Nah. Over time I've grown to increasingly dislike Zelda 2 but also like Zelda 1 more .

It's a great game but it's pretty brutal at times. I saw that laughing Ganon so often on my way to finish the game. It gave us one of the best Zelda themes:

It is a good game. hard, yes.. but not too hard.

it is different... i kind of love it for this.

Says who? Ow... the man who likes the puzzle fest named Wind Waker. 

If you think the PuzZelda games  are better than Zelda 2... that is wrong, very wrong. 

Great game! Played and finished it as a kid. Yes, it was very hard. It took a lot of practice and patience, but it was beatable. By a kid. On an actual NES. Still have my original cartridge.

Also, I think a lot of negativity you hear on this game is in retrospect. People look back on it with the added perspective of an entire library of Zelda games which have built up certain gameplay mechanics and styles. So it's easy to look back on it now and say that it was the black sheep of the series. But when it came out, we didn't have a good Zelda game and a bad Zelda game. We just had two very different Zelda games. Some liked the first one better, and some liked the second one better. But both were well-loved.

It depends upon the lens through which you're viewing it. Maybe it isn't as timeless as Super Mario Brothers 3 or something, but if you look at it in the context in which it came out, it's probably in the top 10% of NES games.

The combat is difficult and satisfying in a Dark Soulsy kind of way, and the music is good. It's also kind of obtuse though. The obtuseness + difficulty makes it hard to approach today.

I don’t find it all that difficult. The first Zelda game is more difficult, especially when you have 6 moving things on the screen at once firing at you. Also, Super Mario Bros 3 and Castlevania 3 are significantly harder. Both games also have more spots that would be regarded as “cheap” deaths than Adventure of Link.

The problem is people who are used to Link to the Past to Skyward Sword’s difficulties are judging Zelda 2 as being too hard - those later Zelda games are disgustingly easy; you’d only die from being careless. Perhaps with only Majora’s Mask aside (and even that’s pushing it), Breath of the Wild is the first Zelda game in thirty years that had actual challenge and could actually kill you. Zelda 2 was the previous one.

I think it's the kind of interesting, archaic game that would benefit from a remake.

No. It's actually pretty great. But I'm not good at it.