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Creator of this hack claims disabling the sword beam makes the game EASIER but if anything it adds a bit more challenge. The beam is kind of overpowered when used for long range purposes, and even if at close range you are hitting enemies with it more than your sword, you're still hitting them and potentially knocking them back anyway.

My problems with the hack are 1) It's way too simple and minor of a hack and 2) The sword beam from the old Zeldas are kind of iconic, so removing them may be more of a negative than a plus in a sense. Zelda II proves that you can have the beam while still being brutally challenging.

All that said, I'd like to see a LttP difficulty hack that does things like make rupees far less generous in terms of how much the game throws at you for basic exploration, make the spin attack take slightly more time to charge (or simply lower it's damage to regular amount) so it's not used as a crutch for combat, and make the sword beam a literal straight beam and less accurate like Zelda 1.

As this hack is now, it's just barely passable, but could be much more.

There are quite a few hacks out there for the Legend of Zelda: Link to the past... from changing Link's hair color, to changing his gender to changing the time of day periodically. This hack fits along well with those and is somewhere in between them in the degree of having a point. I guess it adds a slight degree of difficulty? Personally I don't see it as improving the game and unless you want a slightly harder game, or the sound of the sword shot (is it really any more annoying then Agahinim firing his blasts? Or the sound the cane of Byrna makes? Personally I like the sounds so I'm kind of confused why you'd want it gone)

I could understand wanting to remove the beam because of it's low damage input compared to your sword, but the sound issue seems trivial.

If you're going to go out of your way to make such a minor change like this, why not just make the beam do equal damage to your sword?

This hack is more like a downgrade than an upgrade. Honestly why not take a page out of the Pretty Redux hack and bring in the Beam from Zelda 1 or Minish Cap? Make it a little more powerful and a straight beam rather than a bunch of swirling sparkles that fly across the screen?

I personally cannot recommend/condone this patch as all that is required to make this effect possible is the change of one single byte. It's almost as easy to accomplish via hex editor with little-to-no skills/knowledge of ROM hacking. You could also do this with a single cheat code, but really, the easiest way would be to not make any changes to the ROM and just take a tiny amount of damage.