The Legend of Zelda (Solarus Edition)

"The Legend of Zelda (Solarus Edition)" is, well, that.
It evokes a lot of nostalgia and it already had me on its hook once I started the game and heard the fairy fountain music. My god!
So it's an oldschool zelda fan-game with rips and similar graphic design (A Link to the Past-style, to be precise). I haven't actually played those back in the day, being a young'un I started on N64 and while I did play The Minish Cap and a few things here and there, I have played only very little of the genre.

This version here is a solid entry of a very densely packed world filled with dungeons and treasures to proceed from one to another. However, while you can follow the chains of dungeons well and the majority of the game is paced fast and very enjoyably so, you can also easily miss things and go on without them to only later find yourself in a tough spot (like lacking armor). It's a fun addition at times but I found a few a little frustrating.
The dungeon design feels a little haphazardly put into the grasslands - there is only one big plain from which to access all things - be it deep caves, a magma temple, or an ice palace.
And later dungeons felt a little small and rushed compared to the pace and care I felt in the earlier ones.


It's a late screenshot, whatcha gonna do about it?

Jumping into the game you are greeted by a pretty town. Well, that, and that Zelda is needing help for some reason, and you might as well do it for one reason or another. You know the drill. I didn't really like conversations with townfolks, they seemed more like jerks and nobody else existed in this world (other than a lovely witch selling overpriced, useless potions you could easily replace with ever-abundant fairies).
The graphical fidelity is easy to spot and most areas are pretty to look at, a few dungeons (mainly the spikey ones) have a more utilitarian design and only the water passages look a little bare (specifically the one waterfall map as it is cut off at the sides).

Off to adventure!

You already see two caves and a heart shard trapped inside a boulder wall right after leaving your room.
Too bad you are only equipped with a shield (whatever carrying a shield without the ability to block anything with it is supposed to do), so on to find something else you go. Now being the clutz I am when it comes to finding the obvious, I missed the most important two items right at the start, and I searched every spot (I thought) missing those two.
For one, the sword. It's right outside town, on a cliff, they told me, only I thought it was the one going upwards as I followed the beaten path and was supposed to not follow the beaten path but go somewhere else. After a futile struggle, collecting enough money via pottery to buy a bottle (they sell those invalueable things here!) and making a mental note on every cave I encountered, I finally aquired my sword and could cut things. Wonderful!

Sad discovery, my sword does not cut pottery. It goes right through them. Perhaps Link is taller than I thought.


I will forever miss the sound of pottery breaking. Throwing it doesn't make that satisfying sound, either.

Alright! With a sword I could do something. Maybe. Except you can't, really. You need a bow, duh. I think there is a cave you can pass without one, but anything after that? Nope. I tried. You can actually trick the system by throwing a pot at something instead of using a bow, but then you are stuck afterwards.
I completely missed a nice inviting passageway when I stood right in front of it. And there was the bow. I actually wrote up the creator to ask for help.
Did I mention I tend to miss the obvious?

The Fights

Fighting is pretty straightforward and simple - hit until they die. Done. Just spam that attack button. Your attacks also reach through walls, and there are plenty opportunities to take advantage of that.
Now, there is a variety of enemies here and one bounces you back if you hit them which, combined with environmental damage tiles, makes for an interesting addition and way to fight. Or lacking that, seem a little odd.
The only difficult enemies to fight, bar the boss monsters, are orcs. Because they deflect your attack if you hit their sword first. And since they are also the fastest charging creature, repositioning is difficult. They also happen to be the strongest dungeon creatures later on with nothing else but them crawling around, ugh. Thankfully you can use your prized possessions to deal with them more easily.

Boss fights follow the tried and tested use a certain mechanic to deal with them-method. They are immune to some attacks but receptive to others, and I really liked one where you could actually find ways to block their fire attacks between your attacks.
Most of them were pretty easy with the last few having a power spike. You try a few things until something works and keep going from there. With a constant supply of fairies, you had a lot of leeway for most of them and did not need to dodge every single attack as long as you hit them well enough.
The last one frankly felt like a battle of resources as it was virtually impossible to dodge it all as the attacks became so fast and frequent, and your only hope was killing them before you ran out of health/fairies. It was not fun, and I did not feel accomplished killing them. I just felt lucky I survived with two hearts (a oneshot).

Progression

The bigger satisfaction playing this game came from the sheer notion of covering ground, growing stronger and getting more loot. Oh yes, loot. Give me that bomb bag, please. And quiver.

After I overcame my initial hurdles of not finding the starting point, I progressed smoothly and nicely, picked up more hearts, went from one dungeon to the next and was happy with my life.
I picked up some big bags for my weaponary (which hold 99 bombs or arrows, which is frankly .. too many in my opinion, also given that there were exactly three moments where I needed to use bombs in the entire game), killed innocent orcs, ended up ignoring them everywhere I went as any good adventurer does, hoppped over grass and collected things.
There are a few things hidden under grass that I only picked up later on, but that are not really necessary to proceed either.
As a side note, it is a little odd that there are at times cliffs you can jump from (also into the water), but only at one tile of the many you see with the others simply not working. That felt a little odd, but it was clear that you needed to go there so you tried until it worked.

The difficulty did pick up as the monsters started hitting harder, but it only really hit me for the last two dungeons. One enemy taking 2/3 of your health is pretty scary, and frustrating.
Now I feel the density is already very high and I looked out more for the actual dungeon entries and to which to go next then rechecking or destroying every patch of grass. Which apparantly is recommended.


Did I get everything? Probably not. Will I ever fill this all? Nope.

The bigger reason your progress or what you need to get at that point is hard to gauge is because your inventory is standardized, but not made for this exact game. You will not fill it up, period. There is also a thing for heart shards when you only ever find full containers.
You also have one armor slot, why would you need to get better ones? Why would you know it even exists? (I remember armor more being a speciality thing. Like the Zora one to breathe underwater or the red one to survive the heat of a volcano. But that's the OoT experience talking). I did remember reinforced hearts that practically doubled your hearts, but I did not know there are ways to increase your defense.
Apparantly there is also a better weapon to be found somewhere, looking at screenshots, though I could not tell you where and I beat it, so I am content.

This game did not really make me want to be a completionist, because I frankly don't feel the desire to overturn every single patch of grass, and I wouldn't even know if there even is anything to find. So if I could proceed in the dungeon, I thought I was set.

The puzzles on the other hand were easy and straightforward enough to grasp quickly, but had enough variety to be fun. You often needed to combine different items and use older ones in conjunction with newer ones.
There are places where you need to study the map to fall down where you need to, try out different teleporters, not only use the bow to hit buttons but also be mindful of your positioning so you can be fast enough to run where you need to be while the arrow was still flying and other fun things. It changed it up, and I particularily liked the different sense of pace I got with the bow puzzles.

I feel I talked a lot about other things because I am more conscious about them, but I really enjoyed the puzzles in this game. I usually suck at full-on puzzlers and I like the milder variety the usual Zelda game has. This is no exception. There was one place I was struggling with, but just as I was about to take a break I got it and could continue.

So it feels a little hard to judge for me, because the whole point is to search for things on your own, but if you do not know they exist, or that you would need them, then why would you continously search everything when you can already proceed where you know you need to be?
It didn't help that the last few dungeons seemed odd, a little ugly (the blocks for the hookshot were .. everywhere and looked very out of place and forced to use the gimmick one and one last time).

The last dungeon has two big artifacts lying around on the ground for you to conveniently pick up, it also so happened that the first one was a power glove to lift heavy boulders with. And it just so happened that the best reaction to getting it is turning around, leaving the dungeon, and going to a different small one which you can now reach so you can pick up better armor so the orcs there can't two-shot you.
I understand it's all about discovering new paths, or rather every nook and cranny, but that right there is very unintuitive. And no other dungeon quite worked like that.
(there is an armor elsewhere as well, though I only found that one later. It overrides the one you were wearing tho I am not sure which one is better at this point).

All in all:

I liked the majority of it. I hated the start and the ending, but mainly because I was screwing myself over.
I really enjoyed the densely packed world, relying on my wonderful memory of dungeon places and going from one place to the next. I do feel there is a lot that could be polished up, but I think it is a solid game.