-Story-
There was a lot of charm and humor to the story in the first half of AR1, here the story is just "Collect the 8 Triforce fragments from Vaati instead of Ganon", so that's a letdown. Eggman in AR1 was great, Vaati is just bland, he lacks personality.

-Music/Environment-
The overworld in AR1 had a lot more personality and flavor. The landscapes in this one are quite a bit larger, but feel a bit too generic, bland, and overly large and spacious, much of the problem is due to same-ness of screen design and map layout. AR2 has some nice music tracks, but I felt the music in AR1 had more tracks I liked. AR1 also had stronger dungeon themes, many based heavily on Sonic zones such as Hydro City and (IIRC) Lava Reef, the majority of dungeons in AR2 are pretty generic, however a couple of late game dungeons, such as Star Light zone (the dungeon with the changing water level) and Scrap Brain zone have some great flavor in their themes and visuals.

-Gameplay/Design-

AR2 makes some important fixes. Item gates are more distinguishable from each other, most if not all of the mandatory damage sections have been scrapped. Dungeons are still too long, but not quite as ridiculously long and frustratingly branchy as AR1. Several dungeons are still aggravating though, as they keep going when you think they're done and it can be tasking to remember where the door is once you finally get the key, different looking areas could have helped this (especially if statues and wall decor were used as landmarks, rather than being present in every room).

It’s nice that AR2 doesn’t have all the packed enemy gauntlet rooms that AR1 has, although the room where you get the Magic Key is so ridiculously packed with enemies you can’t see where you are, and that’s awful. The final boss of AR2 is much shorter and more manageable than the final boss of AR1 though, which is good.

There is some bad boss placement where you walk south into a boss room, and it’s a Gohma or Gleeok which appears right on top of you for unfair damage. And there is a cheap fight against a Manhandla in sideview where you need to use the hammer, but touching him can knock you off the ledge into the screen below, making you restart the fight.

Also, troublesome was the item ordering. Once you are out of bombs, the item in the window is automatically replaced with Farore’s Wind, which caused me to accidentally warp out of dungeons a few times, some of which were during boss and midboss fights I had almost won.

AR2 had more shops to buy potion which is great, though the stronger potions tend to be a fairly long trek to restock late in the game.

Three of the late game dungeons have some really nice design, like Star Light Zone, though it’s a bit long in the end. With three or so items in each dungeon though, it can be easy to miss an item and not know it. I missed the Lens and had to go back to fetch it after the next dungeon, which was an obnoxiously mean warping maze without the Lens, but doable enough, and actually interesting once you do have the Lens.

-Summary-
While AR2 fixes some design issues from AR1, I personally got more enjoyment out of AR1’s humor and environments. In retrospect, I would’ve skipped AR2, because I expected more humor and compelling environments on top of improved design, and AR2 let me down in that respect. AR2 is the better game design-wise, but was less engaging to me overall.

EDIT: I also have to complain about the overuse of Windrobes (especially the ones in late dungeon in narrow corridors) and the Mirror Robes, who take forever to come out of the walls.

EDIT 2: Like AR1, keys are used to troll the player. Getting a key is never a good reward because you know you need a second key every time you see a locked door, because of the locked door right behind it. And this is a killjoy.

EDIT 3: Overworld part of Level 8 has glitched music which loops after a few seconds, and I didn't know to download additional music until I got there and it was silent, since that detail is buried in the quest description.

This is one of those quests that I really did enjoy up until the end. It had its share of fun and frustrations but overall I had fun playing it.

The Good

• Tile set - This tile set is one of my favorites. It's large, colorful and easy to distinguish objects on the screen. I find that quests made with this tile set tend to be easier to navigate.
• Overworld - I really liked the layout of this quest. The overworld was large and expansive and there are just enough secrets to keep you trying but not so many that you get bored trying to find things.
• Dungeons - The dungeons were fun and, for the most part, not too difficult. There was a mix of everything...linear, multi-floor, water and confusion. Level 8 was especially interesting.
• Mini-dungeons - I've always liked side dungeons and the inclusion of these in this quest made for a fun play. I prefer them to be limited to extra (optional) items, giving the player the option of skipping them but still, I was glad to see them in this quest.

The Bad

• Backtrack - There was too much backtracking in this quest, in both the overworld and the dungeons. Having to go from one end of the map to the other to get items and entrances makes things a little tedious.
• Windrobes - These were used way too much in this quest. I like a good mix of enemies but the levels in which Windrobes were used did not benefit from them, mainly level 7. Having to drain the water every time you got caught by the Windrobes proved to be annoying. Substituting repetition for long play is never fun.
• Keys - I felt like I spent too much time in the some of the dungeons searching for keys. In level 6 I got something like 10 or 11.

The Ugly

Level 9. Enough said.

Seriously, level 9 is one of those levels that should have never happened. I liked the switch from dungeon to platform and back but that is where my tolerance for this level ended. I don't like slaughterfest levels and level 9 definitely falls in that category. The difficulty level was way too high, even with the purple ring and master sword. The enemy count VS the walkable space on a lot of the screens made fighting extremely tedious and frustrating, especially on the platform screens. Finally, there were too many Rockhandlas. It really feels like the author substituted difficulty for puzzles. This last level went beyond the realm of fun to stupidly hard.

Overall, I would rate it a 4. It's one I would play again.

An overall good quest, but it is not without its common flaws.

The quest's difficulty is on par with many other quests; except that this quest has an unusually easy beginning. Most enemies in West Hyrule Field and the other first few areas do 1/4 Heart damage with some doing 1/2 Heart damage. Not that I am complaining about how easy the quest starts off as, but I do have an issue with the amount of padding the overworld has; making the process of exploration tedious despite rewarding once you start finding the HCPs dotted all over. West Hyrule Field in this quest, for example, takes up roughly half of the Western overworld, but it is so devoid of actual content. Worse than OoT's Hyrule Field, because it is not nearly as easy or convienient to traverse as OoT's Hyrule Field. East Hyrule is not much better despite having more content, with it's field having a whole area of it being just long grass and said field being painful to traverse on your first few trips there. The various sub-areas aren't nearly as bad, but they could stand to lose a bit of filler and the dungeons are often very good in regards to not having padding.

In the beginning, the quest's difficulty is fairly solid; up until around Level 4 or so, but the quality of the difficulty quickly drops shortly afterwards. Like many quests, this quest's solution to increasing difficulty is by spamming more and more strong enemies at the player. As early as Level 5, you begin to deal with shooting statue spam and overpowered enemies and it only gets worse from here. Here's this lovely exhibit I made of this room in Level 7:


Enjoy tediously waiting until the Mirrorrobe walks down out of the wall or play a very tedious Dead-Man's volley with the Fire Boomerang when it emerges from the wall at the top of the screen and it takes 6 hits to kill. BTW, there were two phasing Mirrorrobes and three teleporting Mirrorrobes (the latter of which were buffed) to start!

While I could have saved myself a whole lot of pain and suffering in this room if I didn't miss the Mirror Shield which was in an obvious location in this instance, design like this is no and is sadly commonplace throughout the lategame. According to Eddy, you have to use Rocs' Feather you get in Level 4 to deal with this type of spam. While the feather does help a lot, that alone shouldn't excuse spamming high-levelled enemies because it also restricts your ability to use other tools that might otherwise be more appropriate because you always have your sword out at all times (this quest doesn't use the A&B selection rule). Windrobes also make an appearance starting from Level 7, which happens to be the very worst place for Windrobes to appear. Level 7's gimmick revolves around raising and lowering the water level and is a pretty big dungeon. Windrobes are found throughout the dungeon, including in some very bad locations, and take you all the way back to the start in the dungeon's original state, meaning you have to repeat the whole ordeal again.
Halfway through Level 9, you also come across invisible enemies. This is mandatory to deal with and you only get the Cross if you take a detour through said invisible enemies, which is full of pain and suffering. This is another highlight of cheap difficulty and I'm pretty sure Eddy knew better.


After all of these issues, I think I will address one of the better points of the quest. Eddy has done a good job at bugtesting and making sure the player can't get stuck in random places. Well, with one horrible exception


What is wrong with this picture? If you guessed "I needed Arrows to shoot Vaati without any prior knowledge that this would be the case", then you are correct. By the way, Eppy also ended up having to F6 here multiple times over the same thing during his LP in a previous version of this quest.

While the same holds true for all of the Vaati battles, the first one is particularly easy to end up stuck for Arrows for. You get everything needed to use the Bow in Level 1 and then you are put up against an Aquamentus with an absurd amount of health (but still overall easy because of how little damage it causes). By instinct, the player is naturally inclined to spam their arrows; using them all up in the process because of how much health the thing has, because it is the faster option for killing. By the time you reach Vaati, there is a high chance that you have run out of Arrows and the enemies that he summons before you have to shoot him don't drop any. If that happens, you have to kill all the enemies and then F6 repeatedly until you get enough Arrows to beat Vaati with. To fix that, you could place a 30 Arrow item on the first screen of the fight and chances are the player will never ever run into this situation.


One of the things many people say that this quest improved the most on from the first Amy Rose quest is the story. In my opinion, I do not feel that this is entirely correct. The actual story of this quest is not much better than that of Amy Rose 1's; it still felt like a cringey fanfiction and the cutscenes still has things that are unneeded. However, the delivery of the story is much, much better. Gone are the awfully long cutscenes between each dungeon that more served to shove the cringey fanfiction in your face than give you actual information and in its place are fairly short cutscenes that usually last long enough to serve you the required information and nothing more.


Now that we are onto the music. Much of the music picked is good, with standout examples being Level 2, Southern Chaos Ruins, Icetop Mountains, Armos Garden and especially Level 6. They really helped immerse me into the game, which helped improve my experience with the music. That said, I do question many of of Eddy's music choices though...


Imagine the Vanilla Dome OW music from Super Mario World being played here. Fits like a charm.

Okay, perhaps this is the only example of a really bad midi choice. Moving on-



All the immersion Eddy tried to accomplish here was torn down by his choice of midi for this dungeon.
Also note where the Blue and Red Bubbles spawned in relation to the player in the first screen. 10/10 enemy spawning would worship again *cough*

So yeah, for as many good music choices Eddy had for this quest, there were an equal number of either questionable or downright bad music choices in the quest. The highlight of it all was not even the midi choices at all - It was the MP3s used! You see, Eddy has included a download link for a couple of MP3 files to be included in the folder where the quest file is located in the quest description. Inside contained two MP3 files for songs from VVVVVV, both of which are used in the quest's Level 8 and it's respective overworld area. Both of which were used equally terribly - The one for the outside area is an extremely short 11 second loop that does not fit the area at all and Level 8's theme had serious issues with audio panning (I suspect this was only on my end, but it really affected my experience with it) and it also did not fit the dungeon at all.


Overall, The Legend of Amy Rose 2 is a fairly good quest. It is definitely much better than the first Amy Rose quest, but some of the problems that the first quest had were carried over into this quest. I hope that Amy Rose 3 fixes all these issues!

3/5

Edit: Amended the review a little bit, to sound much less nitpicky over some of the design choices.

Excellent quest.

Pros & Cons:
* Very nice music in some parts, not so nice in other parts.
* Overworld is well designed and beautiful, but kinda overlong and empty.
* Dungeons are obviously very well designed, challenging and fun to play, most specially level 9 is unique and fun to play.
* I personally am not a fan of long stories, so the dialog and story was a turn-off for me. Just my personal view of course.

As much fun as I had playing and completing this, I wouldn't want to replay it. I don't know, the reason is the cons mentioned above, plus even though the dungeons are great, they do tend to get a bit tedious for some reason.

I am a little bit shocked about your improvements. Yeah, we had no need to get tonics over and over again, no horrible level 9, no unfair damagecurve, but mostly because the enemys got soo easy (I died a lot, especially for getting the red ring only after beeing half through level 8, but there were not really any situations or bosses hard to master)... still, it is kind of an improvement, also the ow looks more polished.

Your dungeons also did not improve too much. There were no things over the top (like the former level 9), but again they were branched to much it felt like artificially lengthening them. Of course it is incredible how you branch them and that has my respect, but since you have many branches not connected to each other you can spend a lot of time searching each branch for the next locked door. I have never seen it done so well like you do, but the principle of opening a locked door, getting a new key and opening a path to the next locked door over and over again is a bit boring. Also your maps are designed in a way that does not really help, the only ones that need them for orientation are the ones that use many warps, making the map useless.

Your puzzles are still not so great, but they are not placed at the most horrible places anymore. Your blpck puzzles including only blocks are pretty bad, but the ones using the surroundings (like the ladder or hookshot) to solve the are fun. Also the ememies, again it was an annoying hack n slay... this might be the best for others but is unbearable for me. Something important is the feather. It was my most used item, jumping over traps and enemies was so much help to speed up the game, especially combined with nayrus spell. Here we come to one of the biggest let down, the permanent switching between items...

The story was also a let down, though most were annoyed by the silly story and the high amount of talk in part 1, there was at least a plot, the new story feels kind of forced and has no plot at all. BTW, 15h, 79deaths, all HPs

I would encourage you to polish you skill in branching to create labyrinth like dungeons (costum maps with colorated rooms as hints and such were great for that purpose), with more connections opening up over time and items, if gained, open multiple new branches at once. Therefore, limit the amount of needless extra rooms to a minimum and choose the positioning of enemies more careful, mostly no or only weak enemies for decorations, but if you use harder ones make them a real threat. And enemies beeing so fast you cannot really react to them are no fun btw. The same goes for the items, think about how to use them the best way to get the maximun out of them. Maybe you could limit your amount of items to a minimum and use the disabeling mechanic or string codes to use them multiple times for different dungeons. I mean the majority of the items are rarely used as triggers and useless for fights (since most are wizzrobes and darknuts).

Is it intended that push-block-triggers (eg flag2) are all activated by pushing once (means if there are 3 blocks with flag 2 and I push one of them I can't push the others anymore)? No idea why this happens, I made a test quest and there it worked like normally. (V2.50 Build 29)

Eddy, your really taunting me. I just...UGH!!! I WANT TO PLAY IT SO BADLY!!! ARGH!!!!

I played this on 2.5 and it worked

It got stuck two times in the first 2 minutes of gameplay with v2.5.
Have you tested it at all with that version?

The character, a reddish little girl was a huge turnoff.