Apparently I never reviewed this...

Also sheesh, 2017? How the time flies I guess.

In any case, I really love this tileset. Fully custom, fully internally cohesive, great colors, and all of the objects and sprites have a certain... kind of 3D depth to them that I really like. It's the little details like how the boomerang sprite leans backwards and is nestled perfectly in the little sand divot you loot it from. The terrain while not functioning identically to Z1 terrain looks and feels like how Z1's terrain should be in an HD remake and is still easy to use.

For the dungeon graphics, you absolutely pulled off a middle ground perspective for the walls while still keeping the doors and wall details absolutely readable. Not to mention the dungeon floors, I think frankly everyone should look at and learn from how the floors were drawn and used. Finally, the passageway and item room backdrops are excellent.

Probably the biggest thing holding this tileset back is maybe the bespoke nature of it? I could see someone who doesn't have great spriting skills shying away because the tileset lacks a certain detail they want and ripping in that detail might not fit. The graphics might play nice with Firebird though, so that is an option.

As for the quest, I like the quest. It's fun, simple, and the changing seasons are pulled off wonderfully. I don't have a ton to say about it.

So, if it isn't obvious I rate this 5 stars. The one remark I have on this is I think the database categorization may be a bit of a problem. I half wonder if we would have seen more usage out of this over the years if it were submitted as a tileset with an attached quest rather than the other way around.

First thing's first. This game looks gorgeous.

As for the way it plays, this is a great no frills, classic style quest.Things are a little more difficult than the 1st quest, but not punishingly so. Very fun to play.

A lovely little quest: not overly intimidating in scale, not stupidly difficult in difficulty. The visuals are detailed without being distracting. Design-wise, there are some clever choices in the seasonal differences across the map, and the secrets are fair and rewarding. I couldn't find any bugs.

The quest definitely plays like a Classic game as advertised, but possibly too many elements are beholden to NES conventions. The somewhat blocky design of the dungeons brings this to mind, as do some of the more cliche secrets throughout the map. I would have welcomed fresh music as well.

All in all, this is a compact, fun, beautiful, and generally well designed game. Nicely done, NoeL.

Decided to come back to this quest and pick it up again now I have the expo sorted and other things done. I gotta say, you done a pretty nice job with this. It's quite short but very fun to play through. To begin with, the visuals look incredible, I really love the look of that tileset you made for this quest. The overworld and dungeons were designed very well and they had quite nice flow, I also really liked how the seasons change depending on the dungeons you've beaten, and I have no clue how you made sure the secrets and items collected and stuff carried over to the other seasons, but that was nicely done. The difficulty was spot on, I didn't find any parts to be too easy or too hard, so I had quite a decent challenge throughout.

I haven't got any critiques with this one, so good job! Though I have a quick question, what would happen if you changed seasons without collecting everything from before? Would you have a chance to get them in a different way with the later seasons or are they locked out completely? If you could still get everything no matter what season it is later on, then that's really cool.

Anyways, this is an easy 5/5 for me. Really nice work with this one.

I have only gotten to the second Dungeon so far, but I wanted to point out that the White Sword's Sword Beam is facing upwards when shooting sideways. Another VERY minor thing that I noticed is that the hint guy behind a waterfall in the summer (I think it was a Moblin?) Says "Blue mountain" in his first hint, but he says "Blue Mountain" and "Red Mountain" in his other hints. (He says "mountain" without a capitalized M in the first hint)

Other than that I can say that I'm quite enjoying this quest so far!

Definitely thinking of trying this just because of that tileset. Looks great.

Are there any changes between this and the expo version? Glad to see it officially out though!

I'm giving this a 4, as a quest. My main reasons are, the latter dungeons are quite.. obtuse. This is a personal preference, and not really a reflection of bad design, but I found the later dungeons to be kind of annoying for me. They feel kind of empty with the really nice visuals, but then the design amounts to little more than a maze. My other problem was with the MIDIs used, but again, this is just my personal dislike of hearing a MIDI version of Zelda's overworld ever again.

That said, the quest looks, and plays great outside of the mentioned dungeon design gripes in the later half. There are no glaring bugs, no weird graphical oddities, animations are clean, art is clean, etc. My favorite part of the quest has to be the season changing mechanic. As I mentioned in the thread, that was my favorite part about the oracle games, and seeing it realized in such a clean package was nice. I would have liked to have been able to change seasons at will at some point, but given the flow of the world, and fairly short length, it was never really a problem.

Anthus' Arbitrary Rating Categories:
Overworlds: 5/5
Dungeons: 3/5
Graphics: 5/5
Sound: 2/5
Presentation: 5/5
Fun Factor: 4/5