The adventure of Link, Titans' gate 2

More a comment than a review as I didn't get very far, but I tried playing a bit and have a few thoughts. For one thing I'm a bit confused how data saves in this quest. I'm used to Zelda 2 where my levels save between deaths, but here everything resets when I die or save my progress. What's the requirement for saving level based progress? I also find it odd that saving forces me to quit out every time. So I save my game but get kicked out and lose most of my progress.

The penalty for dying here seems steeper than Zelda 2, but the control feels stiffer and less reliable. Link's move speed and sword combat feels about right, but his jump does not feel correct at all. Part of it's the lack of horizontal acceleration in his walk but I think also how using the sword causes me to stop dead and immediately enters falling action while in the air. The arc on his jump is also completely linear: straight up followed by down where on the NES there was an acceleration to it as well. Overall this contributes to that feeling of stiffness.

Enemies are mixed, some feel familiar, some feel oddly different. Like Wosu I recall being a fast hopping enemy, but here he slides around taking his time. The rocks in the desert and bubbles on the bridge also seemed rather slow. The Stalfos on the other hand shrugged off my hits without taking hitstun like a champ and kept advancing. Iron Knuckles feel far smarter than I remember but that's probably how it should be.

Bug wise I didn't encounter much. One time when attempting to skip health level ups I found that it put me in an infinite loop of the level up screen until I finally chose one. And I had an interesting knockback encounter in an elevator shaft that got me stuck on the elevator for a bit which felt rather unpleasant.

On the whole the quest's very pretty and it's impressive how much you've accomplished in ZC, but the gameplay felt off enough that it didn't really grip me.