A truly tough Zelda

Author's Rating:

Pros: Fun for nostalgia sake. no more lost save games.

Cons: An oddball in the Zelda series, very hard. Graphics dated

The Bottom Line: 
Good for nostalgia and adults with patience. Bad for kids and adults that grew up with playstation.

Author's Review
This is the Gameboy Advance port of Zelda II for the NES. The main advantages of this over the original cart and NES is that the old NES systems had a bad habit of getting a flashing blue screen problem. This blanks out the games on both Zelda I and II. That is the reason I have yet to finish the game after all this time. Also this makes the game portable. But if you own a Gamecube I recommend you get the Zelda Special edition disk which has Zelda I, II and the two N64 Zeldas.
Zelda II is unique. It is the only Zelda game that is totally a side scrolling platformer. While the graphics were superior to the original Zelda it was also much harder. Requiring more eye hand skills than the original. It is also an unforgiving game making you start from the beginning of the game and travel all the way to where you were before you died even if you save your progress. Instead of getting to go to different shops and purchase things you got upgrades based on how many critters you killed. The towns are often rather similar and boring as well. The castles remind me more of Castlevania than the classic Zelda kind. The fighting style also reminds me more of Castlevania. In fact if the graphics were hacked it would probably play the same way. I have found this to be one of the hardest of the Zeldas. I do believe that if they had not returned to the top down format for Zelda 3 and the gameboy versions that Zelda would have ended with II.I recommend you get the Zelda collection disk for the gamecube so that you at least get 2 games that your kids will play because I do not see this one holding their attention long.