Skyward Sword: Flooded Faron Woods

As Link drops into Faron Woods, Fi notes that most of the locations are inaccessible at the moment. Link can land near the Temple, and that’s it. When Link come to the front of the Temple, Groose runs up and says the Imprisoned is about to break free again, so maybe coming back to Faron Woods first wasn’t the greatest idea, because it doesn’t feel like that long since the last time Link fought him. This time, it’s grown a tail; I’m not sure that changes the battle too much. It’s still sending shockwaves with every step, and seems to recover from being hit by the Groosenator faster than before. Unlike previous battles where Link could jump on its head and drive the Sealing Spike in that way, if the Imprisoned isn’t stunned, it’ll shake Link off in about a second after he tries it.

The second phase of the fight is where the real fun begins. This time, the Imprisoned can fly. No problem, Groose can still stun it, and one shot sends it falling all the way down to the bottom of the Sealed Grounds and down so Link can drive the Sealing Spike in a second time. Unless it takes so long to use the Groosenator that the Imprisoned reaches the temple, this is the easiest of the three phases. For the third phase, the game has arbitrarily cut off Groose’s supply of bombs, and the Imprisoned’s still flying. Groose has an idea: Link can come to him, and he’ll shoot Link onto the Imprisoned’s head. (Flying seems to keep it from shaking him off.) This is the awful phase. Link’s starting from the bottom of the Sealed Grounds, and so Groose only has one shot at getting Link to where he needs to be. And the aiming controls are not precise enough this time; it’s too easy to go flying over the Imprisoned, or bounce off its side, with no time left to make it back to the top of the area. Watching videos, it looks like the way to do this is to take the Groosenator around the track until it’s shooting head-on, but I found another way. When the Imprisoned gets high enough, there’s a wind geyser at the bottom of the area that will send Link all the way to the top, and then it’s just a matter of using the falling controls to land on the Imprisoned’s head and hit the Spike. The Imprisoned is sealed back up, and Link completes the seal.

Reasons why I walked away at this point and didn’t come back for a week:

1. To begin with, the Imprisoned is a terrible boss. Whack toes, drive Spike into forehead, repeat as needed. Bleh.
2. So they take this terrible boss and you have to fight it three times.
3. The third time comes too soon after the second.
4. Motion control swordplay, both because moving my arm straight up and down should not produce diagonal strikes, and because when it fails me, I swing harder, and that makes my arm sore.
5. You get one shot at a critical part of the fight that is nothing you’ve ever had to do – at least with such accuracy – before.

Now it’s time to deal with the other problem: Faron Woods. The reason Link couldn’t skydive into the woods was because they’re flooded; the gate between the woods and the temple is closed and sealed, and opening it breaks the seal which is bad times all around. Enter the Groosenator again: Groose flings Link over the temple and gate into the flooded woods. (Skydiving in – no, we can’t do that. Being flung from a catapult – sure! Also… one of the statues, the one in the big central tree, isn’t underwater…) Bucha is near where Link lands, and says the water came from the base of the tree, so Link goes to investigate, and after he makes it out of the water, Faron sees him and comes to chat.

She’s the one who flooded the woods, in an effort to get rid of the monsters. She also knows why Link’s come, but she wants him to pass another test before she’ll teach him her part of the song. Look, ma’am. Do you see any other chosen heroes with swords blessed by the goddess showing up wanting to finish off Demise? No? Then why are you giving Link a hard time? But Link doesn’t actually get to say that, so test it is. Faron splits the melody into Tadtones (note-like tadpoles, cf. the hatched Zora eggs from Majora’s Mask), spreads them all over the forest, and Link has to collect them all. They’re split into seventeen groups, and once Link starts collecting a group, he has to collect the next one soon enough after the last or restart the whole group. It’s here that it’s possible to deplete the Oxygen Blue Citrus Thing if you’re not careful and/or run into one of the purple poisoned air bubbles, but it’s generally not too much of a concern. There’s a couple groups that are tricky to find: one in a cave that needs to be blown open with a Froak, one under a lilypad that needs to be jumped on and flipped over. Once Link has them all, he returns to Faron, who teaches him her part of the song, defloods the woods, and goes home. (Once she’s gone, the enemies don’t come back – great if you want to explore peacefully, not so good if you want treasures they drop.)

Next: And this was the dragon we knew where to find…