The hallway that leads into the Forest Temple is infested with Keese, then Link comes to the first main room of the dungeon. Here, Link’s monkey friend has gotten herself captured again. Once Link frees her, she becomes his guide. However, her attempt to lead Link across a bridge gets stymied when a baboon blocks her path, uses a boomerang to take out the ropes holding up the bridge, and rudely slaps its butt at Link. The monkey’s fine and leads Link back into the dungeon, where she hangs from a rope for Link to swing across the gap.
Across the first gap, Link finds an odd birdlike creature in a pot. The creature’s name is Ooccoo, and she seems to serve the same purpose as the various warp tiles/pots in dungeons, only her description seems to indicate she can be called on demand. And with that, I think I can withdraw my reservations about lantern oil – if Link needs it, he can Ooccoo out, find a shop, come back, and Ooccoo back to where he was. The only caveat on this is that I didn’t actually test her in this dungeon, so maybe there are limitations I don’t know about.
There are four new enemies in this dungeon, three variants of thinks Link has seen before. Instead of bomb flowers, there are Bomblings. They won’t let Link just take the bomb to throw at whatever he wants, so he has to beat them into submission, which causes the bomb to activate. There’s a fair amount of time before it detonates, so Link has an opportunity to toss it where he needs it. Next are Baba Serpents, Deku Babas whose heads detach from the plant base to come after Link. Then there’s the Deku Like, and like other Like creatures, it tries to swallow Link, but unlike the others, doesn’t steal anything from him if it does. Like so many other creatures, its digestive system can’t handle explosions. Finally, there are Tile Worms that hide under floor tiles and pop up if Link walks over them. They can’t be killed at first, so all Link can do is avoid them.
The monkey’s goal in the dungeon is to rescue her friends, of which there are seven. Once Link’s rescued the first three, the monkeys form a line to swing Link across the broken bridge from earlier to confront the baboon, Ook, in a miniboss fight. Ook hops between pillars, throwing his boomerang – sometimes to cut Baba Serpents loose from the ceiling, sometimes trying to hit Link. Link can roll into the pillar under Ook so that he’s too dazed to catch the boomerang when he comes back, so it knocks him off instead, giving Link a chance to whack him a few times. The timing on this can be tricky: get too close, too soon, and Ook will jump off instead of throwing the boomerang. After enough hits, an insect – the thing that made him act weird – will be knocked off of Ook, and he’ll flee from Link, leaving the Gale Boomerang behind.
Like every other boomerang in the game, the Gale Boomerang is magic, this one with a fairy spirit living inside it. Like the Wind Waker boomerang, it can lock onto multiple targets per throw, except the player needs to manually lock it on. Also, as it flies, it summons a tornado underneath it that carries items and/or enemies back to Link. The tornado is also useful for numerous the rotating bridges in the dungeon; the ones in the outside portion are rotated by the wind, but inside, Link needs to use the boomerang to spin them. It can also extinguish torches, spin switches, and drag Tile Worms out of safety so Link can kill them.
Exploring the rest of the dungeon frees the remaining monkeys. There are also two heart pieces – Minish Cap wasn’t a one-off thing. With all the monkeys freed, they form a long chain to swing Link across to where the boss room is. Before the boss is the first fairy Link can grab, and the description says it restores eight hearts – not as powerful as in Wind Waker, but better than Minish Cap’s crappy four, and it says this so the player doesn’t get caught off-guard when the fairy doesn’t help as much as the ones in the N64 games did. (And with only three hearts at this point, there’s no difference between restoring four, seven (A Link to the Past) eight, ten, or twenty.)
The splash screen identifying the boss with a title returns from the N64 games, identifying the multi-headed Deku Baba as the twilit parasite, Diababa. At the start, there are bomblings that Link use the Gale Boomerang with to deliver into the mouths of Diababa’s two lesser heads, causing the central head with an eye in the mouth to pop up. The bomblings flee from Diababa’s full form, but Ook returns, swinging through the arena carrying bomblings. From here, the fight is basically the same as the first phase: use the boomerang to grab the bombling and deliver it to Diababa. When the central head is hit, it flops on the ground in front of Link with the weak spot eye vulnerable.
Once Diababa’s dead, the eye falls out and explodes into a heart container, and the rest of the body forms into something Midna calls a Fused Shadow. This is what Midna was looking for, and what Faron sent Link to the dungeon to find. Midna says the other two light spirits should have the other two Fused Shadows, and remains as helpful as ever in explaining exactly what they are and what they do. Once Link grabs the heart container, Midna teleports him back to Faron’s spring. Faron tells Link to go to the east to Eldin’s lands, and says that Link will find the Ordon children there.
Next: Even London Bridge has fallen down and moved to Arizona, now I know why…
