Beat the second temple and realized the game wasn't really gonna change much. To be fair, it's an NES game and there's only so much it can do. But man, when the game feels tedious even with the "cheat code" version that Nintendo put up on NSO, then you messed up somewhere. I think if they reduced battle encounters by like 50% the entire game would be smoother.

That being said, it is a creative idea for a Zelda game, an idea that hasn't been touched on outside of the brief 2D segments in the GB Zelda games. Perhaps one day we'd get a proper remake or a new game that takes Zelda 2's ideas and executes them properly.