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LALE - Link's Awakening Level Editor

Game : The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX

Platform : Game Boy

Author : Fatories

Release date : 09 May 2021

Category : Level Editors

OS : Windows

Skill Level : Beginner

Version : 2.01

Downloads : 6812

Utility description

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening Level Editor (LALE) is an editor that contains many features for making a basic ROM hack for the Gameboy Colour game: Link's Awakening DX.

In the version 2.01 release it contains:

And many more little features for hacking Link's Awakening.

A version 1.2 LADX ROM is required.

Supplemental Information:

Link's Awakening Game engine information https://github.com/zladx/LADX-Disassembly/wiki/Game-engine-documentation

List of Link's Awakening Item ID's, Chest ID's, Music ID's, Room Events etc. https://github.com/anotak/LALE/tree/master/Lists

Reviews

Very versatile and user-friendly!katage2023-11-11Version 2.01

I used this utility to create New Awakening, and it's been one of the most convenient modding utilities I've ever used. I don't know how many hours I've spent delving into LALE, but it's been very fun and straightforward. It lets me modify pretty much anything I want and, maybe most importantly, it's given me no headaches or frustrations along the way.

Decent Editor with a lot of flawsLetterbomb2022-06-09Version 2.01

To start off, I'd say that this editor is good with drawing the overlays, moving sprites around and changing things like palettes. All of this is easy enough to understand for a beginner and I had no trouble learning how these things worked. The dungeons also seem easy enough to understand, but I didn't mess with them too much, as most of my work I did was on the overworld and the houses. Now while these are great and easy to understand, there are a ton of other things that are not easy or are buggy enough to make this editor not worth using.

First off, the collision editor. Placing objects with this is slow and tedious, especially since you basically are just redrawing areas (At least on the overworld areas). I wish it could just be as easy as just placing tiles and the collision is already there, but I have no idea how LA's engine works so this might not be possible. Another problem with the collision editor is the fact that whenever you place down new collision objects, the editor actually deletes other collision objects in certain areas in order to free up space. While this seems fine, it's actually a major problem, because the editor deletes these objects but not the actual collision in game. Plus, whenever you do place new collision objects in the area the collision objects were deleted in, the new collision objects just do not work, which basically means that area is corrupted unless you use the original layout.

Secondly, the palette editor has a bug where it does not save the custom colors you add to the custom color palette section. This is a problem mainly because this makes editing palettes very slow, and if you want to make a fully changed palette for every area, this can be very irritating since you have to add in the palettes you want manually every time.

Third, I noticed while editing sometimes that some of the objects in the houses would change for some reason. I'm not sure why this happens but all you have to do to fix it is just by replacing the objects to make them correct again. Not a huge problem, just a minor annoyance.

Fourth and one of the most major in my opinion is the way you access houses/caves. There seems to not be a tab for these which means you pretty much have to look for them in other dungeons of the game. For example to find Link's House I pretty much had to go to level 8 and search for the room "A3" in order to find it. While I was able to find these through trial and error, the thing that sucks the most about it is the fact that it keeps the dungeons graphics while editing, so it's very hard to tell what object is correct or not. Either way, I was still able to manage with this, but I think it would be better if there was a tab for the caves and houses in the game, specially because they are a pretty major part of the game.

Despite all of this, I think this editor is a decent editor, it just needs to be improved upon in order to give the most ideal experience. I'd also say that if these problems were fixed that I would recommend this editor, but unfortunately that's not the case. All in all, this editor is a decent editor with a lot of flaws.