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 Ocarina of Time: Master Quest is a curious case in Nintendo's history. It was originally produced as a pseudo-sequel to Ocarina of Time back in 1998, before Aonuma decided he would rather make Majora's Mask and the project was canned until being revived as a pre-order bonus for Wind Waker and later an added selling point for Ocarina 3D. While a beta rom of the game from 1999 does exist, Master Quest is not and has not ever been its own game; even in its completed state, it is functionally a dungeon romhack, with the base game (ie, everything that isn't a dungeon) being completely identical to the original release. This makes it a fascinating point of comparison to some of the actual romhacks we've played, both in its scope of changes and general quality, which is exactly what we're going to explore. See, Master Quest is weird. It's not bad (although there are definitely a few puzzles that come close to straddling that line), and given that its changes are limited solely to actors, even kind of impressive at times. But it absolutely radiates "my first romhack" energy, where even when it does have an interesting idea, it never seems to go anywhere or do anything cool with it. This is most obvious in MQ Jabu (that being the thing that basically everyone knows about MQ, even if they don't know anything else about it), but pretty much every dungeon has something you can point to and be like "Oh, that's it, that was their one idea for this dungeon." When the dungeons are the only thing that are different about MQ...well, you can see why it has only ever been a tagalong for the actual game that people know and love. Since the dungeons are the only thing that are interesting in the slightest, that's what we're focusing on. Each one will get a full-length video with minimal editing so we can all really soak up that Master Quest Experience™, while all the rest of the game will be posted alongside it as a short supercut of the stuff we did in between the dungeons. I have never played MQ period, and Chaos Argate (and FPzero, when he's around) is the closest thing we have to an expert, having played it a decade ago when Ocarina 3D came out. As such, consider this an open spoiler thread for Ocarina of Time because that's what we're going to do in the videos. In addition to our "experts", you can expect to see the usual gaggle of idiots that I do projects with (most notably Faerie Fortune, nine-gear crow, and poorlywrittennovel), as we make our way across Hyrule's stupider cousin. And yes, if it wasn't immediately obvious, we're playing on the "Ship of Harkinian" PC port. This means we get native widescreen, cosmetic options, time saving gameplay stuff (text skips, climbing/pushing faster, etc) and all sorts of other goodies that we will be turning on more and more of as we get further in the game and less patient with its bullshit. So look forward to that! Table of Contents Part 1: The Deku Tree Part 1B: The Tragedy of Impa's Legs Part 2: Dodongo's Cavern Part 2B: The Return of Beancoin Part 3: Inside Jabu Jabu's Belly Part 3B: Let's Play the Song of Time Part 4: Forest Temple Part 4B: Kneecaps Broken Successfully Part 5: Fire Temple Part 5B: Ice Cavern Part 6: Water Temple Part 6B: 6000% Speed Part 7: Bottom of the Well Part 8: Shadow Temple Part 9: Gerudo Training Grounds Part 10: Spirit Temple Part 11: Ganon's Castle Artix fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Mar 17, 2023 |
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Jan 13, 2023 22:46
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Jan 13, 2023 22:46
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 Part 1: The Deku Tree Part 1B: The Tragedy of Impa's Legs We begin our journey by venturing inside everyone's favorite oversized tree and we are immediately greeted with what can generously be called puzzles. That's what they call it when you have to brute force an answer, right?
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Jan 13, 2023 22:48
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It occurs to me that I remember Master Quest being harder because the 3DS iteration doubles all of the damage that you take and possibly removes heart drops.
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Jan 13, 2023 23:12
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Oh cool, this'll be neat to see. I think I've played this less than any of the mainline series outside the NES era on account of getting it relatively late in the Gamecube life cycle and just never looking back after the Wii came out. I hadn't even realized it got a rerelease on 3DS. Anyway, looking forward to seeing all the weirdness of an official romhacky release that I've forgotten or missed.
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Jan 13, 2023 23:23
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master quest sucks, have fun (?)
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Jan 13, 2023 23:24
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I played a bit of this, at least through the fire temple, and found it to be mostly terrible. Gonna check this out for sure, it's been a while and I'm p sure I stopped at some point!
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Jan 13, 2023 23:53
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I have been very curious about Master Quest for a long time. I remember I got a copy for, evidently, pre-ordering Wind Waker (despite buying it online after it came out) and messed around with it some, but I don't think I ever got very far in it. And the few times that MQ dungeons came up while playing Ocarina randomizer, I just got really confused. I am here for this trainwreck.
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Jan 13, 2023 23:55
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This will make for a very interesting contrast with Frenzy's concurrent Ocarina of Time LP. I'm looking forward to more madness!
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Jan 14, 2023 01:26
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On top of Frenzy's LP, I actually just watched Faerie Fortune's incredibly earnest OoT LP so this is beautifully timed. I do remember playing Master Quest once on the Wind Waker preorder disc but basically nothing about it, so I'll be mostly blind for this official horseshit.
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Jan 14, 2023 03:24
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I have a soft spot for Master Quest, though I can't really deny it's less cohesive than the original. It's still fun, and it does enough to make the experience feel fresh on a replay if you've already played the original to death. That's about all I can say for it, though. I may have enjoyed it more than most when I first played it, simply because as a kid my first experience of OoT was with a guide, and by the time I got MQ I was older and understood it was more fun to figure out dungeons on my own (so it was retroactively able to give me some of the experience I missed out on at first). Also, there's one room in Ganon's Castle that I genuinely believed was impossible when I first played it (and given the "baby's first romhack" feeling, I thought might have just been a bug or something they never playtested). It is not, but what's actually going on in that room still kind of does my head in, I hope I'll remember to discuss it once you all get there. Some of the changes are downright weird and will be fun to see you guys react to.
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Jan 14, 2023 05:36
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All those years wondering about the mythical Ura Zelda and how awesome it'd be based on some lovely screenshots in a game magazine. And then Nintendo releases this as pre-order bonus with Wind Waker and  At least there was also the GC port of Majora's Mask since my N64's expansion pak slot was busted...
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Jan 14, 2023 15:42
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Haha, I saw steps to set up Master Quest when I was messing around with SOH and said "gently caress no" even though I've never played it. I'm interested to see how messed up the dungeons get, as long as someone else is doing it.
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Jan 14, 2023 18:00
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Is video 1B supposed to be unlisted?
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Jan 14, 2023 20:02
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I didn't get Master Quest when I played it as a kid and I still don't get it
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Jan 14, 2023 22:21
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Part 2: Dodongo's Cavern Part 2B: The Return of Beancoin Dodongo's Cavern is a much stronger example of what Master Quest has to offer, and you'll know pretty quick if you're picking up what it's putting down.
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Jan 16, 2023 22:29
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Apologies if you figure this out later in the vid but the wall bomb drops to the ground if you touch it with a burning stick.
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Jan 16, 2023 22:53
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It's kinda funny in retrospect, I basically had good memories of this because I played it back when the idea of 3D Zeldas still felt relatively novel, and this was more 3D Zelda. But now I'm definitely feeling the romhackiness, having seen a lot more of those over the years, there's a lot of that feeling of cheap design meant to challenge you at the expense of anything else. Also, I'd forgotten Majora's Mask got a Gamecube release too. That was like game-breakingly buggy out of the box, but it seemed like all that was mostly tied to the gamepad rumble function for some reason - at least, I remember following internet advice to turn that off, and I was able to 100% the game without any real issues after doing so.
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Jan 17, 2023 04:58
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Say what you want about the quality of Master Quest, but putting cows in Jabu was brilliant.
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Jan 20, 2023 19:40
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I refuse to believe that this game was worked on by a first party Nintendo Studio for any real amount of time. I'd be willing to bet that this game has no need for the proposed 64DD's capabilities and this build is just an internal proof of concept that somehow got released, based 100% on a stock N64 console with almost the same memory limitations of an N64 cart Are there real bug fixes or any QoL improvements in this version of the game?
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Jan 20, 2023 20:44
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The Door Frame posted:Are there real bug fixes or any QoL improvements in this version of the game? Are you implying that your life wouldn't be significantly improved by cows in the walls that are actually switches as seen in the most recent video?
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Jan 20, 2023 21:22
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The Door Frame posted:I refuse to believe that this game was worked on by a first party Nintendo Studio for any real amount of time. I'd be willing to bet that this game has no need for the proposed 64DD's capabilities and this build is just an internal proof of concept that somehow got released, based 100% on a stock N64 console with almost the same memory limitations of an N64 cart https://youtu.be/xNkVrMBLh94?t=737 Here's a (timestamped) video that goes into the history of the Ura Zelda project, but the quick version is that the Ura Zelda project was massively reduced in scope and scale because the head of the project, Aonuma, just was not interested in enhancing OoT, so he opted to do a different project that still leveraged OoT's assets and engine. This project did see the light of day, you may have heard of it, it's a little known N64 title called The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. With the discontinuation of the 64DD as well, the remaining team members basically made an OoT Second Quest, which could have been released as a budget N64 cycle, but since the GameCube was right around the corner, it was packed in with the original game as a pre-order bonus for Wind Waker instead. It does run on stock N64 hardware though, I've booted a Master Quest ROM on my EverDrive and played a little of the Deku Tree. If the original OoT team had more time, we very well could have seen the Master Quest content baked into vanilla OoT as something like the original NES Zelda's Second Quest.
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Jan 20, 2023 21:28
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Part 3: Inside Jabu Jabu's Belly Part 3B: Let's Play the Song of Time It's the one thing everyone knows about this game, now featuring an extra nauseous 60 FPS interpolation! Artix fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Jan 21, 2023 |
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Jan 21, 2023 01:46
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The goopy Jabu-Jabu insides never bothered me, it was actually a selling point in its way. The idea of Zelda dungeons in 3D was already novel enough when Ocarina came out, having it animated around you because you're inside a living creature was a real  moment for 1990s me.I actually had forgotten about the cows in this version. I like that a lot, I wish they'd learned of doing more weirdly funny stuff like that in the redesign.
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Jan 21, 2023 02:36
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The movie where someone got shrunk down and stuck inside someone else's body was called Inner Space. I forget exactly why but some bad guy got sent in after him and ended up dying by stomach acid.
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Jan 21, 2023 22:39
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I feel like this dungeon is Nintendo acknowledging that the N64 is an otherworldy machine that we are unable to comprehend and held together with forces that man is not capable of harnessing. Are the cows in the Master Quest version on the 3DS too? I got about as far as the Water Temple in that one, but don't remember the cows.
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Jan 22, 2023 00:54
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Ignatius M. Meen posted:The movie where someone got shrunk down and stuck inside someone else's body was called Inner Space. I forget exactly why but some bad guy got sent in after him and ended up dying by stomach acid. And here I thought they were talking about Fantastic Voyage. There seem to have been a lot of these.
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Jan 22, 2023 01:16
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:I feel like this dungeon is Nintendo acknowledging that the N64 is an otherworldy machine that we are unable to comprehend and held together with forces that man is not capable of harnessing. Yeah, the cows are absolutely on 3DS too.
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Jan 22, 2023 01:38
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This game is kind of like a spiritual successor to Super Mario Bros. 2 in some ways (The actual one). There's not really any new stuff, mostly the developers took the same assets and messed around with them to make new levels. They both went for a 'hard mode' approach, and this was even supposed to be on peripheral upgrade for the N64. I guess you could also compare it to the second quest in the original Zelda NES game.
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Jan 22, 2023 04:21
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I think MQ is fun purely as a gently caress with your built in sense of direction and order thing in dungeons when replaying oot for the xth time. Once. The idea of this actually being sold standalone though is insane and it was a good idea to pass on that and just include as a bundle deal with windwaker.
ChaseSP fucked around with this message at 09:35 on Jan 25, 2023 |
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Jan 25, 2023 09:26
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:I feel like this dungeon is Nintendo acknowledging that the N64 is an otherworldy machine that we are unable to comprehend and held together with forces that man is not capable of harnessing. As someone who's done a bit of N64 romhacking by now, this is, in point of fact, the case.
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Jan 26, 2023 23:57
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Glad to have found this on the precipice of the adult dungeons. I played through MQ at a tough point in my life and I barely remember it aside from like one bit each in fire, shadow, and spirit temples. I totally forgot about the cows
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Feb 3, 2023 03:54
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Fellis posted:Glad to have found this on the precipice of the adult dungeons. I played through MQ at a tough point in my life and I barely remember it aside from like one bit each in fire, shadow, and spirit temples. I totally forgot about the cows We do some... magical things in the Fire Temple that I think the game did not intend. Shadow and Spirit have yet to be recorded, but soon. Also that spiral time block staircase to get that gold skulltula in the Deku Tree was just loving perfection in how obtuse it was.
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Feb 3, 2023 04:09
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nine-gear crow posted:We do some... magical things in the Fire Temple that I think the game did not intend. Pretty sure the part I remember is where this will happen, looking forward to it!
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Feb 3, 2023 04:42
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i hope it's magical in the  way
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Feb 3, 2023 05:23
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biosterous posted:i hope it's magical in the That seems like a good descriptor for Master Quest in general
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Feb 3, 2023 05:24
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Some of Master Quest gets dumb. I'll never get tired of it.
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Feb 3, 2023 07:24
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I remember finding something about the Fire Temple particularly peculiar. I'll be damned if I can remember what that was, though
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Feb 3, 2023 07:31
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:I remember finding something about the Fire Temple particularly peculiar. I'll be damned if I can remember what that was, though
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Feb 3, 2023 11:42
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As I recall you can just grab the hammer, go do the water temple, get fire arrows, go back and cheese most of the puzzles.
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Feb 4, 2023 00:50
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