This quest is a classic, I remember watching Eppy's playthrough of this as a kid and always wondered why it was never on the database and I didn't really know how to get it at the time. Now I've finally played it for myself like 14 years later and ngl it actually holds up fairly well. It's a pretty short but fun GB style quest with a pretty neat overworld and a nice collection of dungeons. The progression is done quite nicely and I do like how the overworld is designed, as well as the ocean world in the latter half of the quest, even though the raft paths were a little crazy to figure out. The quest's difficulty is certainly a bit on the tougher side but ngl it is nowhere as bad as I thought it was going to be after the warning in the description, I was expecting it to be far tougher and actually I kinda had a smooth time despite the Blue Tunic being found in Level 8 lol. I actually think the quest is balanced fairly well around a lack of defence upgrades, and I don't consider myself to be great at ZC. The final dungeon definitely spiked a little but the progression of armour and attack upgrades were weirdly squished to the very end which very quickly makes the final parts actually kinda easy.

Dungeons were pretty well designed, I like a lot of the exploration involved in them and they felt very GB-like to me. The only dungeon I thought was a little annoying was Level 10, especially because of the Mirrorobe shutter rooms that you have to go through every time you die or loop back to the start. Also doing some puzzles multiple times was a bit irritating too, but that is a relic of old ZC so I get it lol. I also felt that some of the secrets and triggers were a bit obtuse in some places, I had to refer to Eppy's videos a few times because of some random bomb wall I would've never thought about, or dive in a random water spot for a key. Again, definitely the kind of thing old ZC had but yea those kind of small things didn't age very well and built up to be a tad annoying.

With that all said though, this is an absolute classic of old ZC and it's one that feels super nostalgic to me from childhood. A lot of it has aged fairly well, other bits not so much, but I'll give this a solid 4/5.

Also I am almost done with L6 (but stuck, missing a key) and so far this has been anything but "absurdly hard." But you specifically mentioned L7 so we will see, assuming I can find the key I'm missing and complete L6.

A stupid-hard 12 year old quest with Exate's fingerprints on it might be just the weekend time-waster I didn't know I needed.