Took 5 hours 49 minutes, enjoyed every second of it! Played with a friend and 100% completed.
Nice! I recently played it, too.
I don’t want to brag, but I’m totally going to… I also got every achievement on RetroAchievements.org in the process. I’m super proud of that. It was incredibly difficult!
Check out some of the achievements:
https://retroachievements.org/game/1454
Some are just “play the game”, but then you have to “beat” both quests without ever getting a sword. I use quotes there because you can’t beat Ganon without the Magical Sword, so the achievement is to get to his room. And there are some really hard one-room achievements like killing a bunch of blue Darknuts with only bombs, and killing each boss hitless. Gleeok was a pain in the ass.
Plus ones like beat the game with no deaths. You can actually die, but you have to hit Retry and lose all your progress since your last save, which means you have to save manually once in a while. I lost an entire dungeon and some rupee grinding from a death one time. Ugh. In all, I ended up beating the game about 5 times to get all the achievements.
At any rate, if you want to torture yourself, try to get them all! 😄 You just need an RA compatible emulator and an RA account.
Retro Achievements is a really cool service, and I feel like no one knows about it. I didn’t know about it until a Twitch streamer mentioned it.
Ok, that’s REALLY cool! I use an everdrive with the original hardware but maybe someone made a romhack. Either way, bosses hitless sounds like a real PITA like you said. Can’t imagine beating Gohma hitless lol
Gohma was super easy. I walked into the room, let loose one arrow, and he instantly died! 😂
Sorry, meant Patra
I recently played through this on an emulator on my iPad. Couldn’t imagine not having save states. I remember watching my dad beat this when I was like 5 years old. He was a hero to that day. Watching him go though the last dungeon was intense af.
Nice, congrats! I did that earlier this year as well. Was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. 😅
This game gets really tough! 🫡 to anyone that can beat it, with a guide and two people it took nearly 6 hours. Probably my favorite game on the nes, it just feels so grandiose and huge.
I never beat it. Didn’t even try though. Just tipped my toe in the water for a couple of screens after being fed up with the octoroks ^^. As someone who completed it, would you say that, structurally, it’s more akin to BotW in its openess than the “normal” mainline zelda games before they went open world with BotW? That’'s what i heard at least.
Huge jump between the original and later titles. This game really does feel huge and the dungeons might be better that BoTW. More secrets than later games and a ton of different areas. It feels super good to get acquainted with the map and actually figure out where you’re going without a guide. Combat is pretty good too, although the knockback is somewhat broken with certain enemies (looking at you, gibdo). Planning order of operations is a big one for me too (i.e “first I’ll get the heart piece, then stick up on bombs, then hit dungeon 5”) and makes the game a real challenge. Just use a guide for the later sections of the overworld. Getting to 5 is pretty much impossible without a hint. It’s worth picking back up again if you have the time.