10 Took me about 12 hours to beat, and that includes completely mapping out the entire game.
I really enjoyed this. I had never played it before, and beat it in one playing session (with a break to eat).
It would have been nice to have a few more weapons and armor, as well as a better ending, but the only bad thing I can say about the game is the lack of any variety of music. I believe there are only 3 themes in the entire game: Title Screen, which plays throughout almost the entire game; Password Entry theme; and End Boss theme. Unfortunately, the theme that plays through almost the entire game is a loop of about 10 seconds, so I ended up putting the volume at the lowest setting possible to where I could still hear it.
I don't mind the bump attacking. My favorite game of all time uses bump attacking -- Rogue (PC), with the only exception in Rogue being that you can shoot projectiles and Zap wands/staffs (but you aren't going to use those frequently due to the very limited ammo/charges). Once I found the Sword, I had fun just mowing down the enemies. It actually gave me the feeling of playing a Pac-Man game, especially in the maze-like areas.
The health regeneration when not in combat depending on the terrain, which this game apparently introduced and is now pretty common in games, is pulled off quite well because you still have to be actively avoiding enemies in most places due to there being very few locations where you can just stand in one place for long periods with no threat of harm. It almost plays like a Stamina meter instead of a Health meter since you don't regain HP in the woods and actually lose HP if moving through the woods early on -- kinda like how you would be watching out for dangers instead of just being able to catch your breath.
The Save feature is something that really should have been implemented in a lot of games. It's quite possibly the best setup I've ever seen for a game that can't keep saves without a battery. Having a Password for the basics of what needs to be saved, for when you turn off the NES, in addition to the Save, which saves ALL info (including location), as long as the NES is on, is genius. This just increases my whole distaste for the battery save system, now that the batteries are either dead or about to be, because now I know that a MUCH better setup existed.
The objective is pretty simple: Find the three fairies that the Princess has been turned into, which are hidden throughout the kingdom, and then defeat the big baddie. Hmm, sounds kind of familiar *cough* Triforce *cough*. Except that this preceded Zelda by a couple years. Being that the entire kingdom takes up a 5x5 grid, having no in-game direction really is no problem -- it doesn't take that long to explore the entire world. Plus, it starts out somewhat linear since you really only have a chance of acquiring a certain item, and surviving a certain dungeon, before it opens up to where you can do pretty much everything else in any order you want, up until the final dungeon which only becomes accessible when finding all three fairies.
The end boss was a decent enough challenge, taking me about 25 tries to defeat it. Since each try took maybe a minute, at most, all those attempts didn't really take all that long. And having that Save feature was really, REALLY useful since I was able to Save with full health and magic right before the end boss.
I really wish I would have played this game much earlier, and definitely will be on the lookout for a copy of Super Hydlide. It also now makes me glad I picked up Virtual Hydlide a while back.
