Legend of Zelda - GrandmasterJ

 

    Hyrule is once again under attack by the evil Ganon! Fight classic Legend of Zelda and Half-Life enemies and find crystals in dungeons to beat Ganon and save the land once again!

SCMapDB page

Authors: IceShaft

Date of release: 2004

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Legend of Zelda

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | May 3, 2026 | 5160 characters

    It's the Legend of Zelda in Sven Co-op! Explore such fabulous locales as Hyrule castle! A big serpent head I assume to be Jabu-Jabu! A mountain I will call Dodongo mountain! A Lost Forest made out of boxes! FInally, a trapped castle with what I am going to generously call Gannondorf!

    One thing you may notice from the screenshots on the map page is that this map looks kind of bad. I think the little village we start off in looks decent but much of the brushwork is overly blocky and there are a lot of opportunities to climb up ledges and access places that don't look like they were supposed to be accessed. The custom models for Zelda and Link look like hot garbage and do not help the first impression. But beyond the bad first impression there is a flow that mirrors the Legend of Zelda, a clear sense of progression, and a boss fight with a satisfying ending.

    Players start off in a village just outside Hyrule castle. We don't have weapons at first and there are a lot of zombies with high health. They do have custom models for redeads and their attack animation is a lot longer than usual. We run into the castle and are told to get the master sword from a rock, which is in the back of the village. Getting the master sword unlocks a master sword drop in Hyrule Castle and so does almost every drop we find. There are big chests littering the map and the more we find the more stuff is available to us near spawn.

    The next area is behind a wall with zero indication it can be destroyed, my teammate started whacking things with the sword and down it went. From here we can go straight to a big eel head accessed through it's blowhole or we can go up a mountain with a big rock that bounces down the path to disappear over the path to the eel. There are also headcrabs here which respawn and annoy. Going down the eel hole gives us a puzzle which satisfies the water temple requirement of this map and gives us the long jump. I think that's supposed to get us to the next area in the mountain except we can climb the ledges and skip over that.

    The mountain is kind of a pain, it introduces barnacles reskinned to be like-likes but they don't have tongue so it is easy to not see them. We have crossbow ammo but still only the master sword here, so combat is slow and annoying and there is lava. We get stuck here and eventually figure out we have to kill an alien slave with a lot of health running around the lava with crowbars only, so thats fun.

    The mountain unlocks bombs so we walk back to Hyrule Castle, which we do a lot since there are no shortcuts in this map. Go through the water temple and we have to run the water temple in reverse, same with the mountain. The next area took a long time to figure out, we have to through grenades over the wall at the Lost Forest area. We don't have to throw bombs at the wall, we have to throw over the wall where they will disappear mid-air and then the wall will blink out of existence.

    So then we have the Lost Woods which had a bunch of alien soldiers behind intangible but opaque black walls that my teammate and I both telepathically agreed was a problem for banana grenades to solve. The maze is a bunch of same size box rooms with solid black walls, the correct way is through intangible black walls and the incorrect ways will teleport players back to the start. There is also a loop in there which definitely had me running in circles until my teammate found the way. We finally get the crossbow here just in time to go back to the castle to enter it and destroy Gannondorf for good.

    The castle is a fancy hallway that leads to a room filled with barnacles, redeads, and a baby garg with a model that came off looking like a black robot. We kill it once, escape a fun trap, then kill him again to end the map.

    The map is good, I think it captures the Legend of Zelda feeling really well and is overall fun. It definitely has a lot of janky moments that hold it back. From being able to climb on top of almost everything and looking straight into the void to having walls that aren't blown up by grenades but instead opened by depositing grenades into hidden areas. It's really fun but it can be a bit frustrating.

Pros:

• The map follows the structure of a Legend of Zelda game
• the map has a lot of well made sequences, I especially like the falling rock
• I like how discovering items in the world made them appear in the castle
• the custom models helped the experience, even if the characters were ugly

Cons:

• I think the climbing mechanic may break this map
• some areas of progression are needlessly obtuse, like both walls we have to break near the castle
• a lot of the monster are just Half-Life monsters, the immersion is only halfway done, Ganon is a robot?
• maybe I just don't like mazes but I feel the Lost Forest was a waste of time
• the map has rough brushwork and looks very blocky
• enemies that we can't eliminate with our current loadouts

Score: 7 / 10