Last Updated: 06/19/05
ZC Version: 2.10
PureZC Rating: 4/5
Hey everyone!
I just wanted to thank everyone for your submissions for the first Random Requested Review. The quest has already been selected out of the entries that we got. As stated before, the review for that quest will be delivered next week. Without further ado, here’s this week’s review!
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Who is WindBoy? Beats me since NineLives (formerly XDragonSB) submitted it.Everyone has their first quest. And if you’re like me, you still at least vaguely remember it, even if you didn’t finish it. I remember mine was Wind Waker themed, involving rafting between islands. However, I was new to Zelda Classic, and it was
terrible. I knew the basics, but I hadn’t quite grasped proper level design, detail of screens, and difficulty balancing. Most other peoples’ first quests are the same way. You start out following a tutorial, then continue after there, learning as you go along, and you get better and better. However, during the course of the quest, a discrepancy between the quality of the beginning of the quest and the quality of the end begins to appear. It’s a huge difference between the start and end in ABITHF, and everything in between can only be labeled as sporadic.
GameplayIn its heart, ABITHF is a fairly simple 9 dungeon romp. It starts you out with nothing. No directions, no items, nothing. It’s fairly typical for a first quest. You’re left to find some rupees to buy a sword. Okay, that’s a bit different. However, I noticed something fairly early. The shop allows you to buy 3 items just like normal.
But if you don’t buy the sword, you’re screwed.. You immediately hit a stop sign with no place to go. You would be forced to restart the quest. Sure, in all honesty, you’d have to be dumb to buy bombs before the sword, but that’s a pretty big oversight
for the first four screens.
The dungeons are a mixed bag. Most of the first ones were very bland where you would simply traverse room after room, killing enemies, bombing walls (NineLives
loves bomb doors), and all of your normal Z1 stuff. After the first few dungeons, the level design gets a lot better, and at times is fairly good. They’ll make you roam around, get some keys, go back, then advance somewhere else. You’ll get an item, and the quest will make you use them. It’s not bad. Those moments are plentiful enough to prevent dungeons from being too linear, but not abundant or long enough to become frustrating. Overall, the dungeons are fairly good. Not great, but not bad by any means.
However, there are definitely some frustrating points. There are times when secrets are confusing and make absolutely no sense. For example, at one point you’re stuck in a room with an inactive warp tile (up to this point, those tiles have been reserved for “landing” from a warp). I bombed all 3 walls since that’s what typically you have to do in the game when you hit a dead end. No doors opened. I used every item I had on the statues in the room, but no secrets occurred. I eventually gave up, went to the next dungeon, and then came back. I still couldn’t figure it out. It turns out you have to walk on one specific combo in the corner to activate the warp combo.
How was I supposed to know this? Was I actually supposed to walk through every combo of the room? That’s ridiculous.
Can you guess what I was supposed to do here?Some other fun stuff includes shooting a sword beam at one of those Oracle Tree Doors on the overworld and shooting an arrow at a grave, and the example above where I had to push the torch over to the ice combo. No other torches in the game are pushable. I guess it should be obvious since it’s by itself, but it’s still a bit odd.
There’s also some really silly stuff that I guess was meant to go easy on the player and not make them backtrack to a shop to get stuff. For example, one room you get the “bait” (it’s actually a fairy). Guess when you use it?
The next room. What is the purpose of that? I can’t think of any. You might as well have not even included it.
As you go further in the quest, you’ll find out that the overworld is very linearly designed. You go to a dungeon, get an item, then use that item to open up a new segment of the overworld. Not that this is a bad principle. Obviously most newer Zelda games use this same philosophy. However, the way it’s used in ABITHF makes the overworld very, very long. Most of the time you use the item to go
further in the overworld. This is especially bad in the second half of the game. You’ll have to trek across around 20-30 screens just to get back to some parts of the overworld if you save and quit.
If you’re going with a method where you need to unlock segments of the overworld with new items, you need your starting point be a centralized segment of the overworld. It’s no fun having to go through 20-25 dull screens just to get back to a house where you can get the flippers just because you had to go back to town to get the bait item. Look at Majora’s Mask. It used the principle, but you started out in a central location and could get to any segment of the overworld completely.
It takes around 25 screens to get to this bland section of the overworld.Something else that is noticeable as you go further through the quest is the lack of difficulty curve… for the most part. During 90% of the game, I had no difficulties at all. I made it halfway through the 7th dungeon for example without losing even half of my hearts. The quest introduces new enemies into the game later on, but they’re oftentimes well after the point where you’re prepared for them. The quest threw level 2 Darknuts at me mostly
after I got the hammer and red ring. They weren’t a threat. At all.
There were some rooms where things did get a bit more difficult, but during most of these times, NineLives just threw a bunch of bosses at you. Sometimes these rooms were the boss rooms. Other times you’ll just walk in a room to find 6 Level 2 Manhandlas shooting fireballs at you that you can’t block. Of course, with the amount of hearts you have and the rings in your possession, most of these times you can just tank the damage. They’re still not that much of a threat, they’ll just take you down to 1/4th of your health. The quest just isn’t difficult at all. Not that I’m that big of a fan of ridiculously difficult quests. I’m really not. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the best ZC player out there and struggle on more difficult quests. (I’ll need as much luck as I can get if I have to play quests like the Armageddon Quest.) But still, I expect more out of levels 7 and 9.
The quest tries to be difficult by throwing bosses at you… but you usually you can just tank the damage.Why didn’t I mention level 8? Because I didn’t even play it! The quest doesn’t force you to. In fact, to me it even sort of suggested not to go to level 8. Level 8 would have required me to go back to the town (I think). However, just walking further in the overworld got me to dungeon 9. And then dungeon 9 didn’t even check for the Triforce. So that was a bit annoying. You know those Triforces that you’ve been collecting? They’re worthless.
Once you’re in the last dungeon, it throws a bunch of useless items at you that you don’t need all in a span of around 10 screens. These items include the magic key (I only found 1 locked door after that point), the 3 OoT spells, gold arrows (which are
insanely overpowered), and the gold ring. The gold ring was kind of funny. Halfway through the dungeon someone tells me that it’s in a secret place. The only issue I had already found it… 10 screens or so ago. All of these items weren’t needed at all. They just seemed like a last-ditch effort to get out everything just for the sake of it.
How did I find that secret room? You see, you’ll get in the habit of using the Lens of Truth on
every empty wall because NineLives uses bombable walls soooo often. They’re about his most favorite thing to use. This is particularly frustrating before you get the lens because there are times where you have to check every wall in a room to see if its bombable. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. You’ll go through a ton of bombs through the quest (I’d definitely recommend getting the bomb upgrade at the very beginning of the quest), and you’ll get to points where you’ll run out of bombs, then find yourself going around trying to get more just so you can try bombing more walls just to try to progress. It’s extremely tedious. Thankfully you get the Lens of Truth in the 4th dungeon, making this a lot easier.
Finally, I got to Ganon. Normal stuff. The only problem was that the left and right sides of the room where solid. Not only did this make it annoying because it got harder to move around the room to avoid the fireballs, but
Ganon got stuck! I was forced to restart the fight because of it.
NarrativeThere’s basically none outside of useless banter by NPCs and random vague hints that weren’t helpful at all.
Design AttentionAs stated before, this quest screamed “this was my first quest!” at me. Especially in the beginning, screens were vacant of detail. The quest uses the BS Tileset, but incorrectly. The ground is a solid color rather than use BS grass, trees were merely used to outline the sides of the screen, and despite being made in 2.10, next to no layers were used. Dungeons weren’t any better. Rooms would be absolutely empty half the time. Even in the final dungeons I’d enter a room that was completely empty of any detail except for a chest.
The level of detail in this quest is insane.[/sarcasm] Also, the BS tileset is not supposed to be used like that.Of course, the amount of detail got better as the dungeon went along. Both dungeon and overworld screens got more effort and detail put into them… for the most part, at least. The entire top right sector of the overworld was just sand… for about 12 screens. There weren’t even any enemies. An NPC even asks why. I’m guessing it’s supposed to hint that Ganon got rid of them all? Except that doesn’t make sense because level 9 is covered with enemies. Obviously NineLives just got bored of making screens and rather than just close off that section, he just made empty screen after empty screen. Where’s the effort?
There are also some very, very obvious mistakes that are very blatant. For example, the first house I entered I discovered that I was stuck in the door. You have to step to the side to progress. This is very obvious and happens in every single house you go to. NineLives uses screen 80 instead of using a different dmap, and he uses a door frame, so you just get stuck in the wall. I noticed this in the first 30 seconds. How was this not fixed? It would take 10 seconds to fix. You could even make new tiles and combos if you didn’t want the screens in another dmap.
In the first dungeon, I got into the room with the boomerang… then couldn’t even leave. Again, how was this missed? In houses, you have pots… with pots as under combos. This was really interesting because it was a fast source of money if you wanted to get buy stuff. Super expensive ring? No problem. More bombs? No problem. You’ll have no problem buying stuff in this game since all you have to do is go into a house and slash some pots for a minute. I repeat… how was all of this missed?
Need money? No problem with endless pot undercombos!My main issue with all of this is that there is a lack of effort to fix all of these despite NineLives obviously progressing in his ZQuesting skills. Obviously you’ll improve when you work on your first quest. But that’s why you go back and work on that stuff! Don’t just leave it since it simply holds your quest back.
Suggestions- The best thing I can recommend is when you’re making your first quest (or any quest), and you learn more about ZQuest, then you need to go back and fix up the old parts.
- Add detail to your screens. Small trees, grass on the ground, something. There were some parts where even Z1 was more detailed than ABITHF.
- Increase difficulty as you go along. Level 7 should not be easier than levels 1 and 2.
SummaryStrong Points- The second half has fairly good dungeons.
- The quest uses most items, and it requires them through secrets.
- For a first quest, it’s really not bad.
Weak Points- Bomb all the walls!
- Some secrets don’t make sense.
- There is a dangerously low amount of detail in a ton of areas.
- The super long treks through the overworld to get to places makes things tedious.
- There were lots of oversights for bugs, messed up undercombos, and places where you can get stuck.
Like I’ve said, ABITHF is the definition of a first quest. It’s not terrible, but there are obvious signs that NineLives was learning during the development of the quest. However, despite learning, he doesn’t go back and fix old issues like the lack of detail on nearly every screen of the quest. In the end, the quest is probably better than your average first quest, but regardless, the tedious nature of trekking through the overworld and bombing every wall really hurt the quest to me. It was tedious, tiring, and not fun. But what makes it frustrating is that a lot of these complaints could be fixed or at least made less severe by a mere couple hours of additional effort. So I have no choice but to rate it a 2. It was a difficult choice because the quality of the quest is very sporadic throughout the play through. Some of the first parts of the game were almost 1 quality. Some parts of the middle especially were definitely worthy of a 3. But overall, I can’t give it anything higher than a 2.
Score: 2/5
