I rarely to never submit a review before actually finishing a quest; but having finished level 6, in the likely event that I just don't want to toil through this quest anymore, I think I've seen enough from Link to the West in order to form an educated opinion.

In a few words, LttW is plagued by cheap difficulty. In addition to Eddy's point about challenging enemies thrown in so early on, which I can kind of forgive seeing as how the second quest in the original LoZ did the same thing, the quest maker seems to have a huge soft spot for using enemies to annoy the player. What I mean by that is that zoras, like likes, red bubbles, and (fast) wall masters, are used to extensive effect - which again, is not a huge deal in and of itself - but these placements are often executed in an unfair manner. Cases in point: the room full of red bubbles, in level 6, right before the room that leads to the grotto, and the penultimate room in the heart mansion. Avoiding the red bubbles seems to be based on random luck rather than skill, as several times I encountered a red bubble immediately after exiting the stairs; but how about the penultimate room in the grotto with the red bubbles and like likes - but without a blue bubble? Hope you brought some bombs to get free if a like like swallows you after you get hit by the red bubble. How about the penultimate room in the heart mansion? I hope you know the wall masters are coming and so will deliberately move down and to the left in quick order.

Those are just two specific examples that are fresh in my mind at my point to advance in the quest, but I can also recall many rooms that are along the same lines: if you don't know what to do, or know what is inside the room, you're probably going to take unavoidable damage. Traps seem to be a big offender in that regard - wherein there are many, many instances where, after entering a new room, the player needs to step across two tiles in order to avoid taking damage from a trap, which amounts to cheap difficulty when the player has no knowledge of such trap placement. In contrast to these sorts of cheap difficulty, the rest of the combat in LttW seems to be pretty average to moderate, with the occasional room full of manhandlas coming as a surprise but bosses being pretty easy to appropriate per the level number. Also, as Eddy mentions, there are too many rooms where the player has to defeat all enemies in order to move a block or open a shutter door. That would be OK were many of those rooms not filled with zols or vires, who of course always regenerate and necessitate another tedious clearing when the player comes back to the room. I, for one, greatly prefer the moderate combat rooms as a way to boost difficulty in a quest as opposed to cheap-difficulty tactics such as the ones I have mentioned.

As an aside, I like difficult navigation and puzzles the best, in order to boost difficulty. To that end, the overworld is pretty well thought out and very LoZ inspired - in terms of item placements and having to actually look for secrets due to there being little to no indication of burnable trees or bombable walls. Navigation on the overworld can be pretty long and winding early on, which is good in my book. Much like LoZ, the player can traverse about 80-85% of the overworld right from the start, although he will probably be soundly defeated by tough enemies without a magic shield. Finding new levels is very LoZ like in that the locations are not necessarily obvious and there is some degree of needing to use a random item on select screens. Finding the blue ring was quite a surprise, and I have to admit, the solution was so obvious in retrospect, but I found out the location by watching the quest maker's let's play videos on Youtube. Dungeon design, aside from the cheap difficulty, is pretty solid and also LoZ inspired. I would wish for some puzzles or more surprise walk-though walls, but I think the dungeons are very LoZ faithful for better or for worse. Sometimes, the correct path is much shorter than you might think and some rooms are truly superfluous and designed to lead to nowhere or nowhere important.

Even though I have been quite turned off and annoyed by the cheap difficulty tactics employed by the quest maker, LttW has enough other good stuff going on that I found myself coming back, over and over, to play some more. Well, play some more until I rage quit again. I think that's a sign of quality right there: that a quest drags the player back even then the player's head is telling him to stop wasting his time, because there's a 100% certainty of another rage quit soon to come. Unfortunately, though my heart says yes, I think my head is going to win out on this one and I have decided that there are just too many questionable choices and execution in LttW that drag the real, intangible enjoyment of the quest down significantly.

Just finished this with a total time of 10 hours and 36 deaths. This quest in general is a massive step up from your first quest (that I admittedly couldn't finish), so good job on this! It plays as a typical Zelda 1 style quest which is quite refreshing to play once in a while. The dungeons were the biggest highlight of the quest for me, while I do feel that the earlier dungeons are harder than the later ones (I'll expand on this later). The quest flowed fairly well and I enjoyed plenty of what I played.

The overworld was pretty neat, though I do feel some of the design in general can be improved on, mostly looking for tile errors here and there and some polishing in other screens. I also would recommend to enable the quest rule that allows you to touch graves and Armos statues from below, since I noticed I needed to force some damage at times, like to activate Armos to get into Level 9, for example. While the dungeons certainly were pretty good, I felt the difficulty was a little off at first. Fire Gels and Zols are not very good choices for the early dungeons IMO, since the waiting you have to do to progress in rooms drag on quite a lot. In addition to that, Level 2 felt much tougher than the rest of the quest because of facing Gibdos and Pols Voice so early on. A bit more of difficulty scaling would've been beneficial here IMO, but not too big of a deal. I think my biggest problem with the later dungeons are the Peahats. As a word of advice, I'd recommend to never use Peahats in rooms where you have to kill every enemy to do something. Waiting for Peahats to stop moving is really painful and made dungeon progression come to a rapid stop most of the time. If you do still intent to use them for these rooms then I would make them "Keese"-type enemies instead so you can hit them when they are flying around.

As for the smaller things I found, I compiled a quick list of weird stuff I came across. You can find them all in the Imgur album here.

Overall though, this was pretty solid and despite some of the flaws I still had a good time. I'm gonna give this one a 3.5/5, which rounds up to a 4. Best of luck for your future projects!

I like these old school NES style quests that are meant for more experienced players.

I can't find the step ladder or lv5 could someone help me, thanks.

This quest is killlllling me but I'm not giving up! I have made it to level 6 but need a better sword. Where is the 3rd Sword located? Please don't tell me the Mall.