Genre – RPG
Platform – Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

I can hear fans of the Legend of Zelda series yelling at me already.  But again, this list is about personal preference, not what critics and other fans widely agree upon.  I enjoyed The Legend of Zelda II – The Adventures of Link more than the first Legend of Zelda.  There, I said it.  I feel like I’ve had that on my chest for thirty years.  This game just made more sense to me and I had a lot more fun playing it.

In typical Zelda fashion, you play as Link, a young hero out to save the pricess, Zelda.  While this sounds Mario-ish, it is far different.  In Zelda, your character levels up and allows you to upgrade different aspects of them such as health or magic.  This allows you to move to different parts of the map and fight stronger creatures.  This type of game is called a role-playing game (RPG).

This game introduced me to a part of RPGs that I hadn’t seen before – the grind.  I spent hours walking around simply killing mobs (gamer for enemies) to get experience to level up.  If a bag of experience dropped, it was like the gaming god shined upon me as it was worth 50 experience points.

This game also got difficult.  Like most games, the boss mobs had a weakness, but it took some trial and error to find it.  This was the first game that I remember playing that let you save your progress, so there was no more keeping the Nintendo powered on while at school and praying that Mom didn’t turn it off.

I currently have this game downloaded on my Nintendo 3DS and I do still play it from time to time.  This is a big reason it made my top 25.