I'm going to have to be honest here, this quest didn't seem to be much of an improvement overall compared to your last one. Some things have been improved, but generally other things have decreased in quality for me. I'll start off with the positives, the difficulty balance definitely seems to be a lot more tame this time round, so you're definitely on track with that. I did find the later levels to be a little too tough but maybe that's because I had the starting sword throughout almost the entire quest. If there was an upgraded sword (besides the last one before the final dungeon), then I probably couldn't find it anywhere. The graphics are certainly interesting. They don't look too good, but they work for the most part and at least they are unique and don't style-clash as much as your previous quest, so that's a positive. I also like how non-linear the quest is, where you have a starting goal and then you can pretty much go anywhere.

However, there were a ton of issues I had which brought down the experience a lot for me. For one, the overworld is very uninteresting and really boring. I appreciate that you have actual areas this time unlike the previous quest with just forests everywhere, however the big issue is the fact that everything is just empty. For the most part, the main field area which takes up the majority of the map is just copypasted screens of nothing (maybe little bits of grass detail here and there). This can be applied for every other area as everything felt very copypasted and very rushed with hardly any content anywhere, so the overworld pretty much became very boring to explore. I would strongly suggest to try and reduce this filler as much as possible by either adding things to most screens or trying to give each screen some kind of purpose if possible. If you have a hard time doing that, then you don't necessarily need to fill out the entire 16x8 map, irregular shaped maps also work fine and would probably look much better in the final product than an entire field of emptiness.

The dungeons weren't too fun either for me and I felt like that was a bit of a step-down from your previous quest. The majority of the dungeons were just enemy gauntlets with nothing in them, so they have similar filler problems to the overworld. I definitely feel like your dungeons could be worked on a lot more, even doing something like imitating Z1's dungeons would've been preferred, where you have block patterns and stuff, rather than empty screens with enemies in them. The only good dungeon I recall is the one in the graveyard area. While that also suffers filler screens, the mirror shield puzzles were actually very creative and is probably the best thing in the quest to me. Other than that though, everything else is fairly forgettable to me.

Overall, I feel like you've improved with some things and have kinda gone a bit backwards with other things. I'll have to give this one a 1.5/5 which rounds up to a 2, like with the last quest. I would definitely keep trying though, I'm sure you'll keep improving over time!

Aside from the huge empty overworld, this quest gave me a very good first impression. I see the care that went into certain things and there's creativity. I like the non-linearity of this quest, even though some direction would have been nice.

However, most of the dungeons, especially the bigger ones are just enemy gauntlets. Lot's of empty rooms with enemies and nothing else. The combat in this quest is bad. Throughout the entire quest, enemies have too much damage and health (except for the 2 easiest dungeons). There was also no more creativity in the later dungeons.

All in all, nice quest. With some more work it could have been really good. Also, let me talk about the graphics real quick... let me just say they look awful but in a hilarious way. They work though.