Throwback

I'm very late to this quest. For some reason I started playing it the same time as everyone else, got stuck on something stupid on an early boss, and never came back. I finally did and I'm glad I did. It's really something. It held my attention through 20 hours and 80 or so deaths at a time when well after a decade plus of playing ZC I'm having a harder and harder time finding quests that hold my interest anymore. All of the criticisms are fair. Damage tiles are overused. A few of the graphical hints needed to advance are there but almost TOO obscure. I encountered a few bugs using 2.53 and a few things that seemed a bit unfinished. There are a lot of B-button items it doesn't use and could. If the author ever wanted to do a remake of this, with a couple more coats of paint, it could enter the pantheon of the best quests in the database.

Having said that, the amount of story and dialogue cleverness and excellent level design is very high. The difficulty is perfect. It looks great. Overworld is solid. Many of the custom bosses are quite fun. The block puzzles are tricky without being bang-your-head-against the-wall tricky. The balance between fighting and puzzle-solving on both a mirco (the room you're in ) and macro (meaning the dungeon and/or overworld layout itself is a puzzle) level is just right. The quest does way too many things right to not get five stars. Play it if you haven't.

Pros:

- entertaining story line throughout. Obviously inspired by Hero of Dreams. The twist towards the end involving the real villain fell kind of flat in my mind, but was a surprise.

- well executed puzzles and dungeon design.

- the medium difficulty is about right - not too easy as to be boring, but not a slogfest.

- there are a lot of "aha" moments when you discover how well consealed is the next path you need to take.

Cons:

- way overuse of damage tiles. In many cases, including involving puzzles, it is impossible to avoid damage.

- the quest just seems unfinished to me. There are many holes in your item inventory at game end and the bonus dungeons after you beat the game have no conclusion. Level 3, in particular seems unfinished.

- the quest is linear in a rat race kind of way. I just don't get quests that block off swaths of the overworld like this until you get the latest item.

- this quest throws lits of rupees at you, but doesnt give you much to spend them on.

I want to give this a 3.5, but will round it up to 4, as the quest was smooth running and gave me a solid 17.5 hours (not 50) of game play.

This is a good example of a well designed quest with a bad implementation. The puzzles are challenging and fun. I really like the layout of the over world and the dungeon designs are well thought out. The story is funny. This is a fun quest for those who don't mind repetition.

Unfortunately there are some rookie mistakes (or maybe by design, which is worse) that really killed this one. One is needing bombs to complete a dungeon but none of the enemies in that level provide any. Having to leave a dungeon to get something trivial breaks the flow of the game. Also I hate scripted bosses, mainly because most of the time they're poorly implemented which unfortunately is the case here. Finally I don't feel that the difficulty matches the progress. For example, level 1 is too difficult to get through with only three hearts (it should have been level 2 or 3) and the fact that pots don't give you hearts or coins is annoying.

I admit I'm having fun playing this quest despite the annoyances. I'm not sure if I will finish it but overall it's not a bad play.

Absolutely amazing. Not sure why more people are reviewing. You should add more to the quest, I was dissapointed when the experience ended, even though it was close to 50 hours long. Great make!

Good quest. Long, but sour. Good level design and I liked the story. Worth a play for those who want an invigorating , funny, but challenging quest.

First of all I'm going to say, this is the BEST Zelda 1 remake I've ever played, and became my 2nd favourite ZC quest just after Hero's Memory. If you think Origin is great with remaking Z1, you have no idea what this quest is capable of.

I had no idea someone could turn a simple game into something pretty complex with an in-depth storyline and tons of exploration. This quest deserves a ton more praise. So I'm gonna start off with all the main great points.
- All the dungeons had really interesting gimmicks.
- The screen design was excellent.
- Difficulty wasn't too bad and it was quite balanced.
- All the bosses had interesting ideas.
- The overworld became a lovely land to explore in with tons of nice secrets
- The ending was a great plot twist. Loved it.
This list could go on forever, but I'll stop there.

Now for the bad points:
- Marino's Wizzrobe phase was freaking extreme. With little space like that it was really hard to hit the Wizzrobes back causing a couple deaths. That was really infuriating.
- Some secrets were a bit too hidden. It's nice to have hidden secrets, but holy crap you went a little overboard with hiding the secrets in areas you would never expect.
- Most dungeons are really confusing (like Level 8, Jesus that was a mad dungeon)

So with that said, this quest definitely deserves 5 stars. Almost everything about it is beautiful and I really hope to see more work from you in the future!

This is a terrific quest.
I agree with GhostKnight's assessment...play this game!

I don't consider myself a bad Zelda player, but honestly, I gave up after dying repeatedly on the first actual boss (Shallow Al) because of how poorly designed the arena was. First phase, simple enough, kill all the baddies. Second phase, move a block through a narrow passageway with auto-blade traps, which was annoying because it requires frame perfect pushes to get through unscathed (keep in mind - you only have three hearts (potions are not available), these traps do quite a bit of damage). Third phase, maneuver between fast moving conveyor belts that push Link into stationary spikes which is near impossible to dodge - given the speed and health of Link and the speed of the conveyor belts.

Clever quest that had a lot of promise, but this is a horrible first impression, reminiscent of kaizo shenanigans.

Finally beat this game 84 deaths in 20:46:07

very, very good. Despite this quest being based off of zelda 1 it feels like a brand new game. I thought it was clever how you put second quest dungeons as item dungeons. Backtracking for heartpieces was like oot. This game definitley through me for a loop, i was goin in circles most of the time, If you didn't help me out it probably would've taken me even longer to beat this. One good point is that all secrets and puzzles are marked in some way, but the player might need eagle vision to notice it though. Adqueate hints are given thoughout the game, it's ok that theres almost no hints after level 6 because the player should be accustomed to the game's logic. Every dungeon is at least twice it's original size without being too tedious. The quest for the red mail was pretty confusing but if you want something badly it doesn't matter how long it takes. All the music was good, and I actually liked reading the strings during the cutscenes. The ending cutscene was pretty funny. This game has loads of plot twists that are executed well. I also liked how you had constantly spawning bomb dropping enemies when you need bombs. One cool enemy i noticed was those white moldorms that kinda looked like the lanmolas for Zelda 3

One bad point was there was no way for me to get the healing meat for the battle with masked man, so I had to beat him somehow without it.

All I have left to do is beat the bounus levels.
Can't say I 100% percented it because it seems I'm missing a heart, didn't find the sobbing lady's son, and I didn't buy the peril beam medallion.

With that one bad point aside I will give it a 5 because this quest was just excellent! =D