Today I played "The Legend of Super Mario" a hack of the original Legend of Zelda by NesDraug, who is quickly becoming one of my fave NES hackers, he also made that wonderful Ninja Turtles themed Mario hack I posted about a few weeks back.
Unlike that game though, this is a full length Zelda adventure, but it's themed after Super Mario Bros, mostly the NES Trilogy, the only thing I can recall that didn't appear on the NES, was the super feather, which acts as Mario's defense upgrades in this game. Even the music in this game is Mario themed, but with a bit of a Zelda flow to it. And this really goes a long way with rom hacks, it's selling the illusion that you're playing something resembling an official NES game.
I am not sure if this says more about my Zelda skills or more about this games balance, but I didn't die once when playing, I have been known to successfully complete no death runs in Zelda 1 multple times, but I feel like health drops were plentiful, I didn't even use the one potion I found. There's also more heart containers than you actually need in the game.
Knoweldge of Zelda 1 did help me quite a bit, but I did need to look up how to get to one dungeon. I don't know if the game clued me in to it's location, or if I was meant to intuit it, I don't know that I would have found it myself without looking it up, as it's a very "trial and error" kind of thing.
I've played several Zelda romhacks, but rarely do I finish the full conversions. Just Outlands, Legend of Banjo, and one or two randomizers, the rest have been QOL hacks. So, the fact that I could finish this in one single day and didn't feel like I needed to take a break after a bit of progress really speaks highly of this hack. I would recommend old school Zelda fans who also love Mario to check this out. It's very much worth your time.
