The Legend of Zelda - Parallel Worlds

Warning: what you are about to read is the opinion of a seasoned A Link to the Past speedrunner. Consequently, I have much greater ease and advanced knowledge of the game engine (the very same used for Parallel Worlds). Therefore, my perception of difficulty will certainly be altered compared to your experience.

Zelda Parallel Worlds is a game where you feel that a tremendous amount of work has been put in. Whether it's the reskinning of various sprites, or simply the overall level design. The guy still churned out two complete overworlds, 10 labyrinthine dungeons, and a very special dungeon in the Parallel Tower with a rather unique mechanic. One thing is certain: Euclid (and Seph, if he was already accompanying him even before the first release of the hack) did not rest on his laurels.

The overworld part is EXCELLENT. The level design is well-constructed, with that Metroidvania aspect where you unlock areas to explore as you obtain items in dungeons, just like in good Zelda games we love. If you add to that the fact that bosses don't drop heart containers, and the only way to increase your health bar is solely by searching for heart pieces, you realize that this is a game that wants to push you to explore. And its level design makes the exploration experience very enjoyable.

But here we are facing a hack from 2006. The era of I Wanna Be The Guy, the golden age of Kaizo Mario... These were the early days of amateur games, which would later become independent games. But like all beginnings, there are flaws, and here it's about difficulty. We are facing a difficulty that sometimes borders on the absurd, which is even often unfair, and which frustrates. For example, right from the beginning of the game, there are dark rooms with Medusa statues shooting fireballs at you from 4 or 5 different directions, all with holes everywhere to make dodging these fireballs very difficult. And this without a shield, because it's very early in the game.

Let's also mention something that was corrected in later versions: the fact that when you die in the GuardHouse (the very first dungeon of the game, the equivalent of Hyrule Castle and its dungeons in ALTTP), you would restart at the very beginning of the game without any save and had to redo everything. That's also Zelda Parallel Worlds.

In contrast to the pleasant overworld exploration, all this sadism and injustice take place in the dungeons. From the very first one, where you face a mini-boss that turns out to be an infernal HP sponge, and if you have the misfortune to die on the boss a little later, you restart at the beginning of the dungeon, and the mini-boss is there again. Dungeons favor cramped spaces, where you have very little room to maneuver. Every excuse is good to place a hole here, a spike there, enemies to make the game lag, fireballs shooting at you at such irregular intervals that it's impossible to appreciate any timing. And all of it, most of the time, in complete darkness, without the possibility of turning on a light to see a little more clearly.

But if everything I'm telling you here is still bearable most of the time, provided one has a bit of patience, the climax is reached in the Parallel Tower. A dungeon of absurd length and difficulty that personally made me lose my temper, even though I had been particularly calm throughout the experience. See Hera's Tower in ALTTP? You take the same principle (if you fall into a hole, you fall back to a lower floor) but you multiply the suffering by 1000 because each floor is long, difficult, unfair, and sometimes you have to wait unnecessarily (special mention to the room with the Moldorm + 4 sets of tiles to wait for combo). All this to then put you in an impossible-to-understand labyrinth a little later, and even later block you if you haven't collected all the keys scattered throughout the overworld, forcing you to leave the tower to go back to exploring. And this tower, you'll have to do it 2 times (3 times in an earlier version!!).

Enemies, on the other hand, have seen their resistance and the damage they inflict modified. Guards, in particular, are much faster, and it becomes more difficult to dodge them (which is a nightmare in the GuardHouse since you have nothing to defend yourself with, no sword). Bosses, meanwhile, are recycled everywhere but quite often revisited with twists that are still interesting.

Dungeons, besides being infamous in many rooms (you'll be facing Beamos and Medusa), are very labyrinthine, and this is not unpleasant: there are some very successful dungeons, like Sheik Hideout, or Darunia's Cavern. The latter even features music that doesn't exist in Zelda 3, and which is a remix of the Zelda 1 dungeon theme! (the entire dungeon is an ode to Zelda 1 dungeons, by the way) Other dungeons have concepts that are very good on paper, but in practice make the dungeon tedious to navigate (hello Nabooru's Hole).

As for the final battle, I won't spoil it, but it's excellent. Something happens in this fight that makes the ending truly epic and surprising at times.

Also a small point on the game's identity: it borrows heavily from OOT, especially in the design of the different sprites: thus Link will successively possess the Deku Shield, Hylian Shield, and Mirror Shield from OOT, the small fairies will be little Navis, and there is even a puzzle that requires having played OOT and knowing an element by heart that is not necessarily the most obvious. This was obviously a bad idea, although it stemmed from a good intention, and the (too) many references to OOT ultimately make it a game that lacks visual identity.

Regarding the story, it's not very interesting, and that's not what we're looking for anyway, even if it has the merit of creating something new with what already exists.

Special mention to the 2nd quest, one of the game's secrets, which, while almost identical to the first most of the time, still holds some welcome surprises, and I really enjoyed the ending (which you can see in video here).

In short, I think this review has been long enough. If you deeply love ALTTP, at least take the trouble to try this hack. If you are allergic to difficulty, I would rather redirect you to the Remodel version (we'll talk about it right after), which, even if it loses a large part of the dungeons' interest, offers a much less frustrating and much more easily completable experience than its base version. In any case, this game is worth trying at least once, if only for its overworld, which is truly amazing.