by Malfeasinator » Sun Jul 23, 2017 10:00 pm
I played the first Zelda game yesterday, and beat it today. I have this problem where I try to be a completionist but I always end up beating the first quest while I'm missing something.
The first time I ever beat the game, when I was a kid, I had 14 out of the 16 possible hearts, and those were just all the ones I could find.
Today, I couldn't even get the Red Ring. The rings, for people who don't know what I'm talking about, halve the damage you take. You start off wearing green clothes, and you take normal damage. You can buy a Blue Ring, and that makes all the damage you take get cut to 50%. The Red Ring takes it down another 50% (note: not to zero; 50% of what it was when you wore the Blue Ring). It's one of the two special items in Level 9. The other one is the Silver Arrow, which is definitely needed to win.
I didn't have the map of the stage and suddenly I was like "Oh crap! Ganon! Guess I'm doing this." I did the thing and won, but I still felt like I was missing out. A lot of stage 9 wasn't filled out; it's supposed to look like a Skull when it's finished. I had nothing like that going on. I won but the feeling felt hollow.
Now it's time for the 2nd Quest. I hate the second quest with a passion. I mean I've beat it, but it's tougher. Besides almost everything being rearranged, the game throws some messed up junk your way, like:
1. A red and blue orb thing - the red orb hits you, you lose your sword, and have to get hit by the blue orb to get it back again. They don't do damage, but it's a real pain when there's only red orbs on the screen and you have to find the room with the blue orbs to feel whole again.
2. Harder enemies, much earlier on. Yeah, I like having a room full of things I have to hit 8 times, like right off the bat.
3. More old guys robbing you. In the first quest, the worst you'd get is someone mad that you blew up or burned down the door to their house, and they'd charge you 20 rupees. In the levels, there are secret rooms sometimes where an old guy will demand 50 rupees or a permanent loss of a heart to leave the room. If you show up with less than 50 rupees, you'll probably just want to reset.
4. There are secret walk-through walls, and most of them are one way. They don't look any different than the normal walls, so you have to keep pushing on everything and seeing what gives.
5. Sometimes the secret walk-through walls lead to the old guys robbing you.
So yeah, I hate it. I also don't remember where all the stuff is, like I usually do in the first quest, so I have to do more of a brute force search. Or I could look it up on GameFAQS, but that's for chumps.
edit: I also tried doing a Swordless run for the first quest. I got bored of it. After beating a couple levels I'm just like "man, forget this."
Also, another thing to hate on 2nd quest: You have to use the flute in your searching for things. In the first quest, the flute was just something you used for travel or to find a new stage, in the second, you have to use it on a lot of screens to find stuff, and unfortunately, the things you find don't stay found like they do when you move a rock or blow something up or burn something to reveal it. So it's like, you get the flute early on, and you try it everywhere. Everywhere.