[5th Quest Entry] Love For Fire

[Nightmare]

OK, here's your review LFF:

Difficulty: 99/100

It's probably the most balanced quest I've played so far. A little ROMhackish towards the end though.

NES authenticity: 25/100
This is where you get hurt. The Fire Zols and Gels for one were never in a Zelda game. Second, the Longbow, why? Upgraded wand a little understandable, Mirror Shield a definite no-no. I didn't pick up a Fire Boomerang though, so you're lucky on that one. Also, there seemed to be no sense of enemy groups during the quest, you might want to work on this.

Fun Factor 90/100. This feels a lot like New Quest for better or worse built with today's Zelda Classic in mind. The Overworld definitely needs some work (it felt recycled too much), but the Magic Key gauntlet made you earn it. I might suggest putting something else in place of the Patra 2 and moving that to the room before Ganon for more tradition.

Overall Score: 71.3/100. It's not terrible, but I think some people definitely followed the reqs better and still put out a quality quest. To be fair this will probably burn my quest in the end too, so don't feel bad. Fun one.

-James

[Love For Fire]

Haha Fire Boomerang too OP, Don't think I'll ever put that in a quest again. Glad you enjoyed playing it and I'm happy the difficulty curve worked for the most part. Also glad someone was able to get to the magic key. It's tricky to balance adding new features/enemies, yet staying truly authentic. As it was built to be considerably more difficult than 2nd quest+, I wanted to reward people for trudging through by introducing more upgraded items, without throwing in things that were completely new like the Hook-shot. Pretty much every major enemy got an upgrade, so why not us? Yeah the longbow is kind of a filler item so I have all the later levels 4+ have two items each without doing something like removing the swords/rings/blue candle from the overworld shop.

I think part of the OW was from a misinterpretation of the rules that I thought all secret entrances must remain in the same location on a screen e.g. If the right bush was the burnable one on screen X, then the right bush must be the burnable one if you still want to put a secret on screen X, though the contents can be different. That's how I was interpreting it, if that's correct I could've done more in moving bombable walls, burnable bushes, etc. Unless of course you're just referring to the actual secret locations being mostly places that were important in the earlier quests and not in more obscure locations.

[Nightmare]

Here's how I got the Magic Key:

http://youtu.be/51HPdoNWfaE

Enjoy!

-James

[Love For Fire]

Nice video, and you're crazy for getting through that with the Blue Ring initially. If it looks too daunting to get don't worry, the key is optional and is more of a trophy for being a badass.

[Nightmare]

Nice video, and you're crazy for getting through that with the Blue Ring initially. If it looks too daunting to get don't worry, the key is optional and is more of a trophy for being a badass.

Yeah, I am insane, both playing wise and in real life.

-James

[Nightmare]

One more bug LFF: Lanmolas shouldn't drop anything except when they're dead. This is an NES quest.

-James

[Love For Fire]

Didn't catch that one with the Lanmolas thanks. How can you get stuck in the Money/Life room in Level 9 coming from the south?

I thought I already fixed the problem with Zelda O_o It's been ages since I've had to make a Zelda room. I think I was missing the flag 15

[bigboylink]

Note/disclaimer - I played the version that was modified on Dec 27 (per the Google Drive timestamp).

First off, some minor issues to report:

(1) Minor bug - In level 7, on the far east side of the level, the room that is one north of the 3 dodongos does not appear on the map.

(2) In level 6 it's theoretically possible to bypass the path to the boss key. When entering the boss key room from the west, a player could just use bombs to kill the blue darknuts. Not really a bug, but perhaps it'd be good to add another column of blue blocks to prevent clever players from taking advantage.

(3) In level 5, the warp in the SW corner makes it possible to finish the dungeon with an extra key (can be easily fixed by just warping the player back to start). Again this isn't really a bug, but I assume it's not intentional.

I managed to find all HCs except one. Care to tell me where the last one is located? Here are the ones I found in the overworld:

Spoiler: show

(1) Using the bracelet in the lost hills
(2) Where level 2 in the 2nd quest is
(3) Using the whistle in the graveyard
(4) Using the ladder where the river turns

Now my review of the quest:

Spoiler: show

This was very fun to play. You'll want to have the white sword before level 2. Level 3 is where the going can get tricky (blue wizzrobes), but there are no unfair (imo) fights - for instance, the room with two blue wizzrobes also contained a bubble, which prevented the wizzrobes from respawning. Without the blue ring, I found myself using bombs against blue wizzrobes (thankfully there's a bomb upgrade in level 3).

Note that level 3 contains goriyas, pols voice, and wizzrobes, so some NES-authenticity points get deducted for those enemy groups. For most of the remaining levels, there's lots of enemy mixing. For every quest competitor, this is going to be a delicate balance: on the one hand, less restrictive enemy groups provide a more diversified fighting experience; however, there are some quests that (imo) have managed to strike a good balance (BigJoe's and Nightmare's entries come to mind).

Some folks may feel that it's a pretty ballsy design choice to not give access to the blue ring until getting the bracelet in level 4 (nice touch to still have the bracelet under the armos btw). I sort of think/expect most of the people playing these quests can handle blue darknuts in their sleep, so level 4 is very do-able (I didn't have my first death until level 5). Whatever the winning entry is, it should (imo) be an appropriate sequel to the 3rd quest in terms of difficulty.

Pretty clever way to make the boomerang required to get the level 4 boss key. Later in the game the book is similarly required to progress (the room east of level 8's entrance).

As the old man says, level 5 basically requires the blue ring. Despite having the blue ring, the difficulty does pick up a bit here. You'll be fighting blue wizzrobes more regularly, with only a white sword. The pink stalfos with its triple swords is a nice touch (glad to not see folks not lazily slapping on the default stalfos-3 enemy). Having to dodge pols voice before getting the wand was fun. The appearance of firerobes and batrobes is starting to detract more NES-authenticity points at this point.

There are some questionable uses of keys within the dungeons. (Of course, it's possible to buy keys for 80 rupees, but I feel that should be used as a last resort; I understand if others feel differently.) Some of the optional items (longbow, blue boomerang) are hidden behind keyholes. In level 8, on the path to the super wand, there is a key behind the lock. In levels 5 and 9, the use of "life or money" rooms only lead to a small key (why not something more significant?)

In terms of difficulty, size, and secrets, levels 8 and 9 are great. The endgame of this quest is especially fun to play. The mirrorrobes in level 8 kicked my ass a few times, but after returning with a full potion, I was able to handle them (in level 8 the most we fight at a time is three, which is ok given only the blue ring...still tough though). In level 9 (nice overworld location btw), I found the passage to Ganon by accident (in the NE-most room, I think the statue is more sensitive to touch than the push-able blocks), but seeing that the statue faces the wrong way should be a sufficient hint, imo.

I admit that prior to starting this quest, your OP regarding the magic key piqued my curiosity - to that I say, bravo - I don't think I've seen any other quest competitor "require" the red candle in the way that you do ("require" in quotes since the key is indeed optional). A bit Armageddon-quest-ish imo, but it seems that several entries are getting clever with some features in level 9 (this is going to be the last "N-th quest", so that seems ok by me).

Overall, in terms of the contest, I think this quest falls in the middle of the pack relative to the other competitors that I've played so far (and I admit to some selection bias in which quests I've avoided, so you're technically higher than the middle of the pack). The difficulty is appropriate, and the quest's pacing is well done. However, keeping the contest in mind, I think there exists too much deviation from Zelda 1 (enemy groups, too many new items, batrobes + firerobes + mirrorrobes, block puzzles within dungeons, the bright blue & pink blocks in dungeons). That said, it's still a fun quest to play even without considering its status as a 5th quest competitor. Cheers.

[Love For Fire]

Thanks for the review and the bug fixes. I'm probably going to leave 3 alone given that in the original there were ways to skip through the dungeons with extra keys by bombing walls. Unfortunately the challenge in designing larger levels is key placement, and it's something I struggled with as I want the levels to have a non-linear feel to them. While there's a usual key -> item -> key -> item -> key -> boss key progression that's pretty standard, I wanted it feel more like you were exploring every corner to collect everything and that it wouldn't feel linear. With regards to the new enemies, we needed to add new enemies as part of the contest, so it felt more natural to add the different wizzrobe types than adding something completely different. I feel you on the enemy groups though (and that's something Nightmare addressed as well), but I think breaking those standard enemy groups made the game more enjoyable. To me nothing is more of a buzz kill than barely making it out of Level 7 alive from wizzrobes and then crushing Level 8 because its mostly super easy Goriyas. Level 6 and 7 in 1st Quest a pretty good example of that.

I'm glad you had fun playing it, as much as I'd like to win the contest, I'd rather have a quest that is challenging, fresh, and fun. From the feedback so far, I seem to have achieved that, so I'm happy no matter the outcome.

As for the last heart container (one of the first ones you can get)

Spoiler: show

Burn a bush to the right of the lost woods. In the 1st there was a 100 rupee bonus here

[justin1]

finally got around to finishing this quest. level 9 was really good. i was probably playing an older version because the bugs that were reported already in this thread were still there (no zelda flag, the push block goriya room in the top row didn't open shutters).

i've played through a bunch of these quests now, and i feel that the dungeons in this quest are the best of the contest. sure there are some authenticity issues with enemy groups, new items and the puzzles but i enjoyed the quest more than the more authentic entries. i don't think it would be too difficult to fix the enemy groupings while maintaining difficulty. and dropping the mirror shield, mirrorrobes and firerobes is easy. the new tiles (magic blocking blocks, magic eliminating floor tiles, etc) i'm ok with. the push block floor puzzles were neat but were a little out of place, if there were more puzzles in the game they would fit better, and why recycle the same puzzle into the next dungeon? they were also too easy to just brute force, both times i found the solution after solving.

this quest remains one of my favourites of the contest, its a shame it'll loose out based on authenticity.