Edited 19 April 2022 - 03:43 PM
It's kind of tough to put into words how I feel about this quest. Obviously, it's a 5/5, but I feel like there's a ton of context that goes into that rating.
I missed out on the time frame this quest was developed in. It was during the time I was least active in the community, and if I were active, I probably would've offered to participate myself. This feels to me like an incredibly complicated last hurrah for the previous decade of ZC, having references to numerous quests from that era, including DayDay, Yuurand, numerous cancelled and finished quests from that era in general, and so on and so forth.
I can start with the negative. Obviously, a growing pain of group projects in general is going to inevitably be inconsistent design, since some dungeons use certain techniques (like unique pit warp scripts and the like) in order to make them cooler presented by comparison. This extends to difficulty as well, with the middle section of the quest being substantially more difficult. There's also just like, blatantly WAY too many Hamiltonian Paths in the quest. It's not like they were difficult either, but it's to the point of absurdity. I also would've liked there being slightly more to the ending instead of just some THE END text, since this quest is p long, but that's just a personal thing. My least favorite boss was probably the Yuurand cameo fight, if only because I felt it was just kind of haphazard projectile spam with no rhyme or reason, which felt very inconsistent with the rest of the bosses in the quest, which all felt like they had very deliberate patterns with just enough variance to make them interesting.
For the most part, the difficulty of the quest was on the relatively normal, maybe above average side of things, which is a good thing. The pacing was great, the relatively semi-nonlinearity was fairly well handled, and I liked a majority of the puzzles and challenges that I was faced with. The final boss was also quite fun to figure out. Many of the custom items were fairly cool (although I think the Phantom Tophat could've used more use), with my favorites being Joel's ability and the Tape Recorder. I should also point out that I found all but 4 HCPs on my own, and I think that reflects well on the design of the quest more than my actual skill level. They were relatively well handled across the full game.
I neglected to mention I played through the quest as Joel's character. I found Cpt. Blue's ability to be really fun to use and even the part of the ability that's supposed to attack you was pretty useful as well on bosses that don't move much. I tried out the other characters for a few seconds as well, and I'm glad I picked Cpt. Blue, because it's the ability I would've had the most fun using in the first place.
All in all, I see this quest as the love letter to ZC as it is, and while I lament the fact that I missed out on it when it came out, it's still a pretty damn good quest that stands on its own.
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