The Third Legacy

I hadn't played any videogames in years but the pandemic brought on boredom and I found myself nostalgic for old school NES. I remember using ZC years ago and found it was still actively developed with plenty of new custom games so I gave it a try.
I chose this game at random because it seemed to have been recently updated and I could tell there was still interest in it from the creator and the players. I made a great choice with "The Third Legacy" as it delivered on the elements that made Zelda a classic. Playable with plenty of challenges, and balanced between looting and shooting. The overworld was large enough to keep me interested and the underworld was a nice feature that was new to me and increased my appreciation for the effort needed to create the game. My favorite part was the monsters. plenty of variety here with summoners causing havoc with digdoggers and darknuts when I was about to get bored.
I am giving this a 5 star rating because I do see myself playing this again and it helped me remember my old 8 bit skills which made this enjoyable.
I felt that this game really stepped up and delivered

The first 2/3rds of this quest is terrific! I read all the reviews and despite most everyone agreeing that the end is a problem, I decided to try anyway. They were right. The last dungeon is a summoner purgatory. Be warned. There's a lot to like here though, and I hope Lut makes another quest.

That was...something. I actually really liked it though the first 7 levels. It was challenging but fair, the levels were interesting and well-designed, I was on pace to give it a four for sure and maybe even flirt with a five. But the endgame, oh my the endgame. It was just too much. Between the path to underworld, the underworld, the underworld dungeon, and the final dungeon, it was literally hundreds upon hundreds of screens of button mashing. With all the powerups, particularly infinite magic, it wasn't hard, it was pure tedium. At one point I had the master sword, the level five! tunic (didn't even know there was such a thing), 99 bombs, infinite magic, Nayru's Love, Din's Fire, upgraded hammer, wand, book, longbow, gold arrows, master key, slash, all scrolls, all rings, and a five-use potion. Death was never even a remote possibility. I would just enter the screen, cast love, and simply start slashing/burning/firing away. After two straight hours of that my hands were tired, I was bored, I just wanted it done.

It felt like two different quests. The first one is really good. The second one I can barely take seriously. I don't know how you fix it other than just a lot of cutting, but man, those last two hours weren't very fun. It's still good overall which is what I rated it.

So, this had been sitting in my downloaded quest queue for a while. I saw it had updated, so I downloaded it again and played through it... Somehow or other, I ended up playing the original one without realizing, though. Looks like the ending has been made a bit easier, but I don't think the changes would've affected my score very much - it was nowhere near a 5.

Anyway, overall it was really good, I thought, for what it was trying to do. It started out very classic and then progressed into lots of very high-powered fights. I wished that the difficulty curve had been a bit more level - my favorite portion of the game was right in the middle, basically the spider, fire, and ice dungeons. Especially the latter two. Those were super fun and well laid out. I also enjoyed the "optional" equipment dungeons - they were at about the perfect level of difficulty, I think, for what they were. I also especially liked how the magic upgrades were distributed one by one, and you had to gather them all up in a relatively short span of the game. Anyway, the whole middle portion of the game was really good. The beginning wasn't bad - basically your standard classic-ish stuff.

My main complaint was the ending. I think it dragged on a bit too long. By that point I could cast Nayru's Love for free - it just kinda turned tedious, ya' know? And crashing through all those summoners while nigh-invincible was certainly fun for a while. It was just pretty much impossible to lose at that point.

If I could make one change, I'd change it so that instead of getting infinite magic, you'd get the ability to turn rupees into magic as needed. That'd make the end game have a bit more strategy, while still maintaining the same flavor, I think.

Overall, really fun.

I totally agree with the two prior reviews by Eddy and Cyruscaine82. The first half of the quest was great - no real irritations for my playthrough, no balancing issues, no enemy spam - I give it 5 stars for the first half. I actually liked much of the overworld design, even the large desert.

The snowy/frozen area was kind of the turning point in the quest, and the second half became insanely difficult and drawn-out due to all the sword slashing needed to kill the overdone enemies. - 2 stars for the second half. The two halves average out to 3.5, but since the previous reviewers rounded up, I am going to round down to 3 in an attempt to balance things out. It's certainly worth a play, just be prepared for the jolt in difficulty halfway in and get all the "optional" items to make it through the second half.

This was quite the ride indeed. Beaten with about 9 hours 55 mins, 16 deaths and almost 100%.

This quest is definitely a pretty decent quest, with really cool classic style gameplay with a few twists here and there. The humour was really nice and was a lot more than the typical old men, just talking about boring stuff. Screen design was nicely done for the most part, with interesting (though some really bright) palettes. The overall progression was pretty good, though a bit too much on the linear side of things, maybe having some more of the overworld being open and branched out rather than completing one area, move on to the next and never really return back to the first part except for some extra secrets here and there. Difficulty was pretty balanced for the first half of the quest. Things started to skyrocket in difficulty past the Inferno Dungeon, but I'll get more into that later. So yeah, this was a very solid quest with a really good classic feel to it.

Of course, when there's the good stuff, there's always the downsides. Sadly I feel like this quest had quite a bit of flaws, one of which killed the experience for me near the end. First off, I'll start with some minor things. For one, I noticed that the desert was significantly larger than almost everything else. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it looks incredibly weird to see a small part of the overworld be a field area and almost everything else is a gigantic desert. I feel like the big desert gets a bit boring to look at after a while, and I was expecting a bit more uniform distribution between each area so that everything looks a bit more varied and not just one huge desert with other areas squashed to the sides.

I also noticed that the quest takes an unfair turn at times with areas you can hardly dodge. They are possible to go through because I've done it, but it's insanely tough because of how much little space you have, and you will most likely get hit most of the time. Something like this was pretty unfair to go through and really irritating. Another minor thing I found were those spiked trees. I understand why you made them damage combos, but really it just looks weird to me since you can easily just mistake them as normal trees (which is what they are supposed to be in default classic) and you can just end up walking into them most of the time thinking they won't hurt you. Another issue I found was in the 3rd treasure vault. You're expected to use your magic quite a lot to get through some spikes, but in the room right after you have to use magic again to reveal the path through this one big pit. This isn't really a good idea, because you're most likely to run out of magic from the spikes before and then you're probably out of magic in the next room. I think it would be better to have some magic refill somewhere in between this rooms so people don't have to suicide into the pits to get more magic to continue... or so people don't have to guess their way around the room at all.

And now I move on to the major issue with this quest, which is its difficulty balance and enemies. For the first half of the quest, everything was going very smoothly, difficulty curve was great and I didn't find any issues. However, at the Inferno Dungeon, difficulty began to pick up a lot which forced me to go to the otherwise "optional" treasure vaults (they felt more mandatory to me because these items were the only way I could survive). The difficulty then went from insanely hard to enemy spam and abuse, which at this point no longer became challenging, but became a complete nuisance to get through. Level 9 is the main issue here and at this point, I couldn't enjoy the quest anymore due to having to sword spam my way through the whole thing. Summoners are good to use for mini bosses or whatever, but putting them in almost every room really wasn't a smart idea, and the sheer amount of them in each room resulted in packed rooms such as this. I get I can just walk out of the room to reset everything, but I feel like that's a very cheap way to clear the room of enemies and isn't a challenge at all. Some rooms get insanely packed with stuff even without the summoners, such as this. Rooms like this make you always get hit and the only way out of it is to spam items, which isn't fun. Sometimes, the enemies themselves are too much. For example, that BS Patra for Level 8's boss and the two BS Patras in Level 9, guarding the Silver Ring and Boss Key. Slashing away for eternity gets boring after a while and these bosses get so repetitve quickly due to the insane amount of HP they have. Another major enemy which was pretty bad were those blue Digdoggers. I don't understand if there's another way to kill them, but I found that only magic hurts them. Without infinite magic, these digdogger kids become a total pain to kill and when you run out of magic, good luck hitting them because of how fast they moves. Even later on, I find myself wasting a good 10 minutes dealing damage to these digdogger kids. Either make them vulnerable to other stuff, or just reduce the HP dramatically so it doesn't become a boring item spam fest. Rooms with mirrors in them also cause some annoying problems. If a Wizzrobe happens to shoot at one mirror, the rest of the room gets flooded with magic, just like here. Thank god I had the Stone of Gravity, but still, that's a bit on the insane side of things. What's even worse is that Ganon was far easier than the rest of Level 9 itself. You know there's a balancing issue when the final boss is much easier than the whole dungeon itself

Despite all the issues I've mentioned though, I still think this was a decent quest. Yes, there were many flaws that ruined the experience for me near the end, but it's very decent for a first quest and you still did a good job. I will give this quest a 3.5/5, which rounds up to a 4, and I'm sorry if this review sounded a bit too harsh, but I hope you'll take on board most of my points and hopefully work towards them in later quests if you'll do any.

(Holy crap I got way too carried away with this review, sorry for the extreme length XD)

I want to rate this game a 3.5 but since I had to choose 3 or 4 I went with 4 because I had a lot of fun with it but it has a few flaws in my opinion.

The quest starts pretty easy and basic and it ramps in difficulty at a good pace until about halfway-three quarters through the game and then it sky-rockets into exponentially more difficult situations and if you don't get all the "optional" items you won't be making it through. That's honestly my biggest qualm about the game. Although there are optional dungeons that have optional items to make your life easier it's practically a necessity later on because there will be rooms with mobs and mobs of enemies that you'll need a lot of potions and return trips and every possible item in the book to make it through. These optional items should make a moderately difficult quest into an easier quest not making a near impossible quest into a barely passable quest. Eventually the last couple levels is mostly swinging your sword or shooting your wand as fast as possible and hoping for the best, there's little to no strategy involved. One thing I've always disliked in quests is the absurdity of having insane mobs of enemies. It's fun to an extent but gets old fast, no one wants to keep going back and forth to the dungeons and the potion dealers all the time.

There are a lot of things to like about the quest though. There is some good humor with the people that talk and I had some laugh out loud moments especially the bit about the potion dealers and their competition. It has a very inviting feel and it makes it more fun. The quest has great balance till about level 6-7ish. The music works and has some great tunes. The creator of the quest has some good ingenuity with item placement and a few of the secrets were put in creative places. It took some good effort to find things and as a more old-school Zelda fan this was fun and made a more immersive experience. I think the amount of items in game might have been a tad excessive but it still worked rather well.

Overall I like this quest and would recommend a go. It's not for the feint of heart especially near the end. I think it was flawed towards the end and a little absurd but overall still a fun experience and I hope Lut will make more quests in the future.