Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is all too often criticized as the “black sheep” of the franchise. People say that it’s too hard; that it isn’t Zelda because of the sidescrolling and RPG-elements. That’s why its nice for once to see the game getting some more fair analysis in this piece by jparish of Telebunny.net.
The Anatomy of Zelda II is a series of articles that just kicked off with Part I – Genre Shift. The piece looks at how the developers took elements from games like Dragon Quest to make Zelda II a different experience to the original Legend of Zelda. Here’s an extract from the article:
Ever restless, the design team wasn’t content to simply rehash Zelda‘s
design and mechanics. Video games still existed in a primal soup,
waiting for definition and evolution, and this particular team wasn’t
content to simply iterate when so many other concepts begged
exploration. Unlike Super Mario Bros. 2, Zelda II
wasn’t simply a harder remix of the previous game’s elements; on the
contrary, that would have been redundant, given the way they build that
kind of “sequel” right into the disk as the Second Quest. Still, Zelda II
seems to have been designed to answer a similar fundamental question to
that of its predecessor: “How do we combine role-playing and action
elements?”
The Anatomy of a Game Series from Telebunny also includes articles on Castlevania and the original Legend of Zelda, which can all be accessed from the series’ landing page.