This was easily the worst for me. I literally just climbed and used Tulins Gale to hop from rock to mine cart track. It was super fast, but really annoying for the confusing mine cart directions.
This was far and away my favorite of the dungeons. It was the only one that used the sage power for puzzles in creative ways, the rest were just glorified levers for activating the dungeon mcguffin. It also had good atmosphere and strong thematic consistently with it's puzzles. Can't say I ever got lost or struggled with where to go, the map made it fairly obvious. None of the dungeons in this game were a challenge, but at least this one had neat puzzles.
I personally LOVED this dungeon. My favorite so far (also completed the water and wind). The music and visuals were the best in my opinion. I felt so good when I solved that last gong! This was the first time in BOTW or TOTK that I really truly felt like I was in an old school Zelda game.
In my opinion the water dungeon is my least favorite, it’s very short and small compared to the other dungeons and felt more like a sky island puzzle than an actual dungeon. It’s definitely weird to say that the “water temple” is the easiest dungeon in a Zelda game
I agree with this. None of the dungeons were bad to me, but the Water one felt so slight in comparison to anything else and the story around it felt less developed or integrated despite the sludge and kind of neat part where you have to solve a series of riddles to even reach it (probably the best part of that quest line imho.) Also, I think might have the weakest musical track; the way the Ruto one layers in new instruments and starts ambient but builds to pounding intensity is SO cool, the Fire Temple does have a fun almost throwback feeling theme, Gerudo does as well.
Sorry this is so long lmao. I gotta agree with you. I like the boss. I like the fact that it was incorporated so naturally into the world. I think it looks pretty cool from the outside, but, I feel like with the Wind Temple, it feels pretty... empty. The dungeons in previous 3D games felt like they had more stuff going on. More decoration. This just feels like rooms with the sole purpose of having one fairly small puzzle inside most of the time. I dunno, I just found them less aesthetically pleasing. A lot of the rooms still just... look the same. Lets take the Forest Temple in OoT. You had the main hall, the garden with the pond and the well with several entrances, the entrance section with the wolfos, the twisting hallway, the room with the ceiling that dropped on you. That's several very differently designed, memorable rooms and I'm sure everyone who played the game can clearly visualize them. I kinda struggle to assign visual and mechanical identity to the rooms in the TOTK temples. I can do another. The Earth Temple in Skyward Sword has multiple rooms with the rolling ball and the fire breathing lizards as a hazard, multiple rooms with a lot of lava and rock platforming, rooms where you duke it out 1v1 with a tougher monster, rooms with all these things combined, as well as metal scaffolding along the side to traverse and bomb bowling puzzles. It just felt like there was more to each room. I miss having keys to unlock different sections. Some level of linearity breaks up the dungeons and can even add more thinking. In some games I can have 2 or 3 locked doors and one key. Which means having to explore to find more keys to unlock the other doors, which I find compelling. 5 choices isn't always better than 3. Especially not if accessing fewer choices is more engaging. I miss having to find the boss key, and then having to find the way to the boss afterwards. You can even use that to subvert expectations like they did in the Temple of Droplets in Minish Cap, where you unlock the boss room very early and see the temple MacGuffin AND the boss. I miss having a unique mini boss in the middle. I miss having a unique, recurring temple gimmick rather than "use champion ability on object" being the gimmick. I miss wall and floor masters dropping down and making you crap yourself a bit. I miss having more simplistic rooms where you just fight a set of enemies to progress. I even miss simple block puzzles as they're a pace changer and keep things fresh. As long as they aren't stupidly slow like in OoT. I found myself electing not to interact with the dungeons mechanics in the fire temple. It was like one recall rock lava traversal puzzle and then 90% minecarts. I just opted to climb to reach stuff because I didn't want to deal with constant minecart puzzles for an hour, and I was physically capable of just climbing everything. I often found the mechanics you interact with in the dungeons to be stale as a lot of the times it involves stuff I've been using for 30 hours already in the open world and all the shrines. In the end I think the new format of dungeons either needs to greatly evolve in order to be memorable and loved, or take more inspiration from older games, as they have stood the test of time. 17 years later, people still love Twilight Princess dungeons. 25 years later, people still love Ocarina dungeons. 32 years later, people still love Link to the Past dungeons. You get the idea. There's so much potential here.
Well said. The new dungeons just don't have as much variety or personality or enemy variety for that matter. Thankfully the rest of the game more than makes up for it.
The last gong is actually pretty cryptic. I had to cheat as well, but I wouldn’t say it felt bad. You have to use recall on a falling block to get to the top section.
The Fire Temple wasn't my least favourite dungeon, but in a dungeon where horizontal and vertical traversal is the main theme of the dungeon (rails and mine carts), it felt really bad to know that I could just climb or jump my way to the next gong. It kind of boggles my mind how they would allow for players to invalidate the entire premise of the dungeon allowing the walls to be climbable. You can kind of tell they thought about Ascend because most of the ceilings in the temple are too high to even use it. So I'm unsure why they allowed us to climb the walls. They don't even let you do that in Shrines so why they would allow it in temples is beyond me.
Exactly my thoughts in this dungeon, “Wait I can climb everything? Wonder why they tossed the unclimbable walls” although now that I’m nearly finished , I’m pretty sure there ARE still unclimbable walls in shrines, but in BOTW all the divine beasts were made of the same unclimbable stuff
@@icedog1588 That is correct. I can't think of (m)any shrine with climbable walls of any kind. It is very disappointing to see they didn't make use of them in this dungeon.
I liked this dungeon but i think it would have been a lot better if they spaced out the dungeon a bit more they could have reduced how spaghetti like the layout could feel but I really liked the theme of the dungeon
The water temple was my least favourite, the temple itself was too easy with hardly any challenging sections and the boss was a disappointment too. I’ve only beaten the wind and water temple so far as I knew the fire and lightning temple had more going for them
Actually my favorite out of the 3 that I’ve done. Haven’t done Gerudo yet. Agree that it’s too punishing if you mess up but I love that every puzzle revolved around the dungeon’s themes. The Divine Beasts and the other 2 dungeons I’ve played just felt like random shrine puzzles slapped together sometimes. For the boss, I actually used recall to ride the rocks upward and shoot it with my bow. My melee weapons also didn’t do a lot so I didn’t bother doing it the intended way.
I don't know about these dungeons... I basically cheesed this one with discount Revali's Gale (two springs). I like the 'go anywhere' and 'do anything' aspect of BotW and TotK, but not so much in dungeons. Just makes me wanna get through them as quickly as possible. The caves were way more engaging. The "just 2 terminals/switches remaining" from the champions really doesn't do it for me. Wonderfully amazing game, but disappointing dungeon experiences for me.
Agree 100%. I hated this dungeon and did attempt to complete it how (I think) I was meant to, but then just ended up climbing to places and standing on narrow ledges to use ascend etc. And you are so right; when you complete it like that as opposed to figuring out the puzzles (in this case, how to navigate the tracks) it doesn't feel good. A strong argument for linear dungeons.
Never found that shortcut you mentioned. That would've helped! Very frustrating but I also begrudgingly say kind of interesting puzzle of a dungeon. Not unlike Water Temple maybe. I also used the hot air balloon for last one, had no idea how else to do it. Another issue I had is the dungeon is so dark, I turned the brightness all the way up and it was still hard to see the rails and such.
Now that I've finally done it (I ended up doing the Goron quest last) I can watch and comment lol I actually really really liked this dungeon. I'm not usually a fan of the fire dungeons in Zelda (the WW one is the only real exception) so I was shocked how much fun I had. It is a bit confusing and I ended up just climbing to the last gong (I realized how you were supposed to do it when I got there tho) but like the Wind Temple, the lead up to the dungeon is so good that I ignore the shortcomings.
Very much agreed, I'm fairly certain I didn't solve one of the gongs the way the game intended me to, and it felt a bit awkward and I had to backtrack a lot. Loved the ambiance and honestly it was still pretty good, but it was the most tedious for me as well
Before the release of totk i replayed many zelda games and the contrast to old dungeons is just too big. Compare it to the water dungeon in twilight princess where i spent more than four hours to figure it out but never feeling overwhelmed or that its unfair. The feeling of beating such big dungeons just isnt here, but in defence i imagine it to be very difficult if not impossible to do traditional dungeons with all the new abilities Link has. Flying through the air, jumping through ceilings basically would break old dungeons.
i liked this dungeon actually! but in fairness, i didn’t play it as it was intended to be played. i used climbing and ascend to traverse. didn’t even know there was a shortcut to be found. but it was fun. the only one i’ve disliked of the initial four is the zora dungeon
I dunno, I really did not have any issues with it. I've only done 2 dungeons despite playing this extensively the last week so I can't speak to its relative quality to the other ones yet. I liked the format, I did not really cheese it but I don't really think you can "cheese" things in this game, they let you approach things in more interesting ways than the older games that railroaded a specific action. There were multiple moments I was confused but they really didn't last that long. Having played this game a lot before even starting dungeons I think I have an easy time getting creative with puzzle solving. Using the sage abilities is so overpowered and I played many hours without having them.
I totally cheesed this dungeon. I climbed and used rocket shields to bypass the MineCraft puzzles. I would agree that too much freedom can be a bad thing, especially when it comes to dungeons.
I do get that freedom part, it happens to me too, but the game really just wants you to cheat. If it didn't it would disable your abilitya and zonai capsules. The objective is really just to find your own solution, even if it wasn't intended.
I miss the old dungeon format. It seems like Nintendo is sticking to the 4 terminals in every dungeon from now on but ngl ever since botw all the dungeons feel rushed
The dungeon itself was alright, not exceeding expectations but alright. The thing that made the dungeon annoying, personally, was the music. Having completed the wind temple before, I expected amazing, zelda-esque music mastery. However, it was extremely repetitive and not memorable in the slightest. That paired with the fact that I got lost a thousand times really ruined it for me, since it really began to annoy me in the end...
100% agree with your pros and cons. So far the dungeons have been a let down IMO. Visually look great, puzzles are boring and enemies are repetitive (only completed Wind and Fire).
I completely broke the Fire temple by using my one personal Zonai machine to bypass all the railroad puzzles. It was fun just because I had the ability to just do the dungeon, but also wasn’t as fun due to not engaging with any of the dugones puzzles.
I strongly disagree. While I didn't LIKE the Goron dungeon, I can see that many elements of its puzzle design are actually pretty good. Plus: When you get to the 5th dungeon, you will beg to return to this one instead! And the Zora dungeon is worse too imo.
I immediately started cheesing the dungeon with rocket shields because I hated using the mine carts before the dungeon. Wish I didn’t have the freedom to do that but it was nice that I could skip what I think is the worst dungeon.
This was easily the worst for me. I literally just climbed and used Tulins Gale to hop from rock to mine cart track. It was super fast, but really annoying for the confusing mine cart directions.
This was far and away my favorite of the dungeons. It was the only one that used the sage power for puzzles in creative ways, the rest were just glorified levers for activating the dungeon mcguffin. It also had good atmosphere and strong thematic consistently with it's puzzles.
Can't say I ever got lost or struggled with where to go, the map made it fairly obvious. None of the dungeons in this game were a challenge, but at least this one had neat puzzles.
I personally LOVED this dungeon. My favorite so far (also completed the water and wind). The music and visuals were the best in my opinion. I felt so good when I solved that last gong! This was the first time in BOTW or TOTK that I really truly felt like I was in an old school Zelda game.
In my opinion the water dungeon is my least favorite, it’s very short and small compared to the other dungeons and felt more like a sky island puzzle than an actual dungeon. It’s definitely weird to say that the “water temple” is the easiest dungeon in a Zelda game
I agree with this
Maybe they did that on purpose! lol
@@Elykar Possibly, although the main issue with that is that they guide you to go to Rito first
I agree with this. None of the dungeons were bad to me, but the Water one felt so slight in comparison to anything else and the story around it felt less developed or integrated despite the sludge and kind of neat part where you have to solve a series of riddles to even reach it (probably the best part of that quest line imho.) Also, I think might have the weakest musical track; the way the Ruto one layers in new instruments and starts ambient but builds to pounding intensity is SO cool, the Fire Temple does have a fun almost throwback feeling theme, Gerudo does as well.
This. The water quest was easily my least favorite from start to finish.
Sorry this is so long lmao.
I gotta agree with you. I like the boss. I like the fact that it was incorporated so naturally into the world. I think it looks pretty cool from the outside, but, I feel like with the Wind Temple, it feels pretty... empty. The dungeons in previous 3D games felt like they had more stuff going on. More decoration. This just feels like rooms with the sole purpose of having one fairly small puzzle inside most of the time. I dunno, I just found them less aesthetically pleasing. A lot of the rooms still just... look the same.
Lets take the Forest Temple in OoT. You had the main hall, the garden with the pond and the well with several entrances, the entrance section with the wolfos, the twisting hallway, the room with the ceiling that dropped on you. That's several very differently designed, memorable rooms and I'm sure everyone who played the game can clearly visualize them. I kinda struggle to assign visual and mechanical identity to the rooms in the TOTK temples.
I can do another. The Earth Temple in Skyward Sword has multiple rooms with the rolling ball and the fire breathing lizards as a hazard, multiple rooms with a lot of lava and rock platforming, rooms where you duke it out 1v1 with a tougher monster, rooms with all these things combined, as well as metal scaffolding along the side to traverse and bomb bowling puzzles.
It just felt like there was more to each room.
I miss having keys to unlock different sections. Some level of linearity breaks up the dungeons and can even add more thinking. In some games I can have 2 or 3 locked doors and one key. Which means having to explore to find more keys to unlock the other doors, which I find compelling. 5 choices isn't always better than 3. Especially not if accessing fewer choices is more engaging.
I miss having to find the boss key, and then having to find the way to the boss afterwards. You can even use that to subvert expectations like they did in the Temple of Droplets in Minish Cap, where you unlock the boss room very early and see the temple MacGuffin AND the boss.
I miss having a unique mini boss in the middle. I miss having a unique, recurring temple gimmick rather than "use champion ability on object" being the gimmick. I miss wall and floor masters dropping down and making you crap yourself a bit. I miss having more simplistic rooms where you just fight a set of enemies to progress. I even miss simple block puzzles as they're a pace changer and keep things fresh. As long as they aren't stupidly slow like in OoT.
I found myself electing not to interact with the dungeons mechanics in the fire temple. It was like one recall rock lava traversal puzzle and then 90% minecarts. I just opted to climb to reach stuff because I didn't want to deal with constant minecart puzzles for an hour, and I was physically capable of just climbing everything. I often found the mechanics you interact with in the dungeons to be stale as a lot of the times it involves stuff I've been using for 30 hours already in the open world and all the shrines.
In the end I think the new format of dungeons either needs to greatly evolve in order to be memorable and loved, or take more inspiration from older games, as they have stood the test of time. 17 years later, people still love Twilight Princess dungeons. 25 years later, people still love Ocarina dungeons. 32 years later, people still love Link to the Past dungeons. You get the idea. There's so much potential here.
Well said. The new dungeons just don't have as much variety or personality or enemy variety for that matter. Thankfully the rest of the game more than makes up for it.
I'm not sure everyone loves a link to the past dungeons lol. I certainly don't.
The last gong is actually pretty cryptic. I had to cheat as well, but I wouldn’t say it felt bad. You have to use recall on a falling block to get to the top section.
The Fire Temple wasn't my least favourite dungeon, but in a dungeon where horizontal and vertical traversal is the main theme of the dungeon (rails and mine carts), it felt really bad to know that I could just climb or jump my way to the next gong. It kind of boggles my mind how they would allow for players to invalidate the entire premise of the dungeon allowing the walls to be climbable. You can kind of tell they thought about Ascend because most of the ceilings in the temple are too high to even use it. So I'm unsure why they allowed us to climb the walls. They don't even let you do that in Shrines so why they would allow it in temples is beyond me.
Yeah it was a mistake, I see so many comments that people cheesed this dungeon
Exactly my thoughts in this dungeon, “Wait I can climb everything? Wonder why they tossed the unclimbable walls” although now that I’m nearly finished , I’m pretty sure there ARE still unclimbable walls in shrines, but in BOTW all the divine beasts were made of the same unclimbable stuff
@@icedog1588 That is correct. I can't think of (m)any shrine with climbable walls of any kind. It is very disappointing to see they didn't make use of them in this dungeon.
I liked this dungeon but i think it would have been a lot better if they spaced out the dungeon a bit more they could have reduced how spaghetti like the layout could feel but I really liked the theme of the dungeon
The water temple was my least favourite, the temple itself was too easy with hardly any challenging sections and the boss was a disappointment too. I’ve only beaten the wind and water temple so far as I knew the fire and lightning temple had more going for them
Actually my favorite out of the 3 that I’ve done. Haven’t done Gerudo yet. Agree that it’s too punishing if you mess up but I love that every puzzle revolved around the dungeon’s themes. The Divine Beasts and the other 2 dungeons I’ve played just felt like random shrine puzzles slapped together sometimes.
For the boss, I actually used recall to ride the rocks upward and shoot it with my bow. My melee weapons also didn’t do a lot so I didn’t bother doing it the intended way.
Fire temple and Lightning temple was my favorite dungeon
I don't know about these dungeons...
I basically cheesed this one with discount Revali's Gale (two springs).
I like the 'go anywhere' and 'do anything' aspect of BotW and TotK, but not so much in dungeons. Just makes me wanna get through them as quickly as possible. The caves were way more engaging.
The "just 2 terminals/switches remaining" from the champions really doesn't do it for me.
Wonderfully amazing game, but disappointing dungeon experiences for me.
Agree 100%. I hated this dungeon and did attempt to complete it how (I think) I was meant to, but then just ended up climbing to places and standing on narrow ledges to use ascend etc. And you are so right; when you complete it like that as opposed to figuring out the puzzles (in this case, how to navigate the tracks) it doesn't feel good.
A strong argument for linear dungeons.
That last final gong in the fire dungeon was the only gripe that I had with this dungeon. Took me quite awhile to figure out how to get to it.
Agreed, worst of the initial 4 dungeons but cool boss fight and the concept was neat!
2nd phase of the bossfught wws torture though. The ball kept going between the spider's legs.
I agree regarding the fire temple being frustrating- i wound up using a combination of climbing and paragliding to get to several of the gongs
Never found that shortcut you mentioned. That would've helped! Very frustrating but I also begrudgingly say kind of interesting puzzle of a dungeon. Not unlike Water Temple maybe. I also used the hot air balloon for last one, had no idea how else to do it. Another issue I had is the dungeon is so dark, I turned the brightness all the way up and it was still hard to see the rails and such.
Now that I've finally done it (I ended up doing the Goron quest last) I can watch and comment lol
I actually really really liked this dungeon. I'm not usually a fan of the fire dungeons in Zelda (the WW one is the only real exception) so I was shocked how much fun I had. It is a bit confusing and I ended up just climbing to the last gong (I realized how you were supposed to do it when I got there tho) but like the Wind Temple, the lead up to the dungeon is so good that I ignore the shortcomings.
I'm starting to come around to the dungeon. I think I went in with the wrong mindset and was really tired so I got frustrated
Very much agreed, I'm fairly certain I didn't solve one of the gongs the way the game intended me to, and it felt a bit awkward and I had to backtrack a lot. Loved the ambiance and honestly it was still pretty good, but it was the most tedious for me as well
Before the release of totk i replayed many zelda games and the contrast to old dungeons is just too big. Compare it to the water dungeon in twilight princess where i spent more than four hours to figure it out but never feeling overwhelmed or that its unfair. The feeling of beating such big dungeons just isnt here, but in defence i imagine it to be very difficult if not impossible to do traditional dungeons with all the new abilities Link has. Flying through the air, jumping through ceilings basically would break old dungeons.
i liked this dungeon actually! but in fairness, i didn’t play it as it was intended to be played. i used climbing and ascend to traverse. didn’t even know there was a shortcut to be found. but it was fun. the only one i’ve disliked of the initial four is the zora dungeon
Idk man, out of *all* of them, thos was my favorite. I really like every aspect of it,
I dunno, I really did not have any issues with it. I've only done 2 dungeons despite playing this extensively the last week so I can't speak to its relative quality to the other ones yet. I liked the format, I did not really cheese it but I don't really think you can "cheese" things in this game, they let you approach things in more interesting ways than the older games that railroaded a specific action. There were multiple moments I was confused but they really didn't last that long. Having played this game a lot before even starting dungeons I think I have an easy time getting creative with puzzle solving. Using the sage abilities is so overpowered and I played many hours without having them.
I totally cheesed this dungeon. I climbed and used rocket shields to bypass the MineCraft puzzles. I would agree that too much freedom can be a bad thing, especially when it comes to dungeons.
I do get that freedom part, it happens to me too, but the game really just wants you to cheat. If it didn't it would disable your abilitya and zonai capsules. The objective is really just to find your own solution, even if it wasn't intended.
Honestly I just skipped pretty much all the mine cart stuff by climbing/ascending and paragliding around
I miss the old dungeon format. It seems like Nintendo is sticking to the 4 terminals in every dungeon from now on but ngl ever since botw all the dungeons feel rushed
imo all the bosses apart from the queen gibdo were too easy. i beat the mucktrock in like 5 seconds with chuchu jelly.
The dungeon itself was alright, not exceeding expectations but alright. The thing that made the dungeon annoying, personally, was the music. Having completed the wind temple before, I expected amazing, zelda-esque music mastery. However, it was extremely repetitive and not memorable in the slightest. That paired with the fact that I got lost a thousand times really ruined it for me, since it really began to annoy me in the end...
100% agree with your pros and cons. So far the dungeons have been a let down IMO. Visually look great, puzzles are boring and enemies are repetitive (only completed Wind and Fire).
Try Lightning dungeon.
I completely broke the Fire temple by using my one personal Zonai machine to bypass all the railroad puzzles. It was fun just because I had the ability to just do the dungeon, but also wasn’t as fun due to not engaging with any of the dugones puzzles.
I hated the whole journey. Cannot beat Tulin and the wind temple
I strongly disagree. While I didn't LIKE the Goron dungeon, I can see that many elements of its puzzle design are actually pretty good.
Plus: When you get to the 5th dungeon, you will beg to return to this one instead! And the Zora dungeon is worse too imo.
Rito was by far the worst IMO. It's basically another simple beast
i literally quit the game over the fire temple
I actually liked the Fire Temple. I despised the Water Dungeon, however. Very short and small and the most annoying boss in the game.
In my opinion this is the worst dungeon too. My favorite is the Gerudo dungeon, I love it.
Agreed!
I immediately started cheesing the dungeon with rocket shields because I hated using the mine carts before the dungeon. Wish I didn’t have the freedom to do that but it was nice that I could skip what I think is the worst dungeon.
Also! I just did a lot of climbing instead of solving the mine cart puzzle. I agree, I didn’t feel a sense of accomplishment
I wouldn’t say it’s the worst though. I didn’t enjoy the water temple either. The moon jumping got old real quick. I don’t know which I dislike more.
Honestly the dungeons are not as good as past ones; none of them are a challenge lol
To be honest the old dungeons weren't that challenging either
Love the game love the bosses. The dungeons are crap.
I thought it was super straight forward. I just wished there were more combat encounters in the dungeon.