I've got quite a history with this quest having made many many attempts at it over the years. I've also written several reviews of varying qualities and varying levels of salt. After playing both Armageddon Quests, I had a real itch for more of this kind of content, and then Dimi started streaming the quest on Discord and I sort of roped myself into playing as well. It took quite a bit, but I did finally beat it and so this will be my final review.

I think the best way to go about this is to just give some quick thoughts on all the dungeons in order, so here we go:

• Fortress 1: This place is the bane of my existence, roller of RNG, bringer of salt. A lot of the sections pale in comparison to things I've played since, but I still can't help but feel the difficulty is a bit off. I said in the past that I thought the quest had an inverse difficulty curve, but I think I was partially mistaken. It starts off really hard, then tapers off and then gets hard all over again. And this dungeon is one hell of an introduction, so much so that I went out of my way to sequence break and skip most of it.
• Fortress 2: This dungeon however is my least favorite overall. It has some cool ideas but they're just overshadowed by the finnicky and precise first gauntlet leading to the boomerang that overshadows everything else. I think without that this place would've been pretty average if not very memorable, but good lord that gauntlet gave me trouble even with sequence broken gear. Also every time I play this section, I forget that the spikes in the gohma room are arbitrarily slow walk and end up eating shit for it. Winner of the Worst Gauntlet Award
• Fortress 3: This was my level 1 pretty much after getting the sword, my strategy being to rush this dungeon early and get the white sword and heart container as soon as possible. It was pretty slow due to my lack of gear, but I'm cool with how this dungeon works. Getting the money for some of the items and fighting the bosses was just rough with starting gear. The darknuts at the end were one of the more fun encounters for me, I just generally enjoy fighting darknuts. And it certainly helped that I liked the music as well. Winner of the Smoothest Tunes Award
• Fortress 4: I think the game starts to pick up at around here. There's some cool encounters and challenges, I especially liked the fight with the gleeok boxed in with no enemy tiles. I was less fond of waiting for wizzrobes to line up to kill them with bombs. This is another spot where I decided to sequence break, this time jumping into Fortress 7.
• Fortress 5: This was my second favorite dungeon. I really dig the creative use of deathknights and I much prefer isolated challenges to longer gauntlets. It's also hilarious how early you can come in here and nab some good items. Winner of the Most Creative Dungeon Award
• Fortress 6: I wasn't as much a fan of this one, mostly because it feels like a rehash of Fortress 3's ideas, just harder. The third path was a pretty inventive idea, but didn't particularly land for me, mainly because the darknuts at the start are so damn tedious and the batrobes at the end are so damn random. I had some heartbreaking moments here. I think the level suffers some from reusing the same enemies on all three paths, though it does have the cool effect where rooms that are easy on one path become hard on another.
• Fortress 7: I love the section at the start here for the fire boomerang. It's like the part of Forest Restaurant that pissed me off in Armageddon Quest, yet feels more elegantly done. A bit harder too, but made bearable due to the shortcuts. After that point the dungeon is alright. It's a mix of Forest Restaurant and B Button Pyramid and devious one at that. The gauntlet for the hammer gave me the most trouble on this one, especially the last room. Part of it was that rude setup where I had to pay for de-bubbling on every attempt. At some point I refused to keep paying it and so slowly worked my way through the first gauntlet again instead. On the way to the boss key I also made a rather unfortunate oversight. I didn't realize room right after the dodongos was a shortcut, and so ended up doing that section twice. Oof. Winner of the Most MooshBlind Moments Award
• Fortress 8: In a shocking twist of fate, the 8th fortress somehow came out to be my favorite. I don't know how this happened, seeing as most of this dungeon is one long gauntlet, but I found the implementation of shortcuts to be perfectly executed and the challenge reasonably paced. It felt like I was playing Armageddon Quest again. The gauntlet at the end is also positively dreadfully rude, but has some setups that I found really cool and creative. I think I lucked out because I've heard that this dungeon was apparently nerfed shortly after the quest's initial release. If I had the version Evan played I'd no doubt have ragequit there. Winner of the Best Dungeon Award
• Fortress 9: The final dungeon is easily one of the hardest if not the hardest outright. I wasn't as fond of this one as previous ones, but it's mainly a matter of length. There's no shortcuts here and no sequence breaks to ease the difficulty. Study the rooms and don't make any big mistakes. There were a couple rooms I never fully figured out no damage strats for, the leever room, the first goriya 3 room, and the second darknut room. I was able to squeeze by unscathed a couple times but my damage was incredibly variable and I had to waste a lot of heals as a result. The final boss is thankfully not that difficult and only took me two attempts, but god is it stressful after going through all that. Winner of the Hardest Dungeon I Guess Award

So that was my thoughts more or less. I stand by some of what I said in previous reviews, the early game being too hard, the difficulty curve being all over, but some other things I was definitely wrong about. The game never gets easy, it keeps the pain on consistently, and honestly I think this is why for the most part this style of quest isn't for me. My favorite thing about Armageddon Quest is the sense of power in finding items; there's an ebb and flow to the difficulty where you'll get a new item and briefly get to revel in it and go on a power trip. This is disappointingly absent here, with the quest instead cramming difficult challenges into every crack. This comes down to a matter of taste I suppose.

There's of course a handful of other problems, the botched "difficulty" settings, the horrible overworld experience, the unfitting and at times grating music choices...I've pretty much driven those into the ground at this point. The stuff James put the most effort into does genuinely have some fun moments in there but it's a very mixed bag for me.

I'm gonna hold off on assigning a numbered rating to this one because who fucking cares anymore, right? If you're into gauntlet based hard-as-balls difficulty, definitely gives this quest a try. If you're not, stay the hell away. If you're burning away at a nearly decade old grudge that just refuses to die, eh, why the hell not? It's free real estate.

Okay, so updated review time. I recently did a little back to back double playthrough of both this and armageddon quest. I'd play one level from each at a time, and compare and contrast what I liked and didn't like. The intent was to highlight why I thought Armageddon Quest was the better game.

I quit about 5 dungeons in; not because of this quest, but because Armageddon Quest disappointed me, yet this quest always kept me going in suspenseful awe; "how can James fuck me over this time?". Armageddon Quest meanwhile had a dungeon so bad (forest restaurant) that I dropped the quest entirely despite enjoying it early on. Needless to say, my expectations of this quest have changed a lot, and I have an overall higher opinion of this than what I used to (had I bothered to update my review before, it would have been a 3).

My biggest problem with this quest is RNG. RNG screws you over so many times through no fault of your own; level 2 being the worst of this with the wizzrobes blocking you and the moldorm room, but most levels have this in some shades. I know ZC enemies are jank, but you still had the choice whether or not to use them in the ways you did. I think the digdogger room everyone talks about isn't that bad; but there's some really nasty offenders people don't talk about, like level 4's wizzrobe bombing being completely luck based.

The other thing this quest lacks is the sort of power trip Armageddon Quest does. Whenever Armageddon Quest gives you a new item, it usually has segments designed to make you feel like you're much more powerful than before. Here, though, items are treated like keys. The one exception to this I can think of is the gauntlet after the white sword, which was pretty fun up until the luck started showing up again. I don't think these segments make the game easier, as long as there's still the same amount of hard sections, but they're like a drug that keeps the player hooked and craving more.

It's well made, but rough. I'll need to give insanity extreme a replay at some point to judge how things improve.

I played this a bit and rage quit after a couple dozen deaths in the first dungeon (I never saw past the first Vire room). However, I did get to see a full playthrough of this quest and I have to hand it to you, I like a lot of the puzzles and gimmicks you have to know about to survive. If anything, LoH shows off a lot of the technical aspects of Zelda Classic and how you have to know every trick by heart to succeed. Probably the most vexing gimmick is in the final dungeon. I won't spoil it, but if you're not positioned perfectly, you basically reset the entire dungeon. Another gimmick I like is having the shops set up so you have three of an item and you get cheaper/better items if you have upgraded Bracelets. Despite me being NOWHERE near good enough to beat this without resorting to cheats, I still thought based on watching Y1oh's run of it that LoH is a great quest. Great concept, just well beyond my skill level and patience tolerance.

First of all just let me say that this quest is extremely difficult to rate. Because of the difficulty present, certain aspects of a specific gaming experience would vary wildly as it is not without a few problems. That said, this quest is brilliant, border-lining on some kind of weird autistic genius in a few places, and WTF were you thinking in others. Even though it borrows many ideas and designs from Armageddon quest, it puts a new spin on it and there is also a ton of new content. Dungeon designs and tactical consideration are very high in this quest and every room is used well in the whole, and is willing to delve into details and exploits.

Bottom line is that this game is very well thought out and doesn't deserve those 1 star ratings. It even says in the description that "you will die many painful deaths". Level 1 is also probably the hardest level so if it is too hard for you I would recommend getting one cheat item and just enjoying the quest instead of getting rage-quit frustrated and then going straight to the internet and posting a bad review. This is the hardest quest in the DB by far, so keep that in mind.

I finished this with 321 deaths and no cheat items. That said, I didn't enjoy this at all. So many segments felt tedious (and not at all challenging. The money grinding sections come to mind), and many of the parts that I did enjoy were almost completely pulled from Armageddon Quest. In my experience with this quest, there's also an inverse difficulty curve; the hardest part of the game is the beginning where you have almost no life and gear. This isn't a bad thing, but I feel it's a serious design flaw when the end of the game fails to maintain this standard.