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I really wanted to like this ROM hack, as Link's Awakening is one of my favorite games and this is the only extensive ROM hack at the moment. It's clear the author put in a lot of work to make New Awakening. But, for me, there are just too many problems to recommend this hack.

For starters there is a serious bug that will often remove a heart piece from your inventory when you choose "save and continue". In practice this means that it's very hard to ever get more than three hearts in the game. I found over 10 hearts pieces, but due to this bug I still had only 3 hearts. Because the difficulty of the dungeons keeps rising, you will get stuck, unless you are an expert player that can survive with a few hearts. And if you are not that good, you are punished even more, because you might lose a heart piece every time you die.

Other problems are with the level design. Chests often feel randomly placed and most of them contain just rupees. Dungeons have the same map, but the rooms are remixed. The room transitions often feel glitchy. For example, at the end of dungeon 1 you are suddenly transported to the room with the instrument and in dungeon 2 you have to glitch through 3 rooms to get to the chest with the Nightmare key.

The ReadMe stated that I would find my sword in Dungeon 2, but I also found a sword near the graveyard in a random cave. Imagine my surprise when I still found my sword in Dungeon 2. This made no real sense and I was never sure whether this was intended or a bug.

The graphics are mainly untouched, but palettes have been changed here and there. This causes some issues with weird inverted colors in some screens. For example, the stairs to the Windfish egg has an owl and some other garbled graphics that have inverted colors.

Overall I'm convinced that the author has heart for this game, but I think that New Awakening in its current state needs some extra polish and bug fixes.

This rom hack is pretty hard, but lets leave that aside, its very unfortunate that we don't get lots of rom hacks for such a simple Zelda game like Links Awakening, but this hack will keep you busy while you wait. I love how the dungeon order is changed, but the graphics could have been edited a bit... One thing I really love about this hack is the straight up dungeon level designs, it always tells you how useful bombs are when you are stuck in an endless loop. This hack takes the game mechanics too seriously!!! And I love it!!!

Seems like a really neat romhack, the overworld is redesigned in a way that makes you have to re-discover paths. The start of the game is different than normal, and it tests your knowledge of the base game in order to accomplish specific tasks.

There seem to be some bugs though:

Issues:

• Heart pieces are not permanent pick ups, they seem to lessen by 1 when the game is loaded. Collecting 4 for a heart means you will lose that heart and have 3 pieces.

• The game hard locks when you pick up Marin for the Yarna Desert quest, with no way to save and quit in order to correct it.

• The ROM information seems to be inaccurate, since the version they say to use does not have the same information as they state.

I would recommend it if not for the Marin bug.

I started this rom today and I have to say it's very nice. There are some great touches and you feel that some true work has been done. It is emotional to see that my favorite game ever has been revamped like this, even if the core of the game stays the same, you have a fresh start and some good old vibes!

the game crashed after link and marin heart to heart in story(beach). 4.1 version of new awakening.

Had to make an account just to review this game in hopes someone sees it.

Wasn't sure what to expect of the hack but it turned out to be very challenging and fun. It will teach you some new tricks to the game if you dont already know them and there is tonnes of puzzles that kept me thinking for 15+ minutes.

A few minor errors, like finding the sword twice, and the hookshot twice, but maybe that was intended.

Either way, a solid 9/10 for difficulty and 8/10 overall gameplay. Not for beginners and might seem frustrating at times but incredibly rewarding.

Took me 3 days to beat this hack in the 4.0 version. I feel like the 4.0 version is a lot more balanced. Though sadly there was a few puzzles I wasn't able to find the intended way to beat and had to glitch through using my knowledge of how the game works, so this can be a bit confusing. My advice for those is that if you can't figure out what to do next, simply just do everything you can think of. Should probably take advantage of the owl statues also... I never did though cause of habit.

All in all, gonna be playing this hack a lot more in the future.

The version 2.0 really is a major improvement since 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2. It basically fixes all the previous mistakes.

You now have enough powder, since you get the upgrade early on, with a lot of powder and bomb stock flying in the air. Both: powder and bomb are now a fine substitute for the sword.

The gfx problems have been solved as well as the early glitch sword with the Like-Like.

The first dungeon has been reedited further, as well as all others. Despite the fact that the overworld is practically the same as the original and the global gameplay remains similar too, we now have some fine remodeled dungeons to play.

Okay, this hack interested me when I saw it in Facebook, and I immediately downloaded it since LA is one of my favorite Zelda titles of all time, and seeing it got a good hack (in concept) really made me happy.

At first it starts good and normal; you go and get the Magic Powder, kill a few enemies and destroy some grass blocking your path, however, you get stuck really quickly; there is nothing you can do after that since you can't get to the first dungeon without abusing of a glitch (walking over the holes by staying really close to the big rock). There is also no way of getting a bomb to get past the rock either, at least not without abusing of glitches.

The glitches in question are MANY. The most noticeable ones are some garbage tiles in the overworld, being able to walk through walls which leads to getting stuck until you save and exit the game, and the most game-breaking glitch: Being able to get your sword earlier by letting a Like-Like eat you and then killing it. There's a way of getting out of the town as well, because these tiles (there are two links in the past two words, in case you didn't notice) aren't solid, and that way you can get 50 rupees earlier, and even access to the Face Shrine dungeon.

Now, if all these "glitches" are what you were supposed to do, let me tell you that I'm highly disappointed; I expected something good instead of relying on glitches or non-solid tiles that you have no way of discovering normally (I discovered those by accident), and an average player wouldn't even search for them because they were not present in the original game, and you can't expect them in a game, unless it leads to a very good secret.

I'm really sorry to say this, but this hack is in a really broken condition to be played normally, so I don't recommend anyone to try it until it's all fixed. If you wonder, yes, I used the exact same ROM needed to patch this (Legend of Zelda, The - Link's Awakening DX (U) (V1.2) [C][!]), I even tried with different ROMs from different sources and all of them had the same results.

At the end, this didn't fulfill the claim of being a hack that everyone can play without getting headaches because of not knowing what to do next, or major backtracking (going constantly to get Magic Powder is REALLY annoying). I hope you fix all of this, because the concept of this hack is really great, despite not having the main overworld edited as much as the dungeons, and I'd love to play it from start to finish.