I didn't enjoy it for the most part, but it does have some nice stuff. Contemplated a lot between a 2 and a 2 and a half. I played the first game, so I did go in expecting this to be a bit of a walking simulator, but I still got bored way often than I expected. It does have some cool parts, good visuals, a great atmosphere and an okay story. But it is extremely scripted, just hold forward through this straight corridor/cave/river/dirt path and something will happen when it needs to. Objectives are very vague and hard to understand, I feel the first game did this a lot better. "You need to get out of this asylum, for that to happen, you need to get the elevator working again, in order to achieve this, you need to fix the fuse box downstairs." and so on. It had clear objectives that made sense and fit properly into the gameplay. In this one, I had no idea what I was supposed to do half the time. Almost the entirety of the first half consists of walking aimlessly from one set of houses in the village to the next. When it does present a proper objective, It is usually a very vague long term goal that tells you nothing about what to do in the specific area you're in. I expected to at least enjoy the ending but I ended up not liking it that much as well. I do have to say I really liked a specific part around the third quarter with the bloody rain and stuff.

It's okay. I was expecting this one to be my favorite out of the bunch and even though it's definitely the scariest one, that did not end up being the case. The general structure of the game is vastly different compared to ones before, as it has completely different activities for every night, has a ton of scripted sequences and is very dialogue-heavy. The activities themselves, even though they're not really as good as the general gameplay loop of any of the older games, are mostly okay. I do hate night 4 with a burning passion. The worst thing about it might just be how it handles checkpoints. To my knowledge, it only saves at the beginning of every night and cutscenes/dialogue aren't skippable, so it quickly becomes very annoying when retrying a specific activity multiple times. To its credit, the aforementioned scripted sequences are honestly pretty creepy and the game generally has a very uncomfortable atmosphere.

Among the four games, I think it has the best ambience and general vibe. With the very basic and realistic design of the bedroom, and especially with the weirdly calming ambient sounds that remind me of Silent Hill 2, its a game that feels very "real", if that makes sense. I also really like the over the top nightmarish animatronics. Definitely the hardest of the bunch, I spent an embarrasing amount of time on Night 2. It can be frustrating at times because most of the hints you get throughout the night are audio cues that can be hard to distinguish and understand at first. But it's really fun after figuring it out.

It's quite different from the first two and the game does an absolutely terrible job explaining how anything works. The first two nights went by fast while I was just clicking random buttons trying to understand what this game was. Then I got stuck on night 3 and had to look up what I was supposed to do. I tried playing a few more times after watching tutorials and scouring the wiki, and honestly, I still don't get it. Even when I'm supposed to know what's happening, the game seems very random and not that fun. To its credit, I guess the atmosphere is pretty cool. I'm sure it's decent after some kind of learning curve, but I still decided to just skip this one.

I'm still not sure if I kinda like it or absolutely hate it. Zelda 2 has some really nice ideas, a consistent world map, okay dungeons, and is definitely much less cryptic than the first game even though I still believe it's impossible to complete without looking at least some stuff up. Combat and especially the magic system are good for the most part. Spells are fun to use and spice up the combat. I'm also happy it has an actual leveling system, it gives the sense of progression better than the first game does. That's about it for the nice stuff, the rest is pretty mixed. I want to love this game and I actually did for a decent chunk of my playtime. So why don't a lot of people like it? Because it just had to go and be laughably, absurdly, unbelievably, ridiculously annoying and unfair.
Enemies are definitely harder than the average Zelda game to begin with, and they're usually very unpredictable with their movement and attacks in a way that feels unfair rather than challenging. Especially some enemies in later dungeons I think are just not worth the XP. When they're in cramped corridors randomly jumping around throwing projectiles that kill in like 4 hits every second, using the jump spell and running past them hoping to take the least amount of damage is the best way to beat them. It also doesn't help when the game mixes platforming and combat in terrible ways, very often placing unpredictable enemies hopping around at the edges of platforms you're supposed to jump on. All of this leads to a game that feels really tiring at times, and you know what? I can deal with that. I kinda enjoyed the difficulty and chaos of this game, until I lost all my lives in the first palace and had to respawn for the first time.
Link starts the game with 3 lives in the main castle. Going out, you're met with the world map, you can traverse this map and get into random enemy encounters, enter caves, villages and palaces. Every time Link dies, you lose a life and start again in the same screen you died in. But when you run out of lives, (unless you were in the final palace) you respawn back in the main castle you started the game in. Doesn't matter if you were in a random encounter next to the castle, deep into a cave, fighting the boss of the fifth palace on the other side of the map, you are sent to the beginning. You have to go back out, fight through all the random encounters again, enter the palace again, go through all the stuff in the palace again to get like one or two more tries on the boss because you probably don't have three lives after all that. I just cannot comprehend why anyone thought this was okay. The first game already respawns you at the beginning of dungeons when Link dies, why is it the literal beginning of the game this time?
I have a rule of not using save states in these kind of games, this game is the only exception so far. I used save states a few times at the end of a palace to beat the boss. And honestly, I don't think I used them enough. I planned on saving at the beginning of every palace though that also doesn't solve the problem because obviously your progress is reverted when using them after exploring a palace, collecting keys, opening doors and whatnot. The game needs to have checkpoints at the beginning of every palace, maybe at random places on the world map in the form of campfires, and maybe even before the palace bosses. Save yourself the annoyance and just use savestates whenever you want.
That's about it. Zelda 2 is indeed one of the games of all time. It would be as good as, if not better, than the first game if it wasn't trying this hard to lengthen its playtime. I beat it in 20 hours and It did not deserve this much of my time.