Have you ever finished Zelda II: tAoL?

1st Official Post
    • Official Post

    This game in known for being frustrating and hard, also as a NES game. Some people never played it on the original cartridge and have only used Virtual consoles to emulate it. I think many have tried it, even briefly but I wonder, have you ever finished this title?

    If you have conquered it, what was the hardest parts of the game for you? What do you think of the game overall?
    If not, how far did you get? Are you planning to return someday to play and finish it?

    • Official Post
    Quote from LinkSkywalker

    I never did, but I did write a walkthrough for it.

    The early 2000s were a weird time for the Internet.

    Hahah, that's quite interesting. You wrote a walkthrough without playing the game. Was it difficult?
    Would you ever consider giving the game a proper go if you had the access to the console and game?

    Quote from Link

    I did and I felt so accomplished in doing so. I wanted to put it down and replay OoT so badly.

    Hahah, I bet the change between those two must be abysmal.

    • Official Post

    I actually do have access to the console and game. I own 3 NES, all of which I replaced the 42 pin connectors on. I've also got a copy of AoL, although I don't recall how well it works.

    I'd be fine giving the game a serious chance, though I don't really give myself a lot of time for video games these days, and I've never really thought AoL was very fun to play. So I'd need a reason to set aside time to play it.

    As for writing a walkthrough, it's kind of a long story. Basically, I was a huge fan of all the numerous Zelda fan sites that were all over the place in the early 2000s. I very much wanted to participate. So at one point I saw a website called "Zelda Cubed" that was hiring a walkthrough writer. I took the job, and was tasked with writing walkthroughs for all the zelda games. I decided to do AoL first, because I thought it was an underrepresented game in the Zelda community. But since I'd never played it, I went to GameFAQs and found someone else's walkthrough to serve as a guide for my own.

    After doing some actual professional writing work, I've learned that this kind of thing is pretty normal and expected of working writers. But at the time, I thought what I was doing was pretty shady. The document I ended up writing was 100% my own work, filled with a lot of dumb jokes, unnecessary parenthetical statements, and poor phrasing. I just had no way of ensuring that my walkthrough was correct, since I was relying on the work of someone else who had actually played the game. (At least I assume they did). Truth be told, I really don't like doing that sort of thing. I've so far avoided it in my writing career, but I also don't make a living wage as a writer, so maybe I've got too much pride. =P

    As an addendum to the story, I was actually the only active staff member of Zelda Cubed, aside from the webmaster himself. Eventually, he set up a forum for his website. I wasn't allowed on forums, but I decided to join anyway, and he made me a moderator of the forum.

    That forum was actually a sub-forum of another forum, called "The Sacred Realm." And that's how I ended up on TSR in the first place.

    I beat the game. Never spoke of it again, because the final boss "dark link" was a joke... and it literally pissed me the heck off because I had to go through all that trouble just to fight a boss not even worth the first temple.

    What's worse is that his GRAND apperance in the Water Temple of Ocarina of Time.. was just ugh..

    Anything with Dark Link or "Shadow Link" just no.

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