Very soon you realize how fragile Link is. He is faster than most monsters in this land but boy his reach is awful when he's not in full health. While you are in full health, your sword shoots little sword bolts, giving you a ranged weapon as soon as you start the game. This is fine and well but once you get hit, you'll be dependent on Link's arms reach and he can only hit things that are an inch away from touching his nose. So if you get hit once you lose your ranged weapon and that means you'll be getting hit constantly from then on and die. Like I said this is not really a problem since you don't lose any money or items. And you get better as the game goes on, so it's all good.
Exploring is a major part of the game and it's a fun process. There's a little bit of trial and error in some dungeon locations but I wouldn't call it unintuitive. A couple of secret locations however I would call unintuitive. It's literally just random places you have to bomb to open a passage. The items you find there are optional but I would like to be able to find them without having to place bombs in every square of the overworld map. I ended up using a guide.
The meat of the game is exploring the overworld to find items and health containers, finding a dungeon entrance and proceeding to kill the monster inside and fetch a piece of the triforce. Here's the whole plot for this game, 2 lines you can read when you turn the game on but don't push start: "Many years ago prince darkness Ganon stole one of the triforce with power. Princess Zelda had one of the triforce with wisdom. She divided it into 8 units to hide it from Ganon before she was captured. Go find the 8 units Link to save her." And that's it. I don't think you need more than that, really.
The dungeons themselves are engaging, fun to run around and, again, they're quite merciful. I only had difficulty in about 5 or 6 rooms throughout all the 9 dungeons in this game. The only one that is really hard is the last one. And I only beat it in a reasonable amount of time thanks to save scumming, something you can do without but then you'll be replaying this dungeon for days before you either get good at it or get lucky. But that's not the only problem. You see, you can only carry 8 bombs at a time and in this dungeon you have to blow up holes in many, many walls. Which walls you should use a bomb on is a matter of guessing most of the time. That means you'll be running out of bombs to use constantly and will have to go outside the dungeon, fetch more bombs, return, kill all the monsters again and try different walls. It starts to feel like busy work fast. Usually I don't mind this type of thing but here I did. Still, for a RPG released in 1986, this is nothing. Try playing Faery Tale Adventure. It's insane how brutal and outright punishing games from this era can be.
There's 3 tracks for this game. Overworld music, a tune I'm certain you'll recognize, the dungeon track and the last dungeon track. All of them are excellent. They're all 10 second loops but I don't mind that at all. In fact I find repetitive music very soothing. And most importantly, it's all square waves and triangle waves, none of that generic symphony so many RPGs use these days.
Graphics are pretty good. Especially in the overworld map they managed to convey different biomes across the land which is quite nice. I find pixel art from this era endearing to look at. There is solid art direction here but I feel like Castlevania spoiled me forever on graphics for this particular console. Nothing looks as cool as that.
I would also like to quickly talk about the monsters here. If you ever played a Zelda game before, you'll be surprised how you'll find most monsters you come across in later games are already on the very first Zelda title. Famous ones like Stalfos, Octoroks, bats, mummies, those flying things called peahats, spider-like Tectikes, they're all already here in their beautiful 8-bit appearance. Even Dodongo, a boss monster you find in Ocarina of Time is already here as well, except he looks more like a triceratops in this one. But you kill him in the same way; feeding him bombs. What a terrible way to go.
So all in all, soothing music, nice graphics, good monster variety, nice enough map to explore, fun dungeons. Yeah I can see why this game was a hit when it came out, so much so that Zelda became one of the bread and butter franchises for Nintendo. I say it's well deserved.
