I've been wanting to do a series where I reviewed dungeons in the Legend Of Zelda series for a long time, so I'm finally doing it. I'll need to actually replay these games to really be able to fully dissect some of these dungeons, so expect new posts to come out pretty slowly. The Legend Of Zelda is obviously a pretty great and influential game for its time, and its overworld is obviously impeccably designed to this day. However, it's probably my least favorite mainline game and a big reason for that is the way dungeons work. Despite the impressive enemy variety (which is weirdly enough better than in the BotW duology), there's really only so much Nintendo could do with such a limited lineup of rooms, so the dungeons feel really repetitive as a result.
On top of that, I think Zelda NES suffers from just how easy it is to optimize the fun out of it. You can get most of the overworld items at the start of the game which just leaves you to go from dungeon to dungeon with nothing to break up the monotony, and the dungeons in question have so many shortcuts and entirely optional rooms that it's almost as if the game encourages you to skip past its challenges rather than engage with the room designs are intended. Zelda 1 has an incredible first 30-60 minutes, but once you get into that dungeon grind, it starts to drag.
So, without further ado, let's at least try to start ranking the dungeons in The Legend Of Zelda:
9. Death Mountain
While I was getting a bit exhausted by Dungeons 7 & 8, Death Mountain is when I was begging for the game to end. This is a shamelessly brutal dungeon, a massive behemoth filled with tons of dead ends and some of the most annoying enemies in the game, particularly the Wizzrobes. For some, Death Mountain is an incredible and fitting final challenge. For me, it's frustrating and unfun. I like to take the time to fully explore every room of all the first eight dungeons, but Death Mountain is so large and so much of it is just superfluous busy work and copies of rooms from previous dungeons that I don't even bother. It's not all bad, I do like how you get to take different paths depending on if you have the Magical Key, and some of the new enemies like Lanmola and Patra are pretty neat, but most of Death Mountain is just a back-to-back onslaught of Zelda 1's worst excesses.
8. Dungeon 6: The Dragon
The Dragon just isn't a very fun dungeon. It feels like it's meticulously designed to be a slog to play through, right from the start. Many have talked about how the very start of the dungeon can lock you out if you don't come in with at least one key, but even after that bit of bad design, The Dragon has everything I don't want in a Zelda dungeon. It's linear, with long and straight stretches without any bends or branching paths. It's repetitive and sluggish, with countless combat rooms of some of the tankiest enemies in the game such as Like Likes and Blue Wizzrobes. It even has a number of pretty cruel dead ends, some of which will require quite a bit of backtracking to get onto the right path. I don't particularly hate The Dragon, but I can say that I felt next to nothing while playing it, and it also marks the point where the first Zelda kinda started to overstay its welcome for me.
7. Dungeon 2: The Moon
Out of all the dungeons in Zelda 1, The Moon is probably the one that suffers most from this game's more freeform approach to dungeon design. Most of The Moon is laid out pretty much like a straight line, with each room on that line being connected to a standalone room to the right. This leads to a very repetitious layout and a short dungeon since half of it is pretty much entirely skippable even without bombs. There's also an abundance of rooms filled to the brim with snakes, which can be a bit annoying. That being said, I do really like that one Moldorm room for how sudden and spontaneous it is, and the purple color scheme in general is probably my favorite in the game.
6. Dungeon 3: The Manji
Okay, let me get the elephant out of the room first. Yes, I know The Manji has a somewhat unfortunate layout, it's a buddhist symbol and it's facing the wrong direction. Either way, The Manji's pretty mid. It doesn't do anything particularly wrong, it's far more windy and twisty than dungeons like The Moon were, but most of the rooms aren't particularly memorable and the abundance of Red Darknut spam can drag down the pacing. I'm also not a fan of how you get the raft in this dungeon but never use it until you're out in the overworld, there's no check to make sure the player has this mandatory item.
5. Dungeon 7: The Demon
The Demon is a mostly fine dungeon with some good and bad elements. The combat encounters are mostly solid, with a focus on the pretty fair Goriyas. I like that the Moldorm pits return, though there's way too many Digdogger minibosses and the Aquamentus fight is a joke. The Demon is easily one of the most nonlinear dungeons with a lot of branching paths, which is nice, but there's also a lot of points where you need to bomb a random wall to move onto the next part of the dungeon. Add in the fact that there are two sets of triple Dodongos in The Demon, and you get a dungeon that feels like it's tailor made to waste all your bombs. I do like the sidequest of having to buy bait though, even if the toll check should probably have been placed at the start of the dungeon to prevent potential backtracking.
4. Dungeon 1: The Eagle
Being the first dungeon in the entire series, it's pretty obvious that The Eagle is one of the most iconic Zelda dungeons, and for good reason. What 1-1 is for Mario, The Eagle is for Zelda, a pretty fantastic tutorial to how dungeons work. It's fairly guided and linear, there's a decent room variety, most of the enemies are pretty manageable, you get your first dungeon item in the Bow, and the first boss is a (admittedly easy) dragon). The Eagle is really short, though, and it suffers a similar issue to The Manji where the Bow isn't actually necessary to get until all the way at Dungeon 6. And even if you do get the Bow early on, if you don't know that you need to get the arrows somewhere else in the overworld, you wouldn't be able to use it. This game is way too cryptic for its own good sometimes.
3. Dungeon 8: The Lion
2. Dungeon 5: The Lizard
A perfectly solid if a tad unremarkable dungeon, which just makes it all the more sad that it's in second place. The Lizard is the first dungeon that starts to really open up and let you explore, with a notable early room branching off into four directions, one of which leading to the dungeon item that will let you defeat the boss. While the boss in question is incredibly underwhelming, The Lizard is notable for the first time a dungeon item is even needed to defeat the boss to begin with. Otherwise, there's some decent water (lava?) bits that make good use of the ladder, a decent amount of Darknuts that can mercifully be taken out easily with your fully upgraded sword, and a pretty BS dead end after the boss that can trap you in a room with enemies.
1. Dungeon 4: The Snake
There is a lot to love about The Snake, it has so much going for it. It's on the linear side like The Moon, but its layout is far more windy and unpredictable. The dungeon actually requires you to take its branching paths to get stuff like keys and the Ladder, which gets fully utilized in the latter half of the dungeon in a manner not unlike modern Zelda games. There's a bunch of bodies of water that you can skip over once you get the Ladder, and that's pretty cool. This dungeon also has the first hidden Rupee room, along with the introduction of some of the more fun enemies to fight like Vire and Gleeok. And on top of that, this dungeon is also the first one that you can't access at the start of the game, and is serves as an important turning point at which Zelda 1 gets a boost in complexity and difficulty. The Snake is just a fantastic dungeon in any Zelda game, it's briskly paced, filled with memorable moments, and feels particularly modern compared to most other Zelda 1 dungeons.
In addition, I thought I'd also rank the dungeon bosses since they tend to be pretty important:
7. Digdogger
What a lame boss. Digdogger barely even attacks you, he just hovers around the room and lets the statues hugging the walls do most of the dirty work. As I said earlier, it's nice that Digdogger is the first boss that demands a dungeon item, you need to use the recorder to shrink it and expose it to damage. However, once you do use the recorder, the Digdogger goes down incredibly quickly with very little effort.
6. Ganon
What is it with NES games and invisible final bosses? Mega Man 4 had it too, though even its final boss was way better than the first Ganon fight. Ganon teleports around the room and you have to hit him four times to expose him, at which point you can take him out with a single Silver Arrow. Since sword beams do nothing on Ganon, you'll have to just blindly swipe around until you hit him a few times, and it's just not fun. It's a final boss that's in the dreaded area of being both underwhelming and annoying at the same time.
5. Dodongo
As a group of enemies, Dodongo can be pretty tricky to deal with since you'll need to precisely place bombs without wasting all of them. But as a singular boss like in The Moon, Dodongo is ridiculously trivial. The hitbox for placing bombs is quite generous, and he lacks any i-frames meaning you can quickly take him out in the span of five seconds without him moving an inch.
4. Gohma
One hit. In his first boss encounter, Gohma goes down in one single hit. To be fair, at the very least he tries to put up a fight. Gohma's eye opens and shuts so you need to time your arrow shot, and he moves around the room shooting projectiles at you. However, that still doesn't really change the fact that he goes down in one hit. Thankfully, his health bar does beef up when he becomes a miniboss, but since I'm reviewing this bosses as boss fights, I can't in good conscience put Gohma any higher.
3. Aquamentus
Aquamentus is a cool first boss in theory. The fact that the first major encounter in Zelda that you have is a dragon, usually the final boss of fantasy adventure stories like this, really sets the bar high for the kinds of boss fights Zelda 1 will have. However, in execution, Aquamentus can be absolutely trivialized with the right amount of preparation. If you come with the arrows, he can be taken out with only two bow shots, and the magical shield can negate all of his attacks. Both of these items can be acquired before even entering your first dungeon. But even if you don't know to get this equipment, by the time you face off wtih Aquamentus again in The Demon, you'll absolutely have them.
2. Manhandla
Manhandla is such a massive improvement over the first two bosses, and it's still one of the best bosses in Zelda 1. For starters, it's actually challenging! Manhandla moves around the room erratically, shooting projectiles to make things even tougher. As you take out its heads, it begins to move even faster. There are a number of methods to defeating Manhandla, with the fight being easier the more powered up Link is, but nothing is quite as satisfying as using a bomb to blow off most if not all of its heads in one fell swoop.
1. Gleeok
Gleeok is easily the best boss in the first Zelda and it's not even close. Like Aquamentus, it's a dragon, but it's an actually tough one with a pretty beefy health bar and multiple heads you need to take out. To make things even more complicated, taking out one head causes it to fly around the room and shoot even more projectiles at you basically giving the Gleeok fight multiple phases that incremently amp up the difficulty. I also love how the later Gleeoks you fight have increasingly more heads, meaning that his fights actually get more and more difficult (looking at you Aquamentus). For as much as I rag on Tears Of The Kingdom, I was so glad to see Gleeok back, he's always been a badass Zelda boss all the way back to the first game.
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