---------
Edit: Staff contacted me an basically told me that I'd have to bump up my rating for all quests I have ever reviewed by one star. Note that this does not reflect my own opinion on the matter, or the quest, but just that it was something I was made required to do.
---------
Okay, so, to the top is in general a fairly good/okay quest. It focuses mostly on puzzle concepts and gimmicks more so than anything. When I went into this quest I was expecting to be blown away by how amazing it was given what I had heard about it, but sadly that did not end up being the case.

I feel that most floor, though not all, overstay their welcome. The floor concepts get old and tiring way before you're even done with it. There are also several puzzle mechanics that are introduced fairly early on, then repeated ad-infinitum throughout the quest. Some of those are manageable, such as the the pit rooms where you need to fill in the missing floor with the yellow cubes to makes yourself a bridge. Other ones like the timed step triggers that show up are just frustrating, some of them almost seem to require perfect movement, not even joking. They would maybe not be so bad if they had less aggressive timing, but it is what it is.

And while the floors drag on, none do so more than the infamous floor 9. In the grand scheme of things I don't think floor 9 takes THAT much more time to complete in contrast to floor 10, but it's just the things you have to do feel like extreme levels of padding. Floor 9 also features some of the worst cases of sub-dungeons in the entire quest..., but also some of the best. Indeed, To The Top is not lacking in good content, there is a fair bit of it. And floor 10 genuinely feels like a great final dungeon that would fit into any quest (aside from what you need to do to find the map).

I also want to throw out there that I definitively think that To The Top is a technological marvel, some of these things in this quest would have been insane to do in ZC 2.1. And I guess if you where there for the time and place when this quest first came out, that would have mattered way more. But I also think that the knowledge that this is a technological marvel don't really affect the screen-to-screen gameplay much. And at the end of the day I feel that this is one of the quests that would benefit the most from getting an updated 2.5 version. Although, in many ways that's really a catch-22, because the very reason that it was made in 2.1 is what makes it special.


My problem with coming to a conclusion for a quest like this is that there are some genuine good stuff in it, but the things I find bad are so bad that they kind of completely ruin the experience. So I guess what I'm trying to say is: Do try out the quest, but don't go in with too high expectations, and realise that a lot of mechanics in the quest makes it very dated.