Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, often shortened to Zelda II, is the second installment of The Legend of Zelda series and a direct follow-up of The Legend of Zelda. It was first released in Japan for the Famicom Disk System in 1987, and about one year later, in 1988, saw an overseas release on the Nintendo Entertainment System.

The gameplay of Zelda II is vastly different from its predecessor, featuring role-playing elements and side-scrolling areas. This style was not reused into subsequent installments of the series (not including the Philips CD-i spinoff titles, Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon). When the third installment, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, was released, it reused the top-down perspective of the first The Legend of Zelda title.

Enemies
Some of the enemies in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link take advantage of the four palette slots available on the sprite layer to give them up to three different color variations, as the fourth is Link's palette. The remaining palettes are an orange palette for the weakest enemies, a red palette for medium-strength enemies, and a blue palette for the stronger enemies. In towns, the white values in the red and blue palettes are changed to tan, with the blue instead being purple to work for the townspeople. The few enemies that appear in towns also have these color changes, but are otherwise the same entities. The red and blue palettes also have minor value changes between other locations, notably whether the darkest shade is black (for light-backgrounded areas) or a dark red/blue (for dark backgrounded areas). The middle shade of blue varies, with palaces typically having a deep blue and other areas usually having a light cyan. Before Link has the Candle, enemies with the red or blue palettes appear fully black when in caves, with the orange palette being unaffected. The orange palette is the only palette to stay the same throughout the game.