Finally got around to finishing this one up, took me a solid 17 hours to beat and I almost got everything but on the whole it was fine and as far as it being based on Link's Awakening goes I can definitely see it with the design. I'll start out with the positive stuff because there's quite a bit before I delve into my gripes, but firstly the accuracy to LA is great, and I do like the changes and alternative routes that get added onto the quest. Also a fan of changing up the dungeon order and using original dungeon entrances for extra boss fights which is neat. General screen design is fine, nothing too crazy but not too basic as well for the most part, pretty much what you'd expect for a GB quest. Some areas are a bit on the bland side of things but it's nothing actually major. Dungeons on the whole look rather cool, the later dungeons in particular have some nice aesthetics (big fan of Level 7's water world type thing going on there). The miniquests found throughout actually give quite a bit of life to the world as well as all the collectibles scattered throughout. The minidungeons that go alongside the main ones were also rather neat!

Some old puzzles make a return but a lot of the new ones found throughout were pretty neat too. My personal favourites were the ones found in Level 5 since using sideview gravity and blocks was actually quite clever and the magnetic glove puzzles were pretty fun too. I'm not sure why I wasn't expecting this to tie in with your other quests but it was cool to see things all come together and progress on to the next one, even if I didn't quite get what was going on sometimes (I kinda get the idea though). Oh yeah and one more thing, the secret ring is a blessing. Absolutely love having that so I can actually be aware of where secrets and stuff are, I probably would've missed way more if it weren't for that lol.

Ok so with all that out of the way, the critiques I have are fairly lengthy so I'll try not to ramble. The biggest problem I have is the dungeon design, not in terms of looks because that has improved massively over your quests, but rather the actual structure of them. Similarly to your previous quests, they all suffer the same problem of being long winding corridors where you reach a point where you collect several keys in a big bulk, use them all linearly and then repeat. I noticed this from the get go with Level 1 and thought sure maybe they'll start to change things up later on. Unfortunately they did not, and because of this they started to drag a lot and ultimately became the same thing just reskinned. The ONLY dungeon that substantially changed this up was the true final dungeon with the super bombs because there was actually a central gimmick that carried over throughout that actually made me think. This was a very well made dungeon simply because of the interconnectivity throughout and I really wish all the other dungeons had concepts or gimmicks similar to this. Level 8 also had a cool idea with the water level changing, until I realised they didn't actually affect elsewhere in the dungeon and were only active for the bits you were currently in, which ended up just being like everything else. My personal suggestion is open up your dungeons and scale them back in size. For the former, opening up dungeons would be like having multiple paths to reach the same place, and making rooms feel larger rather than winding paths everywhere. For the latter, the dungeons get too big for their own good which ultimately makes them feel quite boring IMO. The later dungeons became an absolute drag because of how large they were when all I'm doing for half an hour is collecting keys and keys and keys and keys and keys. It's ok to have small and compact dungeons with a lot of stuff going on, and more often than not, these actually make for better dungeons IMO.

The other major issue I have is some of the scripts used. For the most part they work fine, but for others I kinda question why you would create your own hookshot script when the base one works just as fine, and admittedly a lot better. The hookshot in this just felt far too slow and clunky. The same can be said for the hammer where I feel there was no need to change that up at all. In fact, a lot of items felt fairly clunky to me, even the sword tbh. Bosses in general were ok but again there's that clunkiness I see which makes them behave rather erratic and all over the place, and on the topic of bosses, sometimes there's no clear indication of what I'm supposed to do to hurt them. Biggest one being Ramrock which I was able to hit at seemingly random and the final boss where some music notes made it vulnerable but others didn't? Idk what was up with that. Also Helmasaurus or whatever the guy was called felt totally broken to me because I would imagine the hammer would be able to affect him everywhere but it turned out to be just on his back... but then sometimes I was able to hurt him when facing his mask and other times not, again idk what was going on there. Like the other review said, the custom subscreen definitely had some delays going on with switching items, which generally isn't a big deal, but having instantaneous switching would be nice rather than this big delay between items.

My final thing is a bit more of a minor thing but it would be nice to know what you were meant to do to get the true ending. After activating all the towers as instructed by the owl you're kinda just left in the dark and there was just no indication of what I was supposed to do. It was only after looking at LPs on YouTube that I found out you had to activate all the switches from the fairies (probably, maybe there were other things I already did). It also meant I had to complete the trading sequence which is cool, but the very final thing to get the mirror seemed completely broken to me, so I had to cheat (it looked like I was not the first one to have this issue too judging by the help thread). Some sort of place to get hints for these things would be quite nice to have, just so you don't end up running around the world for no reason and assume things that were optional actually were needed.

But yeah on the whole this is not a bad quest at all, lots of cool ideas going on here and a nice faithful recreation of LA which is always nice to see. The dungeon design still needs a lot of work so I would suggest to strongly focus on that for your future projects, especially with experimenting around a bit more and cutting down on the long routes. These can REALLY change up your dungeons for the better. Overall I'll give this one a solid 3/5, a little more towards 3.5 but I'm hesitant to give this a 4. Things are slowly getting better with your quest design but I'm sure you'll get there! Good effort regardless.

I enjoyed this quest creator's previous efforts, and enjoyed Link's Awakening way back when, so how does Rememberance of Shadows compare?

In short, RoS is a faithful and effective re imagining of LA but there are more than enough changes to make RoS a lot more than just a retread of LA. The overworld in RoS is strikingly similar to the overworld in LA, but there are important differences within the caves, dungeon locations, and the NPCs who inhabit the RoS world that this new world is akin to a universe parallel to the one in LA. If you remember LA, you'll be able to navigate the RoS world and recognize the same NPCs, sidequests, and locations as in LA; but with a serious twist of things to make RoS almost a brand new game. I interpreted this parallel universe theme from the plot of RoS, where the island of Koholint itself is supposed to have certain powers.

As a story-driven quest, the plot here is pretty coherent and decent enough IMO up to around the last 10% of the quest, where I think the events, bosses, and other story elements started veering off from the previous 90% of the game and fell somewhat flat. I did finish the post-game content, but was not nearly so much engaged in the game as I was through level 9.

The biggest take away I can see from RoS is that the gameplay is very, very good and dungeon design is markedly improved from some of the creator's previous quests. Caves and dungeons are pretty item-trigger heavy, so all of those items that you collect throughout the quest stay relevant and used all the way through to the end. The item-use theme is also present in most of the puzzles throughout, and these puzzles are executed in a creative manner without the puzzles being very difficult at all, nor obtuse in any way. There are a plethora of sidequests and other side content to keep the player busy between main dungeons, so the quest never feels like a dungeon-romping chore. Secrets are quite abundant and I recommend taking note of found secrets, because more often than not, the secret requires a later item in order to obtain.

Conversely, in terms of item-related puzzles and secrets throughout the quest, I noticed a theme where there was an ever-increasing need to switch items over and over - often on the same screen - which slowed the gameplay down a lot and became a small nuisance. This was a problem because often the item I need to switch to is opposite of the equipped item and the switching mechanism (I think this might be a quirk of this particular tileset) was delayed and slow. Another issue I ran into is that the dungeons tend to rely on narrow corridors, but the later dungeons screens are also filled with plentiful amounts of enemies with high hit points. Thus, levels 7 and onwards start to feel like enemy spam and will require lots of evasion, tanking damage, or time to clear the path through any given screen. Hookshot invincibility is also gone, which is partially a good thing because the hookshot is such an effective weapon that invincibility would nerf the difficulty a lot, which basically requires that the player will take damage when using the hookshot in the later dungeons unless he or she clears all the enemies on the screen. A big caveat is that the enemy-related issues are effectively nerfed heavily, if not entirely, because there is a healing spell and armor upgrades, both of which can become quite powerful with completion of sidequests and other exploration.

Difficulty wise, there is a definite and even progression, but overall, I think that RoS is pretty easy and relaxed in difficulty. A big part of this that that exploration and finding upgrades really mitigates the difficulty progression such that RoS was even easier than LA in my experience. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you, because I RoS was never designed to be a slog-fest challenge. Instead, navigation and quest progression are the real challenge to be found in RoS.

Music choices are standard fare for the gameboy-Zelda Quest genre. Overworld screen design seems to be a heavy nod to LA, which means there isn't a whole lot of pretty details on most of the screens if you're the type of player who cares about that aestetic. Though there are a heavy amount of scripting and other customization thoughout, RoS never bogs down and there are remarkably few errors or bugs. What bugs I did encounter seemed to be fixed quickly by the creator, which is appreciated. One persistent bug that happened to me is if I fall in a pit while in the process of crossing said pit with the hookshot or magnet - whether by miss-timing a hookshot jump or being hit by an enemy - my character was usually deposited inside the wall of the same (or immediately adjacent) screen. I reckon this is a ZC quirk and cannot be fixed without entirely eliminating all pits or the possibility of hookshot jumping.

Overall, I enjoyed RoS a lot and it took me between 25-26 hours to complete the quest from beginning to end of the post game.