[Enhancement] Wind Fish Egg Maze Randomization Proposal

[Techokami]

Introduction

Not too long ago, in the Zelda 4 Randomizer Discord server, Daid mentioned the idea of randomizing the path through the Wind Fish's Egg. This is my concept for such a feature, based on Daid's idea, as well as my own suggestions on how such a feature can be implemented, to make for more interesting and varied runs.

How It Works Currently

Right now, it is virtually unchanged from how it works in Link's Awakening DX V1.0 on the Game Boy Color. Inside the Wind Fish's Egg, which is technically the final dungeon of the game, the player is presented with a maze similar to the Lost Woods of the original Legend of Zelda; a screen with four exits, three of which lead the player back to the same screen they came from, with only south taking the player back to the dungeon entrance. The player has to take the correct sequence of exits to make the north exit at the last screen of the maze lead to a new screen with a pit that leads to the final boss. (This kind of thing is already well understood by this community, but hey, might as well break it down for newcomers!)

The path is learned by reading one of the books in the library at Mabe Village: "Dark Secrets and Mysteries of Koholint." This presents the player with the text "Round and round, the passageways of the egg..." followed by the 8 directions in the form of a sequence of arrows. The sequence is picked from four precomposed sets:

1. ← ← ↑ → → ↑ ← ↑
2. → ↑ ↑ → ↑ ↑ → ↑
3. ← ↑ → ↑ ← ↑ → ↑
4. → → → → ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑

This then becomes the sequence to get through the maze. Except... you can just skip reading the book. The game defaults to the first sequence, so if you already know that, there's no reason to ever check that book. Furthermore, in an unmodified version of Link's Awakening DX, the player is also required to have the Magnifying Lens from the end of the trade sequence to read the book, otherwise the player is told that the book appears to be blank instead. LADXR removes this requirement.

Proposed Changes

I propose that there be a new set of options added to the Randomizer settings, under the Gameplay category. This is in the form of a new main option, Egg Maze, followed by sub-options that are only displayed if this setting is changed. The values for Egg Maze should be:

1. Standard. This is the default option and leaves everything as it currently is.
2. No Maze. The Egg skips the maze and takes the player straight to the hole that leads to the final boss. This is actually what the alternate overworld settings use, and here it can be used with the standard overworld as well. This will also change the sequence of arrows in the book to instead say "just go up?"
3. Randomly Selected. Another name could be "Switch Style," as this is how the Nintendo Switch remake of the game handles it. Basically, one of the four precomposed sets is selected at random when the game is started, so you cannot rely on the first sequence being the correct sequence. There might be an issue with depending on the in-game RNG to actually select something at random so early into gameplay, that it might be smarter to instead make the selection using the seed during generation, and replace all four paths with the one selected.
4. Randomly Generated. To prevent players from just brute forcing the path, a randomly generated sequence is created using the seed during game generation consisting of 7 directions (left, right, or up) followed by a final up direction, and all four precomposed sets are replaced with it. This is what the older Z4R randomizer does with the Egg Maze.

Similar to how changing the Entrance randomizer setting exposes extra sub-options that pertain to it, changing the Egg Maze setting to anything but Standard should also expose the following sub-options with the values of "Yes" and "No":

1. Magifying Lens required. This toggles whether the player needs to obtain the Magnifying Lens before being able to read the book, just like in the vanilla game. Setting this to Yes will make the Magnifying Lens a required item for logic purposes. Default setting is "No."
2. Direction sanity. This toggles whether the directions are turned into their own check or not. If "Yes", reading the book in the library for the first time will instead give the player an item, similar to Keyhole sanity or Owl statues having items. Then, when trying to read the book subsequent times, the player is instead given the message "Hey! Someone tore a page out of this book!" to let them know that they need to find an item to actually read the book. This new item, the Lost Page, would use the Map item graphic but in the blue palette, similar to how blue overworld keys are used for opening up locations when playing in Keyhole sanity. Collecting the page will give the message "You found the lost page from the book in the library!" and will allow the player to actually read the book like normal. Default setting is "No."