Absolutely amazing project, absolutely textbook amazing level design. The Dark Souls 1 inspired looping shortcutting design combined with the metroidvania item-gating works amazingly well with terraria's looting, platforming, and combat-centric design. Integrating terraria's progression with its ores and boss-eras into a more linear design almost makes too much sense, and now exploring really feels like exploring instead of flowing with the whims of random generation. playing terraria where everything feels so intentionally placed and designed is almost like how it was always meant to be.
that whole mountain area is so cool, optional and out of the way. with the pretty awesome equal footing bosses up there. which, btw, almost every new enemy is awesome and require more strategy than nearly any vanilla enemy. this mod also has made me use potions in ways i never have before - i don't think i ever needed to use a gill potion until now, and it feels good to finally be in niche situations where a potion can be useful and actually use it in that niche situation - so, the potion bag is awesome in other words. i've been playing solo, but the way the loot is set up it clearly has a 4 player co-op in mind and i have mad respect for that, this mod seems absolutely perfect for a co-op adventure and it almost seems more fun than a vanilla co-op session. i'll probably play with a friend at some point to see.

Some minor critiques from what I noticed. (I write a lot of text here but it really is mostly minor (also i want to be clear i've finished ~quarter/third of the mod so far)):

The souls system is a little cumbersome but that's just Terraria. Having it have its own little square to itself in the corner is clever and kinda cute. Though the counter blocking event progress by default is a little annoying.

There's definitely some redundancy, probably due to oversights as things have changed through development. The two that was readily apparent playing through was, first, the two separate chests filled with 4 cloud in a bottles, the first in the clearly intended place to get it, since the whole area is a textbook well designed area where you see you can't get up to the marble and then you get the cloud and then can double jump and immediately get to use it. Then there's a second chest at the bottom of the chasm at the abandoned excavation, which you'd need the cloud in a bottle or some other fall damage preventing tool to get to in the first place. The other example is the goblin army invading the burnt village. I guess you could go past there as soon as you get cloud, but the story progression implies not going there until after eater of worlds, in which case the goblin army spawns naturally and naturally invaded the village, for me at least. Then when you go past the village, you get a sign and chest saying, oh and there's a goblin army thing here's some battle standards. like i guess there's no real good way around this i would guess? a weaker example but it did leave me confused until i realized the goblin army coming naturally was at least somewhat intentional, at least I think. a weaker example, but yeah. i doubt there's a way to better take control over the things terraria does but it'd be nice for guaranteeing a certain experience - which transitions well to my next point.

I'm not a fan of many instances where enemies are spawned through statues via pressure plates or sensors - obviously, you want enemies to show up at specific times, and i'm sure with friends this is no big deal, but playing solo i might end up activating the statues two or three times, and then i'm left with a frustrating situation. this is really a problem at the beginning of the corrupted tunnel where there's a lot of sensors and it's easy to just be in there and activate it a lot. there's no real easy solution to this, and i'm not really familiar with terraria's wiring mechanics, but maybe adding a timer to prevent multiple activations or maybe if there's a mod that can check the player count and account for that, idk. I think in a truly ideal situation statues and switches and sensors wouldn't be necessary at all and you'd have full control to spawn enemies however you like, but those are the restrictions of making a game in a game I would suppose.

i think it kinda goes without saying, but there just has to be a better way to convey the story. as it is right now through the signs is totally serviceable and actually pretty quaint and cute, but is totally static and can't react to, say, how other things have changed. the linear non-linearity of the design lends towards, say, you doing something before another thing, or having totally not gone to some area until finding it way later, and the context of what you have done and seen when you see something that long ago can be jarring. It helps that most of the signs are quite broad and about the moment. Let me be clear though, most terraria mods or worlds barely have an implication of a story, let alone an attempt at conveying dialogue and world building. but i guess that's why i feel like there's so much potential - there's so much mystery and atmosphere conveyed just through environment alone, that it makes me want more to chew on, you know? finding that temple under the water under the bridge because i messed up my jump to have that dank ass metroid music play was just a total mood. I CRAVE coming back to that temple later in the game when i need to for progress and having dialogue going on that acknowledges that. which, like, if you didn't find that until you needed to find it, the sign talking about how it's some story your dad talked about would feel pretty out of place after having traveled most of the world and conquered perilous dangers and traumatizing demonic ♥♥♥♥.

Also, and this the most personal and nitpicky thing really, Dodge roll can be pretty unwieldy in a 2D space when i'm forced to move some fixed distance. I guess it'd be very unrealistic to expect Smash Bros. ass dodging mechanics, but I found myself wish I had a spot dodge instead of having to move everywhere - still better than the master ninja gear where i accidentally find myself getting flung everywhere. which yeah i gave up using my shield of cthulu despite almost always using it just because with all the precise and tight platforming i'm doing hell yeah i'm pressing left and right a whole bunch, and dashing somewhere'll get me friggin killed.

also what's the point of the chits? does terraria not like using the souls as currency directly? idk. it'd be cool if souls themselves replaced money at some point, though obviously just having souls on top of money is the better solution for now.

also, it would be cool if instead of having a ton of health potions to loot we had an estus flask and it could be refilled at bonfires, and you could upgrade your flask at certain points. same with a mana flask, that'd be a cool nod to ds3 since the mod is mostly nodding to ds1 and ds2.

also btw you have an impeccable taste in games. the final fantasy armor makes my heart melt. and the beginning mage set is red mage, because of course you're going to be using melee too? aah, so good. the cecil and shadow set are so sick. oh and course the Hero's Armor set, of course. the music, the music selection is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ perfect it's unreal, not only are the visuals sublime but the music just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ makes the mood of the scene and ties it together, it's so good

k bye just wanted to say i liked your mod and talk about it bye