Between Deltarune, the smash direct, and my having to prepare to move, it was hectic getting this out. But I did! I will never miss an update!
Zodi Plays: The Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass [18] Fire Temple Plus
Video Length: 24:29
Starting us off today, we play a rather unnecessary bit of padding with Gongoron, having to run around the entire island AGAIN to find him. This is a bit annoying, especially because the story they’re trying to tell here (Gongoron dislikes us and thinks we’re not worth of being a goron, but will later realize we’re good) isn’t actually worth all the annoyance they’re asking us to do here. It’s a really minor thing, all things considered, but after the frustration of last video poor Past Zodi couldn’t help but be a bit annoyed. We eventually corral Gongoron into going the right way, and follow after him to the mini maze before the next dungeon. I actually like this area, since it speaks to a design philosophy I care about. In this game, as you know, bombs and arrows are resources that you have a limited supply of. However, they’re not just used for combat but puzzles as well! So using them for the former always feels bad because you never know when the later will show up. This is why I tend to prefer the systems where you have unlimited resources, like Skyward Sword letting you just harvest Bomb flowers for free bombs. However, in Phantom Hourglass, if you ever NEED bombs, bomb flowers are around! Sometimes they’re in inconvenient spots, but they are there. I feel like if you’re going to have limited resources, this is how you should do it. It’s easier to solve this challenge with regular bombs, but you can use the bomb flowers if you need to. I think it’s a bit more nuanced a way to make puzzles and challenges beyond just having a nut full of preset item drops, which this area also has of course but given what they’re mostly used for I can actually allow it.
At any rate, we make our way through the maze, encountering the first new enemy of the area; blue chus! They’re identical to yellow chu’s except it feels like they take more damage from swords. I don’t actually remember if they do our not, my memory’s shot on these guys, but I’m pretty sure they do. We also encounter Like Like’s, the old slimy bag worm jerks who suck you up and try to eat your shield! I erroneously say they still take three sword hits to kill, regardless of powered up sword or not, but I’m not 100% sure on that. They take two bomb hits, and three arrow hits, but later on I hit one with one bomb and then two sword swings that kills it so I’m really unsure what it’s health status is. If I had to get, enemies internally work on the same heart system we do, and if Like Like’s have say three hearts, each four chunks each, the flame sword is actually powered up by 1.5 instead of by 2x like it says, so instead of doing two full hearts it does a heart and a half, and bombs would just do one heart worth of damage. So that would be the math to make that work, and now I feel nerdy. Well, nerdier. ANYWAY, Goron Temple. It’s full of sand, but not the helpful kind, and it’s got strange wire cubes for doors instead of the same regular door we’ve seen in every other temple. It’s odd, to me, because I know games never really do something NEEDLESSLY, so I’m curious why there’s a difference in doors here compared to every other dungeon.
At any rate, the dungeon also has some new foes for us to tangle with! The armos statues, who act much the same as they did in Wind Waker, stomping around trying to bump into you. They can only be hurt by bombs in this one, and they don’t explode violently when they die, instead becoming inert statues for us to push around for puzzles. We also get Eye Slugs, which is a really weird name for a vaguely cobra esque enemy. I mean yes it has Bellum’s eye on it, but I’d call it like…Eye Rope or something. They are so slow to attack they’re barely a threat. We also have the Hinox, the giant man! They can return fire any bombs near them, and swing those massive arms to send Link flying. If you’re only fighting one they’re kind of a joke, as a single arrow in the eye stuns them long enough to be sliced to ribbons. I’m a bit concerned for you if you don’t have the powered up sword. If it really does actually power up your sword, it uh…it still takes a TON of damage to kill the Hinox, and that’s distressing. Also somewhat distressing, the complete and total lack of tutorials for the little one floor gimmick we get with Gongoron! Sometimes a game should probably tell you what you can do, and this is one of those times.
After slaying the Hinox, you reunite with Gongoron. But he’s separated from us by a wall and some gaps and fences and stuff. However, now we can switch to controlling him! It’s very rare for a Zelda to do this sort of thing, and here we are doing it in this game of all things. Gongoron can roll around to move, being a Goron, allowing him to smash anything in his path at high speeds. Except for Rock Helmet Chu’s, which are apparently stronger than the boulders they hide within as they cannot be smashed by Gongoron’s movements at all! This is especially annoying since the game does not tell you how to attack with Gongoron. Admittedly, there’s not many ways TO interact with things in this game so you can figure it out fairly quickly, and in that sense making the Rocky Helmet Chu’s not destroy-able by the roll makes it clear it’s intended for you to learn how to do it, but it still feels wrong to me. Letting us experiment is all well and good, but with something like this I feel like a tutorial would be appreciated. Heck, the Gorons don’t roll at all in this game so if this is somehow your first Zelda game (entirely possible!) you’d have no idea to expect that. You’d very quickly realize they CAN roll, but it would probably be a bit confusing at first. They could of hinted at that a bit by having Gongoron, during his little hissy fit, roll away instead of run away at high speeds. Just saying.
With Gongoron’s help, we get the dungeon item, and it may be one of my most favorite items in all of Zelda. Second only to the Skull Hammer, it’s the Bombchu! These adorable little mouse grenades are quite great in this game, allowing you to set the course when you put them down. It even stops time for you so you can ensure the path you want it to take. Not only that, you can move after releasing them, allowing for some two pronged attacked! The only limiting factor is that Bombchu’s only come in tens, and getting the Bombchu bag would mean leaving the dungeon which just isn’t happening. The other thing I quite like about Bombchu’s is that they have one of the most clear and concise versions of the iterative design philosophy I mentioned a ton back during Minish Cap. You encounter a variety of puzzles involving the Bombchu, each slowly ramping up in difficulty with what they add and what they remove, and it’s really solidly put together. Honestly, in that sense, Phantom Hourglass is a surprisingly mixed bag of a game to me. I’ve made it pretty clear I’m not the biggest fan of it, not the least of which because the boat controls are honestly kind of miserable and the Ocean King’s Temple is an interesting idea executed rather poorly. But the dungeons have all been pretty consistently good, barring the Ghost Ship and that was really more of a mini dungeon and not a real full dungeon in my eyes. It’s sometimes been said that for Zelda games, the dungeons are the real meat of the game, and for Phantom Hourglass that could not be more true.
But yeah, that’s the video! Hope you all enjoyed, I’ll see you next time for when we beat the Goron Temple and then slowly sort of shuffle my way around to the next destination for a variety of reasons!