10 replies to this topic

[Haylee]

Ballad of a Bloodline (+Deluxe) by CastChaos (DX by Twilight Knight)

Due to the original quest no longer being on the database, I shall have to use the information section of the Deluxe version:

The deluxe version of my favorite quest, Ballad of a Bloodline by CastChaos. The focus was on adding 2.5 elements (it was originally for 2.10), making the quest smoother, adding a few new areas and items, in other words: polishing what in my opinion is a gemstone.

 
This is a quest with a MASSIVE history with the community, and yet somehow, I sidestepped ALL of it. I've only ever really glanced at BoaB in passing, and even back when it dropped back in the day, my PC still had dial up internet so I felt like it was too hard to run for my computer.
 
It's influenced a lot over the years, and whether or not those are for better or for worse I am not here to debate. I look forward to covering this one, because I think this was a long time coming. The community has grown a lot over the years, and I think now is the perfect time to finally give another spotlight to one of the most influential quests in ZC's history.

[Rambly]

I was... admittedly, very, very harsh on this quest back in the day. I kind of regret being so harsh on it - I worry my criticism was mean-spirited and only served to stifle the quest creator. It wasn't even fair or honest criticism, either, because, while this quest is flawed in a lot of ways, I actually liked a lot of the quest. I loved traversing the long, interconnected cave networks of this quest's Death Mountain, I loved a lot of the dungeon concepts (Garden Gallery is just straight up awesome), and Colin's custom music is awesome.

 

It's been a long time since my last real, earnest attempt at beating it - I haven't really gotten past the first two dungeons or so since around 2009. I've grown up a lot since then. I think the rest of the community has, too. While I'm sure there'll be a lot that I'll still have criticisms of, I'm also sure there'll be a lot for me to appreciate, too.

[Haylee]

Played up to the beginning of level 1. Pretty short session all things considered, but still plenty to talk about.

 

I think there's a charm to how much of gremlins Knil and Myra are, even if it doesn't always land. I was also caught a bit off guard by how frontloaded the first area is? There's a TON of overworld you can explore without any items, and it can get very dizzying very quickly. Most of the session was very much spent lost until I realized the guard on the southern end of the map turns occasionally. It's certainly a very mean earlygame, and not knowing what to purchase early on (without being told what to get.) I'm sure would've made that a lot worse.

 

I'm enjoying myself so far. I'll probably finish level 1 tomorrow and explore a lot more.

[DarkFlameSheep]

I'm a huge fan of the Ballad of a Bloodline series but I also believe the first BB’s story is strongly confused by crossovers with official games. Also secret triggers are confused, I guess CastChaos referred to Freedom’s quests about it. Freedom’s quests were popular and famous then.

[Haylee]

Made it to level 2's entrance and stopped there.

 

I think the mitigating factors for magic in particular that are added to the Deluxe version are significantly helping this quest. One of my biggest criticisms so far has been that because of how much this quest directly conditions the player searching absolutely everywhere for secrets, the lack of supplies super early on makes the path up to the first actual dungeon quite frustrating, as you're encouraged to bomb and burn everything strange and yet you're discouraged from doing so, due to the amount of ammo you have. As a result of those mitigating inclusions, however, searching the path to level 2, although quite long, and required a dedicated play session unto itself, was significantly more fun and bearable. I also haven't had any particular issues with money yet, however, seeing that Super Bombs have been formally introduced at this point, I could very much see that becoming a problem after Level 2.

 

I'm enjoying myself quite a lot now actually. There's things to appreciate here that I feel hasn't been talked about a lot, and I think one of them is the details in the dungeons and how they in particular look. I actually think that aspect is where BoaB shines best so far, and I think modern quest making has really only started catching up in this aspect, and that's wild to me. I very much look forward to the next play session.

[Jambu]

I played 30+ hours time for a review.

 

This quest is beyond amazing, yeah im gonna have to update my profile cause this is easily my new favorite quest of all time. It is that good. Over the past two days I played this quest 30 Hours folks... I WAS HOOKED!!! What I love most is how vast and detailed the dungeons are. My favorite dungeon so far is problobly tied between Necrolodge and Steaming Systems. Meanwhile Nightmare dungeon made me pull my hair out. Overworld design is pretty amazing aswell and the story OMG! I cannot wait to see the ending. So yeah I will definitely be beating this quest in 3 days it seems. Cause I'm finishing it tomorrow lmao.

[Deedee]

Oh wait, was the original hidden? That sucks. Part of the charm of the original was how unhinged some of the writing was and when deluxe rewrote some of the dialogue it felt way lesser for it.  Not to say Deluxe doesn't make some good changes (subscreen, new content, better cutscenes and bosses), but it does miss something that the original had.

Granted I'm part of the problem here; I made an LP on SomethingAwful that insulted the game and put the creator in a really bad light because I wanted to try and make the next Pokemon Reborn LP; even though as I played it I really grew to appreciate it and loved it. I really regret that LP cause it felt fake and negative for the sake of being negative. It's way more fun to be positive towards stuff.

Anyways I haven't replayed as part of quest club, but I do think it's worth playing (either version). It's unhinged, but in a way where you can feel CastChaos had a really cool vision in his head and it's fun just getting sucked into this wacky little world; and if you're playing DX you can see a lot of Twilight Knight's technical competence at play too.

[Twilight Knight]

I played 30+ hours time for a review.

 

This quest is beyond amazing, yeah im gonna have to update my profile cause this is easily my new favorite quest of all time. It is that good. Over the past two days I played this quest 30 Hours folks... I WAS HOOKED!!! What I love most is how vast and detailed the dungeons are. My favorite dungeon so far is problobly tied between Necrolodge and Steaming Systems. Meanwhile Nightmare dungeon made me pull my hair out. Overworld design is pretty amazing aswell and the story OMG! I cannot wait to see the ending. So yeah I will definitely be beating this quest in 3 days it seems. Cause I'm finishing it tomorrow lmao.

I'm so happy to hear that!

This used to be my favourite quest as well, so much that I convinced CastChaos to let me make a deluxe version. Until I played Valami by him, that is now my favourite. Such a quirky, massive, yet freely played quest.

 

Also the original Ballad of a Bloodline is still available on my website: https://twccgaming.nl/quests

And even better: you can find Valami there :-)

[Haylee]

Completed both Levels 2 and 3 this time around. It's genuinely still surprising to me how hefty the amount of secrets in the overworld there are, to the point that it can definitely get legitimately overwhelming at times. I've also been slowly seeing more and more shortcuts start to creep their heads in and it has me doubly excited to keep exploring.

 

I've heard level 3 is a lot of people's favorite dungeon, and I totally get it. It's definitely on the more confusing side, but the vibes are immaculate. I got lost several times, but I still enjoyed it thoroughly, same for Level 2. From what I could tell, Deluxe tones down the visual fog in level 2 enough to not be an issue, but I was watching the screenshares of those playing the original, and hooo yeah. I really liked Level 2, but I imagine I would have liked it a little less if I had been playing the original.

 

Inconsistency of secrets is very much still prominent issue, mitigated to an extent by the lens of truth. When you're on the same wavelength of the game, it's very cool, but there's still some very mean secrets here and there, but otherwise, I'm still enjoying the overworld exploration a lot, and I look forward to playing it more tomorrow.

 

Interestingly, I feel like I really haven't been having the money issue that I've heard so much about. I'm sure it'll get a lot rougher once the wallet enters play, but opting to avoid money pickups when I don't need it as well as purchasing things when they're available, knowing I can get said money back easily, has actually made exploration yet again very rewarding. There's pretty much always something to purchase, so the value of saving those fixed rupee drops is tremendously high.

[Cobgoblin]

Just cleared, I think I got the best and secret endings.

 

32ish hours. Overall, it was a great time. I'll start with a couple of my more critical thoughts, but close with some of the standout things i liked:

• Like so many 2.10 quests, the endgame really gets bogged down by just face tanking endless waves of 40-headed fire gleeoks, patras, digdoggers, mirrorrobes, and death knights. You have the red/gold tunic and the magic/master sword so the experience kind of turns into just sort of running into the middle of the room and mashing attack until you win or lose. This isn't exactly a flaw with BoaB, this is a trapping of quests of the era.
• Some of the later dungeons were slogs. The ice dungeon was too many slow walk combos for example and clockwork cathedral was a lot of the previously mentioned slog-like combat in the midst of a somewhat frustrating key hunt. There are so many 1-way warps in the later dungeons that kind of became a problem.
• Some of the areas are outright visually unreadable, Mt DeadEnd comes to mind, but also anywhere with too much foreground translucent fog or similar. This also became a problem because there are lots of random damage combos that aren't obviously harmful at first glance.

 

I'll be honest by the time I got 3/4 of the way through clockwork cathedral, I enabled cheats to get some of these more sloggy parts over with. I still played through the dungeons as intended, but I started just auto-killing patras because it wasn't really fun at that point.

 

Maybe some of these problems are mitigated by the DX version, if so that would be excellent!

 

Anyway, now for what I liked:

• Loved the light world. The opening rupee grind was less a grind and more an invitation to explore. As I got through, I unlocked shortcuts between zones and so efficient OW navigation became something kind of fun for me to map out. The lost woods in this act was its best variant, I somehow managed to scramble through it without buying hints and that was quite fun to untangle. I didn't mind 1-way warps here because that felt like the point.
• I loved the reincorporation of parts of the light world in the inverted world dungeons, notably the plant pond integration.
• I really liked the heart container economy. Yeah you get a lot of money-or-life rooms in the late game but there are plenty of HCs and HCPs if you're exploring that I spent life every time and still ended with full containers.
• I really liked how the reward of one of the mini dungeons is a super cheap shop, like 25 rupee superbombs, a very interesting way to upgrade the efficiency of your rupees.
• The rupee economy strangely felt balanced? I rarely felt poor but I was also rarely at max. Once again, there are several instances where you need to buy something expensive, but there are plenty of 200 rupee drops sitting around on the OW, so if you just take note of where those are, you can go back and get them. I think it worked out quite well.

 

This quest is special. It's got its faults, but it's also often brilliant and so ambitious. I'm glad to have taken another jaunt through it

Edited by Cobgoblin, 08 June 2025 - 11:14 PM.

[Lordkronos]

I Had A lot of Fun Playing It The Quest had A Specific Apocalyptic Feeling Even in the Light World A Dark Heavy Feeling Was Always with it and To See where The Story Leads shows i Was Right but I Liked it The Dungeon Were Very Nice as They All Feelt Special Some Even Cozy despite The Deatly Dangers. It Has Many Secrets and Even some Fakes yes I Tested it The Flute Points in The Light World do Nothing but it was Fun to Travel Back in Time With Full Inventory.