From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link - Long Avoiding Destiny
If I was so hopelessly enamored with Link's first adventure, why did I so readily disregard its sequel?

Oh, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

Now here's a game with which I have a really weird history.

And if you don't mind, dear reader, I'd like to tell you about it.

So it all started with the The Legend of Zelda--one of the most monumental games in my gaming history. It was the game that introduced me to the wondrous world of adventure games and used its magic to turn me into a huge fan of the adventure-game genre. It was a game that caused a seismic shift in the way I thought about and perceived the entire medium. And it was a game that provided me some of the most indelible video-game memories I would ever have.

You could say that The Legend of Zelda changed my life.

I loved that game. I played it to death. I spent countless hours exploring and thinking about its world. I memorized every pixel of its every screen. And I talked about it with my friends all the time.

The Legend of Zelda meant everything to me, and I couldn't imagine a time when a game of its caliber and scope wasn't a part of my life. I simply adored it.

So you might find it odd when I tell you that I had zero interest in playing its recently released sequel.

Now, I didn't avoid Zelda II: The Adventure of Link because of a waning of interest or because The Legend of Zelda had given me more than my fill, no. Rather, I stayed away from it because I was very much turned off by what I discovered the first time I saw the game in action at my friend Dominick's house. Something about it was simply repellent to me.

It wasn't that The Adventure of Link had abandoned top-down-style action in favor of side-scrolling, no; I wasn't really concerned with that. Rather, there was something else that was bothering me. There was something about this game that was just plain off. Though, I wasn't sure what, exactly, was causing me to feel that way. It might have been that the title-screen music had an oddly ringy quality to it, and thus it just didn't sound like Zelda music. Or that its miniaturized RPG-style overworld felt comparably sterile and lifeless. Or that its combat looked so complicated. Or that its having a free-scrolling RPG-style map was working to rob its overworld of all-important aspects like explorability and a mysterious-feeling, wondrous atmosphere.

Of maybe it was all of those things.

I can't say for sure.

I mean, it was a different style of game, so naturally it was going to have its own unique-feeling aural, visual and tonal qualities, yeah. But still: It had "Zelda" in its title, and because it did, it had an obligation, I felt, to give me something unmistakable-feeling--to capture at least some of its predecessor's spirit. And I just didn't feel as though it did.

What also hurt the game's case was how it came from out of nowhere. When Dominick showcased The Adventure of Link for me that day, it was the first time I'd ever seen it. I'd never heard of it before then; I'd somehow remained completely oblivious to the fact that The Legend of Zelda had gotten a sequel.

I never needed to have access to Nintendo Power or other game magazines to know about highly anticipated releases (and thus become caught up in the hype, as I did when Super Mario Bros. 2 was on the horizon), no, because I had friends who would eagerly inform me of such things. But when it came to The Adventure of Link, they were, for some reason, surprisingly mum; none of them ever said a word about it. So I never saw its release coming; and because I didn't, I missed out on the buildup, and I went into my first Zelda II experience cold and thus without any feelings of anticipation or enthusiasm.

Had I read about The Adventure of Link and closely followed its progress, I probably would have been acclimated to and accepting of the game's differences by the time I had my first session with it. And it would have stood a better chance.

But unfortunately, that's not how it went down.

Honestly, though: Whether it was one factor or a combination of factors that was turning me off to the game didn't matter. The simple fact was that I just wasn't feeling The Adventure of Link. And by the time Dominick was done showcasing it for me, I'd already decided that I wasn't going to play it. I simply had no desire to. So for years in following, I didn't go anywhere near it, and I never had any qualms about making the decision not to.

And for a long, long time, I was largely content with that decision.

Now, I say "largely" because I did, in truth, have a teeny tiny bit of regret. It'd surface every time an image of the game popped into my head. And though the feeling was usually fleeting, it'd have power enough to make me question my decision, even if just to a small degree.

I genuinely didn't want to play The Adventure of Link, no, but my feelings were telling me that I probably should. This was happening because two disparate forces were successfully conspiring against me. The first was my great interest in the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which, I was excited to learn, would be "returning to the series' roots," Nintendo Power revealed. As someone who was obsessed with both chronology and continuity, I knew that it didn't make any sense for me to buy a Part 3 when I never played through or finished the Part 2! (I was no longer that same kid who dismissed the original Mega Man after immediately comparing it to the newer Mega Man 2 and promptly deeming it to be "obsolete.")

The other force was a strange ailment you might have heard or read about--one that causes the infected subject to have sudden, and often misplaced, nostalgia for mediocre games or games that he or she has never actually played.

Well, I'd come to be afflicted by that ailment. And it was causing me to continuously think about The Adventure of Link and even covet it.

I'm not sure what made me susceptible to the ailment. It might have been that all of my friends owned Zelda II, and because I was still in my "copycat" phase, I felt pressure to own it. Or it might have been that one or more of the game's aural, musical or tonal qualities were actually strongly resonating with me (and previously I was just loath to admit as much). I mean, I did actually like the game's music, even though I wasn't pleased with its aberrant ringy quality; it was quite good. So maybe that was it? Maybe that was the trigger?

I don't know.

Though, soon the ailment had taken a complete hold over me, and I was now regarding The Adventure of Link as something mystical--as something mysteriously attractive. And now I was no longer repelled by the idea of owning it.

Sadly, I could never find a copy of it in stores. Apparently it had been out of print for some time, and retailers, knowing this, simply stopped ordering copies. So I just had to accept that I was never going to get the chance to own the game.

It seemed to be that Zelda II: The Adventure of Link would forevermore be something that existed only in my mind and merely as a series of fractured images.

However, during the middle months of 1991, fate played its hand.

As had been the ongoing process for nearly three years, my NES library was continuing to rapidly expand even at times when I was contributing nothing to the game-buying effort. This was happening because my brother, James, was continuing to go on his patented "collecting sprees," each of which was netting him a dozen or so games (none of which he ever intended to play). By that point, though, I'd mostly stopped paying attention to his inexplicable activities and just learned to expect that each time I looked at my game rack, I'd find that 12 or more of its empty slots were now filled games I'd never heard of.

That's why I was so caught off guard when, on one random day, I sauntered into my bedroom and saw something identifiable in that rack: a newly appearing gold cartridge! It looked completely out of place because it was near the top of the rack's third column and thus placed between games whose titles started with the letter S (I always slotted my games in alphabetical order, you see). My first thought was that it was a The Legend of Zelda duplicate.

Though, when I pulled the cartridge out from its slot, I discovered that it wasn't a duplicate of The Legend of Zelda, no, but instead a copy of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link! It had seemingly appeared out of nowhere (which was fitting considering how it originally came into my life)!

There was no box or manual, of course, though I wasn't too concerned about that, no. I was confident that I knew enough about the game, and thus I could imagine myself jumping right in and making progress with little in the way of trouble! Still, because there was some residual hesitancy, I decided to put off playing it for a while and instead sample all of the other, lesser-known games that had appeared in my rack that day. "I'll check it some other time," I said to myself.

And, well, "some other time" turned out to be a few months later. That's how long it took me to build up the courage to pop Zelda II into the NES and attempt to beat it.

And when the game came into view, everything was just as I remembered it: The title screen's mountains had those conflictingly gray, craggy textures, and its music had that higher-pitched, ringy quality that worked to create a vibe that was strikingly distant from The Legend of Zelda's. Though, like I said, I'd long since decided that I was no longer going to let any of that bother me--that I was going to temper my biases and therein seek to embrace the game's divergent qualities, which were partly the source of my nostalgia for it.

As an aside: It was only at this point that I noticed that Nintendo had cut off the "The Legend of" part of the title. "Removing that part of the title is such an odd thing to do," I thought. "It only serves to create misplaced emphasis!" I mean, this is supposed to be a series that chronicles the events surrounding a princess of destiny whose fate is tied to things that are completely beyond her control; it's not a series specifically about her. What Nintendo did here was equivalent to a film company making a sequel to Saving Private Ryan and calling it Private Ryan II: The Errand of Tom Hanks; the company's doing that would likewise serve to remove much of the context!

"Why would Nintendo make such a strange decision?" I would always wonder.

(Naturally it was Nintendo of America that made the ill-advised decision to shave off part of the title; it was simply another one of the division's localization blunders. In Japan, the game was rightfully titled "The Legend of Zelda." My younger self just wasn't aware of any of this.)

I didn't finish The Adventure of Link that day, no. In fact, I barely got a third of the way in. It was a total struggle. "This game is too damn hard!" was all I could think as I switched off the NES.

In that session, every issue that originally pushed me away from the game surfaced.

First there was the aforementioned difficulty. It was too just much. The way I saw it, the game's level of difficulty was an inexplicably huge jump over the The Legend of Zelda's. Every one of its fighting scenarios felt like a next-level challenge.

It wasn't that I didn't have the reflex-speed necessary to deal with the game's swift, aggressive enemies, no; it was that they were able to pick me apart even when I knew the most effective strategies for dealing with them! The problem was that I didn't how to apply said strategies. I couldn't consistently land hits because the enemies (especially the armored ones) were too defensive-minded and too evasive, and so every encounter was a long, tiring ordeal. It didn't help that Link's attack range was so short (his "sword" was basically a short dagger) and that his sword-beam attack was virtually useless (it was only effective against weak enemies like Bots and the spider-like Deelers).

It was simply too hard to survive for very long.

Then there were all of the annoying tricks the designers liked to pull: having enemies suddenly spawn near the edges of platforms right as you were jumping over to them. Assigning certain enemies, like the rebounding Bubbles and the charging Wosus, special attributes that allowed for them to drain your magic and experience meters upon contact. Forcing you to endure scenes in which poisonous bubbles continued to emerge from the screen's bottom portion and do so with the intention of knocking you into a death pit and thus cheaply reducing your life-stock by one. Having villagers suddenly turn into bat-like Aches and inflict damage upon you before you could even react. And populating fighting scenes with invisible enemies!

I hated all of that.

And what was worse was that the game would send me allllllllll of the way back to the game's starting point anytime I'd Game Over--even when I was currently in a palace. There was nothing more irritating than having to continuously endure a sequence in which I'd get (a) destroyed by a palace boss, (b) mocked by Ganon's silhouette, and then (c) sent back to the start. Then I'd have to re-traverse the overworld and whichever palace I was previously at.

The original Legend of Zelda as least had the courtesy to allow you to restart at a dungeon's entrance!

Oh, I knew that there were hidden 1ups and that they could help me to extend my current attempt, yeah, but the problem was that I'd wind up dumping one or two lives just getting to the map spaces that housed them! And that, right there, was the encapsulation of my Zelda II experience.

And seriously: Why did every difficult NES game have to have wavily-moving, endlessly spawning Medusa Head-like enemies? Was it part of a secret policy or something? Did developers have to sign an agreement that included the line "We, the creators, agree to fill our already-difficult-enough game with annoying waving-type enemies whose aim is to annoy players and cheaply knock them into death pits"?

It had to be that way.

So yes--Zelda II had those enemy types, too.

Really, it had it all.

And by "it all," I mean "every gaming convention I despised."

Another problem was that The Adventure of Link's action was governed by an RPG system and one that I just couldn't grasp (mostly because I had an aversion to RPGs, and my brain would turn off the instant I saw anything that even resembled an RPG system). It seemed overly complicated, and any time the menu would pop, I'd become confused and find myself asking questions like "Why would a game ever give me the option of 'cancelling out' a level gain?" and "Will I be permanently missing out on this upgrade if I pass it up and instead wait for another?"

I just didn't get it.

So I decided not to care about the system. "Screw it," I said. "It doesn't matter to me if my opting to take two Magic or Life upgrades in a row is advantageous or not, so I'll just take whichever upgrade is currently being offered." That way I wouldn't have to worry about accidentally limiting Link's potential.

But there were also other aspects of the system that confused me. I had so many questions: "Why do I have to pick up Heart and Magic Containers? Shouldn't the RPG system, itself, be controlling the growth of my meters? Does having a longer magic meter make spells consume less MP, or is it the leveling-up factor that determines MP quantities? And are any of these attributes even related?!"

So as you can see, I was one very confused young person. I was unobservant, completely uninformed, and lacking for any amount of deductive-reasoning skill.

You could say I was the first Game Grump.

And I certainly wasn't happy with the game's borrowing of other RPG conventions like being confined to map sections for long periods of time and having to grind for levels--spend hours fighting the same enemies over and over again just so you could finally move on to the next section and, you know, fight the same enemies over and over again (and if my experiences with Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy taught me anything about myself, it's that I had an extreme dislike for gameplay that required me to walk in circles for hours).

To be fair, The Adventure of Link didn't quite take it to that extreme, no, but still it forced me to engage in a lot of tedious level-grinding. And while I was doing so, I took an absolute beating, particularly towards the end of my first session; at that point, I could no longer make progress because the overly-defensive-minded Gerus and Dairas kept carving me up, and the Life spell's replenishing power was so inadequate that all it could do was buy me a few additional seconds of life.

"Couldn't they have just programmed it to where the enemies drop meter-replenish hearts, like they did in the original?!" I asked in exasperation. "The other games at least have cure potions! Why not borrow stuff like that, instead?!"

One thing I did like, though, was how the game's action scenes weren't randomly triggered and that you could instead see the enemy avatars and gauge their movements and thus avoid them (well, sometimes). It was a clever twist, I thought. I also thought it was cool how the designers added a psychological element by having known weaklings like Bots represent the "Soft" encounters and having shadowy, fearsome specters of Ganon represent the more-dangerous fighting scenes--the ones you'd desperately want to avoid!

Successfully evading a pack of enemy avatars was still largely an act of luck, yeah, but at least you had some degree of choice, including the option to avoid fighting scenes altogether by retreating to the safe haven of the yellow brick road (you know--because, because, because).

Still, I didn't much care for the fighting scenes, themselves. I found them to be really annoying--particularly when they were home to impervious enemies like scorpions and those "blue scraggly bears" (these were Zoras, I later learned).

The forced action scenes were what worried me most. And I'm talking mainly about the ones that were concentrated into the terrifying Dearth Mountain area. The area's labyrinthine nature didn't concern me, no, because I'd watched Dominick play through this portion of the game, and thus I knew that the key to successfully traversing Death Mountain was to continue to take every rightmost entrance. Though, my having such knowledge did little to reduce the area's extreme difficulty. What I learned was that its fighting scenes, with their uncomfortably cramped interiors and waves of tough-skinned enemies, were designed to wear you down and thus create a challenge of attrition whose difficulty was far greater than anything I'd endured in the palaces.

I strongly disliked the Death Mountain trek, and in future sessions, I would try to get it out of the way early. I'd hurry over there after finishing Palace 2 and tank my way through Death Mountain. (These days, though, I enjoy traveling over to Death Mountain's base and examining it. I do this because, as Jeremy Parish is always pointing out, its base is comprised of a condensed version of the original Legend of the Zelda's overworld [which, I guess, would have to be called "Southern Hyrule"]. It's just cool to look at!)

I didn't particularly care for the palace design, either. I mean, I understood that the designers wanted for the palaces to have a "labyrinthine" feel and thus a spiritual connection to The Legend of Zelda's dungeons, but I just didn't think that such a design concept translated well to a side-scrolling game. I saw Zelda II's as relatively uncomplicated mazes whose solving entailed simply walking all of the way to the right to find a key and then walking all of the way to the left to open a door--a process that amounted to tedious busywork.

The presence of multiple elevators and branching paths didn't arouse my interest in the same way Metroid's did, no. I never got the sense that I was exploring secret-filled dens of mystery. Rather, I felt as though I was engaging in pure exercise: walking to-and-fro and constantly backtracking my way through messily arranged corridors. I felt no compulsion to engage the enemies because (a) most of them were either unassailable or, apparently, completely invincible, and (b) I was usually short on lives and lacking for a sufficient amount of health. So my normal process for traversing palaces was to cautiously inch forward and do so with the fear that any misstep could result in my being sent back all of the way back to the game's starting point.

In future sessions, I made some meaningful progression, yeah, but I also found more things to complain about!

The game, I thought, introduced some fairly creative ideas like having to locate and pass through fake walls and having to reflexively activate the size-reducing Fairy spell to enter into narrow passages, but these proved to be the exceptions. The majority of its "creative platforming scenarios" was instead comprised of tired tricks like invisible floors whose purpose was to cause you to fall down to lower levels and thus have to waste time traversing your way back to where you just were, and disintegrating and fractured bridges that were occupied by smaller, twitchy miscreants whose job was to cheaply knock you into death pits.

Also, it was hard not to notice the game's mechanical flaws and general lack of polish: Enemies would get stuck on screen edges and begin wildly fidgeting and do so in a way that negated your ability to damage them. The Fairy spell allowed you to glitch your way through locked doors. You could bypass a forced action scene by initiating contact with an enemy avatar right as it was beginning to pass through the scene-triggering map square, and thus the normally appearing action scene would be now be replaced by a generic (and lower-stress) action scene (I always felt as though I was cheating when I pulled this off). And Link could sometimes execute three-block-high jumps, which, I was sure, the designers didn't intend for him to do.

And because the dialogue boxes were too small to hold more than four lines of localized English text, you frequently got truncated and thus unintentionally cryptic lines like "East of Triple Eye Rock at Seashore," and they'd only have punctuating if it could fit. ("What the hell does that even mean?!" was my common refrain to townspeople dialogue.)

Cryptic was the operative word here. It defined Zelda II's messaging. I mean, this was a game in which your next goal was never quite clear, and the "hints" were complete nonsense. Had I not had friends and a brother who knew the game very well (my brother actually played through this one, yes), I might never have been able to figure out how to progress past certain points.

Now, I'm not saying that The Legend of Zelda, which I loved, wasn't cryptic at times, no. It certainly was. But it also had clear rules. So even when you were stuck, you still had a pretty good idea of what you needed to do to find the way forward: burn bushes, push blocks or bomb walls. Zelda II had no clear rules, and because it didn't, you could become permanently stuck. You might have never figured out that making progress was a matter of discovering and putting to use some obscure mechanic the game never told you about--something like walking at water, which you could only do in specific places, or using a hammer, of all things, to clear away a woodsy map square and thus reveal a hidden town.

And even if there were townspeople who did possess such knowledge, it wouldn't have mattered, anyway, because I wouldn't have been able to decipher what they were saying! The translation was that bad.

Yet at other times, Zelda II's puzzles were stupidly simple and required that you carry out menial tasks like walking over to a fountain, pressing the B button to get water from said fountain, and then walking two screens over to bring the water to the lazy woman who requested it. When it came to these types of puzzles, it seemed like the designers weren't even trying.

"Seriously now," I'd wonder, "does 'walking a few meters' really qualify as an act that's so heroic that it renders one worthy of earning access to a magic-granting wise man?!"

But you know what? Even after all of that--even after I'd spent hours and hours throwing around an endless amount of complaints and criticisms--I had to admit something to myself: "This game annoys me greatly, yeah, but, well ... I actually kinda like it!"

At the time, though, I couldn't come up with a reason for why I liked it. I wasn't sure what power it held over me or why I was such a glutton for its brand of punishment, no. All I knew was that I wanted to continue playing this game and ultimately beat it and do so even though I saw it as being too advanced for me. I wanted nothing more than to overcome its challenge and come to feel a strong sense of accomplishment (not beat it just for the sake of getting it over with and checking it off a list, like I did with Ninja Gaiden).

The problem was that I got really stuck at one point. I couldn't figure out how to get past the creature that was guarding the entrance to the map's southeast portion--the game's final area (I called this create the "Demon Spider"). I had no idea that the creature was susceptible to the flute or that such an item as the flute even existed--this because I either failed to fully explore a certain palace or hadn't yet found the palace that contained it. (I could've asked Dominick or one of my other friends for advice, yeah, but I didn't want to do so because I desired to solve this particular puzzle on my own.)

Eventually I gave up and shelved the game, and I didn't come back to it until almost a year later.

During my many months away from The Adventure of Link, I continued to wonder about what lied beyond the Demon Spider, and my imagination would always run wild. "The space beyond," I'd think, "has to hold great mystery!"

Over time, I built up that "space beyond" so much that I eventually convinced myself that it had to be nothing short of sacred ground, which, like I've described in the past, was terrain that I believed to be so awe-strikingly wondrous that it wasn't meant to be seen by my eyes.

The image of that particular map section remained stuck in my head, and the thought of finally being able to see what lied beyond it continued to excite me. Ultimately it was what drove me to return to the game.

So in the summer of 1992, I began the third phase of my relationship with The Adventure of Link. By this point in time, though, I'd grown up quite a bit, and I accepted that the only way I was going to accomplish my mission was to put in actual effort and get better at the game. And that's what I did. I exhaustively explored every inch of the map and attempted to locate every cave and every hidden action scene (there were so many I didn't know about). I took the time to observe and understand the enemies' movement- and attack-patterns and thus learn how to reliably take down even the toughest of shielded enemies (though, I admit that I did tend to rely on the cheap repeated-jumping-strike tactic). And I made it a point to memorize the palaces' layouts and traverse them in a more efficient manner (basically refrain from running about haphazardly and trying to tank my way through all obstacles).

Most importantly, I finally obtained the Flute that had been evading me for so long!

During this phase, I finally made my peace with Zelda II. I came to see that I'd been too harsh in my criticisms--that the game and its flaws weren't as bad as I'd made them out to be. In fact, there really wasn't anything "bad" about the game at all; rather, most everything about it was good to great! Zelda II, I could now admit without any reluctance, was a damn good video game, and I really enjoyed playing it! And each moment I spent with the game during this phase was relationship-defining; each was part of a collective that came to comprise my lasting memories of Zelda II.

Part of my newfound appreciation for the game stemmed from my adoration for the recently released The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I was in the spirit, and I couldn't get enough Zelda! Also, I came to think that A Link to the Past wouldn't have been so special had it simply been an updated take on a game that I'd played twice before--that its "returning to the series' roots" was as celebrated as much as it was because it was seen as something "new" in comparison to what Zelda II offered. Zelda II, by taking a bold risk and going in its own direction, gave it the opportunity to be new again.

"Had A Link to the Past been the series' third top-down-style game," I thought, "we might have been inclined to think that its formula was growing a bit stale."

For the longest time, I perceived Zelda II to be a defiant heretic, but now I was able to see it in a new light. Now I saw it as a wonderfully divergent game whose unique contributions served to enrich the series' legacy.

It was quite a big turnaround.

I'd always had a fondness for the game's music, yeah, but now it was dawning on me that I'd never given it enough credit for how well it played with my emotions and shaped how I thought about the game's environments. Each tune could make me feel a certain way.

First there was the game's overworld theme. It wasn't quite as good or as iconic as The Legend of Zelda's overworld theme, no, but it was still pretty epic-sounding, and thus it could always give me a sense of what was at stake. Every time I'd hear it, I'd know that the hero, Link, was currently engaging in a long, arduous journey across a landscape whose every tranquil-looking nook and crevice was hiding unseen danger. There was a reason, I felt, that this theme reused Zelda's overworld-theme intro but soon diverged and thus became its own animal; it was the composer's way of communicating to players that Zelda II was "moving in a different direction and taking you to unexpected places." And that was a sentiment I now valued more than ever.

The palaces' ominous, acutely distressing theme always made me feel tentative and under attack even in moments when there were no enemies onscreen. It was a fantastically stirring piece and certainly one of the 8-bit era's very best musical works.

Though, the one I loved most was the town theme. It was one of those tunes that was dripping with emotional resonance. It told the story of a world that was drenched with sadness, yes, yet still hopeful for the future; and thus it did more than any other to capture the essence of Zelda II's climate. For that reason, it was a highly engrossing tune and therein one that had the power to absorb into the game's world. I was instantly nostalgic for it.

It was a heartening tune, too. I could always rely on it to raise my spirits and inspire me to think about the best times in my life. Whenever I'd get to a town, I'd park there and listen to its music for a couple of minutes, and in that time, I'd reminisce about all of the fun I'd had with friends--all the good times we had hanging out in the neighborhood and playing video games together (games like Zelda II!).

My friends and my brother liked the town theme, too, though for a different reason. To them (and I noticed this as well), its intro sounded very similar to Moon River's, so they'd start singing the lyrics to that song the moment we'd enter a town. Well, actually, we made up our own lyrics because we didn't know any beyond the opening "Moon River." So whenever we'd enter a town, we'd do our best to harmonize and sing our unimaginatively created lyrics and specifically the sole line "Moooooooon Ri-ver, ruuuuuuh-ning a-round the town!"

None of us were taking drugs, no.

I also loved that short, wistful-sounding little ditty that would play whenever you entered into a house. It had such a contemplative energy to it, and, like I did with the town theme, I'd stop and listen to it for a while and think about the things that made me happy. I remember this theme well because it would always play in my head whenever I was casually walking around my backyard on any warm, quiet summer day in which we were about to go on a trip or on vacation; it'd serve as pure nostalgia fuel and do so at a time when thinking about childhood memories felt most appropriate.

That's the power of 8-bit music!

But getting back to the story: So I finally made it beyond the Demon Spider (which the townsfolk informed me was actually a "River Devil"). And in the next few hours, I located and cleared out all of the palaces in the map's southeast portion. Thereafter, all that was left was the final path to the Great Palace (which, for some reason, I kept calling "Ganon's Palace" even though I knew that he wasn't present within it or connected to it in any way).

And let me tell you, man: The challenge here was absolutely insane! I didn't think that anything could be worse than Death Mountain, but here was the proof that it could! In fact, this was Death Mountain times three! This area's action scenes were crazy difficult, and I had trouble surviving more than one of them (I'd keep falling or getting knocked into lava pits). I can't remember how many times I failed and was sent back to the game's starting point, no, but I know that it was a large, large number. And quickly this area became one of my least favorite in all of video games. Had it not been that you could continue from the Great Palace's starting point once you made it there, I might have considered walking away from the game.

In those hours, many (idle) threats were made against the game's creators!

The acts of trudging my way through the red-stained path of anguish and discovering the correct route through the Great Palace comprised a marathon session that took up the entirety of my day. I don't know how it was that I managed to reach the final boss ("the Angel of Death," as I called it), but I did, and it was shocking to me because the whole time I felt as though I'd never find the correct route; I kept expecting each newly discovered path to lead to a dead end or loop back to an earlier palace section.

I expected the final battle to be brutally tough, but it turned out not to be. In truth, it was more irritating than it was difficult, and all it really tested was my patience. Still, I was able to remain focused and concentrate on looking for openings and landing precision strikes. And in the end, I was able to take down the Angel of Death and do so without much trouble; and because that fight went so smoothly, I was now confident that I could capably beat the true final boss (about whom I already knew because it was hard to avoid that type of spoiler), too! Also, I figured that the true final battle would only be moderately difficult, anyway, because the designers would never think to do something so cruel as to introduce a super-difficult boss at a time when the player was likely to be low on both health and magic!

I was dead wrong, of course, and Shadow Link, I quickly learned, was on the extreme end of the spectrum in terms of defensive-minded enemies. I mean, it didn't seem possible to land more than one hit on this guy! It was absurd!

"Are these people insane?!" I'd wonder each time Shadow Link finished slicing me to pieces.

Even in my best attempt, I could only manage to drain a quarter of his health!

At the time, I didn't know about the exploit that allowed for you to crouch in a corner and safely dispatch of Shadow Link with for-some-reason-unguardable low strikes, so I had no choice but to challenge him the old fashioned way: by hopping about like a hyperactive monkey boy and absolutely spamming attacks! And on my 25th or 30th (or maybe 40th) attempt, my strategy finally worked, and thus I was able to beat Shadow Link and at long last earn the victory I'd been craving for years. (Really, the actual worst part of all of this was having to re-traverse the entire castle after each Game Over. That's what almost made me lose my mind!)

And there it was: I'd beaten Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, a game I never thought I'd be skilled enough to complete. It was one of my most satisfying victories. It made me feel as though I'd finally advanced to the next level. And that, I realized, was what my Adventure of Link experience was truly all about: silencing the doubt and understanding that yes--I can get better at games if I actually put in a sincere effort. This victory proved that it was possible.

Over the next few years, I didn't return to Zelda II very often (occasionally, though, Dominick and I would squeeze in some Zelda II action during our marathon gaming sessions and play about a third of the way through it), no, but I never forgot about my experiences with it. I never forgot about the failures and the victories and how they shaped me. I never forgot about the sights and the sounds and how they inspired me to think. And I never forgot about all of the fun moments my friends and I shared whenever we played it together. I didn't need to play it to remember how special a game it was.

When I think about those days, I remember the times when my friends and I would repeatedly say to each other, "Hey--you know Bagu?! Well, I know 'im, too!" and do so in a stereotypical Brooklyn accent. I remember that sleepy, friendly Bot whose rest you could disturb by mashing the attack button--how whenever he'd say, "Let me be. Master in woods," I'd feel sad because I'd imagine that he was delivering that line in the most melancholic, soft-spoken way (because that was the mood the contemplative house music tended to create). And I remember all of the time we spent discussing the nature of Error's name and arguing as to whether or not the name "Error" was the result of a programming oversight.

Also, it's proper to mention that Dominick introduced me to the word inventory during our time with this game. Before then, I didn't know how to refer to the items found within game menus or describe what they comprised. I didn't even know that there was such a word for such things. But now, thanks to Dominick, I had one, and I used it all the time. That guy was always teaching me new words (which was expected behavior from a future valedictorian like him)!

The only problem was that he mispronounced it as "invent-ory," so I, of course, did the same, and I continued doing so for a couple of years--until I heard someone correctly pronounce the word on an afternoon game show. What's funny is that Dominick was kinda pissed at me when he said "invent-ory" during one of our gaming sessions and I corrected him (I guess he was the type who didn't like to be corrected). He was a smart guy, though. He had a lot of potential. So I hope what I heard isn't true--that he wound up driving a truck for a living. That wasn't the path I imagined for him, no. So I choose to imagine, instead, that he has a big family and is currently enjoying the good life!

As an aside: I've always been fascinated by how Zelda II borrows elements from the Super Mario Bros. games--how it reuses some of the latter's enemy types, mechanics, and AI behavior--and does so in such a natural-feeling way (before I started paying close attention, I never realized just how intrinsically linked these two series really are). You have the skull-headed, fire-spewing Bago-Bagos, which are just flying Cheep-Cheeps repurposed for a more-serious-feeling world. The Octorocks are reskinned Snifits. Gumas mimic Hammer Bros. in every way. And Link can even go down a chimney and do so in the same way Mario ducks into pipes! And if you look for them, you'll find plenty of other similarities!

Oh, and yeah: I forgot to mention the down-thrust, which is, for my money, the greatest offensive maneuver a game has ever introduced! Zelda II is worth playing just for the sake of abusing the hell out of and having great fun with the super-satisfying down-thrust! So go do it! Right now!

I played through Zelda II a couple of times over the next decade (mostly on emulators), yeah, but I didn't make a truly passionate return to it until 2011, when it came to the Nintendo 3DS via the company's Ambassador Program. Having convenient access to it gave me all of the motivation I needed to reconnect with the game and start playing it on the regular, and that's what I've been doing ever since. And the whole time, I've been gaining more and more appreciation for what it does--for how it bravely deviates from the norm and thus proves that you can create magic and do so without having to adhere to established formulas.

And so I can tell you today that Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is more than worthy of its title. It's a wonderfully unique video game that provides the series exactly what it needs. That much has never been more clear to me. Hopefully Nintendo sees that, too, and agrees that it might be worth taking inspiration from this game.

And if the company ever makes a spiritual sequel to Zelda II, I'll be one of the first to purchase it!

So that's my long story with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. It went from being a game that I saw as having few redeeming qualities to one that I hold in pretty high regard.

In the end, that was Link's true adventure. It was about saving the world from Ganon's evil forces, certainly, but more so about winning a piece of my heart. And he succeeded wildly in that mission.

And to him I say, "Thank you not just lots, pal. Thanks a million!"