Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is the odd one out. Released in Japan for the Famicom Disk System on January 14, 1987, and in North America and the PAL region for the Nintendo Entertainment System in late 1988, it is the second game in The Legend of Zelda series and the direct sequel to the first. It is also the one that looks least like the rest of them.
Nintendo developed and published it. And almost everything the series is known for — the top-down view, the free-roaming swordplay — gets pushed aside here in favor of side-scrolling platforming and a role-playing system of experience points. That gamble is what makes Zelda II worth arguing about, and it is why it lands at 7.1 of 10.
Link Turns Sixteen and the Door Opens
The story picks up several years after The Legend of Zelda. Link is now sixteen and notices a strange mark on the back of his left hand, one that matches the crest of Hyrule. He seeks out Impa, Zelda’s nursemaid, who takes him to the North Castle, where a door has been sealed by magic for generations.
Impa presses the back of Link’s hand to the door. It opens. Inside lies a sleeping maiden — Zelda, princess of Hyrule from long ago. Her brother, the prince, once tried to force her to reveal their dead father’s secrets about the Triforce. She refused.
The prince’s magician friend struck at her in anger. The spell put Zelda into an eternal sleep, and the magic arced so wildly that it killed the magician. The remorseful prince placed his sister in the castle tower and decreed that every princess born to the royal family would be named Zelda, so the tragedy would not be forgotten.
Impa tells Link the mark means he is the hero chosen to wake her. She gives him a chest holding six crystals and ancient writings that only a future king of Hyrule can read. Link can read them, though he has never seen the language. The crystals must be set into statues in six palaces across Hyrule to open the way to the Great Palace, which holds the Triforce of Courage.
Six Palaces, Two Perspectives
That structure is the game. You move across a top-down world map, then drop into side-scrolling areas when enemies appear or when you enter a palace. The top-down view is the map; the side view is where you fight. No other canonical Zelda game splits itself this way.
The combat is strategic rather than loose. Link has a shield, a sword, and a magic meter — a first for the series, and one that stuck. He also has lives, and a proximity continue system tied to them. Experience points drive his levels. Spells are learned and cast. Non-player characters do more talking than they did in the first game.
The comparison that matters is Castlevania. The side-scrolling action and the experience system sit close to Konami’s series, especially Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, which shares the same stubborn streak.
What Stuck and What Didn’t
Zelda II introduced things the series kept. The magic meter is the clearest example. Dark Link, the shadow version of the hero, is another — a character that would return in later games and become one of the series’ favorite tricks.
Other pieces did not survive. The experience points and the limited lives have not been used in a canonical Zelda game since. The side-scrolling perspective shows up only in a minor way in Link’s Awakening and the other Game Boy entries, where the top-down view still runs the show. Apart from the non-canonical CD-i titles Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, no game in the series carries a lives feature at all.
So the ledger is uneven. Zelda II gave the series a resource to manage and a villain to mirror its hero. It did not give the series its shape.
The game introduced four things worth naming:
- The magic meter.
- Dark Link.
- The side-scrolling perspective.
- Experience points and limited lives.
That list is the whole argument about this game in four lines. The first two are why it matters. The last two are why it feels like a detour.
Where the Game Sits
The Adventure of Link was followed by A Link to the Past for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1991.
It also occupies a specific place in the series timeline. It is the eighth and last game in the “Defeated Hero” branch, the alternate reality in which the Hero of Time loses to Ganondorf in Ocarina of Time. That is a strange home for a game that otherwise stands apart.
Judged on its own, Zelda II is a hard, strange, frequently hostile game. The side-scrolling sections demand patience the first game never asked for. The lives system punishes mistakes in a way the series would later abandon on purpose. The experience points turn exploration into bookkeeping.
But the game is not a failure. It is an experiment that half worked, and the half that worked is load-bearing. The magic meter alone justifies its place in the lineage. Dark Link alone justifies it twice.
The half that did not work is just as instructive. Nintendo tried a lives system and an experience curve, and then spent the next three decades never using either again in a mainline game. That is not a company that forgot. That is a company that decided.
What that record misses is how much of the series’ later identity runs through this cartridge. The magic meter, Dark Link, the willingness to break the formula — all of it starts here. The Legend of Zelda established the idea. Zelda II tested how far the idea could bend before it snapped.
It bent. It did not snap. That is the honest verdict on a sequel that took the biggest swing in the series’ early history and connected on about half of it.
7.1 of 10.
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