I really, really want to like Canaria. I've tried playing a few times from the start, but I finally managed to play for around four hours today, and these are some of my thoughts. This is also me aiming to justify why I've given it a harsher score than others.

There's a good quest in here somewhere. The screen design is pretty, especially in a tileset like GB. However, I feel like the screen design has been focused on aesthetics first, rather than overall functionality. I found myself looping around the overworld for a good majority of the time, running blind at various stages trying to figure out where to go next, what items I'd need to access areas, etc. It isn't telegraphed to the player very well. Having the initial areas of the overworld separated from the desert area also cuts off access to the boomerang too, which itself is also hidden without much information being communicated to the player in that respect.
The lack of telegraphing or communication to the player is particularly true with the lack of saving; beyond saving regularly at the save points, if you die, you've got to do everything all over again from when you saved last. That in itself detracts from the experience, especially if you find yourself in a situation like myself where you don't even know what the save points look like. I rage quit three times in the past year after being sent back to the intro sequence each time. I made the decision to sit down and grind out the quest beyond the opening sequence today, when someone had to tell me what the save points specifically looked like.

These issues are prominent in the dungeons as well. Running around the first dungeon, avoiding the enemies while desperately looking for keys to access the boss room, isn't necessarily setting the player up for a fun experience. The evasion of the boss itself to retrieve the sword is an interesting concept; the build up to that boss room could've been conveyed in about half the dungeon size. The block puzzles having the floor markings a la Minish Cap was great, too - it really makes a difference in regards to determining what you can and can't push when it comes to blocks.

The scope and size of the dungeons are less to do with anything direct about the quest as much as it is an issue with the ZC community itself, however. Even as far back as the mid-00's, quest development was focused on sprawling, large dungeons rather than the gameplay loop. I can speak from experience in that respect - and it's something that you figure out with practice and understanding how and what you want to do with a dungeon.

As a result of sticking to that territory, Canaria draws from a similar pool when it comes to dungeon design. Big, looping dungeons with 4-5 enemies per screen, every screen, that follow the usual ZC "kill enemies/find a key/open a door with a key/repeat" formula. It's relentless, especially with the lack of F6 and limited save points. It's the lack of variety here that can be frustrating, and while there's platforming elements or overarching dungeon concepts - Toxicant had some really unique ideas behind the poison "draining" - they aren't used nearly enough in contrast to the standard formula. The "optional" dungeons aren't necessarily aggressive with enemy placement, but their size made me think they were main dungeons until it was pointed out otherwise.

Similarly, the way one way shutters punish the player for taking one wrong turn - this artificially pads the gameplay, and instead of rewarding the player it detracts from the experience. The switch puzzles in the third dungeon and the minecarts in the mine mini-dungeon are what eventually made me just decide to give up on Canaria; I shouldn't be looping around the same five to six screens trying to understand a puzzle that I can only reset from one particular angle, every time. In the end, recurring mechanics like that are what turn Canaria from a possibly good quest into something less so.

I wish I could rave about Canaria as much as everyone else has, and I feel like having to be in this position of not enjoying the quest is parallel to the majority opinion. I also feel like making this review when I only made four hours progress into the quest isn't necessarily fair, but if I'm already not enjoying the gameplay this early on, I don't think I'd be invigorated to push on into the mid/late-game. As I said before, there's some good concepts in there along with some really striking visual aesthetics. But beyond that, it's a ZC quest. Not great, not bad in terms of designs, but it's a product of the community past and present. Coupled with a few arbitrary developer decisions like the save points over F6 however is what tips this into two star territory for me. Because unfortunately, what Canaria feels like to me isn't fun, but rather a chore.

This quest is a huge accomplishment regardless of any downsides I may have felt tbh. It is absolutely admirable how much you managed to do with this quest and I can only hope to see more quests of this nature from the future, whether that be from you or other users.

Overall, this was a fantastic quest. There were some minor annoyances, most notably the rooms with the transporting smog clouds, especially in the last dungeon. Now that I think about it, maybe (as one of the other reviewers stated) it would have been nice to put more of the dungeon items in the middle. That way one could explore the overworld a bit more and get a bit stronger before facing the boss. The backtracking didn't bother me as much and I felt a sense of accomplishment when activating a shortcut button after a difficult puzzle. Speaking of which, there was a good variety of puzzles, some very innovative, in the quest and you didn't overuse them.

I know there were a few updates made while I was playing so I'm sure one of those fixed the spots where there was silence. Also, you fixed the second key issue in one of the later dungeons, which I mentioned in the forum thread. Other than that, I was never permanently stuck.

I can only imagine how long creating this quest took you, but hope that you may one day put out another quest of comparable length. I would look forward to playing it.

I want to start off by saying, overall, this was a very enjoyable journey, and I had a lot of fun.

Canaria's got everything a good quest needs, with it's very gorgeous overworld being the big draw. In-fact, I hadn't played ZC in years but once I saw the screenshots, I knew I had to check it out. It was definitely a good quest to get back into the swing of things with.

However, after completing the quest in 20 hours and some change- I did have a few gripes which I'll get to but I want to say overall, this was a great quest !

PROS:
* The story behind the adventure is novel and not your regular save the princess shindig.
* As mentioned above: very pretty and very expansive world to explore, a lot for you to sink your teeth into.
* Combat felt very balanced and fair throughout- it's not something you consciously notice when done right but glaringly obvious when not. Great job !

CONS:
* The amount of backtracking and the general time-wasting mechanics (one-way doors, respawning enemies, etc.) really dampened my enjoyment truth be told. One-ways, "trap" rooms with respawns and backtracking are a ZC staple and are found in a majority of quests but I felt like they were really overdone here. At points it really felt like the quest had no respect for the player's time; it turned some of the very atmospheric dungeons into complete slogs which was a huge shame.
* Some puzzle mechanics got very boring- namely the red/blue orb puzzles. I think there were at least 5 (!) dungeons to my memory that used them, and three were in a row! Coincidentally, these orb puzzles also led to a lot of backtracking as, for the nth time, the path ahead is blocked because the red blocks are up instead of blue.
* This might be a personal gripe but a lot of the music choices felt a little strange to me. I felt some of them clashed with the mood the tiles were setting up but, as I said, that might just be my take on it. The biggest offender that stuck with me until endgame was Den of Flames. I felt like I was in a racing game while pushing very slow lava blocks.


All in all, I'd give this quest a solid 4/5. Definitely worth the pick-up.

I'm...conflicted on this one.

Good things first. The overworld is a gorgeous example of what can be done in GBC, full of secrets, and it's pretty fun to explore each area at least the first few times. The items in the first half of the game all open up at least a couple new paths and caves you've seen before. I think the story starts out well and some of the worldbuilding is interesting. (It doesn't get...bad, per se, but there's a point where it started to wear a bit thin for me. Just not that many developments, stretched over a long game, and some of the character's goals felt more meaningful to him than to me.) Whatever else I'm about to say, it's clear that a ton of love and effort went into this quest.

The dungeons are also very pretty, and I did like some of the later ones. But...for the most part, I didn't have much fun with them. The early ones in particular involve tracing over the same steps over and over, with F6ing disabled. The later ones felt better on that front, but there were only a few I liked? (Those would be Queen's Citadel, Tower of Inda, and kind of L8. (EDIT: listed L9 instead of 8 here by accident.) I liked the first half of L7 a lot but the second half soured it for me a bit.) And meanwhile, out of the first six, L4 was the only one never actively made me angry.

F6 is disabled in this quest, and the dungeons aren't really built to soften that. You spend a lot of time in transit. With a few lategame exceptions, you only get dungeon items after the boss, which also hurt their pacing a lot for me. It means you don't get that nice mid-dungeon sense of achievement for finding them, and also means most dungeons tend to have the same mechanics throughout. There is no warp system, and that beautiful overworld is quite large by the time you've explored it all.

These are all conscious decisions, and they amplify a million other tiny, careless little annoyances. Shortcuts being sparse. Kill all enemies rooms that you have to clear every time, twice as many times because no F6. A couple early dungeon gimmicks that boil down to "hitting this switch clears out some obstacle you saw somewhere else, now figure out what changed and walk back there." A lot of variance on the music picks, with some 20 second gameboy loops in long dungeons. (On the other end of the scale, L7's music was wonderful.) Having to switch to the power bracelet every time I want to break some pots for health. Boss cutscenes that replay every time you lose. Money not really mattering except if you get caught by a like-like, in which case, I found exactly one store on the entire map that sells shields. Superbombs, which aren't much better to replenish. Large swathes of ocean with a slow swim speed and limited places to dock. Backtracking. So so so much backtracking.

I stopped in an optional dungeon right before the final one, for something that should barely matter. Two bulky splitting enemies spawn right in front of the boss door, the boss was hard, I wanted to just fight the boss in peace and not keep having to slip past those stupid splitters without getting hit first every time I died. The quest isn't passworded. I could have erased them.

But that wasn't the real problem, you know?

Just finished playing this. Don't really have the energy to write a whole review, but basically quest good. It took me a second playthrough to really "get" it and I think a big part of the challenge there was in the conveyance. Once I actually knew where I was going the quest was a lot of fun.

Also take this award for "least infuriating quest with a save point system." It was honestly impressive how unintrusive the save mechanic felt.

loving the GBC style might check this out soon, will give a review when im done playing it