This game doesn’t have the small fairy fountains that Ocarina did, but I’ve found that the owl statues always have a fairy in a nearby pot or bush for Link to grab, along with arrows, bombs, and a magic refill. It’s a quick way to restock on some of the most important consumables, so of course I figure this out now that I’m trying to empty Link’s bank account and buying arrows and bombs and such in town is a nice way to spend money. Anyway, Link restocks, calls the turtle, and hookshots onto its back. During the turtle ride, the Gerudo pirates make their own attempt at approaching the temple, only to get swept up and blown away by the tornado swirling around it. The turtle safely delivers Link, who cutely waves goodbye as he prepares to head into the temple. (He does the same wave as the great fairies go back into their fountains.)
The Great Bay Temple has none of the things that annoyed me about Ocarina’s Water Temple, and yet it manages to be just as frustrating an experience. I wonder if part of the reason I hated putting on/taking off the iron boots so much is that I wasn’t used to it, having only gotten the iron boots in the minidungeon immediately before the Water Temple; by now swapping out masks is close to second nature. The biggest frustration for me here was the main room with the swirling currents; it could be serious chore to get into the right gateway, and the only thing to do if Link went in the wrong one is work the way through the next several rooms against respawning enemies. Like I said, without the beavers’ swimming challenge actually teaching me the swimming controls, I don’t know that I could have done this. As it is, the first two dungeons I’m pretty sure I could have completed in a normal cycle without the Inverted Song of Time (maybe not in time to get my sword reforged twice), but this one might have gotten pretty dicey.
A lot of that time was spent fighting the first miniboss, Wart. Wart’s a boss in the tradition of patras or Arrghus or Barinade: a central eye surrounded by like a hundred blobs of goo. As such, the idea seems to be to knock the blobs of goo off of it and kill them to reveal the core eye, and I tried it patiently with fire arrows, but like Odolwa it was taking too long so I had Link go in with nothing but nothing but his sword and his lack of caring if there’s a better way. This went pretty quickly, and kicked off phase two, in which Wart zooms around the arena ramming into Link. This was also hard, because it didn’t leave just a whole lot of time to get an arrow shot lined up. This was probably the fight where I took the most damage thus far, even worse than the iron knuckles in the graveyard.
The treasure in the dungeon is the ice arrows, which actually have a use in this game. They can freeze enemies to use as platforms, or when there’s no enemies to freeze, freeze patches of water. They’re also needed against the second miniboss, gekko, who summons a blob of ooze that he tries to smash onto Link but breaks apart if frozen, leaving the gekko vulnerable. The gekko turns into a frog when defeated, and now it’s time to start rounding them up. Link speaks to it wearing Don Gero’s mask, and it promises to return to the mountains come spring.
Halfway through the dungeon, Link needs to reverse the current in the central room by changing which pipes are spinning a giant water wheel, and this leads to the final boss, Gyorg, a gargantuan masked fish. This is kind of an underwhelming fight. He’s dangerous, no doubt, doing big damage when he catches Link before he can get back onto the central platform and his jumps make it hard to stay on that platform if Link’s near the edge (which he needs to be, to shoot Gyorg). But the routine is simple: stand on the platform, shoot Gyorg with an arrow, put on the Zora mask, float down to the bottom, shock him, get out of the water before Link gets eaten. I had more trouble with hitting the wrong button (usually rolling into the water rather than shooting an arrow, which is decidedly Not Ideal) than anything Gyorg did.
Link and Tatl get to meet with the giants again, and Tatl’s demanding that they help. Their response is “Save our friend,” which Tatl takes to mean save the fourth from the canyon dungeon. For rounding up stray fairies, the great fairy in the bay area awards Link with halved damage. Lulu’s voice is back, so the zora band is back on for the Clock Town festival performance, and Link gets to join in as they rehearse the song the bandleader stole from Mikau, Link, and one of the bandmates.
With the pirates’ presence reduced and the waters cleaned up, the fisherman has set up a jumping game that requires riding an automatic boat and hookshotting off to a group of islands. This is a fun and easy game: five islands in an X shape, with torches on the outer islands, and Link has to jump to the island with the lit torch and back. I do wish if the camera were fixed in an odd place, it would be one where I could see all four torches at once. Getting 20 earns a heart piece.
There are four other frogs: one already in the gathering place, one in the swamp, one in Clock Town’s laundry pool, and one left behind after defeating a gekko in Woodfall Temple. Once Link defeats Goht to bring spring back to the mountains, he’s greeted by the reunited frog choir, and thankfully doesn’t have to do anything else after having to visit three different dungeons to get them back together. For his help, he gets a heart piece. While the mountains are thawed, Link can also get a heart piece in the water surrounding the islands leading into Goron Village.
Next: Finishing the Bombers’ Notebook.
