I know a lot of people are against me on this post because Z2 is considered "The bad one" or the black sheep of the Zelda empire so if that's you please have an open mind.
I'm an old Nintendo gamer, in fact I remember buying that funky gold cart at Sears(can't do that anymore). It was right after the cartoon had started up and it made the Zelda games look really good. This was the 80s and for a game to have "stories" was pretty new, usually you're Blaster-Guy shooting aliens no story needed so I looked at Zelda 1 and 2 pictures and decided I wanted the one that looked a bit more like playing Mario Brothers because story didn't matter and it being the second version should make it more advanced.
I loved that game and my Dad did too. The moves were amazing between up and down thrust, sword throw, and magic. The control was good like jumping and attacking felt good, and I liked to showboat which the game let you move fluently enough to look really impressive while playing. It did have it's flaws, I didn't have the strategy guide so him and I spent literal months running around trying to figure out what to do. Playing it recently and noticing that raising the attack stat to max first was almost necessary to advance in the game also seems like a flaw in the stat system. The early Nintendo Towns also suffers from Early Nintendo Towns design, it was 8-bits and I figure they did their best.
I recently got a original Nes and a ton of games and have been back to play it, I'm pretty close to beating it but I'm also noticing except for a few names everyone knows (Mario, Castlevania, Metroid, Megaman, you know what I mean) the other side scrollers aren't as good bordering on mediocre. Zelda 2 is as solid side a scroller as I mentioned, mechanically.
So here it comes, I'm kind of wondering about side scroller Zeldas in the future development of Nintendo? I'm not even going to care if it's an old game that's been recycled into Zelda-scroller and in fact I find the N64 games to be repulsive not because of the content of the games but because of the quality of the N64 system with fans saying that those games have some of the best Zelda content of the franchise, I really feel like I'm missing something.