The Legend of Zelda - A Link to the Proto (part 3/3, featuring Jump Shoes)

Channel:

Erifellen

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Published on April 16, 2023 3:09:53 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxOK-sMkDqQ

Game:

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991)

Duration: 1:15:56

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Continuing from: https://youtube.com/live/dEJ0tpzWCBs and https://youtube.com/live/KypTJB5q1iY

A few years back, a dump of various Nintendo development assets and prototype builds was leaked, including a fair deal of in-progress assets for Link to the Past. SePH has drawn from these and mixed them into a ROM hack, as an interpretation of how some of them might have worked had they made it into the final game.

Note that this is not an actual prototype, nor representative of any particular single stage of development. It's perhaps something more akin to the Ocarina of Time Triforce% speedrun, where hackers made up a quest by combining promotional screenshots, unused assets, and urban legends into something that plausibly could have been part of the game but never actually existed until they put it together.

Part 1 got us through the Light World, and part 2 completed the first four Dark World dungeons and most of both overworlds. Other than the behavior of the Armos Knights and a completely different layout for Agahnim's Tower, however, the dungeons have had only minor alterations. Inventory items also work as usual, other than empty bottles acting like the bug-catching net and the net itself not making an appearance.

Graphical replacements and a redesigned overworld have accounted for the bulk of the changes, and while those have been interesting, they haven't made much functional difference. Perhaps the most interesting modification has been a strange building outside the Lost Woods that repurposes the Zora's Domain submap and seems to be a museum showcasing some beta sprites that the hack doesn't otherwise use.

All inventory items other than silver arrows, the red cane, armor upgrades, the final sword and shield, and whatever goes in the slot that would normally be the bug-catching net are accounted for. Most of those are likely to be in their usual locations. All health upgrades except a single heart container piece are also accounted for (we have 12 of 16 heart containers, two heart pieces on hand, saw a third on the mountain on the floating island, and should get three more full hearts from crystal dungeon bosses).

At this point, the main open questions are where the last heart container piece is (I'm guessing mimic cave, if it exists), whether there are any significant changes to the last few dungeons, and what, if anything, takes the place of the bug-catching net in your inventory. I'm not expecting anything remarkable from either Ganon or the ending sequence, but I've been surprised before, so who knows?

Patch download and more information: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/5630/

More information on the prerelease assets can be found on The Cutting Room Floor: https://tcrf.net/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_A_Link_to_the_Past

...and I just noticed Saturday's date, so I feel vaguely obligated to say something like, "This a totally ordinary playthrough of a perfectly normal Link to the Past build, what do you mean Link looks weird, he's always looked like that."

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