A Legend of Zelda: Hero's Destiny (2018)

A Legend of Zelda: A Hero’s Destiny is a fan game developed by Davenport for Rpg Maker 2003… You can proceed to start running away now.

…Still here? Oh boy. You’ll also find that this game is utterly confused about its identity and just barely relates to anything that makes The Legend of Zelda what it is. You’ll realize this the moment you even download the game, as its title switches from “A Hero’s Destiny” to “New Legend of Zelda” in the game’s folder, then to "The Four Towers" in the game's header and finally to “Zelda ABS” on the title screen… How on Earth are you not terrified? Run, run away NOW!!

In all seriousness, though, this game isn’t terrible by any means. It’s also not good by any means, either. From its bare-bones plot, the RM2k ABS controls, mismatch of graphics and underwhelming dungeons, THE Legend of Zelda: A Hero’s Destiny (aka LoZ: The Four Towers aka LoZ ABS) lies somewhere on the lower end of complete mediocrity.

STORY


You really can’t expect a Zelda game to have anything compelling or heavy in depth. The plot of this game is that Ganon’s screwing around and Link needs to stop him. There is also some corrupt official royal official who works for him and some stuff about the Zora King, but I could hardly find any factor that connects these extra side-stories with the main plot whatsoever.

Of course, in order to reach Ganon in the first place, you have to find the three Pendants of Virtue and nab the Master Sword, then travel to the Darkworld, where Ganon resides, and give him a beat down. Unless you really haven’t played any Zelda game at all, this is the exact same plot as in Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, only there are no maids to save and it severely lacks any kind of structure the original game had.

Heck, that plot I just told you was mostly inferred, because right as you start the game, you are plopped right in Kakariko Village with no introduction or anything. You only find out that you need to collect some pendants by talking to the village elder; just imagine if you didn’t do this at the start.

GAMEPLAY


The flaws with the storyline are trivial compared to the actual game.

To start off with what’s good, LoZ: Hero’s Destiny/Four Towers/ABS features a massive overworld chock full of distinctive areas and secrets to discover, along with a relatively non-linear progression to boot. This is a basic requirement of any Zelda game that was fulfilled wonderfully. Unfortunately, your main character, Link, traverses this large overworld at a speed even a tortoise would laugh at. Top it off with incredibly clunky ABS controls with the poor collision detection that just about every RM2k ABS is notorious for. Suddenly, your foundation for a solid Zelda fan game just took an uppercut to the groin.

To the author’s credit, however, the inherent flaws with RM2k’s ABS is alleviated to a degree. Enemies are sparsely distributed, if at all, on the overworld map and dungeons, and most if not all of them die in one hit. This seems like a solution on paper, as the common frustration with RM ABS' comes from dealing with an onslaught of enemies with poor controls, but it only creates a new problem, one that ultimately plagues the game as a whole: almost every obstacle you encounter in the game is rendered moot, and the game is devoid of both life and challenge.

This is solidified by the fact that enemies don’t respawn in this game at all, much unlike the predecessors its trying to imitate. Once an enemy goes down, it will leave and forever stay as a heart that you can collect to refill your health. Oh, and those secret areas and goodies? They are so badly hidden that even the Heart Pieces (a series staple which are known for being a challenge to find), which this game touts as something “only a true hero can find” is as about as accessible as your local grocery store. There are no special items nor any critical thinking you need to find the hidden areas in the game, just go down the right path or slash a random bush. Eventually, you’ll come to a point where the only way you could possibly get a “game over” is either by encountering those scummy instant-kill scenarios (yes, they unfortunately exist), the game crashing due to some missing sound file (also exists), or you get so bored out of your mind that you quit the game to play something else (which unfortunately happened to me after playing through a large portion of this game).

“Hold the phone, Ratty,” you say. “Aren't dungeons the best thing about Zelda?” Yes, indeed, and fortunately that’s an area this game actually does well, to an extent. The dungeons you encounter in Hero’s Destiny/Four Ohfortheloveofgodyougetthepicture are surprisingly pretty competently designed compared to the rest of the game, and some of them are indeed tricky and have unique challenges. However, anything good about the dungeons is marred by the repetition of boring, brainless stock puzzles that were thrown in the game with no thought. Whereas the professional level design teams of the real Zelda games were smart enough to drop the simplistic “push a block somewhere to reveal a key” puzzle, by the time the second or so dungeon is encountered, Hero’s Destiny (let’s just stick with that title…) has a fetish for them. Almost every dungeon has these same kind of puzzles with very little variation to them. They’re boring, they require almost no thought, and they only drown out the fun brought by the actually interesting aspects about the dungeon, let alone ruin that dungeon's overall potential.

Worse yet, the roster of dungeons in this game contains some stinkers. The first temple you encounter in the game is unremarkable in every aspect, which every room filled with push-block puzzles that take you on a one-way trip to snoresville; setting a pretty bad precedent for the entire game if the other dungeons that followed didn’t make up for it with their interesting concepts (I LOVED this game’s iteration of the Tower of Hera). One of the end-game dungeons is just a gigantic maze with long corridors and no obstacles whatsoever, and you know how fun that is with Link’s slow walking speed in this game.

Don’t get excited about the dungeon bosses, either. Want to see RM2k’s iteration of Moldorm, Dodongo, or Gohma in this game? Too bad, you instead get a shrimpy Grim Reaper type of enemy, who looks like he belongs in another game, for every single dungeon leading up to Ganon. It doesn’t even vary its movement pattern, just the default “random” movement RPG Maker provides. BOR-ING!

As you’d expect of a Zelda-like game made in RPG Maker 2003, the game has a lot of bugs and a lack of general coherency with its design. For some reason you can enter the Dark World even at the beginning of the game, and it turns you into a rabbit just like the original game, but you can still use your sword, which also displays the human graphic for Link as oppose to the rabbit, even though the game implies that you are suppose to be defenseless without the Moon Orb, just like LttP. There are homes where you can’t slash with your weapon, but others where you can. You have purchasable healing items in the form of red, green, and blue colored potions, and while each of them serve a distinct purpose in the original game, they only do one thing in Hero’s Destiny: heal you. Ironic, considering that the game even includes a magic meter as a part of its HUD! The bomb and arrow slots on the HUD, similarly, don't do anything and are just there to try to trick me into thinking this game even remotely resembles The Legend of Zelda.

Likewise, there are just as many things in this game that serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever other than to be weird, as there are things that help with the game's design. One Super Mario Boo enemy (that’s literally what it is. May I remind you that this is a Zelda game?) that inhabits a dungeon patrols a route, pretending to be an obstacle. Touching it will reveal to you, however, that the enemy does nothing but make a freaky laugh and disappear. Just… what?

AUDIO/VISUALS


If the gameplay doesn’t manage to drive you insane, the game’s graphics and visuals will. While the mapping is competent by Zelda standards, the game seems to go through a continual identity crisis between being the style of Link to the Past, RTP, some other kind of obscure JRPG rips, Link’s Awakening, and MS Paint, all while the main character has the Minish Cap iteration of Link’s sprite design.

The use of animations to get the full frames of Link’s sword slashing is impressive, but it can be obviously seen once you enter a dark, tinted room as the animation suddenly lights up. Probably the worst art crime committed in this game is the excessively bright flashing effect that happens every time you collect a rupee. When these items are spread about in a room, prepare to experience some serious optical pain.

The music mainly consists of midis and a few tracks from LttP, which fortunately don’t clash as bad as the graphics. What’s ridiculous, however, is how the game includes several different iterations of the same theme throughout the overworld that switch between each other without any kind of context. Why not just stick with one overworld theme? Sound effects were competent minus the instances where dogs made cat sounds…

OVERALL

A Legend of Zelda: Hero’s Destiny is surprisingly competent. What I mean by that is that I expected this game to be utterly abysmal, but it turned out to be merely boring and mediocre at best. Even if you are developing a non-Zelda game, variety and challenge are important factors to making a good game, and Hero’s Destiny falls short on both. To those looking for a solid, classic LoZ experience, go pick up an Emulator or load up the Virtual Console, download and play A Link to the Past. After all, Hero’s Destiny offers nothing different from that game, let alone gets it right. It does have dogs that meow, however, and dancing pond dolphins, if those are big pluses for you.

2.5
Mediocre