The Great Zelda Playthrough Part 2: Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

Welcome back to The Great Zelda Playthrough, in which I play through all the Zelda games in release order to prepare for Breath of the Wild. If you want to start from the beginning, check out the post I wrote about the first game. This one’s about Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

In my previous post, I said that the first Zelda game is the hardest for me to put into perspective. Putting Zelda II into perspective is relatively easy, but it’s easily the hardest one to evaluate objectively, just because it’s so different from every other entry in the series. Zelda II is the black sheep of the Zelda franchise. It was a game that took a drastically different approach to gameplay that really hasn’t been replicated in any other Zelda game.

The Great Zelda Playthrough Part 1: The Legend of Zelda (NES)

In preparation for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I’ve decided to play through all the main series Zelda games (all of them that have an official placement on the timeline) in release order. What this means is starting with the original game, The Legend of Zelda on the NES.

I think Zelda 1 (as I’ll be calling it to distinguish it from the series as a whole) is the hardest game for me personally to put into perspective. It released in America back in 1987, years before I was even born, and I didn’t really get to play video games until long after that. It was only after completing eight or so other games in the franchise (the exact order I played these in escapes me) that I first played it, and while it did establish a lot of what the series would do moving forward, it’s also drastically different from the direction the series took from A Link to the Past onward.