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[Haylee]

Link and Zelda: Panoply of Calatia by Mitsukara

 

 

One of the most fun experiences on the database, it's a puzzle/adventure hybrid that's a love letter to both Zelda and the NES. One of the big reasons this game is fun is the way all the mechanics intersect, allowing for a game that can be even more open than the already fairly open structure it takes, while still having a defined structure that I found lacking in the official open world zeldas. It's good. Go play it.

Genuinely a quest that's always been on my radar, but I've never had time to play it. It looks genuinely really damn cool, and I absolutely look forward to opening up 2026 with this one!

 

As always, a thread on discord for the quest can be found here. This one will be getting plenty of screentime this month.

[Haylee]

Did two dungeons today! Yamauchi and Tezuka specifically. There's something to be said about just how well the scripted mechanics in this actually feel right at home with individual base ZC mechanics to the point that everything feels natural, even when a new mechanic is actually introduced.

 

Yamauchi is a good dungeon, with the caveat that I probably should've waited a bit before playing it, as its a dungeon that actively wants you to use the Sword, which I had not found by that point, resulting in a number of forced damage taken cause I wanted to see how far I could push things. It worked out though, and it was entertaining!

 

Tezuka is an excellent dungeon. Between the character switching coming in full force, the dungeon items feeling very good to use, and the puzzles being incredibly good, this is pretty firmly my favored dungeon of the two I've played so far, and I seriously look forward to playing more.

 

As an aside, the timer system feels really natural, and the detail of being able to see the time of day even in dungeons with windows is such a cool detail and it doesn't feel jank in the slightest. The overworld is also really good, and I literally had to stop myself after beating my 2nd dungeon because I realized I was having too much fun and potentially gonna play too much and decrease the session count by mistake. That's a testament to how much I've enjoyed things so far.

[Haylee]

Yokoi and Miyahon, as well as a ton of overworld exploration and finding two more dungeons are done. While Tezuka's still my favorite so far, I think the items of Miyahon are super fun to goof around with, and all the little easter eggs with the flute really enhance its feel, and it's quickly becoming one of my favorite items in the quest.

 

Yokoi was also a fairly solid dungeon, with the Beetle being an incredibly fun item to mess around with, and has resulted in some hysterical interactions such as holding the boomerang and doing weird stuff with that.

 

The most entertaining part of today's session by far, is the ways in which I've used items in tandem with eachother to find incredibly elaborate solutions to what are ostensibly, quite simple puzzles that I ended up making more complicated than they needed to be. I super look forward to what's up next session. This quest is really fun so far.

[Haylee]

Marui and Soejima are interesting dungeons. Both are quite complex, with items that are sick as hell, and their complexities can potentially lead to breakable moments that are incredibly fun to pull off. In both cases, their obtuseness can lead to them being considered potentially one of the weaker dungeons in the game, depending on your experience with them, and I think I felt that with Soejima, but the opposite in the case of Marui, which is actually my favorite dungeon so far.

 

There was a puzzle midway through that was trying to ask the player to solve one side of it with Link and the other with Zelda, and I ended up solving both ends of the puzzle with the two of them completely swapped, to the befuddlement of the entire VC. It genuinely ruled. The only part of the dungeon I found myself a little iffed by was a key that simply needed to be grabbed by the beetle, which had completely slipped my mind as an option. With that said, it's still a great dungeon, and the maze path at the end was genuinely masterclass stuff.

 

Both to the quest's benefit and possible detriment, there are a ton of items at play here. Perhaps awesomely, all of these items have a ton of functions and niches, and none of them feel like they just plainly outclass or make other items irrelevant. This is not a "There's a ton of items but little to do with them" situation, this quest absolutely loves these items and wants you using basically all of them at any given time. This does mean however, there's definitely a possibility of choice paralysis later on in the quest, and I felt that pretty fiercely with Soejima. I only have about half the items in the quest, so there's a possibility this gets even crazier later down the line, we'll need to see.

 

Soejima is a good dungeon. I also broke its progression in half and proceeded to get lost a ton, and it definitely asked for a lot. There's some secret stuff around the entrance of the dungeon that are essential for progression and the hint for them kind of overlap and drown out the other in unfortunate ways. Fortunately, the dungeon is still cool in other ways. The items, as mentioned, are cool as well, and there's a lot of really interesting puzzles at play here. All in all, I think it's definitely the weakest dungeon so far, but it's still quite good!

 

God this quest is excellent, and I'm still looking forward to next session a ton!

[Haylee]

Terui and Nakago are next, and holy hell what an excellent session.

 

I think between these 2 and Marui, these are my 3 favorite dungeons thus far. They're fun to explore and look around, have excellent items, make excellent use of those items, and both continue the trend of old items not only being quite good, but filling new niches entirely.

 

Nakago is a water dungeon that gives you a raft upgrade, and then immediately gives you an item that proceeds to fills a new niche that the raft would've gotten completely outclassed in had you not just gotten an upgrade for it, and it's a genuine masterclass in item design. I'm once again stunned by how excessively fun everything in this quest is to both navigate and solve rooms in.

Terui, I think, is just quite a good dungeon, with some slightly weaker roster of items barring some really fun stuff to mess around with in their direct context. I just really liked this dungeon tbh. It's memorable as hell.

 

This one's a bit shorter and sweet, but that's because think a lot of what I said in my previous posts tread the same ground, and I'm actually adoring every second of this enough that I kind of wanna save more thoughts the more relevant they become or in the inevitable full review I plan to make of this one.