Nothing is worse than playing a game and taking a break from it than when you start playing again you forget your progress. I have been working on finishing Zelda II for the first time. I had played through most of the game about a month and a half ago anf finally picked it back up tongiht. I thought I had finished the 5th palace and needed to beat the 6th before heading to the Great Palace. 

I spent time beating the 6th palace and I'm all leveled to 8 with each attribute. I then go through the entire world collecting all of the 1-ups before I make the daunting trek to the great palace. I get to the gate to realize the barrier is still up and I can't get in! Whoops, I still have 1 crystal left. Silly me, I thought this was a crystal you had to put in to a statue to remove the barrier. Wrong.... looks like I forgot to beat that 5th palace. I had to take the gamble of 'shutting the game off w/o holding reset beause I didn't want to save progress. 

Lucky for me I didn't erase the cart. Looks like I'll have to go beat the boss to the 5th palace before doing all that work all over again. 

Hint for future play through.

Once I learned you could jump over the crystals after beating the temple bosses, I'd save all of them for leveling up the higher ranks.

Makes leveling up less a chore as you can level up to 5/6s pretty easy already.

I don't understand why others feel this game is hard.
I run through it every now and then, easily my favorite Zelda game.

Luckily, I'm already fully leveled up, so playing through the rest isn't awful. Its not super hard once you get the nuances, but for 10 year old me, it sucked. I just finally decided to give it a go again.

I am starting to love this game. I really feel it gets a bad reputation. If this game had any other name than Zelda II, it would go down as one of the better NES games out there. If it were simply called The Adventure of ________ (leave out Link or Zelda) it would have been a hit.

If you want to 'cheat' and you have a turbo controller like a MAX, you can get hit by a wandering enemy in the swamp land. Then just stand at the far left of the screen and put a book or something on your controller to auto slash. A little 2 pt bird keeps appearing.

Leave it like that for an hour or whatever and you go up a level. Keep coming back and selecting your upgrade throughout the day you can be at max level in no time!

It was harder for me to get to the last palace than to actually beat it. HHHAAAATTTTEEEE flying eyeballs.

Zelda II was a hit.

Define hit. Sold a lot of copies or everyone loved it.

That being said... I realize depending on who you talk to, it could be both. I've seen the arguement go both ways on this title though, depends on what kind of crowd you have in the room that day. 

Zelda II was a travesty. They went back to what worked for LTTP

^^^^^ This. Lots of people HATE it as a Zelda game because it went away from what was awesome in the original. The only top down aspect was the map navigation portion and it really aggravated the fans of the first game because you can't do anything.

Like I said, if it were released as a stand alone with a different name and not as Zelda II it would be viewed in a different light today. It might have not sold quite as many copies, but it would be fondly remembered for what it is gameplay-wise than being that 'dark horse' Zelda game for the NES.

From my understanding, Zelda 2 was well received at the time. It's only history that hasn't been kind. It's a fantastic game, though.

I find the hardest part to be the Great Palace, which I haven't beaten without using a map. And the boss. Flippin' hard!

Zelda 2 was indeed a hit at the time. The difficulty was the complaint the people had that didn't like it, usually.

Well imagine trying to make it through Death Mountain without your candle....I tried this over and over again before realizing I missed something. Post-Death Mountain I didn't find the game too difficult at all.

Zelda 2 is my favorite game of all time. It drives me nuts when I hear people bashing it. I always think of it as being like Zelda 1 and Metroid mixed together. Brilliant. Nobody talked badly about this game when I was a kid and it first came out. The hatred came posthumously with emulation and people rediscovering the NES only to find the second Zelda different from the first. That's like wanting to play a sports game, picking up Final Fantasy and getting angry when it doesn't contain footballs.

Zelda 2 has a lot more in common with the later versions of Castlevania (SotN) and Metroid (like Super Metroid) than the earlier iterations of those games. There is a logic and flow that it proceeds through that is similar to many famous games which come after it.

The combat in Zelda 2 is superior to Zelda 1. That is all.

It definitely has an interesting combat system.

Good sir, I demand you explain your thought process at once!
 

zelda 2 is my fav zelda of all time. i love the experience points system, and the music is great. the challenge is too much imo. it's not an everyone can play game unfortunately. games should be as easy and accessible as super mario 3. that's the definition of a video game. fun, tough but easy, and anyone can get into it.

i am error.

Travesty is a bit harsh, but yeah, I agree. LoZ and LTTP were (are) tha shizzie.

Agree with robin. If Zelda 2 was not a Zelda title, nobody would like it or even cared as it was just a bad game. Still has good music though.

such a shame. Zelda 2 was my favorite zelda game of all time. LTTP is amazing as well. what Id give for a zelda 2 remake or style revival

I don't think I'd go as far as to call it a travesty either, but it's not even on the same radar screen as Legend of Zelda and Link to the Past.

Zelda II inspired the CD-I games and that says enough right there. It's a tragedy that caused a travesty trifecta.

Link was an awesome game. It established a beautiful precedent of actually making a new game for a sequel that was the best part of Zelda until they got tired of working aster ocarina an just released that one over and over ad-nausium. Of course the change fearers hated it but for me it set an expectation for sequels to be perpetually disappointed thereafter by everyone else

Meh, whatever--Zelda II is awesome.

Nintendo made such a big deal about the release of zelda 2 I don't remember a game that had that kind of marketing push before it.they had us waiting for the game and then came the chip shortage and when we finally got it it was so different from zelda 1 most people didnt know what to do with it. i would have prefered the zelda sequel to be the same as the first with different map , items ,quest etc. something like the zelda outlands game would have been the perfect zelda 2. i agree that if zelda 2 had a different title it would be a more fondly remembered game without having to live up to it's big brother