Hi! I've been playing this quest and strongly enjoying it, but there are some issues I had with the temple I just finished that I'd like to bring up while they're fresh in my mind. I hope I don't come off as too harsh; this quest is polished to a professional sheen and I'd love to see you make more stuff, whether it's for Zelda Classic or an original game, in the future.
Spoiler: showI liked Nakago (palace? temple? shrine?) a fair amount. I thought it was clever that in the same breath you give the player the ability to walk on water (which would have made the raft obsolete), you also offer the raft some new functionality. Very smart! My issues come a bit from the level design, namely...
This screen right here. I did eventually figure it out, no help, but I came very close to asking (and I did check the puzzle solution guide, though it lacked the answer). I'm not entirely sure this is a fair puzzle, but it's mainly because it requires the player to figure out multiple different things, and there are external elements that obfuscated the answer for me.
In terms of things the player has to understand for this puzzle to come together:
1. When they're returning to the player, boomerangs can travel through the blocks that nothing else can travel through.
2. Boomerangs that are in mid-flight can have their course altered if the player character is swapped.
These two things alone probably wouldn't require too much of a leap to figure out with the right level design, but there are a few other things that confused me when I was trying to figure this puzzle out. For one, there's a spider crawling along the room's ceiling when the player enters this screen. In retrospect, I now know that the purpose of the ladder on the far right is to position Link/Zelda such that the boomerang will arc towards them when they swap, but, initially, I assumed it was there for taking out the spider. As well as that, the switch on the far left kept making me question what it was supposed to do. Again, after the fact, I know that it refills the water, but I was really confused by it at first because it didn't appear to do anything except make my HUD flash. There's also a door not too far off to the right that appears to do nothing, which had me thinking that maybe it somehow had to do with this confusing puzzle. Another point of contention is that I don't think the mechanic of separating Zelda and Link is used often enough for it to spring immediately to mind as a tool for solving puzzles unless the level design makes it really clear (and, again, the new ideas that need to be learned here sort of muddy the waters in that regard). In fact, I think the reason it occurred to me at all is because when I stepped on the left-side switch, the parts of my HUD that would flash were the current player character's name and the icon for leaving behind the non-player character.
I'm certain that not all players would struggle with this as much as I did, especially ones who have the concept of "boomerang goes through bad block when moving backwards" more thoroughly ingrained than I do, but it's been my most major sticking point with the game thus far. In the end, I felt like the main reason I eventually figured out the trick to it was because the boomerang is the dungeon item and it had only been used once to this point, so I had to factor that in (after remembering that I could separate Link and Zelda) and I ended up putting together a "what if" sort of thought that pushed me to the solution. It's a shame, too - the core idea of this puzzle is really clever, it just took way, way too long to click with me.
There are a few other things I wasn't really sure about, but they didn't drive me quite as crazy as the above puzzle.
This complaint is a bit more minor, but earlier in my exploration of the dungeon (before I got the water-walking boots), I went back and forth through the top door here a couple times to get my bearings. The problem with this ended up being that getting back up there after you've solved the puzzle is a bit on the tedious side. This dungeon is a bit sluggish in general until the boots are acquired, since you have to repeatedly dive into the menu for the ladder, although I will admit that the payoff of free movement in the water is somewhat worth it.
There's also one of those orange/blue flip switches in this dungeon and it affects exactly one set of blocks that the player doesn't know about for a while. This sort of just feels like it's there arbitrarily. It's not like getting to it if the blue blocks are flipped the wrong way is a big deal, I'm just not sure there's much point.
Also, with respect to that one screen that has a Boo in it: probably not very hard to avoid if you're thinking carefully, but once it's on top of you, it can knock you down your ladder repeatedly and there didn't seem to be a way to ward it off, which got pretty frustrating.
I have a lot of other thoughts about this quest, mainly positive ones, but this particular dungeon had a lot of hiccups that bothered me. With that said, I still think this is a fantastic game so far. It takes a lot of the things I liked about many of the earlier Zelda games while also cutting a lot of the fat and having a difficulty that's much more to my taste. Amazing work!
edit: also...
Spoiler: show
Was I supposed to get the key in this room by using the beetle and jumping around a lot?
Never mind - I figured it out and beat the dungeon without grabbing any keys from the shop. I hate to say it, but I'm pretty annoyed about the fact that one of the keys was hidden beneath an armos in the desert. I'm glad I was at least able to finagle about and do most of the dungeon without getting that key, but the only real hint to its existence is the one from Impa at the start of the dungeon, and I had initially thought that that was referring to the other two keys in the outside area. The word "entrance" is used as well, and I suppose that could have helped if I had read it the right way, but the way I'd interpreted it was to mean that there were multiple ways into the "inside" portion of the dungeon from the "outside" portion of the dungeon. To be somewhat fair, though, you get into this dungeon to begin with by going through multiple layers of armos, so there is some prep for that concept, and that's probably the reason why I even thought "haha wouldn't that be crazy if the key I'm missing is under one of these armos statues" after I accidentally left the dungeon from the top screen. I guess the fact that I did do it without help suggests that it's certainly possible, but that's one that should really have been in the puzzle guide.
All that said: fantastic dungeon. Loved everything else about it.
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