The latest in the GameSpite Journal series has just body-checked the Blurb store with two available versions: Hardcover and paperback. As usual. Like The Anatomy of Castlevania Vol. I, this edition is the larger 10×8″ landscape format and isn’t available in black and white, so the price is a little higher than the platonic ideal for GameSpite books — though the one gracious move Blurb has made lately (they now price books per page rather than per 20-page folio) means that this issue comes in a few bucks cheaper than the Castlevania book since it’s slightly shorter.

• Paperback Edition (70pp): $37
• Hardcover Edition (70pp): $58

I’m still putting together a stripped-down, small-format, black-and-white edition for the budget-conscious, so please hold on if you’re interested in that particular book. I’ve also made the PDF version available (it’s attached to the hardcover book) if you’d like that in the short term — though please do remember that I’ll be setting up a separate PDF store sometime in the next few weeks.

The cover looks better in the flesh than in this image — you can’t see it here, but Link’s Shadow has a sort of rough-edge look meant to call back to the Ganon Wraiths in Wind Waker, and the painterly effect on the coloring looks as nice as it did on the Castlevania book. The pink looks a lot more garish on-screen. Look, I was just being true to the material.

Also, be sure to check out the inline previews on the bookstore to check out some of the great original art Philip “Loki” Armstrong provided for the book. Dude did a doodle for each and every write-up of both Zelda and Zelda II, because he’s insane. The back cover features Bill Mudron’s amazing Map of Hyrule, which you should buy at full size because it’s — what’s the word? Oh yes: Amazeballs.

Also also, the thumbnail image for the hardcover book appears to have a graphical error (it’s missing the line separating “The Anatomy of” and “Zelda”) but the actual book will be fine. What you’re seeing is just a random visual artifact caused by their store system.

And finally, the coupon code MAY15OFF should net you $15 off a purchase, though I’m not sure what the required spending threshold is for that. Poke around online for “blurb coupon code” and you’ll probably find something else that’ll work, too. Anything to offset their hideous shipping prices…. Alright, try the code CROWNED15 and see what happens.

Edit: I’ve begun selling PDFs through Gumroad, per several people’s recommendations. The most recent two books are now up for $5 apiece, and I’ll be publishing back issues for a reduced price when I have time to get those up (i.e. after work).

Anatomy of Zelda Vol. I

Anatomy of Castlevania Vol. I

I won’t lie: Zelda II surprised me. Based on my vague memories of being stumped by its obscure clues and opaque design for weeks on end as a young teen, and given the fact that its successors have only connected with its design concepts on oblique tangents, along with its general deprecation among gamers… well, I expected my journey through the Adventure of Link to be an arduous chore.

In truth, I only took on this particular Anatomy of a Game project out of a sense of completeness. It wouldn’t do to write up the 2D Zeldas and skip over the second entry would it? And yet, while Zelda II has proven to be admittedly imperfect and in dire need of some modern-day refinement, as expected, on the whole it’s a devastatingly inventive and influential game. Despite the action-oriented combat, it’s a true role-playing game (albeit one with very limited character progression options) — the furthest any internally developed Nintendo game has ever ventured into that genre, if I’m not mistaken.

The concept of blending action and role-playing elements certainly didn’t originate here, and Zelda II bears more than a passing similarity to some of Falcom’s Dragon Slayer titles. However, as noted previously, Zelda II takes its role-playing mechanics a step beyond simply giving you magic spells to cast and enemies that barf up experience points upon defeat. Its entire world pivots around the concept of opening new paths and challenges upon the completion of small quests, giving players the freedom to roam a compact but densely constructed realm in search of their next objective. We take this for granted now, but remember that many of Zelda II‘s console contemporaries were still struggling to deal with the concept of arcade action that scrolled beyond a single screen.

As often happens with such radically progressive and ambitious games, Zelda II has some rough edges that need sanding. Players are expected to pixel-hunt in towns and tile-hunt on the overworld map; clues to progress can often be too opaque, or lacking altogether; enemy combat encounters rely too much on endlessly spawning nuisances and being forced to manage more (and more varied) foes than Link can properly deal with. The tools and spells you collect often offer extremely limited use and simply feel like an arbitrary checkpoint to real progress.

Still, it works. Not unlike Konami’s missteps with Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, Nintendo may have bitten off a bit more than it could chew with this game’s design — though certainly not to the degree that Konami did — and many of its ideas wouldn’t be fully realized for another decade. The concept of magic appeared straightaway in the sequel, A Link to the Past, but it was heavily reworked to complement Link’s subweapons rather than replace them. Meanwhile, the emphasis on swordplay and one-on-one combat properly came into its own only after Zelda moved to the third dimension with Ocarina of Time and arguably achieved its peak with The Wind Waker‘s battle mechanics: As in Zelda II, The Wind Waker emphasized defense and evasion more than head-on stabbing.

In fact, while Ocarina of Time owes its quest structure to A Link to the Past, its moment-to-moment play and emphasis on townsfolk feel like Zelda II given a third dimension. Rather than pull the overhead camera of other 2D Zeldas down to ground level for Ocarina, Nintendo simply rotated Zelda II‘s camera 90 degrees around Link, pushing it from a side view to an over-the-shoulder view. It’s no coincidence that the Kokiri characters of Ocarina shared the name of town in this Adventure. Ocarina was a tribute to and a repudiation for The Adventure of Link, the point at which Shigeru Miyamoto and his collaborators finally had the tech and design experience to realize their mad 8-bit ambitions.

Zelda II is hard, no question — often unfairly so. There’s no shame in cheating the game with save states or GameShark codes to help smooth over the hair-pullingly difficult parts. Nor would anyone blame you for asking around for help — that’s what we all did, back in the day. Compensate for the failings of age and naïve design and what you have in Zelda II is a fine attempt to recast the nascent console role-playing genre into an action-oriented format more compatible with the expectations of the platform’s user base. This is essentially the direction the entire games industry has moved over the past five or six years through series like Mass Effect (an RPG becoming a shooter) and Call of Duty (a shooter becoming an RPG). Not only was Zelda II ahead of its time, in many ways it’s a much better RPG and action game than a lot of more recent takes on the concept.

It may be the black sheep of the Zelda family, but that just means it provides the most interesting wool.

Zelda II has that tension; indeed, it drips with it. Once you plunge into the lava shaft, you’ve arrived at the end of the game. Yet you still have some freedom of choice, some personal discretion about when to initiate the final battle. The question is, when will you work up the courage to face it? The ultimate showdown waits to your right, but you can instead go left into a room of stone matrices where the bricks contain a lottery: Will they drop a couple of full magic refills to top you off for the final battle, or will they instead generate Red Fokkas to put you into an even worse state than when you arrived?

I like the uncertainty of this situation, the way the designers give you fairly even odds of things going horribly wrong here at the very end. It forces you to take a chance. Then again, I can also see where you can make a case for it being an instance of hostile design. The Great Palace is so daunting, so huge, so wearing on your resources, fraught with so many perils that can bring a strong run to an unceremonious end, that attempting to top off your magic in order to have sufficient MP to use a costly, mandatory spell against the boss only to get a face full of deadly monster seems rather unsporting.

Zelda II is a game about hard choices, particularly in the final Palace. For example, there’s a 1UP hidden along the shorter route to the final showdown. But you can only collect a 1UP once ever, and then it’s gone for all subsequent attempts. Once you take the 1UP, you’ve used your one shot to battle through the Great Palace with an extra chance unless you reset your NES… but if you do that, you have to fight your way back to the Palace again. Zelda II offers stakes. It demands commitment to your choices.

And that holds true for the final battle itself. The fight takes place across two phases, the mysterious Thunderbird and Link’s vicious Shadow. You can duck out between the phases and possibly undertake the magic refill lottery if you like, but you have to complete both phases in a single life. If you die against the second form, you have to take on the first one again — despite the fact that they appear to be two separate and distinct entities.

So, the question becomes how much magic to invest into your fight against the Thunderbird. You can take a chance afterwards that you’ll get a refill rather than a fatal Fokka stab, but there are no guarantees. The Thunderbird is invulnerable until you use the Thunder spell, which burns half your magic meter if you’re at Magic level 8 and have found all four Magic Containers. You really need to cast Jump to be able to reach the small, vulnerable gem above its face, Shield to dull the potency of its spew of flames, and Reflect the block as many flame projectiles as possible. If you choose any one of these support spells, you’ll no longer have sufficient magic to cast Life if you take a beating. If you cast all three, you won’t have any magic left over at all against the Shadow.

So what do you do? Despite being a brief, sudden encounter, the Thunderbird demands considerable planning… and even then, a single unlucky misstep could undermine your entire strategy, because this portion of Zelda II requires deft twitch skill above all.

The Thunderbird appears without preamble from the right side of the screen and drifts back and forth above you. Its chamber contains a raised platform in the center, which is Link’s ideal launching point for attacks: The only vulnerable point on the entirety of the boss’ body is its gem, which hovers at the top of the screen and only rarely dips low enough to be reached without the Jump spell (and no, the upward thrust does nothing). Further complicating this situation is the fact that the Thunderbird launches its attacks — a fountain of fireballs — from a point a few pixels above the gem. To strike its weakness, you need to jump headlong into the most dangerous point on the screen, which is moving constantly along two axes. And the more damage Thunderbird takes, the more quickly it sprays fire.

Should you manage to triumph (it’s a battle won by conservative play and well-timed jumps), it explodes and allows you to advance to collect the final Triforce. But before you can claim it, a small creature (or possibly a wizened old man drawn in the Rumiko Takahashi style; he looks for all the world like the guy who gives you a sword and other aid in the original Zelda, but smaller and with pointier ears) casts a spell and causes Link’s shadow to separate from his body and spring to life.

Link’s Shadow here makes for a much different sort of battle than in subsequent games. Unlike, say, Ocarina of Time‘s cinematic showcase encounter, the showdown in Zelda II is short, brutish, and nasty. Link’s Shadow has, ounce for ounce, exactly the same physical capabilities as the hero himself. And while he uses no special techniques and has access to no powers Link himself lacks besides the ability to inflict damage with a touch and a backward defensive leap, his standard tactic (going for the jugular with a frontal sword assault) absolutely does the trick. It’s an incredibly difficult battle.

Amusingly, the best defense against Link’s Shadow is to retaliate in kind and go hog wild. With the Shield spell active, chances are good that an offensive strategy will give you just enough of a defensive advantage to outpace the shadow in a pure toe-to-toe battle. Of course, that assumes you make it through the Thunderbird battle with enough magic and health to hold up — or that you get lucky with the magic jug spawn in the room to the left.

With the battle won, Link acquires the third Triforce and uses its power to raise the sleeping Princess Zelda. This raises further questions, of course: What happens to the Triforces once they’re all united for the first time in millennia? Isn’t bringing that power together again kind of dangerous? And what happens now that Hyrule has a superfluous princess, both the modern-day one Link saved the first time and the sleeping one who just rose after countless years of slumber? We demand answers, Nintendo.

From here, players can launch into a Second Quest, which interestingly enough is much easier than the first playthrough since you retain most of your abilities. Where the original Zelda‘s Second Quest  completely reshuffled the world and dungeon layouts, Zelda II keeps everything the same but gives you more tools with which to conquer it from the outset. In effect, it’s a New Game + mode, long before we had a term for such things.