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
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.