This is a pretty big classic from back in the day, and one I surprisingly never played until now. Straight away the tileset gives me immense nostalgia of older ZC versions but the quest itself hasn't aged too badly actually. This is definitely a massive quest, way bigger than I expected it to be but I especially do love the mix between Zelda 1 and 2 and how they seamlessly merge together, I think that is the biggest highlight of the overworld to me. I'm also a big fan of the quick travel system, it really makes getting around the world so much easier later on. As cool as the overworld is though, I do feel that this might be a bit too big for its own good. For example, you'll find many places where it's just long screens of practically empty screens, or with the same kind of design repeating for 10 screens+, and this is present all the way through the world. This makes secrets and such extremely sparse, which is great when you do come across them but otherwise it makes the overworld feel kind of boring to explore a lot of the time. I do appreciate that this is a VERY old quest, but this is just something I wasn't a big fan of. The design of the overworld itself is fairly fine though, I can definitely see the graphical improvements the update made compared to the original and it works for what it tries to do (not much you can do with an ancient tileset like this anyway) so that's chill. Some of the screen design does feel a tad "artificial" though, by that I mean you see mountains in perfect straight lines which makes things feel too boxed if that makes sense. I will say however, that the Lost Woods segment of the quest was brilliantly done and I can't say I've seen many quests pull off something like that before. That is an extremely clever way of using Z1 maze paths.

The dungeons are pretty fun to go through and really does the classic style of dungeons well. Big fan of all the mini dungeons scattered around as well. I feel some dungeons suffer from essentially becoming straight lines where you just take one path from beginning to end, but there are also others where they branch out a bit to get different items which is neat. The ending segments are a bit crazy, the fakeout was cool but I felt things started to drag just a little when you realise there's one more dungeon after North Castle, but thankfully I had the Magic Key so I managed to trivialise this a bit lol. The true final boss was pretty neat though, I do have a softspot for 2.10 style bosses and this really took me back.

Overall though this quest was pretty cool and super nostalgic of 2.10 ZC. There are quite a few things I'm not too big on and others where they definitely have not aged very well, but the quest still mostly holds up and it's quite nice to play. I'd give this a 3.5 since 4 feels too high for this quest and 3 feels too low, but since we can only do whole star ratings, I'll take the upper option so it gets a 4 ever so slightly. Gonna tackle the Link's Decision quests next since I recall playing the first one as a kid but never got anywhere.

This quest is DIFFICULT, but fun as well.

I just recently, over 8 years later, found this quest as well. I enjoyed the massive, 9-overworld Master Quest chapter 2, despite the fact that quest isn't really finished and is buggy. It stands to reason I sould like this 9-overworld quest as well, seeing that exploration is my thing.

Well Nine Villages is a faithful NES-style quest that delivers on its promises of a massive, yet navigable overworld. In particular, the lost woods is pretty brilliant. All of the extra mini-dungeons and caves compliment the nine main dungeons to balance out the mass of overworld exploring. Difficulty is moderate, secrets are mostly obvious, and I took about 23 hours start to finish to 99% this.

On the negative side, there are many, many questionable design choices and flat out bad gimmicks that are inexplicable and drag the rating down. Some that come to mind are the wand-game in Ruto, the use of sword/item jinx bubbles without any blue bubbles anywhere nearby, and I feel excessive use of vires and splitting darknuts. Those two enemies, being always respawned, make navigating the later dungeons much more tedious than need be.

Interestingly, this 2.10 quest does play very smooth and really doesn't show its age. Also of note is the excellent support and walkthrough pages provided at the author's website, linked in the quest's readme. I can't recall such great documentation outside of IoR 's wiki page. I would recommend this to any one else who likes NES-style exploration quests.

Can't believe I waited 8 years to play this. A truly fantastic quest, I wish you would make another one like it.

This was one of my favorite quests to play. I love the vastness of the world. It is large but you also have a warping system that makes navigation easier. The difficulty curve is not so steep as to be torture, but it still is a challenge, especially at higher levels (which is good design IMO). Very solid from start to finish!

Major update complete, lots of new tiles and a few bug fixes. No changes to gameplay or difficulty, aside from decreasing the price of some max bomb upgrades. Still v0.99 for now, but I only expect to find some bugs. Even the maps on the walkthrough are finally updated.

This image is this is a comparison of nine locations. No repeating patterns in the grass, dirt, sand, shoreline, brickwork, rock wall, cave floor, beach surf, even ladders. https://ibb.co/GPwbP1G

The extra tiles I made have been released as Nine Tials. Aside from randomization of existing BS tiles, it includes a lot of the new tiles I made too.