Topic: Question About Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for Game Boy Advance

Recently, I was looking into purchasing Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for Game Boy Advance, and I came across a strange fact about the North American version of the game that I wanted to see if if anyone could confirm or deny.

By way of background, in the North American version of the original NES game, if you saved your game or got a game over, you would retain all of your experience levels (for attack, life, and magic). In the Japanese version of the NES game however, according to a Nintendo website about the new Zelda Game and Watch, all of your experience levels would drop down to the lowest of your three levels. For example, if you have Attack 3, Life 3 and Magic 2, all of your levels would drop to 2 after saving or a game over.

I was looking at a scanned copy of the instruction manual for the North American version of the GBA game (on Zelda Dungeon), and the manual essentially claims that the North American GBA game features the Japanese approach to experience levels where all of your experience levels would drop down to the lowest of your three levels after saving or a game over. Does anyone have the North American version of the GBA game to confirm that this is actually true? It seems awfully strange that the North American GBA game would be given the (more challenging) Japanese approach to experience levels!

I find that a little hard to believe.
The GBA versions were probably essentially a ROM running within Nintendo's custom emulator (under some security, probably to keep third parties from using it without a license, unlike a certain free fan emulator which seemed to have been utilized by some Japanese publishers to produce a few compilations).
Can't imagine Nintendo going to that much trouble rewriting the game to support an unfamiliar game mechanic.
I've heard of the two NES games being changed on GBA, but only to silently make some text corrections. (an old article by Clyde Mandelin, would suggest they've been slowly making text changes to correct bad old translations, but perhaps not too many to avoid breaking people's nostalgic feelings)
I'd think it more believable, if that is in the manual, that perhaps it was translated from the Japanese instructions by someone not familiar with actually playing the game, to notice.

Well they did adapt Zelda 1 in special ways, like the improved translation, how the background is squashed down but the characters are still full size, and the fact they added an easier way to save the game.

I would find it odd if they randomly decided to make an infamously hard game harder just for the sake of it, but maybe!

Judging from this let's play, it seems levels are carried over after a game over https://youtu.be/vSGQoVeO3DI?t=946.

Ah, yup, at 1:00:30 you can see Link has levels 3-3-4, and they stay like that after the game over screen.

Yeah, they optimized the sprites for the squish routine.
But they had to change the save function, since that originally required the second controller, which the GBA lacks.
(reportedly its Japanese counterpart had to additionally map the infamous "microphone" input to, it was like, pushing Select four times, I think)