Alright, so I finally got this one finished and I gotta say it was quite fun to play. Definitely better than your first quest IMO, and there are a lot of improvements in overall difficulty and design. To begin with, the overworld seems to be quite nicely designed. With a tileset like NewFirst, you can't really do a whole lot, but you seemed to have made a nice overworld out of it. Also, are some of the dungeon palettes custom? I don't recall ever seeing purple or dark blue, so if those are custom then they look quite nice. The difficulty balance throughout the quest was generally quite good (except the last parts), much better than the first quest of yours. Nice to see Red Lynels being nerfed early on, which made them less scary for running into them so early in, and some of the newer custom enemies later on were quite refreshing to see. Dungeon progression is pretty much like a typical Z1-style quest, so I can't really comment much on that, but they were generally fun to go through. As this is mostly a combat quest, puzzles aren't really seen much, but when there are puzzles, they're pretty neat IMO.
I don't think I have any complaints besides the major fact that there is 3 heart continues, which usually didn't bother me until the end with the intense difficulty spike. This is the one thing I absolutely hate in quests, since they make the quest tedious and annoying rather than challenging and engaging, which is very unnecessary to me IMO. Later on in the quest, the 3 heart continues started becoming a bit unbearable to me and became increasingly frustrating. Without that, I probably would've enjoyed the last dungeon and that one underwater bonus one a lot more. So yeah that ruined a lot of the fun for me near the end. Other than that though, everything else was pretty nice. Overall, I would probably give this a solid 4/5. Definitely better than your last quest, so there's an improvement there. Looking forward to seeing a potential IcyZelda3rd.qst, maybe?