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Where's my Blue Ring, Ratty?!

The Legend of Zelda: The Last Hero is a Zelda fan game made in the Zelda Classic engine, created by Ratty524 for 2015's No-RM Contest. The rules of the contest were to create a game in one month with any engine except RPG Maker. Fans of the original The Legend of Zelda might find something to enjoy here.

The story is fairly simple. A misguided sorcerer has accidentally pulled Ganon and Princess Zelda into the land of Skyrule, where Ganon managed to usurp control of the kingdom in about ten minutes. Finding their own heroes incapable of vanquishing Ganon, the people of Skyrule have summoned Link to recover Skyrule's Triforce and give Ganon the boot.

The game from here plays out similarly to the first Zelda game. Grab your sword and set out to find the six hidden Temples, where useful treasure, monsters, and a Triforce piece await.

TWO water dungeons? This time you've gone too far, Ganon!



The game departs from the first Zelda in a few key ways. The addition of bushes and grass to the overworld makes finding hearts, bombs, arrows and rupees much easier than the original game. In Zelda 1, if you needed money or bombs, you had to man up and go find something to kill for it. In The Last Hero money practically falls from the sky, and there's generally less to spend it on (you only need to buy one item to complete the game) so rupees feel less useful here, although you better be prepared to shell some out to the fortune tellers at some point. It does make the overworld feel a little safer to romp around and explore. Dungeons aren't as forgiving, so it makes for an okay balance.

At first, The Last Hero feels painfully linear compared to Zelda 1's completely open structure, but once you complete the first dungeon you actually do have a fair amount of freedom in what order you do the remaining five temples, and you still need to explore the overworld very thoroughly to succeed; many of Link's iconic tools are hidden there, and you'll need all of them at one point or another to finish the game. Most are from Zelda 1, but a few other items like the Flippers and the Roc's feather round out Link's arsenal a little.

Dungeons are switched up a bit from the source material, with different patterns of enemies populating the dungeons. Whereas Zelda 1 focused mostly on fighting monsters to progress, The Last Hero focuses much less on fighting and more on environmental hazards, puzzle solving and clever use of your items. You won't run into any rooms filled with Darknuts, and there's only one blue wizzrobe in the entire game. The game doesn't have a blue ring (at least not that I found) and the game has heart pieces rather than heart containers, so Link's health is more of an issue in the early game and enemies and traps in the mid-game do tend to deal rather ludicrous amounts of damage. Finding the red mail in the fifth dungeon quickly swings things back in the other direction and you'll probably have to go out of your way to actually die.

While I appreciate the change in focus and generally find the early temples to be solidly designed, the later ones tend to involve widespread bombing of every wall in the dungeon in order to find ways to progress, and at one point you're required to actually walk through an ordinary wall. Did you even know you could do that? I didn't. The game does perhaps overuse decorative objects in dungeons, and while it looks nice it further obfuscates puzzle solving since you aren't always sure when you should be pushing a block or when it's just for decoration.

Avoiding obstacles like spike pits while also fighting enemies sometimes requires some really awkward item juggling since only the Feather allows you to bypass some traps but some other item is required to fight enemies. Finally, one dungeon relies on a series of traps that repeatedly send you back to the dungeon entrance. It's really neat the first time, not so much the fifth. This same dungeon also has Wallmasters, just to add insult to injury.

Get used to seeing this room.



The bosses are mostly the same ones from Zelda 1, but usually paired with some sort of environmental obstacle where you'll need to use one or more of your items to succeed. And there is at least one new enemy waiting for you.

The Last Hero takes the classic Zelda formula and tries to put a new spin on it. In some cases it works well, but it's held back by some rather obtuse puzzle solving in the later dungeons. The game lacks a true final dungeon, and the overworld is smaller than Zelda 1's as well, so all in all this game is probably about 2/3's the size of the source game. For fans of class Zelda, a quick romp through Skyrule just might bring back some fond memories.

AHHHHHHHHHHHH

Posts

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Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
You can find the blue ring by opening up Zelda Classic's cheat console.
The cheat you need to type in is ZiggyBaggyDoo. It's a secret to everybody!

Jokes aside, yeah, this was pretty much my first attempt at an actual Zelda game. I think as evidenced by how many people posted questions asking for directions in even the overworld map of this game, my biggest faux-pas was overusing obtuse puzzle-solving and relying on that to carry most of the game.

Did you know you could poke your sword against walls to find out which is bombable, just like the Gameboy Zelda games? If you didn't, I can't blame you since I probably should have communicated that somewhere as well.

Thank you for the review! I've learned quite a bit from your feedback as well as others.
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
I was most of the way through the game before I even realized you could use the spin attack, so no, I never knew you could tap the walls.
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