Hi there! So in a 2013 interview with Kotaku, legendary
game designer Shigeru Miyamoto was asked the question, “You said you made a bad game. What was the bad game you made?” His reply? That’s right, it was Zelda II: The Adventure
of Link. Now, compared to the other game in the series,
this one stands out like a sore thumb. Rather than utilising the top down perspective
that its predecessor and many of the titles following it used, large parts of this game
took place from a side on perspective. Plus, the game included many RPG elements
which later games ended up ditching, like experience points for leveling up magic, power
and life. That certainly doesn’t sound like the other
Zelda games, right? But why did this game turn out to be so different
from all the others in the series? Well, let us find out! It was the late 1980s, not long after Shigeru
Miyamoto’s action adventure royale The Legend of Zelda was released. Now, this game was wildly successful - reviewers
loved it, players couldn’t get enough of it. But, that didn’t phase Miyamoto. Instead of beginning work on a sequel right
away, Miyamoto wanted to create a brand new, totally original title. And so, he told designer Tadashi Sugiyama,
“I want to make a side-scrolling action game which makes use of up and down movements
for attacks and defense.” And so, Sugiyama assembled a cosy team of
about 10 developers to put together this unique game. They all started experimenting a whole bunch
with how to create a game that fulfilled Miyamoto’s request. They began production without having a solid
plan in mind, but before long, they came upon an idea - what if the game would switch views
between an overhead view and a side on perspective? This would make for some totally unique gameplay. However, according to Miyamoto, this idea
was severely limited by the hardware the game was being developed. Like Zelda 1, this game was to be released
for the Famicom Disk System. This was great for the the most part - the
Disk System allowed games to be much bigger in size, allowing for bigger, grander adventures. However, according to Miyamoto, “from a
hardware perspective, if we had been able to have the switch between the scenes speed
up, if that had been faster, we could have done more with how we used the sidescrolling
vs. the overhead [view] and kind of the interchange between the two. But, because of the limitations on how quickly
those scenes changed, we weren't able to.” If you’re wondering what Miyamoto's talking
about, check out this video of the game being played on an original Famicom Disk System. They go to change from an overhead to a side
on perspective, and… Yeesh. “Wait”, indeed. Because of this 6 or 7 second long transition
every time the viewpoint changed, the team didn’t feel like they could switch the scene
too often, for fear of irritating players. Now, one of the most unusual features of this
game was the random encounters the player would experience travelling across the map. One second you’d be traversing the map,
the next,l you’d be chased done by a bunch of ominous blobs who took no displeasure in
killing you as soon as possible. So, what was the reason for this radical change. Again, t’was limitation. Because of a lack of storage space (yes, even
with the larger capacity of the disk system), the team wanted to find a way to have the
player battle the same enemies a number of times. Their answer to this: random encounters. However, without some kind of motivation,
these encounters would quickly become irksome. To solve this problem, the team added a leveling
system. When you fought an enemy, you’d be able
to fill up your life, magic or power bars just a little more. However, yet more limitations held back the
team’s vision. According to Miyamoto, “it would have been
nice to have had bigger enemies in the game, but the Famicom/NES hardware wasn't capable
of doing that. Certainly, with hardware nowadays you can
do that and we have done that, but of course nowadays creating bigger enemies takes a lot
of effort.” And so, the enemies had to be a lot smaller
than the team originally envisioned. Now, one of the biggest complaints about the
game that the team received was its extremely high difficulty. However, it wasn’t always going to be this
way. In the final game, the player can level up
their magic, life and power 8 times. Originally, though, Miyamoto wanted the max
levels to be double that - 16. However, as development went on, the team
decided to make it a little trickier. According to Sugiyama, “The foundation of
action games at the time was to feel difficult for everyone. Games didn’t have a ton of content at that
time so in order to have them played for as long as possible we felt like we couldn’t
make them easily clearable.” That wasn’t the only reason, though. Since the team would have to test the game
again and again and again, they would get bored if the game wasn't hard enough. Which was all well and good for them, but
it meant that for the average player, the minimum skill required to complete the game
was verrrry high. After the game released, Nintendo got a call
from a customer who exclaimed, “I just can’t beat the final boss!” However, it turned out he was fully leveled
up already, so the team ended up telling him, “You can only rely on your skill at this
point.” ouch. Now, as development neared the end, the team
made a dramatic decision. Up until this point, the game was planned
as a totally original game, not to be part of any pre-existing series. However, they decided the main character should
be a 16 year old Link from the Legend of Zelda, instead, making this game a sequel to last
year’s game. Now, “The Legend of Zelda” stood out as
a title - rather than sounding like the name of a game, it sounded more like the name of
a book. And so, the team decided to follow suit, titling
their game, “Zelda II: The Adventure of Link”. As for the exact reasoning why they chose
this name - according to Sugiyama, “When thinking of a way to best describe the contents
of the game, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link seemed to pass without objection... (I forgot).” And so, on the 14th of January, 1987, Zelda
II: The Adventure of Link was released for the Famicom Disk System. Financially, it was a big success, becoming
the longstanding best selling Zelda game, only beaten by 2017’s Breath of The Wild. Despite all this success, though, Miyamoto
never ended up liking this game. In a 2013 Kotaku interview, he explained “When
we're designing games, we have our plan for what we're going to design but in our process
it evolves and grows from there. In Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, unfortunately
all we ended up creating was what we had originally planned on paper.” back in 2003, he reiterated, “All games
I make usually gets better in the development process, since good ideas keep coming, but
Zelda II was sort of a failure…” However, not all was bad. When Sugiyama was told that a number of people’s
favourite Zelda game was Zelda 2, he responded, “Those kind of people exist!? (laughs) That’s
a joke of course but I’m very grateful when someone says that. As a game creator, that is best compliment
to receive so thank you all very much. 30 years have passed since its release but
please give Zelda II: Adventure of Link a try!” Hi there! Thanks for watching to the end! I hope you found that interesting. I find this one black sheep in the Zelda series,
even if it lacks the polish of some of the entries. Have you ever tried this game? If so what were you thoughts. Plus, subscribe for more videos like this
weekly, plus sharing this video with friends helps me out a ton. Right, that’s all. Bye!
It has always been my favorite one in the series. It was the first game I ever beat on NES when I was a kid.
The graphics of the old games bring back some weird feels man