All Dungeons EXPLAINED in Zelda: Twilight Princess

Dungeons and action adventure video games are a given in the modern day and this is pretty largely due to the influence of the Beloved Legend of Zelda series I don't think there's a single Zelda fan out there who doesn't have a favorite dungeon or at least a memory of one unless you were introduced to the series from breath of the wild in which case you might not know what a dungeon is no matter how you slice it Zelda dungeons are in and of themselves Staples of the video gaming experience so it's only natural that the dungeons would also be a big deal as far as storytelling and lore is concerned in fact there's such a big deal that I asked the man himself Nintendo black crisis if he would be so kind as to help me out with explaining all the Dungeons and Twilight Princess and after he finally returned my 50th caller so he agreed everyone say hi well technically it was only 49 calls but that's beside the point this collaboration did give me an excuse to replay Twilight Princess though which was kind of amazing since it was the one Zelda game I had only ever beaten once and that was many years ago with the Wii version as this is a collaboration we've decided to split the dungeons 50 50 meaning that each part we'll talk about four of this game's dungeons with the exception of talking for now I didn't invite you over here so you could take over the whole video be sure to check out the other half of the dungeon explanations over on his channel after you're done here or hello and welcome to the other half if you're already coming from over there oh and spoiler alert obviously for the first Temple we'll be exploring in this video let's start with the first temple of the game the Forest Temple also take a shot whenever we say temple on this video just kidding that's a terrible idea any fan who's played the game or who's ever perused the forest section of the Zelda Theory forums is no doubt familiar with the symbolism present everywhere in the Forest Temple and I'm talking specifically about the Kokiri symbols on all the doors but let's take a few steps back real quick and talk about what the Forest Temple even is the Forest Temple itself is actually more of an entire area or complex located within the Faron Woods of intricately interconnected colossal trees most of which are hollowed out from the insides to make way for all the various rooms and bridges and doors and whatnot the biggest question no pun intended is what's up with these trees why are they so massive and grown together like this well let's take yet another several steps back and talk about what Fair on Woods is in regards to the rest of Hyrule and see if we can get any clues from that the previous game in the timeline that actually deals with Hyrule is Ocarina of Time and in that game there is no fair on Woods on the map but since this is the same Hyrule from Ocarina of Time as proven by a direct quote from anuma himself that means that Twilight Princess is fair on Woods must have originated from somewhere on Ocarina of time's map of Hyrule the first and most obvious guess would be the Lost Woods area from Ocarina of Time I mean that's also where the Kokiri came from and it has a large Forest Area so naturally this would be the most obvious answer of course the Hyrule maps from Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess don't exactly exactly match up one to one which could raise some questions on whether or not this really is the same Forest area but we don't have time to create an entire other theory for why I will change this much in between games so for now we're just gonna have to go with the logic of forest equals Forest if this is the case then not only does that explain the Kokiri symbolism and even the skull kid's appearance in the nearby sacred grove but it also reminds us that we have in fact seen a colossal tree surrounded by Kokiri that's hollowed out on the inside to make way for rooms and bridges and doors that being the great Deku Tree which I may add is conveniently missing somehow from Twilight Princess now obviously there is a pretty massive difference in appearance and size between the great Deku Tree and the Forest Temple with the latter actually being composed of multiple giant trees but you've got to admit the fact that they're both trees along with the forest Temple's location and existence of the Kokiri symbolism is way too deliberate it to mean nothing at all I mean it's actually rather obvious that the Forest Temple from Twilight Princess was meant to be an enhanced version of the great Deku Tree dungeon from Ocarina of Time the only question is how and why is it the way it is well let's once again cover a bit of backstory from Ocarina of Time for more context you see before link faces Ganondorf as an adult before he spies on him as a kid before the game even begins Ganondorf has already infected the Deku Tree with the parasite known as Goma at the end of the game Zelda sends link back in time creating the child timeline that spawns the following game Majora's Mask along with Twilight Princess one or two centuries later however what we'd like to point out in this video is that we can actually see link after he sent back in time when he meets Zelda for the second first time and use this scene to pinpoint exactly when he returned to notice how she's spying on someone inside her father's Throne Room exactly what we saw her doing when we met her the first time it can then be assumed that she's doing the same thing and spying on Ganondorf which means that link was most likely sent back in time to the same spot that we played through near the beginning of the game and I'm going over all this to state that it's our belief that at this point in the child timeline the Deku Tree had already been infected by Ganondorf meaning the Deku Tree probably still ended up dying very quickly in the new child timeline the Zelda spawned now one other thing I'd like to mention is that the Deku Tree preemptively planted at least one new giant Deku Tree seed in advance predicting its own death and given that the Deku Tree could theoretically have planted multiple seeds like we see it doing in the Wind Waker all of a sudden we've got a possible explanation for why the Forest Temple of Twilight Princess is composed of a bunch of colossal hollowed out Deku tree-like trees it might even explain how they're able to grow to this size over the span of only one to two hundred years if they really are saplings of the original great Deku Tree then they're kind of you know magic they can grow pretty quickly as we see actually on that note it could even just be one Deku Tree perhaps even the sapling we see in Ocarina of Time why couldn't it grow into a huge nesting of trees like the real-life pandoorganism in Utah a giant forest system of approximately 47 000 trees that all share the same genetic code and a single root system meaning they're all one tree the last question is probably the most obvious and that is why is this Forest Temple not alive if it really is the remnants of one or several great Deku trees well this is just speculation of course but the simplest answer seems to be due to the corruption of the Deku Baba plant that transformed into the Hideous parasite diaba and introduced monsters that drove out the Kokiri all thanks to the fused shadow that was placed inside for safe keeping yeah turns out that was probably not the greatest idea since a few's shadow piece has corrupted every dungeon they were placed in but this way of thinking pretty much explains everything there is to be explained about the Forest Temple of Twilight Princess why it's located where it is why it was clearly inhabited by the Kokiri and how it was created and subsequently abandoned also if you're interested in the Kokiri side of things Bandit actually did a theory recently about that exact topic and how it ties to the monkeys that currently occupy the temple as well as the nearby Ordon Village I believe it will be linked in the description below if you'd like to check it out next up we're actually going to skip straight to the Arbiters grounds because reasons whenever a Zelda game introduces a darker themed dungeon typically that dungeon instantly becomes the fan favorite of the game and the same is true of the arbiter's grounds because it's got it all unnerving atmosphere the undead enemies the chilling soundtrack The memorable boss and polenti of lore implications literally everywhere so let's start by explaining the name arbiter's grounds in the original Japanese it's actually referred to as sabaku no shokejo which means desert execution ground of course in English we refer to it as the arbiter's grounds or the arbiter's keep if you translate the Hylian text on the map with the word Arbiter literally meaning a decider especially in regards to an argument or a trial in reality the grounds themselves served both of these purposes it was a large prison where the worst criminals of Hyrule were tried and sentenced mostly to death some to banishment and others too both actually but what is this place really who built it and why is it out here in the middle of literally nowhere well I'll tell you what I think and the answer is unfortunately not super cut and dry see the symbols and imagery within the arbitus ground seems to be a clash of cultures on the one hand we have Hylian culture depicted by the very familiar Hylian Royal Crest and even symbols of the sages who serve the goddess hylia on the other hand we have Gerudo culture with several statues depicting the serpent-clad sand goddess who fans May recognize from the desert Colossus and spirit temple in Ocarina of Time as the gerudo's deity that they presumably worship even though that's an assumption and has never been stated outright from the Gerudo so in my opinion the arbiter's grounds was built actually in conjunction between the hylians and the Gerudo and I also happen to think that it's a very ancient Place honestly largely due to its appearance alone I mean I doubt this could all be built out of Mighty Stone pillars and then turned into ruins over the span of Amir one to two hundred years which is the amount of time aunuma himself States took place between Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess there's also an old language written on the walls of the arbiter's grounds that to this day still doesn't fit within any known language script inside the Zelda universe meaning it's most likely an ancient forgotten language which wouldn't even be the last time this game deals with ancient forgotten languages but more on that later what this all means is that the arbiter's grounds most likely long predates the events of Ocarina of Time and when you think about it this way new questions begin to arise such as were the Gerudo and hylian's allies way back in the day who built this giant Coliseum together what if long ago in the ancient age of Hyrule if you will the early hylians and Gerudo were actually one and the same this actually makes sense on multiple different levels for instance from the real-life modern understanding of how Evolution works if you rewind the clocks by a few Millennia cultures and even species will be much less diverse and in Universe we know that at least as far back as in Skyward Sword the Gerudo as a race did not exist yet what pretty much proves they were all the same race at one point now the combined ancient hylians and Gerudo people the irudos if you will would have still had their royal family that follows the bloodline of the Goddess hylia which stems from the first ages of life on the surface as alluded to in skyward's sword and as I already mentioned hylians are named after and are all the children of the Goddess hylia so here's a thought what if the goddess of the sand is actually an early depiction of hylia herself which the ancient hirudo architects of the arbiter's grounds worshiped it's female like Hylian the rest of the goddesses and it's always depicted as wrapped in a serpent which historically has always symbolized fertility or life it would also explain the strange appearance of the Royal Crest Sage symbols and goddess of the sand being all in the same place which is otherwise unexplainable and given that the Gerudo and the hylians really were once the same race I doubt that the sand goddess would depict only one of the three golden goddesses such as din which is another popular consensus for who the sand goddess is it's not like they didn't know about the Triune nature of the three golden goddesses I'm I mean all three of them are depicted around the Hylian Throne so in my opinion the sand goddess being hylia herself actually makes the most sense but now to the next question why was it built as a Coliseum isn't that a bit strange you know for a prison even ancient prisons were built differently with jail cells and whatnot but a Coliseum on the other hand only serves one purpose and it's not exactly for imprisonment if you saw my previous video on the boss lore of Twilight Princess you probably already know where I'm going with this but basically my thought process is as follows in the age following the first Zelda and Link's repopulation of the surface technology advancements most likely took a huge dive plunging the land that would eventually be called Hyrule into its ancient ages and just like our own real-life ancient ages the royal family which are devout and religious eventually constructed a Coliseum in the leneru desert which is the old Gerudo desert in order to honor their goddess by way of gladiatorial combat and before you think that would never happen remember it did happen in our own real life history and the royal family of Hyrule has done many Shady things behind closed doors for basically the entirety of the history of Hyrule case in point the Shadow Temple or the onslaught against the sheikah in breath of the wild eventually of course the Coliseum was deemed immoral and abandoned until years later when the interloper War took place which as most fans know ended with The Interlopers all being subdued By the Light spirits and subsequently banished banished where to the Twilight realm banished how by way of the mirror of twilight Atop The Desert Coliseum and this is how I believe the arbiter's grounds got its name because it was at this point that the fate of The Interlopers was decided it's unknown how much if at all the grounds was used following this event but the next recorded criminal to be processed at the grounds was Ganondorf himself who was initially supposed to be executed before the sages resorted to banishing him as well not before he claimed one of their lives though since that day the arbiter's grounds has not only been abandoned but has actually forbidden to enter according to aoru but that doesn't change the fact that there are still powerful Spirits lingering within its ancient halls but I won't go into that here just is to avoid being redundant if you would like to know how those spirits and Zant and the various Undead and Star-Lord and even Ganondorf himself fit into the puzzle that is the arbiter's grounds check out my Twilight Princess boss lore video if you haven't already one of the most interesting takeaways from that video is that if you look at on the lake bed Temple is one of the easier dungeons to explain in the entire Legend of Zelda franchise because in truth it may actually be the second appearance of the water temple from Ocarina of Time just to follow suit with Twilight princesses Hall taking Ocarina of time's content and making a better stick although there have been a few things that happened to it in between games to explain its different appearance firstly we know it's the same Temple as the old water temple because it's Azora Temple located at the bottom of Lake hylia seriously how many can there be only one hopefully I don't think we could take any more than that but in all seriousness it's even roughly designed the same way with multiple Rising water levels and four directions and a large Central piece in the middle of the dungeon although now it's a giant spinning staircase instead of a multi-story room this isn't that I think is important to note in this game is once again The Disappearance of another nature Spirit from Ocarina of Time the water spirit jabu-jabu we know that the lake bed Temple used to be a place of worship for the Zora people back when it was called the water temple and as bandit theorized in the boss lore video for Ocarina of Time It's very possible that progressing through and completing the water Temple's complexity was in and of itself a form of worship for the Zora people however if they no longer have a water spirit to worship since jabu-jabu is currently M.I.A then what other purpose could the temple possibly serve once again enter the fused Shadow Relic since the light Spirits entrusted the four pieces to the Kokiri Goron Sora and apparently Gerudo or Twilight and since we already know that the gorons built Contraptions within their minds specifically to ward off Wayward Intruders from discovering the fused Shadow held within which by the way we go into in my video on my channel why couldn't the Zora have done the same with their water temple what better way to serve the gods and provide worship than to place a few's shadow Relic they were sworn to protect within their already complex Temple and Spruce it up with some new puzzles and rooms and to be honest it's a nearly foolproof plan I mean even midna states that the place is seriously confusing the Sora really do have a knack for Designing the most infuriating puzzles known to Hyrule the last Twilight Princess dungeon that we're going to cover in this part of our collab is also probably the most mysterious and Elusive of them all and that would be the city in the sky but don't worry I'm pretty sure we've got this one all figured out at least as much as possible given the elusive nature of the lore let's start with what the scholarly Shad who's obsessed with the Uka tells us in game he states that the city in the sky is the home of an ancient race of Highly Advanced pre-hylian people who were even more connected to the gods than the modern day hylians and we actually do meet these people in game and they have one of the most unfortunate designs in the entire series say hello to the Uka the ancient race of chicken people and I can't tell if they look terrified lying or funny according to Shad it was actually the Uka who were responsible for creating Hyrule although he does admit that it's just a theory although if it is just a theory and it's not supposed to be taken as fact I don't know why Nintendo would have included it in the game but anyway what he says is that while the people who lived on the surface founded Hyrule proper as in the city and Kingdom the Uka were busy creating their flying City in the sky after which they divested the Dominion Rod to the surface dwelling hylians should they ever need to speak with their siblings in the sky there's more backstory that we could go into regarding the Uka and their Technologies but I want to focus specifically on what the city in the sky is and why it was made in the first place now let me hit you with another idea that may come as a shock to you that branches off of what I talked about in the arbiter's ground segment what if it wasn't just the hylians magruda that used to be the same race what if all of the humanoid races of Hyrule are actually each of the different evolutions of the original race of hylia people meaning the Gerudo the Minish the Zoro the Rito maybe even the gorons and the hylians themselves all originate from a singular race that lived with hylia law long ago in the first era of the world before hylia's battle with demise but due to living in different environments and biomes and with the passage of tens and even hundreds of thousands of years they evolved into their own separate races of humanoids over time I mean in Skyward Sword it's not like the Zora or the Rito or the Gerudo exist yet so they must have been evolved into there's not much solid evidence to support this besides the speculations I mentioned but just bear with me the more you think about it this way the more everything makes sense and ultimately the more explainable the city in the sky becomes see if all hyruleans stemmed from a singular race that then evolved into the different races we know of today then that already explains how modern hylan's evolved from or rather simultaneously alongside the Uka and it also explains why the Uka wished to live in the sky because if they share a history with what we know happened with hylians in the past then they used to live in skyloft alongside their fellow Sky loftians which as we know is a vital part of the history of modern day hylians and why their Royal Crest features a loftwing which is a species of bird that has has since allegedly gone extinct if this is the case then wouldn't it be plausible that just like some hyruleans decided to live in the mountains some in the desert some in the water and some in the grassy fields that some would then decide to live in the skies above like they used to on skyloft another important thing to note is that the ukha as they seem today might not be how they looked when they built the city in the sky in the ancient times I mean just look at this thing I'm pretty sure you need opposable thumbs to build this stuff in fact an early concept art for the race looked like this which is much more human looking with ape-like arms and feet while also sporting feathers in a beat cat or maybe that's a second face given that Twilight Princess was developed after the Wind Waker which featured the brand new race of bird-like people known as the Rito could it be that the ukha of Twilight Princess are in fact the child timeline variants of the Rito or maybe a branch of the Rito thanks to this strange mural that has been enhanced in Twilight Princess HD we can see that the Rito did exist at some point in the past and right next to the panel depicting the Rito we can see the Uka and and while there are many theories that could be derived from the single mural way too many to get into in this video it does seem to prove you the way that the Rito existed in the history of the child timeline but that begs the question if they did exist where are they now and furthermore what if what it depicts is actually the passage of time for the hyrulean people for instance the Rito could have evolved from the earlier Hylian and Goron races then they could have split into the evolutions of the Uka and Zora keep in mind that this mural could be depicting ancient times possibly an era well before Ocarina of Time like I was saying though there are many different ways to interpret this mural this being just one of them and I'm not trying to imply that I have it 100 definitely correct but for the purposes of explaining the city in the sky we're gonna go with this for now and don't ask me about the little Link in the mural I have no clue what he's doing there but he do be kind of cute I guess one way that we could explain the link here would be what he did in between the events of Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask perhaps he went around uniting all the races of Hyrule some of which are the Rito and the Uka although if you think about it that could still be true and fit with this explanation of this City in the sky but anyway back to explaining the city in the sky to summarize it's our speculative belief that it was probably created by an ancient race of hylians that was a combination of many of the hyrulean races we see today which is why the ukha are said to be the predecessors of the modern hylians this ancient race may have even been the retail or evolved into the Rito or evolved from the Rito there's a lot of different races evolving to and from each other it's kind of hard to keep track of it all but anyway this explains why they have a shared history with modern hylians and why they wanted to live in the skies above like they used to on skyloft and given another large passage of time the ancient Uka that might have looked like the flying bird like Rito or maybe even looked like this once then evolved into smaller walking birds that now look like this which is why they have at least one humanoid feature remaining that being their faces they never forgot about their surface dwelling Hylian siblings though which is why they created the Dominion rod with the sole purpose of uncovering the ancient Sky language and thus enabling the holder of the rod known as the messenger to the Heavens to ascend to the city in the sky and Converse with and that about wraps up the explanation on the mystifying City in the sky and apologies for getting into some heavy speculation there like I said it's got to be one of the most vague dungeons in the history of the series but given the pieces of evidence that we do have in some what if questions I think we've got a solid explanation to use but we're not done yet because that's only half of Twilight Princess dungeons for the other four head on over to Nintendo black crisis Channel where you'll find our other part live right now unless you're coming from there too here in which case hooray you made it to the end give yourself a pat on the back thanks for watching everyone always a pleasure being here talking about the zeldas you should definitely play this game if you haven't yet here's hoping that Nintendo actually ports this as well as Wind Waker HD to the switch and if you want to see the other half of this collaboration make sure to click the link in the description thank you so much for watching please consider leaving a like if you enjoyed it or if you enjoyed our efforts into making it and subscribe if you haven't already to stick around for many more deeply interesting video game videos to come huge thanks as always to my Bandit crew of which Dr ohm 7 recently just joined up and that's all I've got for this one so follow me on my socials and I look forward to seeing you over in the other video this has Bandit going over there [Music]

Channel: Bandit

Views: 295,598

Keywords: zelda, twilight princess, arbiter's grounds, zelda theory, twilight princess theory, bandit games, nintendo black crisis, zeltik, masked nintendo bandit, legend of zelda, twilight princess hd, twilight princess explained, twilight princess story, twilight princess cutscenes, twilight princess lore, twilight princess secrets, city in the sky, forest temple, lakebed temple, water temple, oocca, ganon, ganondorf, gerudo, gerudo theory, botw, totk, nintendo, switch, release date, nbc

Id: uu-yY4FWLtU

Length: 22min 45sec (1365 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2022