Leynos said:
Zelda 1 and 2 were great on NES. Zelda II reminds me somewhat of Ys 3. Ys 1 and Zelda 1 are top-down. Ys 3 and Zelda 2 become a more side view and tougher games. Fantastic games still. I normally hate this meme but I'm somewhat serious when I say. Zelda II is the NES Dark Souls in how enemies behave and how you as a player fight them. Not the difficulty alone since all NES games are balls hard. |
I always find it funny that just about everyone finds Zelda 2 more difficult than 1. For me it's the opposite, Zelda 2 might have been one of the first games I ever completed. I don't have much issue finishing it today (as I have finished it twice very recently), but I still have yet to complete the first Zelda game. It's normally about dungeon 5 or 6 where I get stuck, and healing up takes so much longer in Zelda 1 than Zelda 2.
Then again, I knew the tricks to Zelda 2 (such as late game boss>level hopping) from around the first time I played when I was a kind. I am also much more into RPGs and stat exploitation is something I have always understood well; a valuable skill for Zelda 2, despite its very basic RPG mechanics. But to me, Zelda 2 is actually the easier game of the two. Of course, Link to the Past was probably among the easiest adventure games I ever played at the point of its release.
Why do I think people struggle with Zelda 2 over the first game? I think there are two very clear reasons.
1. Zelda is, IMO, the more difficult game. Despite Zelda 2's reputation, I think Zelda 1 ramps up the difficulty faster than Zelda 2. Where Zelda 2 is harder is in how spiky it is. The first few areas are easier than any location in Zelda 1, but then Death Mountain comes up. Death Mountain is not particularly more difficult than Zelda 1, it's just that dying 10-20 times is normal in the first Zelda, and is highly abnormal in Zelda 2. So I think enemy difficulty is mostly perception.
2A. Zelda 1 uses adventure mechanics for health while Zelda 2 uses ass-backward RPG mechanics. Basically, Zelda 2 destroys all of your experience points if you get game over. Those experience points are vital to the difficulty curve.
2B. I mentioned boss>level hopping earlier - basically, you do NOT need to kill bosses to progress in Zelda 2, and killing bosses auto-levels your character. If you auto-level early on, it is fairly wasteful because those early levels are really easy to get. The later levels take an immense amount of work, but can be done very quickly by heading back to dungeon 1 and killing the boss later on, then dungeon 2, and so on; and while this is an exploit, it doesn't impact the gave curve, it only reduces the grinding. The only way the game curve is impacted is if you are not sufficiently leveled.
2C. I think many Zelda 1 players went into Zelda 2 without an understanding of the concept of XP level value abstraction on attack power, rather than the more simplistic adventure style Sword C is better than Sword B which is better than Sword A. So, it is probable that the Zelda 2 that I played was an easier game than the one most played simply because my version of Link was literally much more powerful.
Moral of the story, if you beat Zelda 1, you are a more skilled NES Zelda player than me. Because success in Zelda 2 is actually based less on skill and more on levels.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
