Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is commonly considered a black sheep of the Zelda series, due to it both being a full sidescroller and having many RPG-style elements. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a very successful game.

Unused Areas


There's an unused graveyard side-scrolling area if you use an overworld walk-through-walls code to get into a battle on a mountain tile, which isn't normally possible.

In West Hyrule, there are two areas that have no pointers associated to them and therefore are never seen in the game.

Unused Area 1


This area looks like a plain grotto, with no relief. Its data is located at.

Unused Area 2


This area was most likely meant to contain an item judging by its structure. It appears you were supposed to enter it by falling through the shaft on the right. The black part on the left is actually made of individual breakable blocks, like the ones in the palaces. Every area in the game has data for fully functional breakable blocks, but West and East Hyrule don't have any graphics associated with these; if you fell in this room without the Handy Glove, you would be stuck. Its data is located at.

Unused Palace Windows
Almost all of the palaces in the game have windows present, except the fourth and sixth palaces; theirs went unused. Using a glitch involving the "Fairy" spell, it's possible to see them anyway. They're both unique, and not used anywhere else.

Post-NES Rereleases
Zelda II was re-released for the GameCube in 2003, the Game Boy Advance in 2004, the Wii Virtual Console in 2007, and the 3DS Virtual Console in 2012, some with a few minor changes. Though the American/European/Australian Wii release is straight from the NES version, the Japanese Wii release seems to be based on the Japanese GBA version, so it features some parts of the disk and cartridge plus things like the new 2003 script. Like with the first game, the American 3DS release seems to be based on the original NES version.

Intro
The new GCN and GBA versions tried to fix up the grammar again, though being based on the NES version, there's still no mention of the different Zeldas; the copyright date was updated as well, of course. As previously mentioned, the American/European/Australian Wii release is pretty much the NES release, while the Japanese Wii release seems to be derived from the previous Japanese GBA version.

Screen Flashing
When losing a life on both FDS and NES, the screen flashes rapidly with a rainbow of colors, potentially causing seizures. In the updated versions, the screen just flashes between similar shades of red, though it's dubious how much this helps.

PAUSE Text
The 2003 version added a black "PAUSE" box, nowhere to be found in either the original disk or cartridge port.