The key item for the House of Gales is the Tornado Rod. As I’ve said previously, the Rod creates a whirlwind, lifting Link and objects/enemies around him into the air. The winds stun most enemies (making the Rod a very powerful combat item), shatter tiles, and extinguish fires (when I first encountered one of these puzzles, I used the Ice Rod – which does work, as it should – but then I realized it’s probably meant to be the Tornado Rod again), including those around Bubbles (resembling the ones from A Link to the Past that I knew as Fire Faeries). Lifting Link is also useful for platforming – he can land on a moving platform while he’s higher up or be blown into a gust of wind that sends him to stable ground – and jumping over rolling spike traps.
This, along with the Tower of Hera, is also the first dungeon where Link can merge with walls, so that also shows up as a featured mechanic. I really like this idea, but it’s novel enough that it is not something I think of quickly. There have been way too many times where I’ve stared across a gap, knowing that even if there was a way to Hookshot across, there’d be an alternate solution for those armed only with the Tornado Rod, and failed to come up with the way for several minutes. In addition to crossing gaps, wall-merging is also used to bypass inconvenient wind gusts.
The miniboss is a pair of Heedles, giant lava salamanders whose fire needs to be put out with the Tornado Rod before Link can safely attack them. Then the dungeon boss is Margomill, a set of stacked spinning plates. The top plate has an eye, so clearly Link needs to use the Tornado Rod to simultaneously stun the boss and land on the top plate so he can strike the eye. After each of the first two rounds, Margomill grows extra plates that Link needs to knock out with his sword while it spins around the room. The third round is the last one, and Margomill leaves behind the Pendant of Wisdom. Unlike the Eastern Palace, Link is instantly teleported outside. A Zora is standing near the entrance, noting that Oren has gone missing – she’s presumably the fourth Sage to be captured in paint after Seres, Osfala, and Gulley.
I probably went a little out of the intended order by getting all the world-opening items available at once and saving the two dungeons for the very last thing I do for this part of the game. After so many games have “had quest to find the next dungeon / do the dungeon / repeat until Ganon” blazed in their cores, it’s refreshing to go back to how it was in the first game and A Link to the Past where, once you find the dungeons, you can do them whenever you want relative to overworld questing, and any order is just a suggestion. Maybe in the second world where the other 50 Maiamais are, it’ll mean the dungeons don’t ramp up in difficulty like they have, or maybe it’ll throw back to the original game where dungeon difficulty was used to help encourage doing them in order. (Mostly.)
As expected, the key item for the Tower of Hera is the Hammer, moving from the Dark World to the Light World. There are more of the springs throughout the dungeon, which usually serve as the way of going up a level. Terrorpins appear in this dungeon, with the standard trick of smashing them to flip them over still working. Other enemies come from the Tower of Hera: Hardhat Beetles, Mini-Moldorms, and Flying Tiles. Color crystal switches that raise/lower sets of tiles show up, and they’re an actual wall now so Link can wall-merge on them. Unlike the Eastern Palace, it doesn’t really feel like the same-named dungeon from A Link to the Past; there are more but smaller floors, and sections of riding platforms outside the tower walls.
Neither boss or miniboss needs the Hammer, although it can be effective against the four Stalfos that are the miniboss. Moldorm’s back as the dungeon boss, and it’s not quite as aggressive about trying to knock Link off the platform as the ones in A Link to the Past, but given the Hammer’s slow attack speed and Moldorm’s fast skittering speed, I can’t imagine using it. I managed to avoid getting knocked off so I don’t know if the fight resets if it happens. Also, I don’t know where I saw someone compare this version of Moldorm (and the Switch Link’s Awakening's, which uses the same model) to a string of hamburgers with a lot of lettuce on sesame seed buns, but now I can’t unsee it. Anyway, Link gets the Pendant of Power for his victory and now has everything he needs to get the Master Sword.
Next: High and low.
