I originally started playing this quest back in 2019, but abandoned the game after just level 1 or perhaps level 2, because the progression was just too tedious and elusive. Much like Mike's Fun House, another highly imaginative and unconventional NES-style quest that I also rage quit too early before much later re-discovering, I'm really glad I have Wizzrobe's Big Day Out a second chance.

I guess I have to mention the elephant in the room, like many others already have: the gameplay and progression through around level 3 is so obtuse due to arbitrary secrets and low offensive and defensive capabilities of the character, it's not particularly fun. This is the point where I quit the first time and almost quit a second time but for some advice from forums posts, which I usually don't feel the need to turn to. I get that LoZ had obscure whistle triggers and other unmarked secrets that most player's wouldn't think to try, but that just so happens to be one of the few bad things about LoZ. In WBDO, this bad element is utilized too much. I'll reiterate that the wand triggers for and inside 'The Gauntlet' are pretty bad because the entrance trigger is so non-obvious and the ice trigger in the dungeon, that leads to an essential item, was hard for me to recognize. There was quite a bit of my character being 1-hit-1-killed early on, and other arduous combat that required some lengthy backtracking, but I get that the difficulty of WBDO was meant to be above-average to solidly moderate.

Past these growing pains, once the player can access the desert, the quest honestly comes to life. There is exploration-galore and the quest becomes gameplay-centric, which gameplay is the quality where this quest really excels. Suddenly, the player's impotent magic, offense, and defensive capabilities can be markedly improved if the player chooses to explore, which is an essential element for every quest in my opinion. The difficulty kind of plateaus from this point and stays fairly easy for a long time, but that's not a bad thing because the dungeon design also markedly improves during this portion of the quest. Early on, the dungeon design is honestly pretty bland, but suddenly the dungeons become more than a means to and end in finding the next item. The story-driven elements take a backseat but are still there on occasion and remain interesting.

Towards the end of the quest, the difficulty ramps up to a solidly moderate level (and sometimes hard) and the story-driven elements come to life again. Without spoiling things, the last 1/4 or so of the quest is probably the strongest portion where gameplay, story, and dungeon design really fire on all cylinders.

I, for one, also really enjoyed the palettes and screen design used in the various overworlds and caves. The world looks relatively real and like a real place, especially for an NES-style quest, which is something few quests manage to achieve. There is a lot of attention to detail in world building, even if most of the maps outside of the main 8x16 overworld are incomplete, and it really shows. Some of the music choices are also impressive and obscure, which others are pretty standard ZC-fare.

Overall, WBDO is another quest where tenacity and stick-tu-it-iveness pay off and there is a grand and rich quest to be had if you can make it through the rough beginning. Honestly, I don't know why these issues with the beginning are still there, after multiple other critiques, but maybe it's for the best? I got a solid 18-hours of play from WBDO and hope to keep[ hunting for some elusive mega secrets and a second ending.

I enjoyed especially seeing funny and a bit strange story and cutscenes so much, also exploring overworld is very fun. It is a bit hard at beginning with only one heart, though.
I think seeing the opening helps you know the atmosphere much better than my words.
My Wizzrobe's Big Day Out playlist on YouTube

Just beat this last night and it was quite an enjoyable experience. It oddly felt quite nostalgic to the old 2.10 style quests, while also being fresh and unique with cool new things here and there.

This is definitely quite different to a lot of quests since you're playing as a Wizzrobe, and I like how a lot of the items were modified to accommodate for that. The quest itself looks really well made, I'm a big fan of all the custom tilework going on, it really freshened up the classic tileset as a whole. The cutscenes and custom artwork for some of them are very cool to look at, I can see a lot of time and effort was put into them, so really good job with those. The dungeons were quite cool twists on Z1-style dungeons, and the unique design of them all were refreshing. The overall flow wasn't too bad and dungeons were slightly above average in difficulty, but nothing too hard IMO, even the final boss.

There aren't many negatives I can think of, but three things come to mind. For one, some of the progression secrets felt a bit nonsensical early on since for example, I didn't think the Wand would ever work on an ice block, and I would have never checked some other places like using the Whistle to open the hint on the Black Isle on the mountain top. Granted, you are given the Lens of Truth so that issue was no longer a big problem, but just felt a bit odd early on for me. Another thing is that while the combat in general was fine, I'm not a big fan of placing Red Bubbles in rooms that are quite difficult to dodge. Two examples come to mind, which are the Ice Palace and the Catacombs. In the Ice Palace, I recall one room near the bottom middle of the dungeon with two Red Bubbles and a very cramped space. If I wanted to continue through, I ended up waiting around for quite a while for the bubbles to get out of the way before progressing, otherwise I'd have no "sword". Likewise in the Catacombs, I disliked how they were mixed in with enemies in one room on the left side that was quite tough to navigate. I found the Blue Bubble room shortly after, but I had to do the whole loop again to get back to where I was. I think an easy solution for this would be to either free up quite a bit of space of where the Red Bubbles are, add a Blue Bubble in the mix, or just simply remove them entirely. Lastly, I felt like the starting parts of the quest were quite slow, mostly because you have such limited magic and things drain magic rather fast so you have to keep grinding off bats or buying magic jars to continue exploring around. Without having a Lens so early on, this was kind of irritating IMO.

I quickly compiled a list of random things I found when playing, check it out here.

Overall though, it was quite a fun experience, some things were a little annoying due to what I mentioned earlier but I liked it a lot. I'd give this one a 4/5. Nice job!

This quest is funny.' I like it, but it is difficult trying to raise rupees and
survive the first dungeon with darknuts. -Also 1 health hp?.. that's kinda harsh to players.

Holy cow, didn't think it would be finished after all these years!

Can't say I've honestly heard Megadeth's "A Tout Le Monde" as an overworld theme before ... EXCELLENT!

I've beaten The Crypt (Lv 2, I assume), gotten everything (that I know of so far), and even bombed some Darknuts for a Life Vial Piece (coining new name here) in the Black Isle... don't know where to go next...

Well im stuck got magic den got the Book (white sword) explored and all but no progress
but further its pretty challeging