled maze and defeat its boss, wasn't introduced till The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (1993). And in more recent times, Breath of the Wild completely subverted what we would expect from a Zelda game, mixing puzzles and a sandbox, open-world exploration. Zelda 2 attempted to answer "What is a Zelda game?", and its answer wasn't puzzles, and it wasn't dungeons, though its answer was just as valid as any of those. Its answer was, quite simply, the journey of a hero into the unknown.
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