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

Joining me once again is Dart Zaidyer. He has a thing for Ice Dungeons so I felt it was appropriate to bring him along.

Part 21
Part 22
Part 23



Last time in the darkest world this side of dwarfville: Teleporter mazes and the shrill cries of a newborn.



Ever since he was a lad, Gannon had heard tales of a mythical fortress that had been eaten by time that contained something very special. Many adventurers had gone on many adventures in search of this great treasure and every last one of them went and died adventurous deaths. These doomed adventurers knew their target well as the entrance was almost always adorned with a seashell. So many adventurers ended up dyeing a solemn death that the gods decided to banish the fortress to a land that no one liked. This was that land and Gannon was at the foot of peril.

Welcome to Ruto’s Fortress. I may or may not have mentioned it, but this dungeon starts out with a rather spectacular statue pushing puzzle.




It’s every bit as tedious and annoying as it looks. The thing you need to know about this section of the dungeon is that firesnakes are not your friend. the entire time you’re trying to push the statue, the snake does everything in its power to get in your way. So yeah, you’ll take plenty of damage from it. Not only that, but the firesnake in this room also has a real mean tendency to get stuck in the statue making it almost impossible to push without taking damage. Of course, having an invincibility item makes this difficulty moot, but you should know that by now. Aren’t you glad I took the Magic Cape when I had the opportunity? Anyway, what’s our reward for this ludicrous waste of my time?



Okay cool, so how do we get to the chest again?



FOR FUCK’S SAKE!



I give, Parallel Worlds, you can go play by yourself.

Wait, why are we here?



Okay, so this right here is a rather glitchy way to avoid having to deal with the statue puzzle more than once. If you walk straight through the head of the statue, you can wander straight into the boundaries of the western screen. You’re obviously not supposed to be up here, so movement is pretty finicky and it’s really easy to clip through and jump to the opposite side of the screen like some sort of crazy Mortal Kombat technique. Even still, this isn’t the major glitch that you need to avoid if you’re going to try for this. Hugging that rock you see in the rightmost snap is pretty much required to get your bearings for the next trick. If you somehow manage to muck it up, though, you end up with something like this:



Endless running. Your game is essentially frozen and you can’t even access your save and quit function. Even still, it’s pretty neat to watch, so I went ahead and recorded what happens if you screw up. Here’s what happens if you’re actually successful and use the rock correctly:



This skip cuts you straight to the second segment of the dungeon and you can just backtrack through less awful rooms to get whatever you missed out on.



This treasure is so worth all the agony.



A couple things to note: We get the Blue Mail/Tunic and we are in the presence of a lantern puzzle. The Mail itself is great and wholly worth getting. The lantern puzzle, however, is made of vile, vile things. You can try all you want, but the ice physics make it impossible to actually succeed. I’m not kidding here, Euclid and Seph were both aware that it was impossible and just sort of left it in the game as a giant red herring. They love us, yes they do. And with that, we’re done with the first segment. Time to take on the rest of the dungeon in the way it was intended.

Now that we’re in the second segment, it’s time to push more statues! Also, some of these bridges are too narrow to walk on.



And we have the Big Key. Things are looking up already!



*BOING* for a key



Pushing this statue opens the door.



Okay, if you’re not careful here, you can very easily hook onto the wrong peg and fall in the endless abyss. Normally, I’d just take the heartloss and try again, but since you actually need to lift up the skullpot to keep on going, you’re kind of fucked. You pretty much have to reset the dungeon cache to try again. This can be done by Magic Mirroring(err, Book of Mudoraing in this case) or by walking through four rooms. Since there aren’t enough rooms for me to do that here, I just have to teleport to the beginning and start over. That’s why I’m missing some hearts. At least the reward will be good, right?



Er, looks like I hit my snapshot key too slowly and missed it, but I got a key!

This door on the left is important. If you go North through this room, you’ll find another key and another broken lantern puzzle. Instead of taking up my time writing about that and taking up your time having to read about it, well, that’s what I did. So now that we’re back at the important door to the left. The thing about this particular room is that it’s one of those rooms that has shutters triggered by enemy death. While the door always opens on the Northern exit, this door never opens the way it’s supposed to-at least, that’s the way it looks. The thing is that this shutter does in fact open just like the Northern shutter. The problem here lies with the fact that they forgot(?) to change the graphics and the door itself doesn’t actually appear to be open when in fact it is. To make this slightly more irritating, the only reason I know this is because it opens just fine when you backtrack on out of it. The whole place is really unintuitive.



You guys have no idea how good it feels to take part of this dungeon out. I’ve had my vengeance upon the place, but I’m afraid it will be shortlived.



Well I’ll be damned, there’s a third segment.



The first thing you’ll notice when you enter this section of the dungeon is that there are spiketraps everywhere and you’re getting pelted with ice on a near-constant basis. The second thing you’ll notice is that there’s a keydoor on the other side of the ravine. Yeah, don’t go there yet. If you do, you’re just going to have to teleport back to the entrance. I know the game loves to have you backtrack, but that doesn’t mean you have to do so at every turn.



The third thing you’ll notice in the third segment is that Kholdstare is a righteous jerk and that ice really hurts. As I’m sure you guessed, Kholdstare is the miniboss of the dungeon and this his lone appearance in Parallel Worlds. He can be somewhat of a pain if you don’t know what you’re doing, but luckily for me I found the perfect way to cheese my way through half the fights in the game.



Magic Cape+repeated sword swings=dead boss.



I got a key!

One more red herring lantern puzzle for good measure and we find ourselves somewhere special.



There are two ways you can get to the boss room. The first of which has a spiketrap in a rather tight corridor and the second is much more manageable. Because I’m a genuine smart, I go for the painful way and hope for the best.



Turns out it doesn’t matter which way you go, because you’re getting a face full of laser regardless.



Mothula again. Why they decided that a significantly more difficult Kholdstare made more sense as a miniboss instead of this guy, I’ll never understand. I mean seriously, that was Kholdstare’s only appearance in the game, why not have him be the boss of the Ice dungeon instead of a fucking moth that we’ve already pounded once. ARGH!

Talking Time, it is now the time of choosing. What Parallel World do you desire?

I'll go with Rauru's Ruins.

The hole is unlocked, eh? Go there.

Dart's voice is awesome. He sounds like the guy who parodies the guy who does movie trailer voiceovers.

I say go for Rauru's Ruins next. The water temple in any given Zelda game is always a trainwreck, so we simply must see just how bad Parallel Worlds can make it.

Sheik's Hideout, dude.

Naboorus Hole is a huge dungeon that requires guts.

Darunia's Cavern
I... I have to see how bad they ruin Zelda 1

I'm also voting for Darunia because I just saw a video of the 3DS Ocarina of Time port where he did the happiest dance. Yet, I know the dungeon will be the opposite of happy.

Nabooru's Hole. I have to see what's in there. eww

I vote Nabooru's Hole, because the treasure there actually sounds useful (assuming it blocks Beamos lasers, anyway. It's been so long since I played LttP).

It didn't in LttP. And while it's possible that the item has been made more useful by adding a fantastic new function.... this is Parallel Worlds. And that is not how things are done.

If they were going to change its function at all, I'm sure they'd make it drain health or something rather than make it more useful/safer for the player.

The mirror shield actually reverses your controls while equipped. I would not be surprised.

Shoot, you're right. I still say get Nabooru's hole out of the way, just because its name sounds more like a mind-scarring fanfic than a dungeon.

Good God. Every time I think I've seen the worst that this game has to offer, it somehow manages to top (bottom?) itself. Impossible puzzles? Nearly impossible puzzles that you don't actually have to do? Pushing statues across a room filled with pits, firesnakes, Wizzrobes, and Beamos statues? Jesus H. Christ!

After my heated diatribe about Mothula earlier, it stuns me that the 'real' battle with her is the least annoying part of the dungeon. Not only that, but I think that non-Euclidan-geometry and inSephruable once again forgot to close the door to Mothula's. Does this result in another game-breaking bug? If it does, then it should count double since you may be forced out of the room thanks to that conveyor floor!

As for the vote, I feel a lot like Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol when he's at his absolute lowest, saying, "Please - show me some tenderness connected with this, or it will haunt me forever!" So I vote for the least sucky area, whatever that may be. (And I get the feeling that the least sucky part of this game is the 3D Worldrunner game breaker...)

I'll vote for Darunia's Zelda 1 Fun Times again.

But Nabooru's Hole of Chain Chops also sounds intriguing. So I'll vote for that too if multiple votes are allowed.

Every time I hear that Orson Welles thing I always go back to the Pinky and the Brain version. Yes always.

This game breaks my heart, because I look at that gorgeous overworld and dream of what might have been.

i vote Rauru's Ruins. i wanna see how euclid put this one together.

Wow, so I finally got around to reading this LP. I was trying to watch the videos for each section first, but i just haven't had the time, so I just sat down and read this version of it.

As a Zelda fanboy, I feel like this game is violating my childhood or something. But in a really, really perverse way i kind of want to play this monstrosity. But I think I'll just watch you suffer instead

(BTW, if you need another guest for the video portion, let me know!)

Reading about this ...thing make me want to biscuit punch the people who are guilty of creating it.

when is the next part going to be updated garrison?

Whenever the stars align and I feel the need to play Parallel Worlds.

I watched the videos for Impa's Path and Ruto's Fortress and you know what? I've never said this before, but I vote for you to stop this LP. Not because it isn't entertaining or anything because you're doing a fine job of showing off the "game", but because I really cannot abide the level of bullshit you have to put yourself through in order to play it. I have a hard time standing by watching people hurt themselves. The single Thief only run in FF1? Madness, but within the bounds of how the game was programmed. But this, THIS, is an affront to game design everywhere. PEOPLE ACTUALLY MADE THIS INTO A THING! Just watching you play this made me physically angry, not at you or your commentators but the ROM HACKERS!

If you must, I say screw it, Sheik's Hideout. Crank this motherfucker up to 11.

Putting in a vote for Darunia's Cavern.