Spoiler – This was an April fools joke!
A user going by the handle “Miyahon” has contacted Gaming Alexandria regarding our recent dissection of the special Charumera Edition of the Legend of Zelda, which you can can find here.
He gave us some ideas of techniques to try in order to get a better dump of the game without corruption. I made his adjustments to the dumping software and hardware and we were able to get a cleaner dump without corruption. I’m glad we did as we soon discovered something amazing hiding where the previous dump had corruption in the ROM… A secret Level 10 dungeon! Reminder this ONLY works in the Charumera Zelda version, so if you don’t have the disk (And very few do) you’re sadly out of luck.
In order to trigger the dungeon you have to go to the normal Death Mountain entrance with 0 rupees, zero bombs, zero arrows, 3 hearts and the wooden sword ONLY. Upon entering under these parameters it actually triggers level 10.
The dungeon colors are golden unlike any other level in the game. The music and enemies are the same however BUT there is a new layout for the level as you can see in the map on the screenshots. Instead of finding the red ring or the silver arrow there is only one item in Level 10, a bowl of ramen. At first it seemed it didn’t actually do anything but we found out later it did…
Surprise! The boss of the level is a purple version of Ganon! We found that without the ramen item we were unable to damage him. Even with this item it took 99 hits from the wooden sword to defeat him! It took me multiple tries but I was finally able to beat him to see what happened next.
Sadly the ending is the same as normal except Zelda says you’re the “Hero of Charumera” instead of Hyrule. But at least we finally found out that the Charumera version does actually have some special content!
Is this an April Fools joke, or not?
I really can’t tell.
I am curious if this could be implemented on the NES ROM… 😀