This hack is incredibly hard. That’s not an uncommon thing to say about hacks here, but this one is hard for all the right reasons. There’s nothing unfair about this challenge. It’s straight up fighting against the bosses from Zelda II: The Adventure of Link with next to zero help.

Your magic and life does not refill after defeating the bosses, and leveling up magic or life does not refill these either. There’s only two red potions in the entire game, and how you choose to use your magic is up to you.

I’ve probably burned an hour playing this before writing this review. I’ve gone from my first rather pathetic encounter barely beating horse head and then embarrassingly having helmet head crush me. After playing a few times and realizing that you had some limited control over which order you fight the bosses and how you choose to level up, I made a few adjustments.

At the end of the hour, I made it to the 6th palace boss, where I used the jump spell too early, hit my head on the first jump and promptly fell into the lava before the battle began.

The only flaw that I see in this nearly perfect NES hack is the fact that the counter that tells you how many times you’ve died doesn’t work. That’s really unfortunate, since I think by the time anybody finally beat this one without using savestates they’d look at that number and have a great laugh. Right now though, it always stays at Zero. :(