I am supremely happy to have been proven completely wrong in all of these concerns.
Ballad of a Bloodline is not a perfect quest by any means. Hell, even me giving it a 4 might be a bit generous. It is, however, truly deserving of its status as a landmark quest, and there's a reason beyond its issues that people still talk about and return to it to this day. It really is one of the most special quests on the database.
I played the Deluxe release, so I can't entirely attribute every positive to the original, so for the sake of not pulling my hair out for this analysis, I will almost exclusively be talking about the Deluxe version of the quest, with occasionally bringing up the original when it is relevant to. I'm going to split this into categories because holy moly, I had a lot to say about every aspect of the quest.
= STORY / WORLD BUILDING =
The story is definitely hard to talk about, especially given the the grammar issues present entirely throughout the quest. I'll start with my defense of the silliest aspect of the game, and work my way down. Spoilers abound.
Spoiler
As a whole, I fundamentally have no problem with crossover content in fangames, because at the end of the day, these are passion projects that are supposed to encapsulate your hobbies. The Mega Man and Final Fantasy stuff here is very unsurprising, when the ZC community has had pretty intrinsic ties to Metroid for years, and there's many quests that either reference or actively use terms and the like from that series.
Now that's not to say the story of this quest isn't, and pardon my french, COMPLETELY BATSHIT INSANE, but I think it's insane in the most affectionate way possible. I think Knil and Myra are absolute gremlins, and outside of their interactions with each other REALLY not landing for me, what does land is the way the two of them interact with the world they're in, and having two appropriately insane freaks for main characters for as insane as BoaB's interpretation of Hyrule is is perfectly fitting.
Getting into that world now, while I think the true insanity of the world doesn't really start until the end of Steaming Systems, there's a ton of stuff that does some wool pulling. You have Darknuts being a regular part of Hyrule's army, with them regularly ambushing you for daring to go out adventuring, you have an info house guy doing human trafficking, and you have Myra's father demanding he be called "BIG DAD". BoaB's Hyrule is a very strange place, both surprisingly miserable as well as whimsical.
That 2nd bullet point however, does get into a very largely talked about issue with the quest, that is, for the most part, fixed in Deluxe, but I figure I should still talk about it here. There are many female NPCs in the original BoaB you could slash to remove the clothes off of, as well as several references to girls being poorly treated (including the aforementioned human trafficking.), all of which treated more like a punchline than anything. An overwhelming majority of this was scrubbed from Deluxe, replaced with new bits entirely that I think are actually hilarious for the most part, however, the human trafficking joke remained the same, just with the gender of the person being trafficked reversed. This is hardly a censoring of the original version, and it's kind of a strange thing to still include in the quest.
I won't hark on this aspect of the original after this, because frankly, I think the discourse surrounding this one aspect of the quest, that was inarguably edgy teenager bs, tended to drown out any other positive discussion of it in the past, so I will leave it there. Many have already given their piece on "BoaB's problematic portrayal of women" and so the only thing I will add to that discussion is that as much I love Myra, the writing of the quest also does joke about her sexually a lot, and it's probably my least favorite aspect of the writing.
I cannot get into my favorite part of the writing, however, without getting into major spoilers, so let's discuss the transition to the Dark World, shall we?
Spoiler
All in all, working through the weird English and liberal use of emojis here, the version of Hyrule here is truly unique, and that uniqueness carries itself throughout the entire quest really well, making me wanna see what happens next at every step of the way.
Hoo boy, there was such an absurd amount of stuff I had to say about the story, let's see what the next category is-
= GAMEPLAY AND VISUALS =
I'm putting these in the same categories because they both integrate with each other can clash in very strange ways. BoaB's Overworlds are, simply put, absolutely massive, with dozens upon dozens of secrets to find, many of which are minor shortcuts or even just outright nothing, solely for the sake of the vibe. Before you can even find the first dungeon, you are completely frontloaded with stuff to do, and like 5 different directions you can go in, but with only one real direction to go in, but not before buying some important items at the shop which requires rupees. This is where the sprawling overworld truly comes into play, as there's so much to find and explore, the inevitability of getting a ton of money from the experience is pretty much guaranteed.
This ultimately culminates in the core gameplay loop of BoaB, where you're told to explore a very large and cryptic overworld, and while you're failing to find the dungeon, you're finding various small rewards to help you along the way, such as rupees, HCPs, Magic Containers, or bomb expansions. I actually really enjoy the concept of this gameplay loop, and it gets a ton better once you gain access to some items that, unfortunately you will have to know about in advance, however they CAN be gotten before the first dungeon.
Without those items, however, exploration has the potential to become outright miserable without the items, as you have an incredibly limited magic pool, and a blue candle to boot, actively discouraging you from exploring as much as you'd like and making it difficult to find the first dungeon, as it requires the blue candle to access. Two of these mitigating factors, the Lens of Truth and Half Magic are both obtainable pre-level 1, and in the Deluxe version, you can also find both a magic ring as well as a lens upgrade to mitigate things much further. I ended up having to ask where the lens, half magic, as well as any magic containers any players knew the locations of if I wanted to enjoy the exploration, and once I did, overworld exploration was suddenly super fun and rewarding.
This does lead to the light critique that the quest is entirely too lens reliant, and if you can somehow get to the Dark World without the lens, then you're out of luck, and the only way you can get back is through either a bug or a feature added in the Deluxe release as a reference to the bug. If you don't like quests that expect you to use the lens a lot, you will likely not enjoy your time here.
With all that said, the overworlds are super cool and interesting, and frankly feel like dungeons in their own right. They certainly don't feel as climactic as the dungeons, but they're often filled with so much content that it's a good time exploring them regardless.
I will talk generally about the dungeons here, unless I need to hark on something specific, but overall, I like the dungeons that are on offer here. By far the most impressive element on display here is the visuals of the dungeons. Source of the Flow, Garden Gallery, and Plant Pond are all some of the prettiest looking dungeons I've ever seen in the ZC quest, and locations like Necrolodge, Nightmare and Clockwork Cathedral are incredibly visually striking.
The dungeon design itself is certainly more of what I talked about with the Overworlds. Many of these are competently designed, but with incredibly cryptic moments that are for the most part, mitigated by an early lens. There are some exceptions to this. I didn't have the lens for Source of the Flow, and there's a puzzle where you need to hit a fire with your sword to create a path. I got stuck on this for a while, and then I learned that the original version of the quest, actually tutorialized this, by having the same puzzle earlier, but nudging you towards hitting it with your sword. It's actually a shame that this was removed in the Deluxe version. The lens also won't always be help, especially in cases where what you're looking for is a hammer peg or hookshot post, of which there's two REALLY mean ones in the lategame. I also wanna mention Clockwork Cathedral's absolutely BRUTAL 8 key gauntlet that is one of the most ridiculous things I've played in a ZC quest.
While I mostly enjoyed the main dungeons pretty consistently, there's one aspect I didn't enjoy. In the Dark World, every main dungeon has a sub-dungeon called a Lightforce dungeon you can enter, generally by finding a vague tile difference and interacting with it. While this wasn't an issue for most of the dungeons, as they either incredibly obvious an intuitive locations, the ones for Necrolodge, Beamos Barracks, and Plant Pond are particularly egregiously annoying to find, and I just ended up asking someone where they were. The Lightforce dungeons range from really cool to kind of boring themselves, but I wanna give a shoutout to Myra's Dream in particular for having some interesting gameplay story integration. Visually, however, I like a majority of these dungeons quest a bit as well.
This is a good time to give a shoutout to the bosses as well, and frankly, many are fun, and others are simply not winners. It very much depends on the day. The final bosses in particular I thought were pretty disappointing, and honestly, the final dungeon itself was pretty uneventful. It's still cool, essentially being a giant maze akin to the original Level 9 in Zelda 1, but with no more items to actually find, it becomes a very kind of nothing dungeon after a while, beyond searching for lore bits. Vibes are still immaculate though.
I think it's interesting that I barely talked about the rupee grind in this quest, and frankly, that's because I found myself not needing to grind at all. IDK if the Deluxe version added way more fixed rupees or not or what. I know it lowered the cost of the money or life rooms, but surely that wasn't enough for the disparity in how rich I was for the entire quest, to the point that I could buy anything and everything I needed for every point in the game pretty easily. Item balance as a whole here is also quite good, with me feeling the need to switch to a number of items constantly to deal with what I was going up against, and that's always fun.
Lastly, I wanna talk about the Deluxe exclusive areas. They're all pretty sick, but the purple sky area is just the prettiest thing ever. The items you get through each of the locations are also all decently balanced, however, there is one very clear exception. The Fire Boomerang upgrade is simply put, a pretty massive overtune, when the Fire Boomerang is already the best item in a majority of ZC quests and this one is most certainly no exception. I do like the color purple though, so I'm not complaining that much.
So lets talk about the music, because BoaB decided to be super ahead of its time and have original compositions for some of its soundtrack. Colin's music here is especially fantastic, and the Source of the Flow theme remains a winner in my book. There's not really much to say beyond that, it's just really good much, so I'm leaving it in this section.
Overall, I actually had a ton of fun with the gameplay here, outside of the very big hiccups I outlined here. The item balance is mostly good, the dungeons are rewarding to navigate, and there's almost always something to find, and with how pretty the quest can be, exploring can be fun in its own right.
= Conclusion =
Ballad of a Bloodline is beyond legendary. If you're willing to work past its issues, it's still a tremendous effort in its own right, and there are so many things to celebrate and learn from it that I cannot and good faith give it anything below my current rating for it. It doesn't do what it sets out to do perfectly, and it definitely rough in some key ways, but I cannot emphasize enough that what it does right, it does super right. I really enjoyed my time with BoaB and I barely even scratched the surface with this review. So much of what I can say is not even here, and that is a testament to this entire quest. Man I love this quest.
I ended up leaving out a ton because there's just too much to say, and this review would be 7 times longer if I did so, and so, I will say, this quest asks for a lot. It's 30 hours of really cryptic secrets, and if that's not your thing, you definitely should just admire this one from afar instead, but if that kind of experience doesn't bother you, then give this a shot!
