Version differences - Zelda 2: NES Vs FDS 

Another pretty noticeable difference that you missed is that in the Famicom Verison, Link doesn't have a mouth while in the NES Version, Link does have a mouth.

"Fuck it, I'm calling them dungeons." And I'll call them temples.

"Well, they're called 'palaces' in the NES version. But the FDS version calls them 'sanctuaries'. F*** it. I'm calling them DUNGEONS." Agreed.

6:24 Disney Animation 6:27 Hanna Barbera animation

"Imagine all the menus being in different language when you were a child" I think I only had one video game with Finnish subs as a child. Everything else had to be played in English.

And I have to say: That Boss roar, combined with the lack of movement of the sprites of the bosses make them incredibly scary to me :s Because it just looks otherwordly.

I was scared shitless of the FDS death screen

Another difference: in the water town of Saria, there's a small graveyard; in the FDS version, if you press B at the center tombstone, you'll find that it has an inscription which reads, "Here lies Loto." (a reference to the hero of the original Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest game). In the NES version, no such message exists… It's been dummied out. It's funny to note, though, that this ties in with the Zelda/Final Fantasy/Dragon Warrior (or Quest) rivalry: in the original Final Fantasy, there's a tombstone whose inscription reads, "Here lies Erdrick."/"Here lies Link." - for the North American (and maybe European?) and Japanese versions, respectively -, complete with born/died years (though I forget what they are). To my knowledge, neither Dragon Warrior nor Dragon Quest - nor their sequels - had anything similar to the grave stones in Final Fantasy and Zelda II. :)

Dude that's crazy I never knew the MInish Cap music originally came from Zelda II

For those wondering why the overseas release of Zelda2 had more dungeon textures than the Japanese version the answer is quite simple: by the time Nintendo decided to port Zelda advances in cartridge technology had outgrown the storage space of the floppy disks used by the Famicom Disk System. While the game took a minor hit in sound quality there was a lot more room to add content using the modern cartridges of the time. Its one of the reasons the Famicom Disk System was never released overseas. (The other reasons being complaints about the load times and the disk reader breaking a little too easy).

Another thing that needs to be mentioned is that you can't go sequence breaking in the FDS version because it is VERY strict about story progression. For example, the stolen Trophy in the cave up in the northern desert won't appear until you complete a specific task. But in the NES version, the Trophy is there to be picked up at any time.

Hah, épeler means "spell", but as in "spelling words". Magic spell is "sort" ;)

2:09 that is a cool thing to notice.

zelda 2. its still my favorite on the nes :)

2:00 this music was also added into MarioMaker2 with the link update

God, if they had kept the roar used for the FDS game over in the NES version, it would've given me even WORSE nightmares than the NES version did.

I don’t understand RU-vid sometimes. I LOVE Zelda and have been on this site for over 5 years and yet a video this good I am just now being recommended it 5 years later? OH well Good video and the channel is still going too....might have to stick around 😏

I AM ERROR

That's the boss roaring sound effect from the FDS version of Zelda 1!

Anyone else notice Link's missing mouth?

First difference I noticed once the game began was in the Japanese version, OH MY GOD LINK HAS NO MOUTH Also, the "elephant" sound effect reminds me of the noise a Baron of Hell in Doom makes, admittedly creeping me out quite a bit. But man, who would have thought the American version was a pretty big improvement, despite being downgraded to a cartridge.

Great vid. NES seems to be obviously improved in most aspects.

The NES version is better. No flipping, no wait screens, better music, more dungeon textures, no rolling back stat levels after Game Over, one extra boss, no annoying elephant sounds (although I will say its use on the Game Over screen in the FDS version is pure nightmare fuel!).

Most kids in Japan speak English as well as Japanese.

Did not know ANY of this! I mean, I was obviously aware of the FDS, but figured with it all being ‘80s tech, the differences would be almost indecipherable to someone who didn’t know where to look. The fact that I couldn’t have been more wrong about that is actually pretty exciting. This is an awesome video, and thanks for sharing!!!

In the FDS version in dungeon 5, right before the false wall, you fight Horsehead II. In the nes version Horsehead II is replaced with a blue iron knuckle, making the false wall less obvious. So many comments, am I the only one noticing this??

What the fucking fuck dude?! How the fuck did you not mention he is missing his mouth in the FDS version? That bugged the fuck out of me.

They could have called this game Bird vs Camel

5:09 That was the case for me! My older brother got the NES when I was 6 and he was 10. He got Zelda 1 and 2 a bit later. We couldn't beat the game since we are french, and english was not thaught at all in french primary school back then in the 90's. Fortunately we had an older neighbour who was in Junior high to help us with the game. And we didn't have english RU-vid videos or even american tv shows and movies to learn english faster, since back then every single program was dubbed in french with no choice to watch the original version with subtitles. Before Internet came in french homes, we were totally isolated in our language with only a few options to learn english at school or in books or audio cassettes. Now they teach a bit of english in french primary school but you don't know enough english to understand the game until the end of Junior high or even high school. Internet is a revolution for knowledge and communications (and a lot of crap also :). That's why I love it!

5:10 I'm french and for split second I was like "wait, why can I read these" 😅😂

This is a very professionally made video! Great work, and it's great to see ALL of the differences :)

Spell = Épeler... lol!! Actually "Épeler" means spelling. The correct translation is "Sortilège". Link: "I got to level up.. I'm gonna beat Ganon at Scrabble."

Another difference is when you game over and save. On the NES version it saves all your levels, and experience. On the FDS version it saves all of your progress, but resets all your stats back to level 1.

"Imagine if you were ten years old and playing this game, and all the menus were in a different language. You couldn't read a damn thing." Now imagine that said language is part of the standard curriculum and everyone is required to be at least somewhat familiar with it. It's more like using Roman numerals instead of regular numbers. We all know that "Superbowl XLIX" is the 49th superbowl. It just takes a bit longer to parse because we're all used to numbers like 49 instead of XLIX. Same story in Japan, except it's a whole language.

If you think about it, stabbing items to pick them up makes sense. I mean you do it for potions and P bags, why not the other items? I also actually like how Link doesn't have a mouth in the FDS version, because he has a dopey expression with it always being there.

Weirdly my first version of Zelda 2 is actually the Disk System version it was my first old system I collected for

Okay, have to admit, this guy is legit an entertaining reviewer.

Elephant sounds...? I think it's more of a horror sound... 😂

“So, let’s start the game, huh...aww, fuck.” 😆

You are saying, that one should imagine playing a game as a kid, and that the whole game was in a foreign language so you would understand nothing. Well... I'm from Denmark. It's part of Scandinavia, which must be the only region of europe where they don't translate movies and video games. I played soo many games without understanding a thing. It sucked, but on the contrary you learn to use a dictionary at a really young age :)

That FDS roar sounds like buzz saw, according to my opinion. Ganon's laugh is like Soda's from Punch-Out.

You didn't go into the RNG bug on the NES version. In the FDS version you couldn't defeat the final boss by hiding in the corner and stabbing. A bug introduced while porting it to NES really messed up the enemy AI, so instead of doing things that are actually creative every instance of an enemy just picks a single attack mode and stays with it forever. You can see the behavior easily in the blue slimes.

3:22 Death of Elephant

It's kinda funny that later cartridge games looks and sounds way better than disk system. Especially Sunsoft games. I can only imagine how something like "Batman: Return of The Joker" would look and sound if it was actually developed for FDS.

What i found odd about zelda on FDS disk system is, that those save files are written on the disk itself,considering 1 they had to limit the game in size and 2 rewritting and erasing your save files on the disk will probably wear out the disk. I wonder how many copy's of the FDS version of this game have servived.

There's something rather charming about the way you speak. I like it.

Here in Latin America we always got the US versions of these video games. I played this when I was ten so every now and then I had to use a dictionary to know about some key words in conversations that would lead me where I needed to go. With the PS1 and N64 in Spain they started translating almost every game in Spanish because the plots were more complicated, but in Latin America we still always got the US versions, so we've been always more exposed to English compared to Spain, even on TV, we have a lot of things in English.

3:22 - The Boss/Game Over roar influenced the Wind Fish crying sound in _Link's Awakening_. noproblo.dayjo.org/ZeldaSounds/LA/LA_WindFish_Cry.wav noproblo.dayjo.org/ZeldaSounds/AOL/AOL_FDS_Boss.wav

wait, you also forgot. in Ganon's name. the names were different. the fds version was named Gannon but, in the NES version, the name was Ganon

the death sound is still scary in both

I just beat FDS Zelda II on Switch. The "levels reset after dying" thing destroyed me early on. Overall, I think it was easier to level up in FDS. Also, there are three villagers added to the NES version (skinny man, chubby lady, kid).

Zelda 2 took two full years to reach American shores! The Japanese version is what Miyamoto considers: “Borderline unfinished”. A lot of the menus are English in the Japanese version, NOT because they were fluent in English, (like some of the ingrates here will have you believe) but because they romanize a lot of their specific words, like names and logos, in a weird way. For example, Namco’s Splatterhouse is known by that name, written in English characters, in all regions, in places like the marque and title screen, but talking about the game in a specific context, such as a manual are magazine review, is written in Kanji (insert appropriate Kanji here).

A couple of years back I bought a Japanese completion CD with all the Zelda soundtracks on it up to Four Sword Adventures. This CD contained the FDS version of the Zelda II soundtrack. I never played Zelda II when I bought CD, so I actually heard the Japanese version of tracks before the Western versions. You can imagine I was a little confused when I heard the NES version for the first time.

Many Japanese NES games were improved when released in North America because they had more time, money and wanted to sell a better product overseas. Take Dragon Warrior 1 on NES VS Dragon Quest 1 from Japan. The original japanese DQ1 game didn't even have character and NPC sprite animations when walking up, left or right!!!! All characters in DQ1 were facing forward on the screen no matter what direction you were facing! But Enix wanted Americans to buy the game and not play a cheap looking game, so they added more sprites and then shipped the game to us. Or maybe DQ1 was improved because they saw how Final Fantasy was like and didn't want Americans to think of Dragon Warrior as an inferior product.

The NES Version is way better.

*Elephant Noises Intensify*

Thanks for doing this video. I sooo like our version better!

What is the difference between the game over screens

You forgot the sound when you hit a wall or shield, and cast magic. Those are also different.

this is good stuff. keep refining your commentary technique and i can see this really getting popular. i love version differences, and it's cool to see stuff on games a bunch of people haven't already made videos on

I almost spit my tea out when. You said agh fuck

That's kind of cool having the Kings tomb be an entirely secret area

You Should Continue The Series!

Ganon’s evil laugh in the game ruins the scare factor.

The reason so many sounds were different are due to the FM synthesis sound chip in the FDS add on, the sound in the original FDS were impossible to recreate for the NES, so they just changed the sounds that used FM synthesis, like the title screen.

5:08 Welcome in my world lol. Before 2006-2007 all games was in english only in Quebec (78% are french native speakers here). French (France) games was on SECAM/PAL and our tv system was NTSC. The Quebec market was too small for a french-canadian NTSC version.

Food for thought: Most multi sided FDS games contain all the saves on side one, the only side of the disk that the game writes to.

I always thought of them as dungeons myself.

If James Rolfe was a gunslinger, there'd be a lot of dead copycats

Lots of differences I never knew of! Nice vid man.

All the bosses could be named Elephant 1 Elephant 2 ...

Im glad you called them dungeons subbed lol

I like Zelda 2, it was the first Zelda I played. I played the first Zelda a few years later.

Seems like they didn't know the existence of epilepsy

I am so terrified of the game over/boss's noice *shivers*

I’m always surprised the cross item made it to the US version

I love the Minish Cap soundtrack. They use a fat square wave oscillator for basslines and it sounds great.

2:04 I KNEW I heard that music somewhere before!

It is funny that you traduce spell by épeler. In french, for magic spell, we use the word sort. Épeler means spell like in mispell.

Josh this is currently my favorite video on RU-vid!! I hope it gets a million views... And now I need to get my hands on a Famicon disk system!

Isn't the boss roar identical to one of the boss sound effects from the Famicom TLoZ? And I'm pretty sure Gannon's laugh in the NES version is borrowed from Soda Popinski from Punch Out.

I played Zelda 2 first on the FDS since Famicoms were more abundant in my region. When I tried the US version I was surprised it quite different despite being the same game. I kinda prefer the FDS music over the NES not that the NES was bad or inferior.

well done, the video was informative and well thought out and put together. i really enjoy videos like these, and look forward to seeing more of them. you have a new subscriber.

I like both battle themes

Great job dude! Can't wait to see more!

So what you're telling me is we actually got the superior version for once?

Dude, the biggest difference is price. The disc games only cost less than one dollar and u know how much the cartridges cost.

And also the announcer in the Arcade version of Tekken is also English.

There was almost 2 years between the Famicom Disc System release and the NES release, if I'm not mistaken. That gave them plenty of time to make some tweaks. Great video.

Zelda 1 was released on Famicom as well. Did Zelda 2 ever get ported to the Famicom as well? Especially, considering the Western Zelda ll is the superior version.

Link no Bouken?? I want MY Link with EXTRA Bouken, please

The memory addresses for magic spells, are different so is up thrust and down thrust.

The NES feels more complete than the Famicom version. Unsurprising, since North America finally had the game a year later.

Who knew that the NES and the FDS versions of Zelda 2 had so many differences :o. You should do more version differences videos with other games :)

I like the music and sounds in the FDS more then the NES version Also Link does not have a mouth in the FDS version

Wow, the non-Japanese version is the best one here. I bet they had no idea how well this game was going to do when they released it in Japan so when they went to release it in other markets they spiced it up. Everyone says this game sucks but to be honest I loved this way more than The Adventure of Link but The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is the defacto adventure for Link IMHO.

does anyone know if the Famicom GBA collection version of Zelda 2 keep the Disk System unique quirks or is just adapted from the NES release?

Hell yeah, I was able to read the menu screen that you wrote in french because it's my first language

Is it true the crouch in the corner trick doesn't work in fds version?

I never really got anywhere in Zelda 2, but this was definitely a neato video. Good work