{"id":2455,"date":"2013-03-07T13:10:37","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T13:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/?p=2455"},"modified":"2013-03-07T14:05:25","modified_gmt":"2013-03-07T14:05:25","slug":"my-top-100-12-zelda-ii-the-adventure-of-link","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/?p=2455","title":{"rendered":"My Top 100: #12 – Zelda II: The Adventure of Link"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"1987<\/a>

1987 – Nintendo (NES, Game Boy Advance, Virtual Console, eShop)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Wait…\u00a0 so…\u00a0 that guy you control\u00a0isn’t named Zelda?<\/p>\n

Similar to me not realizing Super Mario Bros. 2<\/em> was set in a dream world, I\u00a0didn’t quite\u00a0grasp the fact\u00a0that Link was actually the name of the young man in The Legend of Zelda<\/em>.\u00a0 Like I said before, I wasn’t that good at reading English yet,\u00a0and I’d say that had something to do with it…\u00a0 but check this out; the following text is from the intro to the first Zelda<\/em> game, before it was re-written for later releases.<\/p>\n

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\"zeldaintro\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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The translation was pretty bad, so I’m not really surprised that last sentence’s significance was lost on me.<\/p>\n

Adventure of Link<\/em>\u00a0has a reputation for being a black sheep in the franchise.\u00a0 Most casual Zelda<\/em> fans don’t care for it, and for the longest time, I didn’t appreciate the\u00a0game all that much, either.\u00a0 In fact, had I made this countdown two or three years ago, it\u00a0might not have even\u00a0made the list!<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I didn’t really play the game\u00a0the way\u00a0it was meant to be played when I was younger.\u00a0 As I mentioned in\u00a0a post a while back<\/a>,\u00a0my\u00a0friend’s father\u00a0owned the game, and I got to borrow it on a few occasions.\u00a0 I played it a fair amount, but when it came to one of the more interesting\u00a0tweaks to the formula –\u00a0being able to\u00a0level up\u00a0your Attack, Magic and Life attributes\u00a0– I didn’t even know what it did!\u00a0 I mean, yeah,\u00a0they all\u00a0“get better” as you accumulate experience\u00a0points, but I never cared\u00a0about points!\u00a0 I’m going to turn it off eventually anyway, and they all reset to zero when you do that.\u00a0 Who cares about stinkin’ points, anyway?<\/p>\n

Obviously, I was way, WAY wrong about that one.\u00a0 For years, that level-up screen would pop up, and I’d press Start just to get it off the screen, not really caring about how it worked.\u00a0 I knew it was all relevant to the gameplay, but didn’t much care for the game enough to really take a look at how you could use it to your advantage.<\/p>\n

I was watching a speed run a few years ago, and the person flying through the game beefed up his Attack stats quite a bit before\u00a0upgrading his Magic and Life.\u00a0 I knew you could\u00a0pick and choose what to improve and when, or that you could keep your experience points for whatever the next upgrade was that you were looking for.\u00a0\u00a0As a kid though, I just had no interest in\u00a0experimenting with that whatsoever.<\/p>\n

So, on top of the fantastic swordplay, the countless NPC’s you can interact with, and incredibly satisfying difficulty (as opposed to the rage-inducing kind found in Battletoads<\/em>), you have this wonderfully simple and intuitive system that lets you play the game however you want to play it…\u00a0 and I only recently came to appreciate how awesome that made\u00a0the game.<\/p>\n

For many years, I neglected\u00a0it because I thought\u00a0it simply didn’t like me,\u00a0or that it was too different to even be called a Zelda<\/em> game.\u00a0 That was a mistake on my part, and I’ve been making up for it by playing it quite a bit over these last few years!<\/p>\n

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