Tag: action rpg

The Legend of Zelda: The Anatomy of: The Book

…The Ride: The Book: Etc.

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The latest in the GameSpite Journal series has just body-checked the Blurb store with two available versions: Hardcover and paperback. As usual. Like The Anatomy of Castlevania Vol. I, this edition is the larger 10×8″ landscape format and isn’t available in black and white, so the price is a little higher than the platonic ideal for GameSpite books — though the one gracious move Blurb has made lately (they now price books per page rather than per 20-page folio) means that this issue comes in a few bucks cheaper than the Castlevania book since it’s slightly shorter.

I’m still putting together a stripped-down, small-format, black-and-white edition for the budget-conscious, so please hold on if you’re interested in that particular book. I’ve also made the PDF version available (it’s attached to the hardcover book) if you’d like that in the short term — though please do remember that I’ll be setting up a separate PDF store sometime in the next few weeks.

The cover looks better in the flesh than in this image — you can’t see it here, but Link’s Shadow has a sort of rough-edge look meant to call back to the Ganon Wraiths in Wind Waker, and the painterly effect on the coloring looks as nice as it did on the Castlevania book. The pink looks a lot more garish on-screen. Look, I was just being true to the material.

Also, be sure to check out the inline previews on the bookstore to check out some of the great original art Philip “Loki” Armstrong provided for the book. Dude did a doodle for each and every write-up of both Zelda and Zelda II, because he’s insane. The back cover features Bill Mudron’s amazing Map of Hyrule, which you should buy at full size because it’s — what’s the word? Oh yes: Amazeballs.

Also also, the thumbnail image for the hardcover book appears to have a graphical error (it’s missing the line separating “The Anatomy of” and “Zelda”) but the actual book will be fine. What you’re seeing is just a random visual artifact caused by their store system.

And finally, the coupon code MAY15OFF should net you $15 off a purchase, though I’m not sure what the required spending threshold is for that. Poke around online for “blurb coupon code” and you’ll probably find something else that’ll work, too. Anything to offset their hideous shipping prices…. Alright, try the code CROWNED15 and see what happens.

Edit: I’ve begun selling PDFs through Gumroad, per several people’s recommendations. The most recent two books are now up for $5 apiece, and I’ll be publishing back issues for a reduced price when I have time to get those up (i.e. after work).

Anatomy of Zelda Vol. I

Anatomy of Castlevania Vol. I

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The Anatomy of Zelda II: XIV. In Conclusion

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I won’t lie: Zelda II surprised me. Based on my vague memories of being stumped by its obscure clues and opaque design for weeks on end as a young teen, and given the fact that its successors have only connected with its design concepts on oblique tangents, along with its general deprecation among gamers… well, I expected my journey through the Adventure of Link to be an arduous chore.

In truth, I only took on this particular Anatomy of a Game project out of a sense of completeness. It wouldn’t do to write up the 2D Zeldas and skip over the second entry would it? And yet, while Zelda II has proven to be admittedly imperfect and in dire need of some modern-day refinement, as expected, on the whole it’s a devastatingly inventive and influential game. Despite the action-oriented combat, it’s a true role-playing game (albeit one with very limited character progression options) — the furthest any internally developed Nintendo game has ever ventured into that genre, if I’m not mistaken.

The concept of blending action and role-playing elements certainly didn’t originate here, and Zelda II bears more than a passing similarity to some of Falcom’s Dragon Slayer titles. However, as noted previously, Zelda II takes its role-playing mechanics a step beyond simply giving you magic spells to cast and enemies that barf up experience points upon defeat. Its entire world pivots around the concept of opening new paths and challenges upon the completion of small quests, giving players the freedom to roam a compact but densely constructed realm in search of their next objective. We take this for granted now, but remember that many of Zelda II‘s console contemporaries were still struggling to deal with the concept of arcade action that scrolled beyond a single screen.

As often happens with such radically progressive and ambitious games, Zelda II has some rough edges that need sanding. Players are expected to pixel-hunt in towns and tile-hunt on the overworld map; clues to progress can often be too opaque, or lacking altogether; enemy combat encounters rely too much on endlessly spawning nuisances and being forced to manage more (and more varied) foes than Link can properly deal with. The tools and spells you collect often offer extremely limited use and simply feel like an arbitrary checkpoint to real progress.

Still, it works. Not unlike Konami’s missteps with Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, Nintendo may have bitten off a bit more than it could chew with this game’s design — though certainly not to the degree that Konami did — and many of its ideas wouldn’t be fully realized for another decade. The concept of magic appeared straightaway in the sequel, A Link to the Past, but it was heavily reworked to complement Link’s subweapons rather than replace them. Meanwhile, the emphasis on swordplay and one-on-one combat properly came into its own only after Zelda moved to the third dimension with Ocarina of Time and arguably achieved its peak with The Wind Waker‘s battle mechanics: As in Zelda II, The Wind Waker emphasized defense and evasion more than head-on stabbing.

In fact, while Ocarina of Time owes its quest structure to A Link to the Past, its moment-to-moment play and emphasis on townsfolk feel like Zelda II given a third dimension. Rather than pull the overhead camera of other 2D Zeldas down to ground level for Ocarina, Nintendo simply rotated Zelda II‘s camera 90 degrees around Link, pushing it from a side view to an over-the-shoulder view. It’s no coincidence that the Kokiri characters of Ocarina shared the name of town in this Adventure. Ocarina was a tribute to and a repudiation for The Adventure of Link, the point at which Shigeru Miyamoto and his collaborators finally had the tech and design experience to realize their mad 8-bit ambitions.

Zelda II is hard, no question — often unfairly so. There’s no shame in cheating the game with save states or GameShark codes to help smooth over the hair-pullingly difficult parts. Nor would anyone blame you for asking around for help — that’s what we all did, back in the day. Compensate for the failings of age and naïve design and what you have in Zelda II is a fine attempt to recast the nascent console role-playing genre into an action-oriented format more compatible with the expectations of the platform’s user base. This is essentially the direction the entire games industry has moved over the past five or six years through series like Mass Effect (an RPG becoming a shooter) and Call of Duty (a shooter becoming an RPG). Not only was Zelda II ahead of its time, in many ways it’s a much better RPG and action game than a lot of more recent takes on the concept.

It may be the black sheep of the Zelda family, but that just means it provides the most interesting wool.

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The Anatomy of Zelda II: XIII. Into the Breach

You know what I miss about games of late? That sense of finality, of crossing some threshold of no return. Say what you will about the ending of Mass Effect 3, but for me its most disappointing aspect was that it lacked a sense of trepidation. You hit a certain point after which you had no choice but to march in a line straight ahead so the designers could tell their story. A forced march can be stressful, but it lacks that certain stomach-churning sense of player agency — it’s “Well, here’s the end,” as opposed to, “Oh god, am I ready to do this?”

Zelda II has that tension; indeed, it drips with it. Once you plunge into the lava shaft, you’ve arrived at the end of the game. Yet you still have some freedom of choice, some personal discretion about when to initiate the final battle. The question is, when will you work up the courage to face it? The ultimate showdown waits to your right, but you can instead go left into a room of stone matrices where the bricks contain a lottery: Will they drop a couple of full magic refills to top you off for the final battle, or will they instead generate Red Fokkas to put you into an even worse state than when you arrived?

I like the uncertainty of this situation, the way the designers give you fairly even odds of things going horribly wrong here at the very end. It forces you to take a chance. Then again, I can also see where you can make a case for it being an instance of hostile design. The Great Palace is so daunting, so huge, so wearing on your resources, fraught with so many perils that can bring a strong run to an unceremonious end, that attempting to top off your magic in order to have sufficient MP to use a costly, mandatory spell against the boss only to get a face full of deadly monster seems rather unsporting.

Zelda II is a game about hard choices, particularly in the final Palace. For example, there’s a 1UP hidden along the shorter route to the final showdown. But you can only collect a 1UP once ever, and then it’s gone for all subsequent attempts. Once you take the 1UP, you’ve used your one shot to battle through the Great Palace with an extra chance unless you reset your NES… but if you do that, you have to fight your way back to the Palace again. Zelda II offers stakes. It demands commitment to your choices.

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And that holds true for the final battle itself. The fight takes place across two phases, the mysterious Thunderbird and Link’s vicious Shadow. You can duck out between the phases and possibly undertake the magic refill lottery if you like, but you have to complete both phases in a single life. If you die against the second form, you have to take on the first one again — despite the fact that they appear to be two separate and distinct entities.

So, the question becomes how much magic to invest into your fight against the Thunderbird. You can take a chance afterwards that you’ll get a refill rather than a fatal Fokka stab, but there are no guarantees. The Thunderbird is invulnerable until you use the Thunder spell, which burns half your magic meter if you’re at Magic level 8 and have found all four Magic Containers. You really need to cast Jump to be able to reach the small, vulnerable gem above its face, Shield to dull the potency of its spew of flames, and Reflect the block as many flame projectiles as possible. If you choose any one of these support spells, you’ll no longer have sufficient magic to cast Life if you take a beating. If you cast all three, you won’t have any magic left over at all against the Shadow.

So what do you do? Despite being a brief, sudden encounter, the Thunderbird demands considerable planning… and even then, a single unlucky misstep could undermine your entire strategy, because this portion of Zelda II requires deft twitch skill above all.

The Thunderbird appears without preamble from the right side of the screen and drifts back and forth above you. Its chamber contains a raised platform in the center, which is Link’s ideal launching point for attacks: The only vulnerable point on the entirety of the boss’ body is its gem, which hovers at the top of the screen and only rarely dips low enough to be reached without the Jump spell (and no, the upward thrust does nothing). Further complicating this situation is the fact that the Thunderbird launches its attacks — a fountain of fireballs — from a point a few pixels above the gem. To strike its weakness, you need to jump headlong into the most dangerous point on the screen, which is moving constantly along two axes. And the more damage Thunderbird takes, the more quickly it sprays fire.

Should you manage to triumph (it’s a battle won by conservative play and well-timed jumps), it explodes and allows you to advance to collect the final Triforce. But before you can claim it, a small creature (or possibly a wizened old man drawn in the Rumiko Takahashi style; he looks for all the world like the guy who gives you a sword and other aid in the original Zelda, but smaller and with pointier ears) casts a spell and causes Link’s shadow to separate from his body and spring to life.

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Link’s Shadow here makes for a much different sort of battle than in subsequent games. Unlike, say, Ocarina of Time‘s cinematic showcase encounter, the showdown in Zelda II is short, brutish, and nasty. Link’s Shadow has, ounce for ounce, exactly the same physical capabilities as the hero himself. And while he uses no special techniques and has access to no powers Link himself lacks besides the ability to inflict damage with a touch and a backward defensive leap, his standard tactic (going for the jugular with a frontal sword assault) absolutely does the trick. It’s an incredibly difficult battle.

Amusingly, the best defense against Link’s Shadow is to retaliate in kind and go hog wild. With the Shield spell active, chances are good that an offensive strategy will give you just enough of a defensive advantage to outpace the shadow in a pure toe-to-toe battle. Of course, that assumes you make it through the Thunderbird battle with enough magic and health to hold up — or that you get lucky with the magic jug spawn in the room to the left.

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With the battle won, Link acquires the third Triforce and uses its power to raise the sleeping Princess Zelda. This raises further questions, of course: What happens to the Triforces once they’re all united for the first time in millennia? Isn’t bringing that power together again kind of dangerous? And what happens now that Hyrule has a superfluous princess, both the modern-day one Link saved the first time and the sleeping one who just rose after countless years of slumber? We demand answers, Nintendo.

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From here, players can launch into a Second Quest, which interestingly enough is much easier than the first playthrough since you retain most of your abilities. Where the original Zelda‘s Second Quest  completely reshuffled the world and dungeon layouts, Zelda II keeps everything the same but gives you more tools with which to conquer it from the outset. In effect, it’s a New Game + mode, long before we had a term for such things.

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The Anatomy of Zelda II: XII. The Great Palace

I am so glad that you are here with me, here at the end of all things. No, seriously: Check the Zelda timeline. Officially, this is the furthest point ahead in the series’ longest story branch. Future Hyrule, as we’ve seen, is kind of grim.

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Case in point: The path forward to the end of The Adventure of Link is obscured by yet another graveyard. Remember the scale of the first game’s Hyrule within Zelda II‘s world map? This cemetery is vast.

With the sixth dungeon down and all six crystals placed in the statues within, you’re free to move ahead to the finale. Unlike in the original Zelda, the path to the end offers no ambiguity or mystery. While previous dungeons have required detective work, good luck, dogged persistence, and likely a strategy guide to uncover, the Great Palace sits in plain sight deep within the mountains. Technically, you can head to the Great Palace at any time after passing the River Demon, but the road ahead is fraught with invisible peril until you acquire the Cross to render the floating eyeball things visible.

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Even with your levels maxed and the Cross in hand, the road to the Great Palace yields a hard-fought victory. Thankfully the “lava” tiles in the mountains don’t hurt Link, just as the game’s swamp tiles don’t poison him. But the encounters along this road will beat you down. Simply reaching the Great Palace can burn through your stock of lives in short order.

In recognition of this fact, the Great Palace is the one point in Zelda II in which a Game Over doesn’t send you all the way back to the beginning of the game. Should you exhaust your lives here, you can continue from the entrance to the Palace. You’ll return to Princess Zelda’s side if you save and quit, but as long as you keep hitting continue, you can keep hitting your head against the dungeon’s proverbial wall in hopes of victory. This isn’t just a nicety; I can’t imagine possibly completing this game if you had to start from the beginning and worth through the mountain path every single time.

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The entrance to the Great Palace repels visitors with a magical barrier that lifts only once you have placed all six crystals. You’ll also need all the Magic Containers scattered throughout the world — not to enter the Palace, but you can’t learn the magic spell required to win the final battle until you’ve maxed out your magic.

The Great Palace possesses both a unique color scheme and a special musical theme, much like Death Mountain in the first game. And, like Ganon’s Death Mountain hideout, the Great Palace is enormous, easily twice as large as any other Palace. Where it differs from the final labyrinth of the first game is that its size is strictly to make things hard on players. At this point, Link should have collected all his tools and spells and power-ups for the entire game, meaning you’ll find nothing here except sheer difficulty.

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And what difficulty there is. Right away you’ll begin facing off against never-before-seen enemies, such as this Fokkeru (who tosses flames that sometimes land in a fixed position but can also unpredictably slide toward Link at random); in fact, the Great Palace offers more newly minted and unique foes than any dungeon since the first one. Again, this makes for an interesting contrast to Death Mountain: Whereas that maze offered only a single new monster (Patra) and revolved primarily around complex pathfinding and well-hidden essentials, the Great Palace leans entirely on brutal combat and long-term action game endurance.

While Zelda II may indeed be the ur-action RPG, at this point the RPG elements slip away and the remainder of the quest focuses on twitch reflexes, timing, and an awful lot of good luck. Even the most superficial of its RPG mechanics, the experience and leveling system, has no real meaning at this point: Wise players will have built up Link’s stats to a uniform level 8, and those who haven’t won’t do much progressing inside the Great Palace. The enemies within yield surprisingly little EXP despite their high difficulty, and the chances of surviving their onslaught long enough to hit high EXP requirements for the upper tiers of the leveling system are pretty slim.

That doesn’t stop EXP bonuses from dropping far more often than magic refills, though. If you’re at max levels, those EXP bags are like some kind of taunt, as Link can no longer level his stats once he hits 8. Should you somehow accumulate 9000 EXP, you can simply choose a free refill for Life or Magic when you see the “level up” interface. This is considerably less useful than blue and red pitchers.

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The Great Palace consists of a massive loop, with players free to travel either a left or right path into the depths. The left path sprawls across a much greater amount of real estate, but it’s a much clearer route to the end. The right path is considerably shorter (which means fewer horrible enemy encounters to whittle Link’s health down and defeat him through attrition), but its path is more oblique, with forward progress frequently disguised through situations such as this row of blocks that covers an invisible pitfall into the depths.

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Among the new enemies in the Great Palace is the frightful-looking King Bubble, which is actually incredibly easy to avoid — and in fact offers no reason not to avoid it, since it yields no rewards upon defeat.

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There’s also the Giant Bot, which appears from nowhere and drops from above as Link walks beneath it. This is basically a reverse King Slime from Dragon Quest in that striking it causes it to split into multiple normal Bots (rather than a bunch of Slimes gathering together to create the giant form). Though given that King Slimes wouldn’t debut until a few years after Zelda II, a better comparison might be the Zols in the original Zelda that burst into Gels when struck. The Bots in this Palace, however, take more hits to defeat than just about any other creature in the series.

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None of the new challenges put forward by the Great Palace put a seasoned player to the test like the absolutely brutal new upgrade to the Ironknuckle, Fokka. This image alone should be enough to send any Zelda II veteran into a cold sweat. These aren’t simply the most difficult enemies in Zelda II; they’re the toughest opponents in any Zelda, period.

Fokkas come in two colors (red and blue, per usual). The red ones are merely incredibly difficult; the blue ones can bring your game to an instant end if you’re unlucky.

At their basic level, Fokkas act like Blue Ironknuckles. They attack with sword and shield, blocking Link’s attacks with remarkably prescience and flinging sword beams quickly and with abandon. What makes a Fokka cause you to pine for the relative wussiness of a Blue Ironknuckle is the fact that they’re both airborne and evasive. It’s hard enough to sneak a sword strike through the knights’ shields, but it’s even harder when you can’t even get close enough to land a blow in the first place. As soon as you move into sword range with a Fokka, it leaps high into the air, usually over your head, and often while tossing a difficult-to-predict sword beam.

To make matters worse, Fokkas soak up at least as much damage as an Ironknuckle, possibly more; yet they yield very little EXP. They can absolutely ravage Link’s health in a matter of seconds. There is no reason to fight them besides bragging rights — and even if you choose to simply make a mad dash past them, you still can’t guarantee your own safety as they follow you persistently, tossing sword beams at the back of your head while you break through barriers barring your path to adjacent rooms.

Fokkas are Zelda II’s one final design misstep, a race of enemies that manage to be even more difficult than the final boss. Their evasiveness, endurance, obstructiveness, offensive power, and utter persistence makes them better suited to play the part of minibosses, but they’re not; they’re standard foes, and there’s no real reward for besting them. Ironknuckles make for great enemies for the way they can go toe-to-toe with Link on his own terms, but Fokkas commit the grave sin of being too much better than Link, lacking any weakness or even a reasonable exploit.

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Finally, the path ahead to the end appears as a narrow shaft beneath a crumbling bridge and surrounded by lava. This drop is conspicuous in its insanity: Only a fool would jump down there, so obviously that’s where you need to go. I love this touch. Not only is it couched in Zelda II‘s design language, calling attention to itself with visual vocabulary that players have learned over the course of the six previous dungeons, it also creates a powerful sense of no return. Once you drop down that hole, there’s clearly no coming back.

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The Anatomy of Zelda II: XI. One last nuisance

While making the trip from the Maze Palace to the Ocean Palace proved to be a snap — basically as simple as walking directly south from one to the other — Zelda II has one final nasty surprise in store for players. The final standard dungeon, the Hidden Palace, is, well, hidden.

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This should feel familiar to those who completed the original Legend of Zelda. As in that game, many of the hidden secrets here can be accessed immediately if you know the trick, and the Hidden Palace is perhaps the most extreme example of this phenomenon. Once you know the secret to revealing its location, you can also head there immediately from the previous Palace. The initial challenge, of course, lies in unraveling those secrets from villagers who are curiously knowledgeable about ancient mystical secrets.

You use the funny-shaped key from the Ocean Palace, the Flute, exactly twice in Adventure of Link. First, you use it to vanquish the spider-like River Demon blocking the path to the southern half of the east continent….

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Then you use it once again while standing in the center tile of the diamond formed by the palace and the three boulders north of it. But, of course, there’s no way to intuit this without some insanely canny game logic decryption skills, and let’s be honest: You’re not that smart. None of us are. Video game logic in the 8-bit era — before everything was predictable and codified the way it is now — didn’t make a lot of sense.

We can argue at length about whether creative-but-incoherent or rote-and-decipherable is a better approach to game design, but at the end of the day you probably got stuck at this point in the game until Nintendo Power helped you. If only we’d had the Internet back then for sharing tips…

Once you bypass the River Demon — and no, the Boots from the fourth Palace won’t let you walk on the river here — the path south gives you a taste of the nastiness ahead for the remainder of the quest. The “safe” path on the overworld may be free of random encounters, but going forward your critical path is laden with fixed battles that in many ways are much worse.

The most common combat scenario going forward takes the form of a straight march along low, flat ground with a tall wall rising behind it. Lizard men poke their head above the top of the wall and chuck rocks at you as you walk, and believe it or not they have good aim. Their logic routines aren’t your usual “throw randomly in a fixed pattern” affairs so common to games of this vintage; rather, they lead their aim, throwing rocks ahead of Link when you walk full tilt forward so that if you simply try to motor through these phases you’ll take tons of damage.

It’s pretty irritating in practice, but I respect the added effort that went into the hazards here. The developers must have watched play testers (such as they were in the day) make a mad dash for the exit and thought, “No, screw you guys. You’re gonna suffer.” There’s a real dedication to human misery on display here.

Once you pass through these gauntlets and the most frustrating bridge sequences in the game, you reach the town of Kasuto. Ragged and worn down by the preceding combat sequences and the brutally difficult random fights, you duck into the village looking forward to recharging your life and magic. And then you promptly die as the town is empty but for invisible monsters that smash into you seemingly at random and brutalize your life meter. Game Over. The return of Ganon.

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Kasuto, as it turns out, has been abandoned but for an old man who proclaims, “This town is dead.” This lends a little more credence to the notion that Zelda II took some pointers from Dragon Quest (with its desolate village of Hauksness), but it also leads to a fairly maddening snipe hunt. The Kasuto holdout tells you to look in the forest to the east, and eventually you’ll probably cotton to the fact that he means the forest along the continent’s eastern edge, separated from the main map by a cavern. But no village appears, and no matter where you walk you’ll never find it by simply passing over the correct tile.

Instead, you have to use the Hammer to knock down trees — a secondary function of the tool you’ve never needed to use prior to this point. While I admire the developers for giving one of Link’s treasure multiple functions as opposed to their usual routine of forcing you to track down a tool to use once or twice, this portion of the game can be quite infuriating if you don’t know about the Hammer’s clear-cutting feature. And you probably don’t, as it’s alluded to vaguely in the manual and never in the game.

Should you manage to find your way to the relocated village of New Kasuto, hidden beneath the trees and inaccessible until you raze the forest, you’ll find your final magic upgrade — essential for completing the game! — and the lamest magic spell in the game. In fact, it’s so lame they didn’t even bother giving it a name. It’s just called “Spell.” The only real use of Spell is to access a couple of buildings in New Kasuto, one of which gives you the helpful (but not essential) Magic Key.

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No, the real coup in finding New Kasuto is that the elderly holdout living in old Kasuto will now give Link the Thunder spell, without which you can’t complete the final boss gauntlet. Also, someone tells you the secret to finding the Hidden Palace, mostly.

After all of this, the Palace itself is fairly mundane. It lacks any significant new challenges; the main feature of note is the fact that it features the game’s only recurring boss, the mounted Ironknuckle (Rebonack), who shows up twice. By this point in Link’s murder career, they should be simple, as once dismounted they actually take less damage to dispatch than standard Blue Ironknuckles (two hits with a level-8 sword versus four).

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The Palace treasure this time around isn’t a mere key but rather an essential tool, the Cross. (Nice consistency with the mandatory religious censorship, there, Nintendo.) The Cross does nothing for Link besides rendering the invisible enemies that haunt Kasuto visible. Big deal, you may say, but the entirety of the path to the Great Palace is lousy with the things. I suppose it’s technically possible to reach the final Palace without the Cross, but only if you are very, very lucky. Or very, very unafraid to use a GameShark.

Ultimately, the one tricky part of the Hidden Palace is that to reach the boss, you need to drop down a pit and use the Fairy spell while in midair on the screen below so you can fly into a small passage in the wall. Mandatory use of a high-cost magic can be a real pain in this game, since magic refills are random drops from certain enemies (and once you clear a room of foes they almost never return); chances are good you’ll need to farm drops from the few respawning enemies nearby… or else just kill yourself.

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After all of this, the Palace’s boss is almost laughably anticlimactic. He rises up from one of three lava pits, waits for a few seconds, belches fire, and ducks back down again. If you time it right, you can hit him three times per appearance — and if your Magic and Life ratings are high, the Shield spell will trivialize his fire attack.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the bulk of the difficulty in this portion of the game stems from unintuitive secrets and poor user guidance, not from sheer tests of dexterity. That changes now, though. With the sixth crystal placed, Link’s only remaining task is to reach the Great Palace and conquer it, but that’s easily the most daunting challenge in the game — in fact, you could argue that it’s the most difficult task in any Nintendo-developed game, ever.

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The Anatomy of Zelda II: X. The seaward

After completing the Labyrinth Palace — by which I mean accomplishing its more difficult goal of acquiring the treasure inside rather than simply besting Carock — the player acquires the latest in Zelda II‘s series of funny-shaped keys. The Boots from the fourth Palace allow you to walk on water… but only a little bit of water. You can’t roam across Hyrule’s rivers and oceans with impunity simply because you’ve acquired a treasure designed for that explicit purpose. Oh, no. The only place the Boots work is in the eastern ocean to the south of the dungeon you’ve just completed.

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This actually is one of Zelda II‘s more sensible design choices in guiding the player to his next goal, though. You may well chafe at the limitations imposed on the Boots; their strict range reduces them from a valuable supplement that increases the efficiency with which you putter about previously conquered grounds the way the Hammer does. Nevertheless, at this point in the game the secrets have grown increasingly abstruse, with fewer clues to your next destination appearing in towns and more potential ways and areas in which they can be hidden from your sight. By making the boots work only in the area where Link needs to find the next Palace, the designers mercifully reduce the amount of real estate you’ll end up wandering through when you inevitably find yourself stumped by another oblique puzzle.

And even then, the map designer managed to throw in a little “screw you” moment: Hidden a few spaces north of the Palace — a spot accessible only by finding an invisible single-tile path on the water — one of the final Heart Containers lurks. And, again, you can’t access the Great Palace without it. Have fun pinpointing the exact title in the vast overworld in which the one last item you need to complete the adventure has been hidden.

Invisible tile shenanigans aside, the Ocean Palace is actually the game’s most easily accessed dungeon. You can walk immediately from the Maze Palace to the Ocean Palace without stopping in a town, collecting a clue, or completing a side quest. But then, the Palace sits on a small island just off a piece of coast line that can be explored immediately once you reach the eastern continent. Most likely by this point the player will have been wondering how to get over to that island for quite some time; being able to go immediately from gathering the boots to the nearby Palace that’s been taunting you for so long feels quite satisfying.

Inside the Ocean Palace, it’s business as usual. By now the Overworld encounters should be growing less grueling as you level up Link’s skills; Fire spells cost fewer MP, enemies do less damage, and you can take down foes in fewer strikes. Nevertheless, the Palace interior is considerably less of a chore than navigating the land above.

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The main objective in this Palace is the Flute, which unsurprisingly turns out to be yet another funny-shaped key that you’ll use all of twice. On the plus side, this Palace allows you to make use of one of your other funny-shaped keys, the Fairy spell, and not just for sneaking through keyholes and dodging blue Ironknuckles as above.

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Granted, the mandatory Fairy spells can be a little annoying, as its magic cost is very high and you’ll want as much magic juice as possible saved up for Shield and Life, but so it goes.

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At this point you’ll have seen most of the tricks present in the Ocean Palace. Like this vanishing bridge guarded by the swooping horse heads, and the fact that a bag full of EXP sits in the middle of the bridge to tempt you into doing something stupid.

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Honestly, you don’t really need EXP bags in this dungeon; the new enemy type, called Mago, surrenders as much EXP per kill as you find in the bags that foes occasionally drop. Magos greatly resemble Wizzrobes; in fact, if Wizzrobes hadn’t been all over the previous dungeon, you’d be forgiven for thinking these are Wizzrobes. Like Wizzrobes, they materialize in a random spot, cast a spell, and quickly vanish again. The main difference is that they fling fire that slowly travels forward about three spaces and lingers momentarily before flickering out as opposed to the spell beams the Wizzrobes cast. They can catch an unwary adventurer off guard and hit pretty hard, and they soak up a fair amount of damage; at full strength, Link will have to land two blows to take them down.

It’s nearly impossible to hit them straight on without being toasted by their fire, so the best technique for victory here is using the downward thrust attack. But then, that’s pretty much always true.

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Case in point, the boss. Gooma barely represents a step over the “stand in one place and hammer the attack button” design of the original Zelda‘s bosses. He spends almost all of his time swinging a mace on a chain that blocks Link from hitting his vulnerable torso and inflicts considerable knockback damage. There’s no real timing possible for this fight given the fact that the boss’ attack features almost zero downtime, so the best approach is to cheese the nature of the downward thrust — while Gooma’s head is invulnerable, if you come in from above at an angle you can slide past his head and hit his torso instead.

This leaves one last Palace before the big one, though unfortunately the road beyond here ranges from “maddeningly difficult” to “soul-crushingly hard.” Not to mention enough vague goals and secrets to inspire true existential despair….

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The Anatomy of Zelda II: IX. Gonna meikyuu sweat

The path to Zelda II‘s fourth dungeon incorporates my absolute least favorite area of the game: The eastern labyrinth. The labyrinth contains a number of key points of interest, including the Labyrinth Palace and a fetch quest item, a small lost child. I don’t know why Link has to rescue the kid; any child capable of making his way through the deadly fields and caverns between Darunia and the labyrinth without being slaughtered by the various murderbeasts along the way is probably some sort of chosen prodigy. Nevertheless, Link has to go out and find the kid, tucking it into his satchel like any other quest item before returning him to the corresponding quest-giver. In return, he receives the Reflect spell, without which the next palace cannot be completed.

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The labyrinth itself isn’t tremendously daunting. It’s separated from the Hyrule mainland by a lengthy bridge that, miraculously, doesn’t send Link into an extended combat sequence against infinitely spawning monsters and bubbles to chip away at his EXP tally. The labyrinth itself consists of neutral tiles, so you don’t have to deal with random monster attacks as you explore. Rather, walking over certain tiles of the labyrinth sends you into fixed combat spaces, including a pitfall that leads to a cave where the lost child awaits.

Also hidden in the labyrinth is a Magic Container to boost your magic total. This has been tucked away in a path of the labyrinth you never need to walk over and is incredibly easy to miss. I did, back in the day. I then discovered that you can’t enter the Great Palace unless you have maximum health and magic, even if you’ve conquered the first six Palaces. In the days before the Internet, that meant I wandered the entirety of Hyrule for the better part of a month, trying to find a cave or secret that I’d somehow missed before finally stumbling into an unmarked spot in the labyrinth that contained the crucial, untelegraphed item I needed to complete the game.

For all of Zelda II‘s clever ideas and creative successes, it was still very much a product of its time, and this means it sometimes falls into unfriendly patterns of design. It doles out hints far more readily than other console games of its vintage, nudging the player toward success and rarely leaving you to wonder how to proceed — or at the very least, giving you the pieces to sort it out on your own. However, many of its solutions rely on forcing the player to cover every square inch of the overworld in search of hidden spaces, often while under constant assault by irritating monsters. These few areas — the labyrinth Magic Container, the ocean Heart Container, Bagu, etc. — at times reduce the game to a matter of dumb luck and persistence and become unwelcome choke points to progress.

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Thankfully, once inside the Labyrinth Palace, things are nowhere near so frustrating. True, the Palace can be tough, and it does have a few excessively cheap elements. By far, my least favorite are the Medusa-like horse heads that swoop down on their parabolic assault vectors. Even with Link powered up to the point he should be at by this point in the game, they require multiple hits to take down and will drain considerable EXP from Link upon contact.

That’s not why they’re so frustrating this time around, though; rather, their exasperating quality in the Labyrinth Palace comes from the way they appear in dangerous situations — usually over collapsing bridges above pits of lava. They swoop down quickly at an angle that’s difficult to defend against, always appearing in just the right way to knock Link back into lava. Yet there’s no easy way to stop and fight them off here (because eventually they do stop spawning), as the bridges over the lava vanish once you step on them. You need to keep pressing forward, leaving yourself incredibly vulnerable to the horse heads; a handful of slip-ups and you’re back to the game’s starting point to fight back to the Palace all over again.

Outside of these nuisances, however, the Labyrinth Palace mercifully plays nice. The enemies in this area are almost entirely creatures you’ve faced elsewhere, and while they’re powerful you have plenty of techniques and spells to deal with them. They also yield far better EXP rewards than the beasts of the overworld, so it’s not too impossibly difficult to farm experience near the entrance to the labyrinth and build up some levels if you find yourself deficient.

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The one new foe of note this time around is the Wizzrobe, who behaves much as in the original Zelda. They materialize into the room, fire a beam of magic at the lower shield position, and vanish again after a second or two. Link’s shield can, by default, absorb these spells (provided he ducks), so the Wizzrobes aren’t too difficult to defend against. However, none of Link’s offensive options can hurt them; both his sword and his Fire spell pass right through them, harmlessly. Instead, you need to use the Reflect spell to bounce their magic back at them for an instant kill.

The Palace’s boss turns out to be a large Wizzrobe named Carrock who must be defeated in the same manner. The boss teleports around the room at a much faster pace, often appearing before Link can even respond and frequently hitting you in a fairly cheap manner. However, with the Sheld spell up, Link can soak up dozens of attacks by the boss. You can’t hurt him and he can’t hurt you much, so the question becomes a matter of how you can triumph before your health whittles its way down to zero.

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Obviously, the answer is the Reflect spell. And while it’s possible to enter the Palace without the spell, you receive both hints as to its importance from villagers and face off against smaller versions of the boss several times through the Palace. There should be no real mystery about the secret of success here, and while the boss can be dizzying with the rate at which it warps around the room, victory is as easy as standing in one spot and facing back and forth to let the boss warp into his own reflected magic. The in-level boss tutorial represented by the Wizzrobes is one of Zelda II‘s better learning-through-experience instances, and suggests that the developers didn’t totally lose the plot in the second half of the game after all.

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