Bring Potions, Boots, and Bombs! Let's Play The Legend of Zelda: Parallel Worlds

Yeah I am just watching the video now. Next time I will watch before I speak.

But anyways, laser eyes are DUM

I say Ruto's Fortress, because relatively easy blue mail is the best thing. Assuming it actually works, and isn't just a sprite recolor, which I wouldn't put past Euclid.

Spoiler tags in the future, please

I vote Saria's Gardens because I have got to see what those conveyor belts are about.

I thought the same way. Gross!

I vote we start with the one that's the least bullshit.

I vote we start with Sheik's Hideout, because it's not Parallel Worlds if it isn't bullshit.

Impa's (wild) Way(s), please. Then Darunia's Cavern, because I love Zelda 1 but I'm morbidly fascinated to see how Euclid fucks its rotting corpse.

I don't like you. I watched one of your videos and you sound almost exactly like me. I will find you, and I will fight you. You are a dead man.

Oh man, I thought exactly the same thing. It's like that's the Zelda LP voice.

Still catching up on my LPs... I'll throw in a vote ofr Darunia's Cavern sooner rather than later for fun(?) Zelda1 times.

I second (or twelfth, I'm not really keeping track) this motion.

Bit off topic, but is the Cane of Somaria used anywhere for anything? Do the blocks stop lasers? Though, I imagine it's moot in Sheik's hideout, since they're firing from both directions.

Yes, the Cane of Somaria is required in a couple places in the endgame dungeon and makes several other spots easier to manage. The lasers are pretty much only avoided by either the Cane of Byrna or the Magic Cape.

Anyways, Screenshots and video are pretty much done and recorded for the next update. All I'm waiting on is to get together with my guest and to actually write out the written LP stuff.

Saria's Gardens sound like fun.

Well, this took me a little while. Those around #talkingtime may be somewhat aware that this update took me forever to write. In truth, it took me somewhere in the realm of five days to actually finish. It's not like this is a particularly long or uneventful update, I just didn't have the will to put it into words. Anyways, enjoy the show.

In video form, I have special guest Demoweasel of Zombies Ate My Neighbors and Plok fame. He's also a pretty awesome dude and it was awesome having him stick with me for thirty minutes of sheer agony.

Part 19


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In such a cold, dark world, how is a man supposed to live? Last time we got two medallions, a sword upgrade, the boomerang, the bow, and five heart containers.



Gannon had enough snow for one lifetime and he had learned from the Hunter’s bed that the forest was a good place to look for something good. There were rumors that the forest was a warmer place and those rumors were mostly true. When he had arrived, he discovered that the forest actually had the power of fire. It was the perfect self-defense.

The next dungeon is located in the same place that the Halls of PAIN are in the Light World. Are you ready for this? I hope you are because...



Upon his arrival at Saria’s Gardens, Gannon discovered that there was little more than Beamos Statues and spikes to greet him. This place had obviously gone unkempt for eons and the weeds had gotten out of control. Gannon needed a bigger sword.

Welcome to Saria’s Gardens, home of conveyor belts, spikes and backtracking!

This place pretty much just opens with a room full of Beamos Statues. Did that surprise you? Did it really? Aside from the obvious, the floor below pretty much consists entirely of conveyor belts in this room. Why exactly this is, we won’t know for a while. You guys like a little mystery, don’t you?



It’s kind of hard to tell from this tiny screenshot, but Gannon is actually walking below the floor tile. This baffled me for a while until I was unlucky enough to figure it out this time around. Basically, they shoved an invisible Beamos Statue underneath the little awning thing and the game just does not know how to handle it. So while you can walk over it like any other thing that would be on the layer beneath you, the game flips out and makes it look like you’re walking through the floor. Parallel Worlds is a quality product made by quality people.



Okay, here’s the main gimmick in the beginning of the dungeon; You’re thrown on a narrow little pathway that’s impeded by a gigantic block. Your goal is to lift said block and go on forward. The only problem with this is that there’s a snakehead shooting fireballs at you the whole time. Now, this wouldn’t be so bad if there was any rhyme or reason to it, but that just isn’t the case. These things pelt you at random and there’s simply no timing to it at all. Sometimes you’ll get through it unscathed and other times you can take about four hits. It’s pretty fair, I guess.



So yeah, the fireball gauntlets really suck and for the most part, it’s up to luck whether or not you make it through. There’s about four instances of this in a row, so if you’re really unlucky, you could very well end up using your first fairy here. Me, I don’t play by luck’s rules when it comes to Parallel Worlds. This is probably the top reason why I decided to grab the Magic Cape in the dungeon preview. With the combination of the Magic Cape, the bonus effects from my Quake Medallion and a good sense of timing, I can make it through without taking a single hit and with about 3/4ths magic. I forgot to do it here, but you can actually get half-magic from The Great Fairy by throwing in your Ether Medallion, which makes this solution even better. Fireballs ain’t go nuttin’ on me.



The same solution works on the Beamos Gauntlet, which is thankfully a lot shorter. I haven’t seen much plant life thus far, so I guess they’re growing Beamos Statues here.



In the middle of the Beamos Gauntlet, you’re given the Big Chest Key for pretty much scott free. I wonder how they’re going to twist this one into being something incredibly tedious and unfun?

Oh, I hope you remembered to hit the switch earlier in the dungeon. If you didn’t, you have to go through most of the gauntlet again. What switch? Oh, the easily skipped and completely out of the way switch, of course.



Brilliant level design, Euclid



Hard to stay mad at a dude who showers you with rupees.



I TAKE IT BACK



Okay, so now that we have the boomerang, the Armos Knights are pretty much just chumps. They take somewhere between twelve to fourteen hits to kill as opposed to 282 in total. While this is pretty awesome, it still takes considerably longer than shooting arrows into their faces. Now, that’s still an option for me, but I chose to go a different route. Instead of having a shuttered door block your way, you have, well, a block. I didn’t do this while taking screenshots, but I figured out later that it would be a wiser move to just Magic Cape passed them and lift the block with mad zeal. Armos Knights are dumb.



This is our reward for everything. Enjoy your key, pedestrians!



Now, you have two options from the key room: You can waltz your way through the Beamos Gauntlet or you can go through the fireball version. Me personally, I used the Book of Mudora to go through with the fireballin’. Either way you’re going to be backtracking through a place that’s more than likely going to hurt you. Oh well, let’s see what the masterminds behind the world’s greatest puzzles throws at us next.



Oh, awesome. I always thought LTTP needed more Gibdos and Wallmasters.



I love how the Lizardmen just sort of wander around aimlessly on the spikes as they ponder about the misdeeds that brought them to this game. This fork is pretty important. If you head north, you’re going to run into a minor switch puzzle and the way to the boss. If you head west, well, you’ll see where that brings us.

NOTE: I guess I just suck or something, because I forgot to screencap the next section entirely. While I could just go and take them out of the video, I think I’ll go for something different instead.


So yeah, another short gauntlet, this time with more firesnakes and lizardmen in your way. This one is pretty much impossible to avoid taking damage outside of item abuse.



Well, hot damn! The firerod is the best subweapon in the game. This sucker kills about 3/4ths of the enemies in a single use and uses fairly little magic to use. That combined with the fact that magic regenerates makes for a wonderfully broken item. Despite this, I’m still playing Parallel Worlds and as I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, small enemies are the least of my worries.

Oh man, this room looks simple enough. I mean, I’ve gone through rooms with like ten Beamos Statues a piece. This is easy street.



OH WAIT, SPIKES OUT OF NOWHERE.

This is going to be all too prevalent shortly.



I’ll be honest here guys, I have no idea what Euclid is going on about here. I scoured the net for secrets in LTTP in my youth and I remember nothing about talking to chickens to reveal asshole spikes. Anyways, the wonder twins programmed a way for me to disable frames in-game, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to play a better game to help me with this monstrosity. Lord knows I’ll never finish this if I even see a screenshot of LTTP. If you know what the hell they’re talking about, feel free to school me.



Okay, so we’ve finally made it to the room with all the conveyor belts. With one small use of our layer glitch/feature, we can see just what Euclid had in a mind here. I guess this is as good a time as any to spill the truth about this revealing thing. You see, Euclid and Seph only meant for the layers to be disabled with the use of the ‘X’ and right shoulder buttons. When you do this, the secrets are revealed quite cleanly and it’s almost passable in the context of an actual game. The problem, however, is that the use of the left shoulder button also reveals things. ‘L’ button reveals are quick and dirty and can easily be abused in half the areas in the game. ‘R’ button reveals are useful in only a handful of spots.

Now that you know the awful truth, let me tell you about the conveyor belt room. There’s actually a pathway through the conveyor belts that you’re supposed to take. How do I know this? As seen in the image above, there are all kinds of obscured spikes that will harass you if you don’t realize they’re there. So I honestly have no idea how to legitimately get through this room without taking a hit outside of repetition and memorization. Personally, I much prefer Magic Caping my way through here to glitching, but that’s me.



Gannon was hurt badly after a bout with some unknown force. It felt pointy and sharp and there was nothing he could do about it. “There’s nothing there at all!” Gannon screamed to himself “I have no idea which sort of context this chicken should be used in.” Saria’s Gardens was a bad place and it had no qualms with letting Gannon know this.

Innovation!



One of these Lizardmen has the key needed to continue on with the dungeon. Remember that forked path I mentioned earlier? Yeah, this Lizardman is the sole reason we came down here.



Oh hey, a crystal switch!



This is one of the more ridiculous puzzles in the dungeon. Basically, the idea here is to make you run here, realize that you need the switch to be lowered and then come back. Okay, so that’s kind of bad in and of itself, but it’s made even worse by the fact you can pretty much avoid this backtracking by ricocheting off the wall and over the spikes. Not only that, but canny players can once again abuse invincibility items to make it through. This puzzle is dumb for two more reasons. One won’t rear its ugly head for a while, but the other is:



The Mysterious Tablets are almost entirely useless in the game. You’re flat out told that their use is a secret to everyone. What they don’t tell you is that they don’t even work for their original purpose. If I am to understand correctly, these McGuffins are meant to unlock something special after the credits. If you collect all seven, then voila, special things ahoy. However, the problem lies in the fact that they don’t actually act as a trigger and you’re rewarded no matter how many Mysterious Tablets you get. It’s a pretty fantastic reward, really. It really isn’t that great of a reward

Anyways, it’s time to backtrack our way to the forked pathway.

Oh wait, we’re locked in if we try and go to the right. You see, there’s another fork after fireball gauntlet that I captured in the ancient art of Haiku. This fork leads to both the lower floor and a “HAHAHA, YOU’RE FUCKING STUCK, YOU TARD” room. So yeah, if you lowered the blue switches and went right, well, you’re boned. This happened to me in this particular run as I forgot all about it.

Game design!



Here’s that minor switch puzzle I mentioned earlier. The goal here is to lift up one of the skulls and drag the statue around the spikes (through in my case) and onto the switch. No, not that skull, the harder more difficult to reach one. Forgetting to screencap that is my greatest sin as an LPer.



Oh hey, yet another fireball gauntlet. Also, this room seems a bit too nice.



DAMMIT



Once again, I find the Magic Cape is the best way to get through these spikes. This room is kind of a jerk. The way its laid out leaves the player with the intention of having to walk through the two spike traps. The problem is that you have to be pixel perfect to get through here without being knocked back. Players who haven’t become accustomed to the bullshit required for Parallel Worlds might take several hearts worth of damage here. Smart players will just hookshot across the spikes on the way to the chest and then let the auto-alignment get you through unscathed.

Now that we’ve got the Big Key, it’s time to fight the boss!



Oh, here’s that Haiku room finally. Unfortunately, this is the only screen I have of it, so you cats are just gonna have to pretend it’s filled with Lizardmen and fireballs to make it worth while. I’m sure your imagination is well trained enough at this point to make it work.

Wait, didn’t I say we were going to go fight the boss?

OH FOR CHRIST’S SAKE EUCLID, THERE WAS NO POINT IN THAT SWITCH OTHER THAN FORCING YOU TO BACKTRACK. AGHGHGHGHGHGnh

Okay, yeah, there’s a tad bit of backtracking through here involved. Okay, now put yourself back in that darkroom that we got locked into. In that particular room, we needed the red posts to be down to go on with life. So then we did that and blocked off that particular crystal switch. Then we go down and get the key that’s required to open up the room to both the Big Key and the Boss. On your way through this corridor, you get the key about halfway through. What’s at the end of the corridor? A fucking crystal switch. Then presumably you hit it and then you go on your merry way and find yourself somewhat stuck in the Mysterious Tablet room. You go back, hit it again, get the tablet and make your way back to the fork. However, you unwittingly go right instead of left because you want to avoid the fireball gauntlet and get locked up forever. Because of this, you need to do the whole cycle again. Okay, so now it’s time to get the Boss Key. Depending on whether or not you thought your moves through, you may also get locked here and have to walk all the way back and hit the switch again. Assuming that you don’t get locked, you still have to walk back and lower the blue pegs just because Euclid is a dick. This whole fucking thing is because they wanted to waste our time, not create some masterful puzzle. The average run through the dungeon the first time can potentially require the player to go through here Five fucking times.



These Beamos Statues offend the senses.



Oh neat, the Blind fight and it even looks like it went entirely unchanged! Now that I think about it, this was always my worst fight, so I think I should probably go back and restock on fairies.



What?



NO

BUT... THE FUTURE REFUSED TO CHANGE

If you try and leave the arena while fighting Blind, you crash the game. Each time you do so, something dramatically different happens. Different sound effects are played, different glitchy sprites appear. It’s a completely different ballgame every time. I can only imagine that your SNES would start smoking if you tried this on an actual cart.



Aside from the crash, there’s nothing else noteworthy about Blind. Anyways, it’s time for some exposition.

Good luck indeed. Anyways, I guess it's now time to...


CHOOSE YOUR DESTINY

It's been real, guys. Hopefully the next update won't take me so long

Ruto!

Ruto.

Saria's Gardens: Fuck the fourth wall, fuck sound game design, but most importantly... fuck you.

Darunia

Ruin Zelda 1, go on, ruin it!

This game...wow. My mind cannot compute the sheer perversion of the greatest game of the 90's.

You know, I always imagined Shinji sounding like Voltar.

Darunia.

With the Fire Rod in hand, I third Ruto.