As Link exits Jabu-Jabu’s belly, we cut to Twinrova in their ritual room, where they gloat over the fact that the Black Tower has been completed. In the tower, Verambi uses the power gained by the Tower to affect the timeline in similar ways to what Veran did with Nayru’s power. The Maku Tree can’t sense where the final essence is, but once again, there are only a few areas left for Link to explore. As he leaves the zora city, a zora presents him with a scale as a token of appreciation for all he’s done. The scale allows Link to access a walled-off area in the ocean called the Sea of Storms, where the pirates from Holodrum have come now that they’ve got their sea legs back. The captain trades the eyeball from a tokay statue for Link’s zora scale, which will give him access to the last area of the map in the past.
With the long hook, Link now has everything he needs to explore the Hero’s Cave. It’s a long series of the trickiest puzzles in the game. An early one that sets the tone for the experience is a standard puzzle of matching a set of statues to a reference set, only the movable ones seem to be one statue short. As it turns out, one of the reference set can be stolen and needs to be brought over to the puzzle solution. It only gets worse from there. A later puzzle requires pushing against a block to create a Cane of Somaria block on the other side of it and bending a jump in ways that my thumb does not appreciate. There’s a room where Link needs to walk over all the tiles in a single path, only he can’t; no matter what he does, he’ll leave one square untouched, which needs to be covered with a Cane of Somaria block. To get one reward, Link needs to create a Cane of Somaria block under himself while he’s jumping.
All of that pales before the worst puzzle. It combines two simple puzzles, each quite familiar by now, to devious effect. The first puzzle type involves rolling a color cube onto three color tiles. The second has link pull a lever which temporarily halts a lava flow, allowing the cube to be rolled over the lava bed. However, if the cube falls into the lava, Link has to exit the room to reset the puzzle. And, because it’s not already mean enough, Link entered the room through a portal, not a door, so if he falls into the lava, he doesn’t just return to the entrance, he’s warped back to the last room, and the puzzle completely resets. As you might guess, this puzzle is completely unforgiving and took a whole bunch of tries to get past.
Then the penultimate room has a tricky series of bent jumps, and the final room has a bunch of enemies to kill before getting the reward, including a couple wallmasters because Nintendo hates us. The reward for all this is the Armor Ring L3, which greatly reduces incoming damage but also greatly reduces sword damage. For enemies that are immune to the sword, that’s not a bad tradeoff, so at least all those tricky puzzles have a good payoff.
Getting back to the quest, the past version of the entrance to Moonlit Grotto on Crescent Island only has one of its two eyes. Putting the tokay eyeball Link got from the pirate captain in the missing eye’s slot opens an entrance. The entrance does not lead to a past version of Moonlit Grotto but a secret path to a walled-off section of the sea. The secret path has several tests for Link before he makes it through: fighting enemies, navigating traps, finding a hidden path, and once he’s through the cave, there’s a simple puzzle for lining up statues to open the way forward. The grounds for the dungeon are another maze crawling with darknuts and lynels, and Link finally comes to the entrance to the last dungeon.
Next: The final exam.
