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

Ruto. Because the ice dungeons are always so great.

Nabooru's filthy, shameful hole.

The Rut of all evil.

Teach us all of Impa's Way(s)!

By the way, at 9:02 in the video... The reason that Beamos can hit you is clearly because it's standing on a table! You know, the random household table that they just happened to have in the dungeon.

Ever notice that the Link to the Past dungeons have crazy Escher-esque dimensions? The bricks in two story rooms get incrementally smaller as you go down. That, or the bottom floors are actually 20' high, and the doors are freakishly distorted.

Hey. Im bored. Where mah LP?

The LP is kind of in limbo for the time being. I just got myself a new computer and I'm still trying to set stuff up. Hopefully I should have a two dungeon update ready by next weekend.

Mini update coming tonight or possibly tomorrow. I'm still having some tech issues, so that may complicate the actual update I had planned for. If anyone has any tips about live streaming or anything like that, let me know.

For this mini-update, I have two fantastic guests. Joining me this time around is Loki, of Super Squad and Zork fame, and his newborn son. It was fantastic having them on and it would be great to have them return for an actual dungeon.

Part 20

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Last time in the frigid wastes of the Dark World: Backtracking and firerodding, gamecrashing and Blind smashing. Just a good time all around



Gannon had had just about enough of the rot and turmoil in the Dark World. Nothing made sense. The only thing that could calm his weary mind was taking a stroll through Impa’s Ways. This place made for quite a shortcut to get all over the Dark World and he was curious just how far this rabbit hole went.



The rabbit hole went pretty far



Welcome to Impa’s Ways and what might actually be the smallest update we’ve had thus far. This dungeon is pretty unique for a couple reasons: there are no enemies in the dungeon and it is completely uninteresting in screenshot form. There is literally nothing to really show you guys with screenshots around here. I knew that going in and I decided to lump this dungeon in with the next. Due to some unforeseen difficulties with both time, schedule, laziness on my end, internet stability and a whole new computer, well, things just didn’t happen the way I wanted them to. So I guess for the time being, this will have to quench your thirst.

Anyways, because the entirety of the dungeon takes place on the blinking, red platforms, nothing really conveys itself way through the traditional format. Don’t get me wrong, this place is still hellish despite being impossible to capture, just not a readily apparent form. The main thing with this dungeon is that it’s essentially one of the biggest, most aggravating teleporter puzzles this side of Shin Megami Tensei. Normally, I’m pretty okay with teleporter puzzles. They literally don’t bother me in the slightest. Here, however, they’re pretty hellish because of both the way the hack was programmed and the formation of the individual rooms. I’d say a good 3/4ths of the dungeon takes place in several identical rooms. To compound issues a bit, Parallel Worlds doesn’t have any sort of dungeon maps. There’s no way this bullshit wasn’t done on purpose. How could the beta testers approve of something like this? There’s quite literally no visual indication what room you’re in and where you’re going until it’s too late. Well, outside of a few videos on youtube, there are no definitive maps of the place anywhere on the internet. Since this LP has been an exercise in doing as much harm to my sanity as possible, I took it upon myself to map the damned place. Just a fair warning, these aren’t pretty and my camera isn’t of the greatest quality.







Just a couple of figures for people who honestly couldn’t give a damn about the maps: This dungeon has 43 individual teleporters placed into 20 individual rooms. Of which, sixteen rooms are identical to one another. There are two main loops that the player has no way of discerning until it’s too late. You can only get through here by sheer repetition and failure with some luck thrown in for good measure. This place is absolutely fucking ridiculous and it’s easily the worst dungeon in the game. This whole place is 100% bullshit and 0% fun. It took me about three hours of save-stating my way through each individual teleporter and following them to their natural end to come up with the rudimentary maps you see above.

Anyways, I think we deserve some treasure after that




Hooray for skipping over almost the entirety of this dungeon! Anyways, let’s just skip straight to the boss.

Oh, it’s just a terribly glitched out Moldorm. There aren’t even any pits in this dungeon, what gives?


Oh. Well fuck me, man.



All those Moldorms in the past, they were chumps. This dude right here is the real deal and he won’t accept you talking otherwise. Take a minute to take in what exactly is going on in here. The first thing you notice when you’re playing this boss is the flying floor tiles that come out of nowhere. Just as they always do, they’re eventually going to leave you with the skull pattern in the middle of the floor. To make things worse, the floor gives out and the center square arena is separated from the walls. This leaves you with literally no room to avoid Moldorm or the flying floor tiles. To avoid this, you can cling to the walls and hope you get lucky swiping his tail from far away. Well, this would work pretty well it if weren’t for the fireballs constantly raining down upon you. Pretty much any hit you take in this stupid boss room is going to knock you into a pit. This brings us to the final slap in the face: if you fall, you have to start the whole thing over again.
I use the Magic Cape and some speedy tactics to take out Moldorm fast and end the fight. This makes me wonder though, what exactly where you supposed to do if you didn’t have the Magic Cape? If you remember, the Cape is in the hardest dungeon in the game and there’s pretty much no way to get it sans the cheesy strategies I used in the dungeon preview video. You could get the Cane of Byrna, but that has one quality that makes it all but ineffective that the Magic Cape does not: bounce-back. While the Cane of Byrna leaves you invulnerable, you’re still susceptible to getting bounced around. Just one bounce can end your attempt at Moldorm.

Anyways, let’s see the fruits of my labor.



Nothing.

If you kill Moldorm too quickly, the crystal will never spawn and you pretty much have to go start the fight all over again. The thing here is that due to an unforeseen glitch involving the flying floor tiles, the game doesn’t actually trigger the boss fight until the tiles are done doing there business. So if you manage to kill the boss before the tiles are done, well, the game thinks there wasn’t a boss to begin with. Hmm, it’s almost as if Miyamoto had no intention of using flying floor tiles and bosses at the same time.



Well, kids, sorry for the lack of updates. Hopefully I’ll work out my tech problems soon and get the real next update going soon.

Alright, let's review. The game is wall-bangingly hard. Frustration, stupid tricks, and cheap shots are around every corner. You just went through disco hell to get that crystal. And what do you get for your trouble? Perhaps a plot coupon or a useful hint?

NO. You get badly-written EMO HORSE GARBAGE and a trick you couldn't have gotten this far without knowing by now.

I hate this game.

Man, I hate this game just from following the first few pages of LP. Garrison is clearly a masochist to have made it this far.

It's even worse than that.

The ice rod! You can you that to...

to...

well, your inventory screen is fuller.

Garrison is clearly crazy to have played this enough to make homemade maps.

Doesn't the Ice Rod do a number on Lanmolas?

Also, there's the trick to hit frozen enemies with the hammer for magic pots, but regenerating magic kinda obsoletes that so bluh.

You're absolutely right about that. Truth be told, Lanmolas are the last thing on my mind right now.

And you're not even the one playing it.

Something has gone horribly wrong when you hate a video game by proxy.

How...um...buh?

OK. I'm not sure what I'm more disgusted with. The inviso-dungeon with few to no landmarks of any sort, or the fact that beating the Moldorm To End All Moldorms only 'rewards' you with the same clue you already got at the beginning of the game. (And no heart container, but that applies to every boss. And why the hell were they just sprinkled randomly over the dark world like confetti? BLARG)

I'm going to guess that they ran out of places for heart pieces, what with the bosses not dropping them, and tossed out a few whole containers on the overworld to make up for it. Because they don't understand difficulty curves.

This piece of shit was beta tested!?!

Not without invincibility cheats.

I'm guessing most romhacks are "beta tested" by the people developing them. I can say from experience that beta testing your own software works as well editing your own book.

Of course, I might be wrong about this one, since it's a pretty big time hack (apparently). They might just have a cadre of testers who are so hardcore at Zelda that they can't even tell anymore when something is complete bullshit gameplay wise.

With regards to sections that are completely terrible framerate-wise, it's also possible that the guys developing it are playing on an emulator that doesn't restrict itself to the limitations the SNES had. Of course, the fact that they're selling it as an actual SNES cartridge to go in your actual SNES so you can actually throw it across the room suggests that they should be mindful of how well it runs on SNES hardware. The mind boggles.

Ahahahaha Jesus Christ.

I find it kind of hilarious that this romhack is so profoundly terrible that it disturbed Loki's child to be present while a recording of it was being played, as if saying 'this scares me and I don't know why'.

A more accurate testament to its awfulness than any room with a million Beamos statues can be.

This.

Also, this dungeon may be super-boring to watch, but Loki's baby redeems it!

I feel like that might have been a terribly cruel thing to do to a baby.

im on the edge of my seat!!!!

Sorry, there's a Moldorm there and you got knocked off your seat.

Update coming tomorrow after work. You will all see things.