I'm an unapologetic fan of Zelda II as well, but I wouldn't call it one of the best Zelda games. It was harder than the first one, and definitely harder than A Link to the Past (which wasn't hard). If you want A Link to the Past but hard, play The Minish Cap. Kind of the same thing, plus the shrink mechanic. It has an unfair but not-too-difficult boss fight (you need to get behind a boss and it rotates faster than you can move, and you can't slow it down), and the ending is like three super hard bosses with no breaks or health refills. Then again, Capcom made that game, not Nintendo. A Link Between Worlds was a harder A Link to the Past (and was a direct sequel to it), but it wasn't quite as hard as The Minish Cap. The Adventures of Link is harder than either of them, though. But, if you have a Switch and a Switch Online pass, you can play a cheat version which maxes your levels. That at least makes the game a bit more fair. It's still hard, though. (I also think a lot of people early on failed to grasp that you did not have to complete temples. We did so because that was how we were trained to game. We weren't trained to min/max levels, and Zelda II was made to be played differently. Since each temple raises you a full level, you were meant to only get the items in the temples and then leave. There's a certain level, when you're X (X = number of temples) levels shy of max, that's when you go back to Temple 1 and beat Horse Head. That brings you up to X-1 from max and you get a stat boost. Rinse and repeat. Makes the game a bit easier at the tail end. Of course, having everything maxed means you can tackle those bosses whenever you want, and none are too difficult. (I wonder if you could get high jump and downward thrust, and just bounce on Horse Head until he dies. Probably. But he's not that hard to play normally once you realise you can only strike his head.)