7. Link Gets The Blues
Lets go back a bit now and visit Zelda 2. Not the most popular of entries in the series but Ive always had a soft spot for it, maybe because I played it first time round and didnt have the later games to spoil my perception of it. It was hard throughout, but where you really needed to be on your mettle was when you ran into the Iron Knuckles in the dungeons. They would attack and block high and low, just like you could, and it always took a bit of skill to despatch them. It was always a good satisfying fight in which you felt youd earned your victories. Until you came up against the blue ones. These walking nightmares didnt just hit you with swords, they fired sword beams at you. Lots of them. And their ability to retreat meant that most encounters ended up with them backing off throwing things at you. Which was annoying because: a) Ive had blind dates like that. b) In that really annoying eight-bit way they could also back off the side of the screen so you couldnt see them, but they could still attack you, doing massive amounts of damage. Thats not even the frustrating part by the way. They were killable. Just about. But when you arrived at the great castle theyd been replaced with thinner knights, but these knights had learnt a new trick. They could jump. And not just a normal jump, theyd bounce all over the screen like they were wearing flubber armour. The orange ones and red ones were just about dealable, but the blue ones were a fully-fledged nightmare from the gates of Hell itself. Watch the first twenty seconds of this if you don't believe me. In researching this article Ive found out that theyre officially called Fokkas. Some jokes just write themselves.
Frustration rating: 8.