This is the start of a series of reviews that I’ve titled “The Great Zelda Binge”, where I’ll be reviewing all of the single player mainline entries in The Legend of Zelda series, as well as their various ports. The Legend of Zelda is my favorite video game franchise. It’s that childhood game series that remains near and dear to my heart to this day, and is immensely responsible for my love of the medium in general. Writing in-depth reviews on each mainline entry in the series is my way of paying tribute to it, as well as finally forcing myself to catch up on a couple of stray titles in the series that I just haven’t gotten to yet. Some friends of mine, Reyn, Quent, Steinco, and PT are also doing similar Zelda marathons, and I highly recommend giving their reviews a look as well.

All that being said, despite my proclaimed love for the franchise, I will admit: coming to appreciate its very first game is rather difficult. The original Legend of Zelda lays down an enormous amount of groundwork for the series. It is more or less the template that the vast majority of games in the series would follow going forward. Despite being a strong foundation to build upon, ultimately, that’s all the first Zelda is: a foundation. It’s a primitive game that understandably has numerous issues that end up being addressed in future entries of the series.

Ages ago, the kingdom of Hyrule was in possession of the “Triforces”, which were golden triangle-shaped objects imbued with mystic power. The Prince of Darkness, Ganon, led an army of monsters to attack Hyrule in order to seize the Triforces and wield their awesome abilities for himself, so he could plunge the world into darkness and rule over it all. After he acquired the Triforce of Power, the princess of Hyrule, Zelda, split the Triforce of Wisdom into eight separate pieces and hid them throughout the kingdom in order to keep Ganon from obtaining it, while sending her attendant, Impa, to seek out someone with the courage to defeat Ganon. After learning about what the princess had done, Ganon imprisoned Zelda and sent his monsters to track down Impa, who at the last minute, was saved by a young man named Link. After Impa tells Link about everything that’s happened, Link’s sense of justice causes him to resolve to find the eight pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom, rescue Zelda, and stop Ganon’s plans to take over the world.

The Legend of Zelda is a game that’s meant to recreate a traditional fantasy adventure. It’s a top-down, action-adventure game rooted in the concept of exploration, of going out into the world and uncovering all sorts of secrets and battling evil monsters during your quest to rescue the princess. The game starts Link off in the Overworld, which is where you’ll spend a majority of your time traversing. After obtaining the wooden sword from the cave on the starting screen, you set out into the world. There’s a lot you will find throughout the land of Hyrule. You can discover special items that Link can use either in combat or while exploring, such as the boomerang, which can stun enemies, or the bombs, whose explosions can damage enemies and reveal hidden caves and pathways. There are hordes of monsters that you encounter, as well as various caves with merchants you can purchase items from, and even secret individuals who will grant you a reward for finding them. Despite the game’s ethos being rooted in exploration and discovery, its biggest problem is that it’s designed in a way that doesn’t make exploration enjoyable at all. In fact, blindly exploring in this game is downright painful. The Overworld in particular is absolutely miserable to traverse if you don’t know where to go or what to do.

Almost every screen in the Overworld is overrun by all sorts of different monsters, and I do mean overrun. You can’t go a single screen in any direction without a mob of enemies immediately spawning in and hurling projectiles at you. At the start of the game, Link is particularly fragile, it doesn’t take more than a couple of hits for him to go down. Dying causes Link to respawn with only three hearts at the starting screen with the cave where you find the sword, and while you can obtain items and upgrades that will make Link live longer, I can’t imagine most people figuring out how to find them on their own.

I will be completely up front: I used a guide for the Overworld sections of the game, and if you plan on trying this out for yourself, I highly recommend you do the same. The particular guide I used, which was found on zeldadungeon.net, specifically has you go out and obtain a number of items and upgrades as the very first thing you do in the game. It’s very understandable why the guide has you get them. A couple of these items, specifically the Heart Containers and the Blue Ring, are particularly important to get as early as possible if you want to keep yourself from dying to a single touch, as they give Link additional health and lessen the amount of damage he takes from enemies respectively.

This ties into what I believe to be the biggest issue of the game. A number of these special items and upgrades are located or tied to secrets you can find throughout the Overworld. These secrets include hidden merchants who you can buy items from, old men who will give you additional Heart Containers, and the occasional friendly monster who will pay you an amount of rupees (the currency of The Legend of Zelda series) for discovering them, which you would otherwise have to collect by grinding enemies. While you could consider the game’s secrets to be optional, as it is possible to beat the game without them, choosing not to seek them out will make things much harder for you. The problem is that the game’s secrets are hidden in an extremely poor fashion. They will usually be hidden in caves that you have to discover by bombing specific walls, or underneath bushes that you have to burn using the Candle item. However, you have absolutely no way of telling what wall can be bombed or what bush can be burned. When it comes to bombs, you can only carry a limited supply, and the Candle can only be used once per screen. Unless you want to go through the utterly insane process of bombing every single wall you see, or burning a single bush, leaving the current screen and then returning to burn another one, then you will not find these (in my opinion) highly necessary upgrades.

The pieces of the Triforce are all located in places known as labyrinths, which are underground maze-like locations filled with traps and enemies. Labyrinths are where you’ll find a majority of special items in the game, as each labyrinth has at least one item for you to find. The end of each labyrinth features a showdown with a boss guarding a piece of the Triforce. Upon defeating it, Link will earn a Heart Container and he’ll also be able to collect the Triforce piece the boss is guarding. After completing all eight labyrinths and gathering all eight Triforce pieces, Link can then set out in search of the final labyrinth in Death Mountain, where Ganon and the Princess reside.

The labyrinths are relatively simple to explore compared to the Overworld. They typically consist of various rooms where you just fight enemies on your way to find the dungeon's key item and then the boss. You’ll occasionally need to push a random block in a room in order to unlock a stairway to a hidden passage as well. About halfway through the game, however, labyrinths do require you to bomb specific walls in order to progress, and you run into the same issue that you have with the Overworld: you have no way of knowing what walls to bomb, which can cause you to waste them. If you’re not using a guide during the labyrinths and you’re playing the game either via an emulator or on Nintendo Switch Online, you’re going to want to use the rewind feature very often just to make sure that you don’t waste bombs trying to figure out where to go.

Labyrinths are also where you’ll be doing the most combat as well. Combat in this game, despite being simple at heart, does get more complex than you’d expect. You can only thrust your sword in the direction that Link is currently facing, meaning you have to frequently move and position yourself according to the enemy’s moving patterns so that you can hit them without getting hit yourself. Certain enemies can only be attacked at certain angles, though as you progress through the game and get more upgrades, you can just start to tank hits from weaker enemies and mash your sword, which is admittedly rather lazy and does make the combat less engaging than it would otherwise be.

Its presentation is about what you’d expect for the NES. Its visual style is simple, yet iconic all the same. It makes great use of the NES’ color palette to simulate various climates that you explore, such as green forest areas, brown mountain areas and deserts, and blue lakes and rivers. It’s only got about five music tracks, but again, it's some of the most iconic music in all of video games. The main theme in particular is up there with Super Mario Bros’ overworld theme as one of the most well known video game songs of all time. Koji Kondo made do with what he had to work with, and he did a damn good job, he truly understood the assignment.

The Legend of Zelda, despite not quite earning my enjoyment, still earns my respect at the bare minimum. Technically, almost everything that I would come to love about the series is here, but what’s here is rather unrefined. It’s a game that I’m happy to have completed for the sole purpose of being able to say “I beat Zelda 1”, but otherwise, it’s not really a game I can recommend to people nowadays unless you are adamant about experiencing Zelda’s roots. It doesn’t accomplish its goal of providing an enjoyable exploration-based experience primarily because of the way its upgrades and certain items are distributed and hidden, but the building blocks for future Zelda titles are there. The series wouldn’t be around without it, and plenty of other games wouldn’t be around without it either. It’s a necessary first step on the path to something far greater.

The Puzon game. GOTY 2024 so far.

Very addicting, fantastic gameplay loop even if you don't like playing cards. The cool shit you can do with the jokers you find never stops amazing me.

Only drawback is this roguelike is so fucking random, by virtue of it being playing cards, that often you can't do a thing and you just lose. Or the boss has a rule that you cannot get around in any way and just stops your amazing run. A little annoying at times, downright frustrating at others.

A must-buy since it's only like 13 dollars.

If not for some better design choices, better framerate, better controls, and a few better levels, this would have been maybe a 9/10. Maybe the Xbox 360 version is that game.

Great humor and characters and some great levels. Great music, the shell of a great game is there.

There are better platformers on this very console and the PSX that came out before this that I feel like this game felt like a few steps backwards.