Retro Replay Retro Gaming History, Reviews & Emulation
My father probably will never read this. He has never had much use for the internet. That is all right. I have been meaning to thank him anyway.
Our NES arrived at Christmas in 1987. I remember it as the beginning of a very good run for my imagination and, eventually, a rather demanding part-time job for my father. Somewhere along the way, that gray box brought a gold cartridge into our lives. We were going to play Zelda II: The Adventure of Link together.
“Together” is the part I care about most now. At the time, I was understandably occupied with the sword, the monsters, and the urgent business of being a kid with a Nintendo. My dad had agreed to learn this strange little world with me. I had no idea how much that agreement would mean years later.
We spent months on it. There were early mornings, late evenings, trips through caves that did not go well, and a final enemy so aggravating that my father eventually picked up the telephone and asked Nintendo what on earth we were supposed to do. We did finish it. I still get a ridiculous amount of pleasure from that sentence.
A gold cartridge and a very patient dad
Zelda II did not ease us gently into a pleasant family activity. It gave us Link, a sleeping princess, and a countryside full of things prepared to hit us. Towns offered spells and advice, but there was still plenty left for us to work out. The next trip across the map might bring a discovery, a better plan, or another reason to try again tomorrow.
My father came along for all of it. This was unfamiliar territory for him, yet he was willing to sit beside me and give it his attention. I was excited about where we might go next, and he joined in. We talked about what had worked, what had gone wrong, and what we ought to try when we got back to that troublesome bit.
Looking back, I appreciate the time involved. A child can become completely absorbed in a game without giving much thought to the hours. My dad had a life outside Hyrule. He still gave us evening after evening, learning the enemies and trying to get a little farther.
I could not have put that into words then. I was too busy needing to know what was inside the next palace. Fortunately, my father seemed willing to find out too.
Horsehead had to go
The first fight with Horsehead in Parapa Palace is one of the moments I can still picture. My father had the controls. I watched him maneuver Link, trying to get close enough to do some damage without paying for it immediately afterward.
I remember the excitement of it, my heart thumping as if I were the one standing in that room with a sword. Watching somebody else play can feel terribly helpless when you are small and deeply invested. All that energy has to go somewhere. Mine went into hoping very hard that Dad would land the next hit.
Then Horsehead fell. I cheered, and my father smiled. We had done it. There were more palaces waiting, and the game was hardly finished with us, but none of that spoiled the moment. For a little while, getting past that one guardian was plenty.
That is the sort of victory I remember fondly. Two people sitting in the same room, both delighted that a difficult thing had finally worked. We had made some progress, and now there was another piece of Hyrule to explore.
My morning shift in Hyrule
I would get up early and work on experience points. If Link needed to become stronger, I was happy to put in the time. There was something satisfying about having improved our chances before the next serious attempt. It felt like I was doing my part.
My father would join me with his coffee, and we would go over the previous evening. We could talk about a difficult enemy or a place we had not finished exploring while I kept working away. The game gave us a conversation that could pick up exactly where we had left it.
I like that memory more with every passing year. There is nothing spectacular happening in it. A kid is playing Nintendo. His father has a cup of coffee. They are talking about their game. I would happily spend another morning there.
There was always something worth discussing. Another Heart Container meant we could survive a little longer. An upgrade made a familiar enemy less troublesome. Learning the upward thrust in Darunia gave us a new move to try, which was considerably more exciting than most things on a normal morning’s schedule.
We made our way through the swamps around Midoro Palace and the caves of Death Mountain. Some trips produced progress. Others produced information about what we really should avoid doing next time. Zelda II was generous with that second kind of education.
We kept at it. We wanted the next spell, the next palace, and the next small breakthrough. Our progress belonged to both of us, including the less glamorous hours spent getting ready for it.
The game kept finding ways to make us work
The farther we went, the more the game asked of us. A plan that had served us well could run into an enemy that demanded something different. We had to learn when to attack, when to protect Link, and when the clever thing we had just tried had actually been a terrible idea.
The palace guardians made sure we paid attention. Carock and the other bosses gave us plenty to work through before we could move on. Getting a spell was exciting, but figuring out where and how it helped was another part of the adventure.
There are details in those early Zelda games that interest me differently now, including the religious imagery around Link’s early adventures. Back then, I was mostly concerned with keeping him alive. Hyrule was a big enough mystery without stopping to write an essay about it.
Eventually, we reached the Great Palace. After all the preparation and all those evenings, we were close enough to the ending to want it badly. The place still made us earn the trip. There were routes to work out and enemies to get past, and our long acquaintance with the game-over screen was not quite finished.
Dad calls Nintendo
And then there was Dark Link. Our last opponent was a shadow with our own equipment, which felt like a particularly cheeky reward for everything we had already accomplished. We had brought Link all that way, and now his silhouette was beating us up.
We tried. We failed. We tried again. The ending was right there, close enough to make each defeat that much more frustrating. Neither of us wanted this to be where our adventure stopped.
My father picked up the phone and called Nintendo’s help line. We generally liked solving things ourselves, so asking for help was a change of approach. At that point, however, a useful answer sounded considerably better than another unsuccessful round with the shadow.
What I remember of the advice was to use Shield and crouch in the corner, attacking from there. It gave us the break we needed. Dark Link finally went down, and we got to finish the game we had spent months playing.
I wish I could bottle that feeling. We had stayed with it through the awkward bits, the repeated defeats, and the mornings spent making Link stronger. Now we had reached the end. My dad and I had beaten Zelda II together.
He put the controller down. I kept going.
For my father, that was more or less the end of the Nintendo adventure. He had given Zelda II months of his time, and he was ready to be done. Years later, Pebble Beach Golf Links briefly tempted him back, but he never took up gaming the way I did.
I went in the other direction. There were more games to play, more worlds to explore, and eventually shelves filling with Tolkien, Lewis, and Jordan. Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger took up their share of my weekends. That appetite for fantasy was already growing during those mornings in Hyrule.
My dad did not have to become a lifelong gamer for those months to matter. He had been there when I was discovering something I loved, and he had treated it as worth sharing. I think about that whenever I return to this game.
I have played adventures since then with bigger worlds, more elaborate stories, and rather more forgiving ideas about difficulty. Zelda II can still bring me back to that room faster than any of them. There is Link on the screen. There is Dad with his coffee. We are talking about what to try next.
Dad, I love you. Thank you for the early mornings and the late nights. Thank you for being pleased when we got a little farther, for sticking around when we did not, and for making that phone call when the two of us had finally run out of answers.
We beat it. I still remember.
Another Zelda fanatic in the family
These days, my son is a Zelda fanatic too. He just finished Ocarina of Time on his Switch 2, then went a step further and wrote his own review here on Retro Replay as DashingDerek. Seeing him finish an adventure and want to tell people about it makes me smile. I know that feeling very well.
And yes, I am the one who got him into Zelda. This time, I got to be the dad sharing Hyrule with his son. We have made plenty of memories of our own together, and now he has his own opinions about these games. Putting them into a review on this site feels like a pretty wonderful next step.
I would never have had those moments with my son if my father had not shared them with me more than 36 years ago. Dad picked up a controller, spent those mornings and evenings with me, and helped start something that is still going. Now his grandson has finished another Zelda adventure, and I get to share in the excitement all over again.
