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I remember I tried to play original Zelda 2 after loving my play through A Link to the Past and I got disappointed and bored very fast at all the tedium that game had prepared to slow down your progression.

This hacks fixes all that by rebalancing all the game so you have a more natural fluid progression. Not once I had to stop at a point to grind for EXP. It is still a hard action-RPG platformer, specially in later dungeons, but it has a nice learning curve so by the time you get to the advanced parts you are very ready for it.

I managed to solve most of the games insane hard secrets just by the hints given by the NPCs but I still got stuck in two parts where I had to look a video guide to continue: I never could guess the hammer could break forests. And I missed one of the magic containers which is mandatory to progress later in game and I had no clue where in the world to go find it.

My only suggestion for improving this even more would be reducing the frequency of random enemy encounters in the overworld. Those are extremely annoying, not because they are hard but because they are very repetitive and tiresome and they almost drove me mad in rage when searching for spots in the overworld.

After playing this hack, I realized that this is an easier version of the original, with some nice improvements in Link's appearance, UI, and some enemies' mechanics.

However, if you're looking for a hardtype challenge, this hack is NOT for you. It's quite the opposite, a breeze to beat the game with minimum effort.

I never played past the first palace but was always fascinated by The Adventure of Link. This hack has completely changed that and made the experience both fun and manageable. I beat the game with 13 game overs.

After beating the game I looked through the list of changes. I approve to all except I would keep the western 2d parts music through all the game. I would also add a way to save and later start the game from a palace.

There were a couple of places where I had tho check a fat to know what to do. I would add information as to where all the magic containers can be found.

Zelda II Redux is not as good as Zelda I Redux. However, Zelda I is the better game over all and it's hard to blame Redux for that. I truly appreciate this enormous effort and recommend anyone who wish to experience Zelda II to use this hack.

I probably don't have to tell you that of all the Zelda games, this is the one that needed a "Redux" the most.

The FDS version is very, very tough, but ultimately fair. The same cannot be said of the NES version. Unfortunately, this game was ported from FDS at the height of Nintendo's "anti-rental" practices.

At the same time Nintendo was sending lobbyists to Washington to try, unsuccessfully, to outlaw video game rentals in the United States (yes, I am dead serious), they cooked up another solution in the meantime. If a game was too hard to beat during a rental, they figured, the player would be more likely to buy it outright.

Nintendo's own games suffered from this policy a lot less than many third party games (Bayou Billy, anyone?) but they still suffered, and Zelda II for the NES is a prime example. The vanilla game manages to be well-crafted yet outright malicious towards the player.

The first time I tried this patch, I thought, "hmm, maybe this is a bit TOO easy." Then as I got further along I realized, nope, it's still an incredibly challenging game and still a bit of a slog, even in "Redux" form. Enough said.

Without this patch, I probably wouldn't have ever bothered playing Zelda II. Well done.

Back in high school, years and years ago, I borrowed a friend's copy of Zelda 2 for the GBA. Its reputation preceded it, and I expected to play it for an hour, laugh at the "haha funny garbage game", and then give it back to my friend before the end of the day.

Instead, I got completely sucked in and played for a straight week until I beat it. It's still one of my favorite games in the series even to this day, so you could call me a pretty big fan of Zelda 2. It's flawed, to be sure, but incredibly fun when everything is at its best.

Redux maintains all of the good of Zelda 2 while polishing and smoothing out the rough edges, creating what I'd consider the absolute best way to play the game. It maintains the fun movement, frenetic combat, exploration and general adventure, while removing the pitfalls like severely-limited lives or the need to grind for levels at this point or that.

On top of that, it adds tons of welcome quality-of-life improvements, ranging from bigger textboxes (improving the translation and hints) to graphical tweaks that improve both visuals and gameplay. In particular, Link's sprite doesn't just look better, but I think it makes his sword's hitbox easier to judge, too!

And on top of all of *that*, it's highly modular. Want to keep the EXP-draining enemies? There's a side-patch for that. Want to make the battle music random rather than split between West and East Hyrule? There's a side-patch for that. You can make it as close to vanilla or as Redux'd as you like, and there's something to be said for putting so much effort into letting players choose how they'd like to play Zelda 2 whenever the itch strikes.

tl;dr: Fantastic work! :D

This hack, plus the optional patch to continue at the same screen after game over, turns an excruciatingly frustrating waste of one's life into a game worth playing through, even if just once. Recommended!

I actually hadn't played Zelda II in about 20 years. Even though I did enjoy it back in the day, the one thing that did stick with me was how unbalanced it was. I remember just grinding out levels to beef up for Death Mountain. This hack definitely smoothed that over to go along with a bunch of subtle QoL improvements. New players might not catch how brilliant this patch is because it still feels like you're playing Zelda II, only better.

There are a lot of optional patches to sift through, but these ones are a must, imo.

1) Change Text Sound

This removes the garbled typewriter noise with a more pleasant sound due to the welcomed text speed up. Honestly, should've been the default.

2) New EXP.

This patch really changes the game for the better. What it does is bank your EXP. which can be accessed at any time. Low on health mid dungeon? Go into the level up menu and upgrade your armor, and voilà - full health. It pretty much replicates Health and Magic Potions, allowing you to focus on leveling up your sword. Never level up your health or magic unless you're low on them, awesome!

This patch also lowers the values for later levels to remove unnecessary grinding. It is perfectly balanced, when I entered the Grand Palace for the first time I was at 8, 7, 8, perfect. (But I also tied it with the next optional patch.)

3) Static EXP at Crystal Palaces

The patch gives a solid value for completing a palace rather than an auto level up, pairs perfectly with the "New EXP" patch.

4) Restart at Game Over (No restart at Palaces)

This patch is for balancing purposes due to how the new 1up Link Dolls work. They are permanently banked once you find them. So if you find 2 Link Dolls and get a game over you will start with 5 lives at Zelda's Castle instead of just 3. I felt this patch was necessary to help balance out this fact.

What I would change/improve?

Not much. The only things that came to mind on my playthrough was I thought the Marsh Temple and Ocean Temple should've had their color palettes swapped. (Make the Marsh Temple dark green, and the Ocean Temple aqua blue.) And 2nd, Link's new sprite is an improvement, but I would like to have and option to patch in his original color palette. These would be great optional patches to have.

Great job!

This was previously a semi-critical review that praised several aspects of the project but expressed reservations in regards to players who enjoy the classic difficulty of the original game.

I'm happy to report that ShadowOne33 reached out to me, inquired about the issues I expressed (as well as a few more once I got going) and addressed everything diligently.

It can now be said that an old school, challenge-loving curmudgeon like me can now be 100% satisfied by this version of Zelda II, as there are now optional patches available to address any kind of balance changes imposed by the default features. What you have is the same classic experience (or a much more gentle one if that's your thing) coupled with a better translation, a vastly improved UI, conservatively improved graphics, new convenience features, and other miscellaneous improvements.

Thank you ShadowOne33 for all the work you put in to these top notch improvement projects.

After a complete playthrough of Zelda 2 Redux I can safely recommend this hack to all players who are hesitant to try out Zelda 2 for themselves. Zelda 2 Redux fixes almost all annoying aspects of Zelda 2, while keeping the great things intact. Gone is the long grind and the broken lives system. Gone are annoying enemies that steal your exp and take endless time to kill. In is a save system, restart at a temple when you die, better balancing, better dialogue, and many other things. Finally you can just enjoy the game's best sides: The world exploration, temple designs and a rewarding EXP system. Sure, near the end the game still is pretty hard. But hey, a fair challenge is part of the fun!

All in all this is the definitive version for Zelda 2. Highly recommended!

Everything the game needed! I agree with another review about the magic Level thingy, but this hack is so useful! Only thing it really needs now, is a WORLD MAP. :D

This is an amazing hack, full of wonderful upgrades & changes. Highly recommended to anybody with any interest in this awesome game. I do wish we could revert Link's sprite to the FDS version, though.

Finally, a zelda 2 hack that fixes all the stupid things that the original game does while bringing it more in line with later games, as well as coming up with clever fixes for some of the original's short comings. Like why does the 1up dolls in the overworld save and stay gone even though they only give you a life once? I would've never would've thought to increase starting lives, instead of not saving the dolls being picked up.

Also should mention the optional patches in case it does something you hate or doesn't do enough. I personally use "Change Text Sound.ips" which changes the text sound to the heart refill sound and "FDS King's Tomb.ips" which makes the king's tomb the bigger more grander version of it.

But yeah if you love Zelda 2 like me but wish it was better, then well here it is.

I'm a huge fan of ShadowOne333's work, and this is probably their best yet. Takes a frustrating game and adds so many tiny improvements to keep the feel of the original game, with taking much of the frustration and outdated game design out. Being able to customize *exactly* how you want it is fantastic too. The time, effort, and love put into this hack shows a whole lot. Used this hack to beat Zelda II for the first time and I loved all of it! If you weren't a fan of Zelda II before because of it's punishing nature, please try it again with this hack!

Here we go again. A classic game exists ... it has flaws but is still a classic ... everyone simply accepts these flaws as inevitable and just deals with it ... then the hacking community comes along and makes that classic game into something so much better than the original you wonder why you would ever play the vanilla version. To put it simply, with a hack like this, you wouldn't.

This hack fixed so many things wrong with Zelda 2 that I found myself enjoying improvements that I never even considered needed improvement. I'm guessing that the author sat down and played through the game with a notepad and wrote down every single thing that bothered him and then attempted to fix it. It's pretty astonishing how many positive changes I noticed in this hack.

I have a tendency to ramble in my reviews, however, there's not much more to add to this. The hack is phenomenally well-made; in fact, it's probably one of the most comprehensive hacks I've ever played. There's not much to add beyond that point simply for the fact that so much has already been so expertly accomplished.

Other than for posterity, there is just no reason to play vanilla Zelda 2 again. I can't think of even one aspect to this hack that I didn't enjoy more than the original. However, there are still things that could use changes and updates. For example, the difficulty of the game scales very poorly; as soon as you enter the area after the spider, it ramps up extremely hard and suddenly (as if the designers realized at the last second that the last palace should be tough). I do wish the game either scaled the difficulty higher beforehand OR reduced the difficulty for everything after the spider.

Any other suggestions I might offer would all be something that are radically different than the vanilla (like adding dungeons, creating more secrets on the world map, adding a 3-D side-scrolling first-person puzzle fighter real-time strategy mini-game, etc.).

To the author: thank you so much for the work you have done. There are people who have never played Zelda 2 and now, if they play this hack instead of the vanilla, they may not end up abandoning the game in frustration. It is these kinds of hacks which open up games to a wider audience. Congratulations.

The original Zelda 2 has some difficulty design issues and quite a few of them boil down to Fake Difficulty. While this patch doesn't address all of them (the cryptic clues are still cryptic enough regardless of text speed), I can at least appreciate the effort when it includes. I may as well list off the clear benefits, and then what the hack doesn't address:

Useful benefits:

• Manual saving no longer adds to the file counter (eliminates need to play the entire game in one sitting for Triple Zero)
• Faster text speed, which makes talking to people not a chore (benefits exploration)
• Sword beams' higher velocity and range allows them a niche in sniping off weaker enemies as reward for having full health (speeds up gameplay)
• Lowered magic costs, eliminating how stringent magic was in the original and reducing need for Bot milling (speeds up gameplay again)
• Increased drop rates, which reduces time spent on any Bot milling in the first place and also has the added EXP Bags speed up Level Ups (minimalizes grinding issues)
• Reduced magic costs (cuts down on problems with necessary magic usage)
• Anti-Fairies take far fewer hits, eliminating tedium with them, while making them not respawn to avoid having them be abusable under this new change (cleans up gameplay)

Not addressed but still the original's fault:

• Enemies being overly obtuse to deal with cleanly in general
• Wizzrobes not being vulnerable to the Sword Beam, so dealing with them and their painful sounds is still an inconvenience
• No active reason to get Magic past Level 5 due to Shield/Heal/Fairy/Fire not having improving costs
• Level Up bias toward Attack is still high due to the exponential damage increase

I will say that the hack works as far as trying to improve Zelda 2, with TLC in enough areas, just that balance isn't one of those areas that gets TLC, particularly displayed by halving magic costs, which isn't exactly a show of full comprehension of what goes particularly right or wrong, especially when the magic halving even makes Heal a potential case of overbuffing since overuse of it and Shield becomes far less likely to overwhelm Magic Jar provision rates.

My recommendation is still Yes due to the original's problems, but if there was a more in-between option, I would go with that to make sure what I call out is highlighted.

ShadowOne333 and the other romhacking gods have graced us with this masterpiece. Like the previous review stated, the annoyances with the vanilla game have been addressed. Balancing is very good between challenge and fun. The new UI is wonderful as well as the optional graphics patch being a welcome addition. And I personally love the moving water, grass and smoke stacks on the map. Most of all, it's freaking great to have all of this in one package instead of having to Frankenstein a bunch of random hacks together and hope they play nice.

I realize Zelda II is panned as the worst in the series, but this game is near and dear to my heart. I skipped school to try and beat the Harpy boss many many years ago (I didn't succeed that day). This game has total nostalgia for me. Glad to see it dragged into the 21st century with style. Thanks.

Like so many others, I've been waiting for ShadowOne's Redux hacks for both the NES Zeldas to drop... and now, the first one is ready.

It's simply put, the perfect way to experience a classic game the way it should have been all along. Virtually every design flaw of the game has been carefully corrected, whilst keeping the original feel and charm intact.

This is one of the best improvement hacks I've ever played. Wholeheartedly recommended alongside this programmer's other Redux patches.

I'm so excited that this hack finally released officially! It's a hack you do not want to miss out on. It's been in development for years and a lot of care has been put into it. The fact that there's optional patches included shows that the developer of the hack cared about the user base. There's literally no reason to complain since it's really customizable this way!

I played through this hack myself and it really did make for a less frustrating experience. I've beaten this game about 5-6 times before this hack so I know where to go. I never got game overs with this hack because I would always manually save the game once I was on one life to reset it back to three lives before tackling the next dungeon. But the restart at palace feature sure is handy, because restarting at the very beginning was only tedium and not difficulty. There should be no reason to start back when you get game over, but thanks to this hack you don't have to deal with that.

The halved magic costs and increased item drops from enemies certainly does make the game easier than before. But it was still challenging and I feel that this is the right kind of balance the game needs. But if you disagree with this, you can always apply the optional patch to restore the original magic consumption. Personally I will stick with the rebalanced magic.

My friend is new to this game and I want to introduce this game to them through this hack. I would much rather have them play the game without a lot of the frustration of the original game.

You can always keep the original unpatched game so you aren't really losing anything by having this hack. Literally no reason not to be using this hack in this day and age, unless you're a purist and don't like hacks that alter anything. Think about it this way, there's no other huge improvement hacks for Zelda 2, this is the only one bringing justice to this game so there's a whole lot to appreciate here. A future for a better Zelda 2 experience!