Trivia / Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

• B-Team Sequel: Most of the development team had not worked on the original, with the only exceptions being Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka themselves, who returned in a much more limited capacity, going from personally designing and directing the first game to merely writing the story and supervising the production of the second.
• Creator Backlash: Shigeru Miyamoto stated in an interview that he considered Zelda II to be the least favorite game he ever made, for reasons as follows:
  "I wouldn't say that I've ever made a bad game, per se, but a game I think we could have done more with was Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. When we're designing games, we have our plan for what we're going to design but in our process it evolves and grows from there. In Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, unfortunately all we ended up creating was what we had originally planned on paper. I think specifically in the case of Zelda II we had a challenge just in terms of what the hardware was capable of doing. So one thing, of course, (that he would have liked the game to been like) is, from a hardware perspective, if we had been able to have the switch between the scenes speed up, if that had been faster, we could have done more with how we used the sidescrolling vs. the overhead [view] and kind of the interchange between the two.^note Specifically, he's referring to the long loading times of the Famicom Disk System version of the game—the loading times are nonexistent in the NES versions But, because of the limitations on how quickly those scenes changed, we weren't able to. The other thing is it would have been nice to have had bigger enemies in the game, but the Famicom/NES hardware wasn't capable of doing that. Certainly, with hardware nowadays you can do that and we have done that, but of course nowadays creating bigger enemies takes a lot of effort."
• Demand Overload: A combination of the Nintendo Entertainment System's growth in popularity and a worldwide chip shortage in 1988 (which had already delayed the game's North American release) meant that cartridges were produced in smaller batches that often went out of stock in a flash. Many parents consequently had to drive out-of-state to find copies to buy for their kids.
• Dolled-Up Installment: According to director Tadashi Sugiyama, the game began development as a new project, based purely upon Miyamoto's concepts for a side-scrolling action game with both high and low attacks, without any ideas for a story. It was not until late in development that the development team chose to name it The Adventure of Link and make the protagonist the same character from The Legend of Zelda, and it was only in the eleventh hour that it was decided to include Zelda II in the title (or The Legend of Zelda 2 in the original Japanese) and promote it as a full-fledged sequel.
• Dummied Out: The game has unique window graphics for all palaces, even though the fourth and sixth palaces don't have any windows. The unused window graphics can be seen by using the "Fairy Warp" glitch^note transforming into a fairy above the top of the screen, then moving left or right to load Parapa Palace's layout with another palace's graphics. There are also unused Spikes of Doom graphics for each palace.
• Follow the Leader: Zelda II inspired the creation of Battle of Olympus. Rambo (1987 NES) also has a very similar gameplay design but it's still unclear if it was inspired by Zelda II as well.
• Manual Misprint: The instruction manual helpfully warns you that some "P" bags are hiding enemies inside them. The opposite is often true, in that vanquished enemies can drop the bags, and some Iron Knuckle statues may disgorge a real one when struck, but there are no "P" bags in any version of the game that behave this way.
• What Could Have Been: There actually was a "Zelda 3" concept in the works that was fully intended to be a direct sequel to Zelda II on the Super Nintendo. But it was scrapped and replaced with A Link to the Past for various reasons, such as Miyamoto's dissatisfaction with Zelda II and a desire to return to the top-down format of the original Legend of Zelda. The embarrassing debacle that resulted from Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon ensured that there would be no return to the side-scrolling format.

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