This hack does two things. First, it makes the hearts fill up faster. In the original games, drinking a potion or visiting a fairy would slow the game to a crawl as your hearts slowly filled up. Now it’s pretty quick.

The second thing it does, is that it fills out the map in the corner of the screen as you explore, when in the original game, it would stay a grey rectangle forever, which, if you ask me, is pretty useless. The original didn’t even have gridlines to compare to the physical map that came with the game.

Some would argue this defeats the purpose of the original game, but since you’re on a romhacking website, it’s reasonable to assume you’re here to enhance your game, not play the vanilla game. As someone who loves this game, hails it as my favorite NES game and Zelda game, and has played the vanilla game with no deaths many times, I would absolutely recommend playing this by default… and besides, it’s much harder to find those physical maps that came with the game.

Just having the map fill out doesn’t really defeat the purpose of exploration. It’s really just eliminating one step between you and a sheet of graph paper. And even with the map in the corner of the screen, you still have to find all the hidden rooms and burnable bushes ( hint, you won’t find more than one secret per area, no square of the map has two doorways ), and the dungeon map system is still completely unchanged, still encouraging you to use the good old graph paper map drawing method.

I think some Zelda hacks go a little too far in attempts to make the game accessible, but this one is just right. All I would do differently adding an option for the Famicom Disk System version of the game for those sweet sound effects.