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Originally posted by: GoldenPhoenixI don't believe I said Zelda II was difficult for the sake of being difficult, I think it is poorly designed which makes it difficult. Now what are these design flaws? Oh perhaps the random battles later on that throw a buttload of enemies at your, which will more than likely hit you. Could it also be the ridiculously poor sword distance? Or maybe it is the cheap "throw you back" when you get hit which I never liked in a game? Or perhaps it is the button smashing battles such as with Ironknuckle which weren't fun nor innovative. This may not be a difficulty flaw but what about the lame "cheap" glitches to kill some of the bosses, like the final one.
The enemy recoil, while at times annoying, wasn't unique to Zelda II, and could be certainly as annoying elsewhere. I do agree about the short sword distance, though it can be overcome to a good extent by mastering the combat. Im' sure there's a saying something along the lines of the weapon not always being everything. And the Ironknuckles were more than "button smashing", which I'll get to in a bit. And the only exploitable glitch involved the final boss.
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Not much different from CV or Metroid? You are kidding right? The design in those games alone beats this one with the ugly stick, not to mention that the "Metroidish" segments are only a part of the game, it has more in its goofy design including the thrown together "random" battles.
Zelda II came at an early age, where memory constraints limited design. This was also the case with Metroid 1. Heck, it wasn't until Super Metroid that they really got it right on that series. And even if Zelda II was simpler in its design, at least it wasn't half as laden in terms of needed backtracking, something which still to an extent is present in the exploration based Castlevanias. (Though it has been fixed in 2d Metroids thanks to nifty shortcuts and high speed powerups such as the Dash Boots.)
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In regards to random battles and Pokemon, that game is an RPG whose staple is random battles, Zelda II didn't know what it wanted to be, there is a difference.
So just because a random encounter results in a non-turn based battle system encounter, that means the game is genre-confused? What about Star Ocean or the "Tales of..." games? Getsufuu Maden, a non-RPG, also had a few visible encounters in one area.
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Anyway I can say I was wrong about Zelda II, it isn't above average it is average to below average! The game is flat out terrible in places, I just played a couple hours of it and see little to nothing redeemable about it (now I know why I never liked it). Text conversations are snore inducing as you wait for them to finish, fighting is simple and stupid (As stated earlier the Iron knuckles are hilariously dumb to fight, down jab, up jab, down jab, up jab really fast), over world map is generic and cramped, level design is generic with little to no variety (Where are all the great puzzles? Where are the distinguishable landmarks? Above all else why does every room look the same in a dungeon?), it is a grind fest, random battles suck being more tedious than fun, item variety is pretty lame in comparison to other Zelda games, and the leveling system is ridiculous. So yeah I would say I have some legitimate reasons for not liking the game (I also found the music nauseating, you can tell it did not have Zelda's lead composer).
Text conversations? You're complaining about single, small blocks of text that you can mostly skip with the push of a button. And from the sound of it, you didn't learn to use the shield properly, or watch their shields, because the Iron Knuckles aren't that bad. It's all about timing and reflexes. I'm not sure I know what you mean by the overworld map being cramped. Zelda I and Metroid were just as repetitive about level design, the latter case a more critical shortcoming given the bigger single area construct. I do understand the gripe about there being a lack of puzzles, though it beat having obtuse and/or badly conceived puzzles (see: Simon's Quest), and the combat kept things interesting for me. As for grind fests with often tedious random battles, let me point you to Pokemon and the first two Final Fantasies, aka Dawn of Souls (GBA) and Origins (PS1). And the leveling system worked pretty well aside from the loss of all present level experience at game over. And the music was fantastic. (If any early Zelda track became nauseating, it was the dungeon music from Zelda 1.)
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