Last weekend was the beginning of the 40th Anniversary of The Legend of Zelda and that's a great reason to revisit the NES classic. Last time I played through the entire game was over nine years ago, on the Wii U, where I had made it my mission to play through most Zelda games again during the 30th Anniversary and before Breath of the Wild came out, starting a new era for the series.
Of course, it's not like I have had no contact with the game since then. I played a bit on the Game & Watch system that was released for the 35th Anniversary. And it was my favorite part of the Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. But this was really about going through everything from start to finish again, both in the 1st and the 2nd Quest.
For this I was using the Nintendo Switch Online version, which brings one major novelty with it: you can now rewind at any time. Well, this has been a thing for many years now, so I'm a little late to the party, but it makes replaying the NES games a lot more forgiving and fun.
I wasn't using any guide maps at first, so I was simply guessing from my memory where I could bomb walls and burn trees, but my memories were a bit hazy. Luckily, you can just quickly rewind to not having wasted your bombs or having to go back and forth between screens to reload the candle.
The best usage in the early game turned out to be the money-making game, however. Make a pick and rewind whenever it was the wrong one. It is predetermined when you enter the cave, so you can just look at the result, rewind one step and then pick the positive value. This completely erases the need to farm Rupees in this game, making items like the Blue Ring quickly accessible.
Technically, all of this was already possible with Restore Points on the Virtual Console, but it was much more of a manual effort, because you needed to create a new save state every single time. Rewinding is so much more convenient that it makes me want to re-explore some other Zelda classics later this year, just to see what can be done with it.
Most importantly, it lets you quickly undo mistakes. You need to defeat a Dodongo, but only have exactly two bombs left? Not a problem any longer... Or in the 2nd Quest you will often go through one-way doors, where the other side is basically a trap that forces you to backtrack through the whole dungeon. Again, this isn't a problem any longer...
Speaking of the the 2nd Quest, here I was mostly following my "guide" from when I had played the game on the Nintendo 3DS right for the 30th Anniversary. The main difference was that I went through all of Level 8 right away, making it the second dungeon to complete.
Thanks to the rewind feature, all those triple Dodongos became rather trivial. And getting the Magical Key early was also a relief, because the keys are not evenly distributed throughout the 2nd Quest dungeons, where this can create annoying dead-ends, unless you have purchased keys in advance.
The 2nd Quest's Level 8 doesn't have any Blue Darknuts or Wizzrobes in it, making it easier in comparison to Levels 6 and 7. And I also often used the rewind when fighting those annoyances to minimize damage.
By the way, you can save your game (without it counting as a death) by activating a second controller and then pressing Up + Select on the second controller in the item menu. This works just fine with the Nintendo Switch Online version. I've only used this once, right at the very end of the 2nd Quest, because the Restore Points are more convenient for saving, but I wanted to have actual save data present to get a sense of completion.
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