I was probably the happiest person in the world last night.
Of course, I am talking about a Zelda related moment, what else would make me happy at night? Finally. I did it, I beat Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for the first time ever. The original cartridge on my NES of course, I don't wuss out by playing it on virtual console. This now replaces beating the original Zelda a couple of years ago as the greatest gaming achievement of my life. Was it hard? Yes, it's brutal.
I had never even been able to get past the first dungeon (not on NES, not on GC and not on 3DS, though I barely tried on the last one), until I found the secret. After first leveling up a few times I was strong enough to get through the first dungeon. What a relief.
According to the counter, I've been game-over 62 times. With the 3 lives you get plus the 5 extra lives I got during the whole game, that means I've died a whopping 191 times! The 2nd, 5th, 6th and last dungeons (those jumping knight enemies!) gave me the most problems. Besides that, the journey to the 4th dungeon, the Maze Island, and the long path towards the last dungeon, the Valley of Death were serious struggles. Especially the latter, it lives up to it's name. As far as bosses go, they're all hard but I had the most difficult time with the 6th boss, the fire dragon. Also, the Thunderbird in the final dungeon gave me a hard time.
Funnily though, the things this game's difficulty is notorious for gave me little problems. Death Mountain and Dark Link were both 'doable'. Yes, they were still hard and still I died, but it didn't took a lot of tries to get through those parts. Dark Link's fight is long, because it's extremely hard to hit him and you have to be lucky enough to stay alive long enough by jumping around frantically dodging everything, but at least he doesn't deal a whole lot of damage surprisingly, contrary to the Thunderbird right before him who kills you in only four hits. I do probably make it sound easier than it was though, because I finished that final battle with only half a pixel of health left...
So naturally I'm in a happy mood still, and with beating this game, I've beaten every Zelda game that's in my possession, and all but one in the series. The only one left is Four Swords Adventures, which I don't have...