The Free Gaming Thread v3: Check Out Cosmyk's Mustache

[Arjahn]

It's 4 am and I've got Zelda on the brain so I'm just gonna rate all of the Water Dungeons I've played through fuck it.

Swamp Palace - Link to the Past
Eh, it's fine. Just like a standard, run of the mill dungeon but with some watery bits. Hardly even counts as a Water Dungeon if you ask me, which might be a good thing. 5/10 - Meh.

Inside Jabu-Jabu's Belly - Ocarina of Time
I love this dungeon, I've always loved it. Killing Jellyfish and Uvulas with a boomerang? Weird, creepy viruses and quicksand pits made out of blood vessels? This place is weird as hell and exemplifies everything that a Zelda dungeon should be.

Except for the escort mission fish-person-box bangalore, that was tedious and dumb. 8/10 - Love it.

Water Temple - Ocarina of Time
Ok, honestly, I've never really had a problem with this one. Even as a kid, I never had that much of an issue with it. Inside the Deku Tree always screwed with my head though so I might just be off. It does get tedious, don't get me wrong changing the water levels and your booties all the time is annoying as hell, but both of the boss fights are great, the item is great, and I have a soft spot for that block that floats up then you have to drop underneath where it was. 6/10 - Alright, personal bias.

Pirates' Fortress - Majora's Mask
This one only kinda counts but the swimming up to it with crummy stealth elements bugs the crap out of me. It's just the Gerudo level from OOT but worse and with water. Dropping the Bees and collecting the Eggs are fun though, and I always really enjoyed the Gerdudo fights in the N64 games. 4/10 - Ehhh

Great Bay Temple
I fuckin' hate this place. I fuckin' hate the clunky Zora mask, I fuckin' hate screwing with currents, I fuckin' hate tiny hallways you have to awkwardly swim through, I fuckin' hate the horrible camera tracking here, and I fuckin' hate the boss fight. Ice arrow platforming is fun and keeps this from being the worst Water dungeon ever. 3/10 - Please no

Lakebed Temple - Twilight Princess
I love this place, probably the only Water dungeon I'd ever actually consider good. The underwater segments are still clunky and uncomfortable, but they're few and far between. I love messing around with the Hookshot and I think that it was used incredibly well here; I still think about pulling those turtle guys shells off and throwing them back at 'em today. 7/10 - Really good.

(Breath of the Wild mostly-mechanical but still kinda early story spoilers below)

Spoiler

Divine Beast Vah Ruta -Breath of the Wild
Ooooooooooooh boy, where to begin with this guy. This stupid, old, fat, dumb, stupid robot elephant.

Well let's start with the area leading up to it! You're instructed that you'll need "At Least 20 Shock Arrows!" to face this foe, so naturally instead of selling you any or sending you to craft them or anything reasonable, the Zoras send you to sprint around a giant evil centaur who can one shot you's house to scavenge a bunch. Cool!

Now you have the arrows, so let's see why we need so many---

...

you need 4.

...





Now you're riding on this giant fish dude's back surfing circles around this elephant fires Ice Blocks with wonky ass physics at you. This part's annoying but not actually that bad, no when it gets bad is when you are required to enter the belly of the beast. This will be the first dungeon for a lot of players in BOTW, so naturally it's the first time that the horrible voice acting pauses your game for you and tells you that you'll need a map, which are now MANDATORY. Cool! It also plays a cutscene showing you exactly where the map is, COOL!

You do some light messing around with your powers, nothing really special, and then, my friends, you come upon the ability to move the robot elephant's trunk. This is a crucial element to finishing the dungeon, and make sure you have a good book alongside your videogame, because it is slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. Which makes sense for a giant elephant apendage, but not for a fun game! Seriously moving this thing takes like 20 god damn seconds every time and you need to do it A LOT.

Gotten used to the +1 Trunk of Tedium yet? Great! Now let me introduce you to my friend, the great big spinning wheel of PAIN. It's basically an enormous wheel which you need to rotate buy moving the elephant's trunk. However, it's a Water Wheel, which means that you need to dip the Elephant's trunk into the lake, then bring it all the way up again so the water can spill onto it (even though the game specifically stated that the elephant's power is that it can generate an infinite amount of water which is causing environmental problems but just ignore that I guess). Which means, if you mess up the insanely precise jumps that you need to make on this moving abomination, you'll not only have to fall to the floor below and take a solid minute to climb back up, you'll have to slowly grind the trunk alllllllll the way back down and then back up again. GAME DESIGN! :D

Oh and you need to jump at a weird angle into a tiny chamber on a moving platform, then wait for it to rotate to the exact right angle to press your tablet onto it for no god damn reason, and they even included Spikes that damage you INSIDE OF THE TINY CHAMBER. You figured out our puzzle? Fuck you motherfucker! But it's cool, now you've awkwardly flailed about trying to wedge yourself into the minuscule closet and used the console, so naturally the next step is to (and I'm not making this up): jump off of a ledge, start the water wheel mid-jump, take out your parachute, fly to the bottom of the outside panels of the water wheel, hug the panel and pray to your god that the game's weird climbing mechanics let you grab on, THEN jump off to get to the upper floor. Sound like some crazy bullshit? That's what I thought! I screwed around for like half an hour trying to setup, what I thought were more sound solutions like jumping from the smaller wheel to the larger one, before looking it up and realizing "oh damn, it really wants me to do that." Oh, and if you mess up that jump. you fall to the bottom floor AND have to reset the trunk again! FUNNNNNN!!!!

The rest of the dungeon isn't as bad, just uninspired. There's a part where you get outside and the trunk's water creates a waterfall to the top floor, and the whole previous area with the Zoras had you using their power of climbing up waterfalls, which was pretty gosh dang cool. So I walked up to the waterfall annnnnnnnnd nope, can't ride this one. Just gotta go stand on the trunk and take it up, ok I guess. Then the boss shows up and I was out of arrows so I had to leave and get more before coming back, that was fun.

That one floor drove me god damn insane, easily earns this dungeon my #1 spot on the "Arjahn's Official Shitty Zelda Dungeons" List. At least it didn't have a horrible Escort mission, the NEXT dungeon has one of those!

1/10 - Just shit.

There are others but I don't really remember them well enough to rank them. Phantom Hourglass's was just hammer puzzles, honestly can't recall anything about Wind Waker's.