The Great Palace

Entrance to the Great Palace

Here we are, after much toil and hardship...the entrance to the Great Palace.  Getting here wasn't easy, and getting through it isn't easy either.  Like Death Mountain in Zelda I, the Great Palace is an enormous structure where you don't have to explore half of it to complete the game.  And why would you go through additional toil and hardship that's unnecessary, after everything you've done to get to this point?  This Palace does everything to you...thrusts every kind of puzzle and weird thing you want, keeps you in a maze, throws new enemies which you must find new and clever ways to defeat them, and keeps you on your toes all the way to the boss room.  And then it throws two boss rooms at you.

First, you must defeat the Thunderbird.  This giant bird is rendered vulnerable by the Thunder spell and only the Thunder spell, and only then can you harm him with your sword.  And even then it's difficult.  His attacks are nearly impossible to dodge (though if you stand on the very right of the screen you are invulnerable...you'd think programmers would have fixed something like this) and like Barba Ray before him, he is hard to hit between dodging his attacks since he floats so high above you.  Not to mention to make life more difficult, after casting Jump, Shield and Thunder...you are left with no magic to cast Life to aid you into your next fight, which might be considered tougher.

The final boss of the game is generated by the evil wizard who is the mastermind behind Ganon's revival as well as Zelda's slumber.  Funny how easily they are connected, no?  Or perhaps he's not an evil mastermind, perhaps he's just testing Link's courage.  One way or another, he gives life to Link's shadow and we must fight ourselves (a theme which is revisited several times in later titles).  This boss can do everything we can do and is extremely aggressive, which as you know is irritating given our poor showing in defense.  But as they say, the best defense is a great offense.  If you stay on one side of the screen and keep stabbing at Dark Link, he'll rarely hit you and keep running into your sword more often, at the least.  Eventually, Dark Link will fall at the hands of the real McCoy and the wizard allows us to claim the Triforce of Courage, and the game is over!  Celebrate, the hardest of the Zelda titles is behind us!