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[Haylee]

Zelda: Flow of Time (Remastered) - DAWN VERSION by Obderhode

 

I last played this one a very long time ago, while I haven't played the newer Dawn version of the quest I do remember the original remaster being really good, utilising a lot of GB-style design and a massive adventure using all the early 2.5 stuff available at the time. I thoroughly enjoyed this one although it's definitely quite a long quest from what I remember.

I nominated it because it looked cool and got a big update recently

 
This one got tiebroken during the Community Poll in favor of BoaB, so it's nice to see it finally get its chance to shine here! I've heard pretty universally good things about this one, and I look forward to the play sessions this time around! Of course, due to the length of the quest, there will be 2 QC VCs every weekend instead of 1. I'm excited for this one.
 
The Discord thread for it can be found here. I look forward to your participation!

[Haylee]

I played the first two dungeons today, just because it was quiet and I really felt like it!

 

Honestly everything up to the first dungeon was pretty vanilla. I enjoy, however all the small little instances of scripting to make it feel more authentically Zelda (A number of screenshakes when activating secrets goes a long way in making it feel good to activate. The first dungeon itself was also very much completely fine. I did however like both of the bosses, and thought they were fun little deviations from the normal gameplay.

 

Level 2 is where things pick up, however. There's visual hints for just about every element of the dungeon, and it's extraordinarily rewarding to figure out. I think I accidentally massively broke sequence but aside from that, I think if you like deciphering dungeon visuals to look for secrets, Level 2 rules in that regard. The bosses were once again also fun to fight.

 

Honestly a very fun start so far, and honestly a little on the harder side, while still feeling fair. I had about 17 deaths in my first session, which is more than I expected.

[Mani Kanina]

It's pretty sad that most quests lean a little on the harder side. I recall playing this and thinking it was easier than most contemporaries. That's probably still true, but, you know. Makes it hard to recommend to outsiders.


As for me I've played at least three different versions of this quest, and each one have generally been a pretty marketed step up. I still think there is room for improvement in places, but it's definitively worth playing for people into quests. As this is a complete version of the idea of "hey, what if a new GBC Zelda game?".

[Haylee]

Finished up Level 3 and the first Trial Dungeon this time around.

 

I actually like the kind of natural way this quest handled establishing its rules, where once you're told how it works, you're expected to just regularly follow those rules, from diagonal water hopping being intended design to the unmarked torches being secret indicators.

 

Level 3 was quite a hefty one, but ultimately fairly rewarding to explore. I'm sure on repeat playthroughs, it goes by a lot faster (especially if you took notes and relook at them on a replay.) It's a good dungeon. The Trial Dungeon where you get the White Sword is definitely where some issues begin. There's been some indication of this being an issue for a little bit, but the checkpointing in this quest is actually pretty rude sometimes, often asking you to walk across entire maps for dying. It's not a big issue if you know how to navigate everything, but it's definitely a little unfortunate having to replay certain segments over and over because I either didn't understand something and wanted to double check, or I died midway through and needed a way to get back. I still ultimately enjoyed the dungeon, however.

 

To clarify what I mean on the difficulty, when I say it leans on the harder side, I really do mean it like, barely leans against it. There are difficult portions of quest, but most of it is simple navigation puzzles and regular puzzles. What's here is good, and I could see someone falling head over heels for this quest if it were one of their first ones.

[Ether]

I played this around two years ago, on a version that had a lot in common with the Dawn update but was missing some of the password stuff. I really loved it at the time--it's got scripted bosses and a smattering of spritework that doesn't appear anywhere else in ZC, and I love giant quests within reason, so it was a joy to explore. I remember it dropping off a bit near the end, but being so long that it's still a perfectly satisfying experience anyway.

 

Yesterday I replayed up through the Tower of Time. Admittedly I've been wishing there were more shortcuts and points to heal--it's a little frustrating making a long trek to a boss/miniboss and having to fight it without much health left, and there's definitely a lot of just walking around. (I think the ability to warp might also have been pushed back until later? I could be misremembering a step, but when I played I remember there being a boss I could fight from early in the game that would give me a whistle tune.)

 

I quite like the bosses, and I'm not normally a boss enjoyer. But in a game that's already very Oracles-like in general, it's just cool to see it also going all-in on the scripted bosses with original sprites that fit the GB style reasonably well. I remember being really impressed by the uniqueness of the torture chamber boss (obviously this is much later in the playthrough). I think psychologically it might also help that Obderhode is a complete stranger to me, while being friends or acquaintances with most other ZCers kind of demystifies their projects a little? Hard to explain and obviously there's other benefits to being friends with people, but.

 

So far I don't think I've seen anything drastically different here vs my first playthrough. (Except not being able to fight that boss for a warp spell yet, and having automatic magic regen--in my first playthrough the regen ring was an optional thing in L3 and I actually managed to miss it.)

[Ether]

I must confess these continue points are quite jank.

[Haylee]

I do think this quest is a very good teaching tool on players understanding the growing pains of poor checkpointing/continue points if you're new to quest design. I really like every other aspect of the quest so far, and honestly, the checkpointing issue is something I myself have struggled with for years with some of my own dungeon design. It's not particularly a big issue that significantly hurts the quest in any way for me so far, as I like the overworld and dungeons, it's just a really interesting lens to look at when it comes to learning design.

[Ether]

I've just finished L8.

 

It's kind of strange to me how the dungeons were ordered? I feel like the most complex dungeons in the game were L5 and L6, with L7 and L8 both being significantly simpler. (Part of this was probably Link's power level--it was much easier by this point to just ignore enemies and breeze through rooms--but I don't think that's all of it.)

 

I really, really liked Turtle Rock and the Great Caves, incidentally. Those interlocking cave systems with multiple hidden entrances and multiple rewards is really cool. I've got mixed feelings on the jumping in Turtle Rock, but it did do a good job of making just getting from room to room nontrivial, and making it feel even more like a delve. I like that even now there's still a thing I need to go back for in the Great Caves, and I can't remember what it is.

 

I remember the lategame kinda dropping off compared to the early and midgame, the first time I played. And I do still think that's true, but there's some stuff I picked up earlier this time that I didn't find without spoilers the first time I played, which gave me more time to actually play with it at least, so that was nice.

 

On my first playthrough I hated the Red Caves. This time I'm not really sure why I had that reaction, the four of a kinds were a bit goofy but it wasn't that hard to deal with in practice? A little anticlimactic as far as dungeons go, but not actively unpleasant.

 

The Dawn update content was a bit of a letdown, which is a shame since having those big question marks looming the whole time in my first playthrough, not knowing when I'd get to them but knowing that they were still unaccounted for, was a part of the magic. Ah well. It does kinda make me appreciate how Ages and Seasons handled their linked games, with those little ongoing cameos from NPCs you wouldn't expect to see again. I didn't ever care about Sybil, but since Dawn of Time never happened, there wasn't really any way for Obderhode to capture that anyway.

[Haylee]

Level 4 was quite good! Unfortunately I was kind of weirdly physically exhausted the entire session and was missing obvious things, but honestly both the between dungeon stuff and the dungeon itself were very good. This is the point where the quest opens up and it absolutely shows. Admittedly, there is a kiiind of unnecesarily padded series of talk events before the Tower of Time, but outside of that, basically everything else here was good. Tower of Time was an excellent mini dungeon, and the gimmick of Level 4 as well as the ways things play out result in just each moment to moment element of the dungeon clicking quite well. Also shoutouts to having an actually engaging version of that one face guy from LA and OoS.

 

The continue point issue remains to be a relatively minor but still annoyance. Now that there's a 2nd overworld to access that mostly uses the same DMap, there is some absolutely rude continue points involving it. With that aside, exploring continues to be really fun and rewarding.

 

The pacing here continues to be really conducive to the format, which honestly has me pretty impressed. I look forward to next session.

[Haylee]

Hoo, I ended up having to end the session off at the start of level 5 instead, and did Turtle Rock.

 

Admittedly, this is definitely the roughest section of the entire quest so far. There's a ton of dialogue that's easy to zone out and thus makes it very hard to grasp what it is the game wants you to do. Top that with a lot of this inbetween section being a particularly egregiously long fetch quest that requires going across the world multiple times (Of which I was unaware that a form of fast travel has actually been accessible this entire time, and I didn't notice, as it's locked beneath a sidequest that's locked behind the completion of a different sidequest.), and this ended up being a pretty unfortunate session that could've been even longer had I not explicitly started requesting hints.

 

Turtle Rock itself was a fun dungeon, but I ended up going in without the item you're supposed to have going into it, and that ended up causing a massive amount of headaches. I'm still very much enjoying my time with the quest, but this one was a pretty difficult section and session.

[Haylee]

I ended up playing double the amount of time I usually play for this session, and I'm kinda glad I did! There's a lot to cover, and I'm glad to say this particular session was far more fruitful than the one before it, having beaten both level 5 and 6, as well as gotten a fair amount of overworld content done as well.

 

Before getting into the dungeons themselves, there's two particular items I'd like to talk about. While it is a bit of a hacky solution, I actually really like the way the Feather and Boots are handled in the quest. Jumping now costs magic no longer making it this catch all broken solution to all your problems, and it's kind of something I'm considering doing myself in my own future projects now that the ideas been put into my head. Similarly, I don't actually see quests enable the boots using magic despite it being a 1.92 feature, but it's put to frankly great use here as well, especially because I'm pretty sure it drains magic even faster than the regular boots drain? Overall, just two creative solutions to otherwise broken items.

 

Level 5 is my favorite dungeon in the quest so far and it's not even a contest. Navigation is super fun, remembering locations is incredibly rewarding, there's a ton of shortcuts as you progress further, reducing backtracking, there's just a lot to love about it. My only real complaint is the dungeon boss itself. I think if it had roughly 25% less HP, it'd be a good boss, but as it stands, it kind of outstays its welcome pretty quickly.

 

In contrast, level 6 is good, but I do think it's actually too much of a navigation puzzle. I do like exploring the dungeon, and I did feel rewarded for remembering a bunch of stuff after receiving the dungeon items and such, but it's got that thing that I complain about a bunch, that if you've seen me talk about before that is simply not my genre of dungeon: Key Gauntlets. There's a particularly massive one near the end of the dungeon, requiring a whopping 5 keys, all of which are from locations you pass by and have to remember them after receiving the dungeon item. If this kind of dungeon design is your jam, you're gonna love this one I think. I also didn't really like the miniboss that much, but that completely is made up for by the boss itself. This might be one of my favorite custom bosses in ZC, and it's the kind of hype moment to moment boss design that I hope to be able to replicate in my own projects in due time.

 

Overall, and very good set of dungeons I played today, and my lack of enthusiasm when doing the previous session has been more than made up for in this one.

[Haylee]

Hefty play session, comprising of a bunch of overworld stuff, Trial #2 and Level 7.

 

Trial #2 wasn't really anything interesting I fear. Of course, it's supposed to be a compilation of the stuff in levels 4, 5, and 6, like trial #1 was for the first three dungeons, but it doesn't feel particularly great to play, and its a bit unfortunate. The most notable instance here is the hint guy saying that there's a secret path in the room you fight "Zora Prime" in, and there's two Zora minibosses in the dungeon, neither of which you're given the name of, and you're more likely to fight the wrong one first, and it becomes a bit unfortunate to just look around for secrets and whatnot.

 

Level 7? It's not a terrible dungeon, but there's definitely a lot holding it back from being super great, and it's probably my least favorite of the main dungeons as a result. To start with the positive actually, I think the way the dungeon goes out of its way properly introduce its gimmick, and set player expectation as to the rules of the dungeon are really good, and as a result, when I was actually taking part in the dungeons core gimmick, I was actually having a lot of fun. On a surface level, a dungeon primarily comprised of hidden walls isn't a great idea, as they usually come out of nowhere and are typically terribly checkmarked. In this case though, the proper establishment of dungeon rules, there being plenty of hidden walls earlier in the quest, and the way the dungeon map itself works all lend itself very well to it feeling very rewarding to cross reference the rooms you've been to compared to the dungeon map and figure out "perhaps there's a hidden wall on this screen," and it was consistently fairly rewarding to figure that out. I'd also like to give praise to yet again, the creativity behind the boss of the dungeon, as its one that I don't commonly see in quests, and that makes it novel in its own right. It's a pretty good boss.

 

My negatives however, are two realllly big sticking points for me. For starters, I think this dungeon goes entirely too far with kill all enemy rooms, to the point that the penalty for dying somehow feels even worse than usual, in a quest with already pretty big checkpointing issues. I found myself doing the same kill all enemy rooms over and over and over again, because I spent so much time doing them that I got lost while remembering where certain parts of the dungeon were. The other is a particularly egregious issue with sideview areas. I don't recall if this is an issue with sideview areas in earlier parts of the quest, but none of the sideview areas in the dungeon are properly set up at all and will send you to the screen below it if you fall into the lava/water, sending you completely out of bounds in some cases and other parts of the dungeon entirely in other cases. Because of this, I found myself frequently F6ing due to minor softlocks, and it meant having to redo the various kill all enemies rooms that I complained about before. This dungeon is good, but with those two abundantly clear issues, it becomes very hard to rank it particularly high among the dungeons in this quest.

 

This was a fun session, in spite of the obvious sticking points. Exploration continues to be the best element of this quest, and fortunately the overworld itself is quite memorable as well. I look forward to seeing what else is left on offer.

[Haylee]

A slightly shorter session, because I was getting a mild headache, but I finished level 8!

 

It was a pretty average, but good dungeon. I liked all the sort of like, seeding of what you'll be doing throughout the dungeon, and it wasn't too egregiously long either. The boss was a bit janky if it spawned on top of the center of the room, but otherwise, it's a fairly fun fight for the 8th main boss.

 

I wish there was more I could comment on, but like, it was just a good dungeon. Not much else to say there.

 

I do look forward to level 9 though. It should be interesting seeing what the finale of this quest has to offer!

[Haylee]

I did the remainder of the main story, Trial #3 and completed level 9!

 

With that, the quest is Finished, but not Complete. There's plenty of side content to do, that for the time being, I largely have little time to invest myself in.

 

Re-exploring the shrines for extra stuff to do now that you've beaten every dungeon was pretty cool. I've had issues with a number of the backtracks in this quest, but this one stuck out to me as a very entertaining one, and I had no issue with this final one.

 

Level 9 was quite good. There was a very healthy amount of stuff happening in the dungeon, and reusing every level gimmick in one dungeon is always gonna be a treat. My only real complaint with the dungeon structure is the backtrack being kind of unnecessary, I'm sure there was a way to simplify that a bit. The final boss meanwhile was an endurance challenge to end all endurance challenges. It's a pretty mean fight if you don't know what you're doing, especially with how long it is. Fighting it with the blue ring definitely made things harder than they needed to be, but running on a schedule meant it was do or die, and I was sure as hell gonna do. And boy did I. I managed to beat it and got to the credits.

 

The credits are very cute, and it's something I very much was entertained by watching.

 

I will give my full review of the quest some time in September, but tentatively, I really liked this one. I have plenty of massive crippling flaws with it that definitely knock it down to a 4, but there's a lot to love here, and I understand why there's many users who were clamoring for its inclusion in Quest Club. It's a fun time!

[bigboylink]

This is a fantastic quest.  I played & completed one of the earlier versions of this quest years ago and remember really enjoying it.  I'm enjoying this new "Dawn" version a lot too.  Just finished level 5.

 

A+ music (seriously - the forest, ocean, and lots of the dungeon tunes).  Even the classic GB & LTTP tunes are well placed (and not overused).

Others have said this quest captures the good feels of the GB Oracle games, and I agree! 

And while there are certain parts of the Oracle games that feel "Capcom-y", this quest also has some of those moments, if that makes sense...voyaging all the way back to the ruined village to get the key to open the Tower with the harp is one example that could maybe use some refinement for the player experience.

 

In case the author is still around & reading this thread, I have two bugs to report -- nothing game breaking:

Level 5:

 

Spoiler

The mid-boss portal doesn't appear after beating the mid-boss.  Perhaps this is an unintended result of cycling through blue/green water rooms.

 

Before level 5:

 

Spoiler

In Turtle Rock, there's a telepathic tile that tells Link "Hit the eye with your sword after he has been stunned from a fall".  It even has "sword" highlighted in blue letters.  However, the eyeball doesn't take damage from the sword -- you need the wand to damage him (after he's been stunned).

 

 

Edited by bigboylink, 11 October 2025 - 02:06 PM.