The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – The Desert
Before starting to cross the desert to the Spirit Temple, there are some goodies to round up in the Gerudo Fortress. There’s a heart piece and skulltula on the fortress itself, and then there’s a minigame: horseback archery. A skulltula hides on one of the targets at night, but during the day Link and Epona get to compete against Gerudo records. Epona’s on rails for the game, so it’s not as frustrating as riding down the poes was, but it requires a pretty good degree of mastery to get both rewards. The first reward is another heart piece – just one to go now – and then for 1500 points, the second quiver upgrade. There’s also a mini-dungeon here, but completing it requires an item Link will get in the next dungeon, so let’s put it aside for now.
The Gerudo woman at the gate deeper into the desert says that there are two trials to the crossing. First up is the River of Sand, a huge quicksand bed. She said Link couldn’t walk across it, but she probably didn’t know about the hover boots, which let him do exactly that. After that is a bunch of signposts leading to an outpost. Before Link gets there, there’s a man on a flying carpet selling something that I didn’t actually buy because I’m pretty sure from his description they were bombchus which Link already has plenty of, especially since there hasn’t been a need for them. Anyway, the outpost has a skulltula for Link to collect, and then on the roof, there’s a poe he can find with the Lens of Truth. The poe offers to lead Link the rest of the way through the desert, but he doesn’t take a straight route, and Link is constantly attacked by leevers as he follows.
There’s not much to do at the Spirit Temple right now. The path to the east is blocked by a block too heavy for Link to move, and the path to the west is blocked by a crawlspace that adult Link can’t fit through. Signs inside explain what to do: explore the western part as a child, then return with a treasure he’ll find in that part of the dungeon that’ll let him move the heavy block. Getting through the desert as a child would be a challenge, so Sheik’s there to teach Link the final ocarina song to teleport back to the Desert Colossus. Kaepora Gaebora’s there to observe this exchange, and flies off as Sheik disappears into a sandstorm. Before Link teleports to the Temple of Time for one last childhood adventure, there’s a skulltula hiding in a tree to knock free and a Great Fairy to visit who’ll teach him the third spell, Nayru’s love.
Spirit Temple, Part 1
The area around the Haunted Colossus has a magic bean planting ground, so the familiar game of luring out the skulltula then planting the last magic bean plays out, and then it’s time for young Link to enter the Spirit Temple. There’s a Gerudo woman blocking the crawlspace. She turns out to be the mysterious Nabooru, and she wants Link to get the silver gauntlets so that she can kick Ganon and his followers out of the temple. Link agrees to help her, but we all know who’s going to end up using the gauntlets.
The Spirit Temple features a new enemy called Anubis, who mirror Link’s movements and are only vulnerable to fire. There’s a crystal switch in the room that activates a fire trap, so the idea is to maneuver the Anubis onto the spot where the fire ignites and shoot the switch. Alternately, Link can just get close to it and kill it with Din’s fire. The other new feature this dungeon has is an actual use for bombchus, which are needed to reach an explodable crack in a wall to light up a sun face and open the way forward. There are also three skulltulas in the parts young Link explores.
Child Link only gets a miniboss, but what a miniboss it is: the return of iron knuckles to the series. This guy hits like a truck and takes a bunch of hits to kill. It’s fairly easy to get the rhythm of jump back, wait for him to start swinging, jumping attack, but oh, does he make Link pay for every mistake. Once the iron knuckle’s down, Link walks to an outside ledge. Kaepora Gaebora’s there to greet him, giving one last bit of advice: the boss is a pair of twin witches, and their powers can be turned against them. When Link finds the silver gauntlets, the item description text says he promised to give them to Nabooru.
Well, just then, Nabooru gets grabbed by the witches, who send her off to an unknown fate, yelling for Link to escape. So, that issue’s settled. Link heads back to the Temple of Time and takes up the Master Sword one last time.
Next: The last sage reveals herself [1].
[1] I already used a “Fire and Ice” joke, dammit.
