Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: Zelda II: The Harrowing Escapade of Link

Do you love Zelda II, but yearn for a challenge? Do the terms super-jump, eco-key, and ceiling-walk mean something to you? Do you like to push the limits to see what is possible? If so this may be the hack you're looking for. This kaizo style hack grants infinite lives, but there are many difficult obstacles to overcome. You can no longer game over as normal, but you can still pause and Up+A on controller 2 to save your progress. Note that damage boosts and deaths are required in places, and there are a few places to watch out for where killing an enemy could leave you without its projectile to damage boost on. This hack leaves a lot of the vanilla familiarity in tact, but really cranks up the difficulty factor. Note that the fairy spell cost has been incresed to prevent it from trivializing some obstacles, the exp soft lock should be fixed, and Up+A restarts at palaces.

This hack was created over a period of 10 days for HackJam 2020 hosted by scorpion_max on the Zelda II discord. It has some warts and some things were not the most carefully thought out and tested as a result, but it is beatable.

Update: 1.1 significantly shortened the death animation.

Database match: Zelda II - The Adventure of Link (USA)
Database: No-Intro: Nintendo Entertainment System (v. 20180803-121122)
File SHA-1: 353489A57F24A429572E76BD455BC51D821F7036
File CRC32: E3C788B0
ROM SHA-1: 11333ADB723A5975E0ECCA3AEE8F4747AA8D2D26
ROM CRC32: BA322865