I had tried this before the Anniversary Edition and didn't like it back then. But now that I've tried it again I see that it's a great quest. Had a great time playing it.

Pros:
* Well designed and beautiful overworld.
* Well designed dungeons.
* Balanced difficulty.
* Pretty good music in the dungeons.

Cons:
* The custom sfx sounds have hisses and cracks in them, quite audible when you throw your boomerang for example.
* The music in the overworld is just from the Twilight Princess. Kind of a turn-off since it's certain that every Zelda Classic lover has played the real Zelda games dozens of times, so the music gets repetitive.

Huh... I LP'd this and for some reason didn't leave a review. In my LP, I said a lot of things about the quest that presently, I regret. But, this review will be the definitive view I hold on this quest. So let me try and do this right. This is the first review I'm making, so I'll try and take it in a format I'm familiar with since I also don't have any other quests I've rated so far to compare this to. Also, I never played the original quest, so this is basically going to be me taking this as if it was the base quest. FINALLY with that preface out of the way, let's actually get into this:

Gameplay: Obviously I can't really comment on the base gameplay since it'll be nearly the same for most every Zelda quest there is. Rise of Ganon is a very linear quest and it is quite obvious where you are meant to go next simply because it is blocked off by an item need (e.g. Bushes blocking Kakariko that need to be burned and the Hookshot cacti blocking the way to the river). This is not necessarily a bad thing on it's own, but I found that this idea hindered certain parts of my enjoyment. The major example that comes to mind is that the raft is behind a wall of 100 rupees, which at the time required me to take quite a few minutes to rupee grind. This is not necessarily related to the linearity, but the fact that the item was needed to progress while still behind the rupee grinding felt a bit annoying to have to do. This aside, the linearity was not a major hindrance on enjoyment or exploration of the overworld once it was completely opened up to me. On design, most levels made use of every room in one way or another and there was a feeling of progression all through out the quest. (Well, except that one room in dungeon 8. I'm still not sure what that was there for). A very vanilla Zelda Quest overall, but that is never a bad thing when it is designed well enough and originally enough. No scripts were used as far as I remember, but this quest managed to keep my attention and interest the whole way through regardless of that fact.

Music and Story: (One section since it's so short for both) There is no original music, as far as I could tell (please correct me if I'm wrong). However, the selection of music used was perfect for every location and nothing felt out of place for the feel trying to be portrayed in each area of the quest. As far as story, it's your pretty basic "Ganon captured Zelda, get the Triforce and save her" plot. But, personally, I consider story to be more extra credit than anything else and this quest at least added a thing or two to the plot in order to not make it entirely stale and unoriginal.

Graphics: This refers both to tileset choice as well as how it is used. For this kind of quest, the BS tileset was a perfectly fine choice. The aesthetic use was done in the way the set intended it to be and the entire quest managed to be, again, vanilla without being bland. Well there were a few locations I personally think could have been done better (Death Mountain whistle bridge blocking off the shop comes to mind), the overall use of tiles was exactly what they were meant to be and did not look out of place in any location.

I'm not sure what else to touch on, so some pros and some cons as summary and then I will give my final rating.

Pros:
- Good tileset choice along with proper use of said set.
- Good music selection for every part of the quest.
- Despite mostly vanilla gameplay, plot, and aesthetics, the quest manages to be creative and interesting.

Cons:
- Rupee grinding was a necessity I ran into at more than one time within the quest. Not just for optional items, but items that were either fully required (Raft) or would be so beneficial that it would be very difficult to move on without them (Blue Ring).
- Difficulty fluctuated quite a bit. Some times a dungeon would be a nightmare while the boss was a pushover, or the opposite would be true. This, coupled with the fact that you cannot leave the boss room without beating the boss made for some frustrating situations.


Overall: Rise of Ganon does not bring anything amazingly new or innovative to the table. But, as a Zelda quest, it is a fun and interesting quest with good overall design even despite the flaws in difficulty spikes or rupee grinding. I thoroughly enjoyed the quest and even went on to 100% it just because I had enough fun re-exploring old dungeons to do so. This quest, from me, gets a 4.5/5 (rounds up since PureZC can't get too specific with the present rating system). I suppose I should mention this is basically a review of the quest before any updates and the few issues I mentioned might be fixed by now.

I'm actually surprised there still isn't a review of this quest ever since the update came about, kinda sad since this was a really cool update. But hey, time to add one myself

So, Rise of Ganon Anniversary Edition. This is definitely a better improvement over the original version for 2.10. I had a real blast Let's Playing and beta testing this quest (the LP finishes going up next Monday, I decided to finish recording the quest a week in advance). There are quite a lot of pros with this quest. The screen design in general is some really good 'BS Tileset' usage, it's great to see a quest with this tileset after quite a long while. The ideas and quest design put into this are fairly well thought out with some pretty clever puzzles all over the place (which is always good). The music is very nice (I especially love Level 4 and Level 7) and I see there are quite a lot of cool changes since I last beta tested the quest (thank you so much for readable text). There is a pretty smooth difficulty balance as the quest went on. The quest doesn't get too hard or too easy, the difficulty is just right (well, except for the Death Knight boss of Level 8, but that's my fault for not buying a better boomerang lel). So yeah, almost everything about this quest was very well done.

Now for the cons. I don't really have any major negative to say, though I still have some minor complaints. For one, that whistle trigger in Level 6 with the pool of water is a bit out of nowhere. I still think a hint of some sort would help people realise they need to play the whistle to continue onwards but that's up to you really, I don't mind. During my beta testing run, I was stuck at that point for a very long time. I get that it's at a dead end though, so I guess that could cause people to try the Whistle, I just didn't try hard enough I guess lol. Another issue I had was in the Sacred Golden Temple, the room near the top-left with a key and a note symbol in front of it. I dislike the way the puzzle was set up honestly. I really don't know if anyone would ever figure out that you had to push a block into lava to reveal a note symbol to progress, especially since the block blends in with all the other blocks, there was no telling which one you had to push, or if you had to push any at all. I would recommend to change the location or to add some sort of hint, because I honestly don't think that was too good of a design choice. Finally, I found a couple strange mountain tile errors, where mountain walls got randomly cut off and a mountain barrier looped into itself which looks a little odd and off, but that's a minor thing.

All cons aside though, this still was a terrific quest. I had a lot of fun playing this and I would definitely recommend others to give this quest a shot. I'd give this quest a 4.7/5, which rounds up to a 5/5. Great job Ken, looking forward to going through Neverending Fantasy Anniversary Edition as my next Let's Play

Seems like a cool quest! Just started it.
Any chance to add diagonal movement though?
I'll play it either way.

I think this (the original version of it, anyway) was the first custom quest I ever played in Zelda Classic! Or, at least, it's the first one I downloaded from PureZC; not sure if the ones included with ZC 2.10 are considered "custom" or not. I'll check this out as soon as I have the time!

Lookin' forward to playin' this!

Yo for anyone reading this if you want the music the work put it in the same folder as the quest, and make the quest directory where the quest is.