The Dungeons of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Ranked from Worst to Best

hey everyone I'm Alex from cydenox and today I'll be ranking The Dungeons of Ocarina of Time from worst to best Ocarina of Time is the darling of the series and just about everybody's favorite if you ask him it's like my third favorite probably but I can totally get why people regard it as highly as they do and I certainly love it more than most games out there it was one of the first games I ever ranked as a kid the other being Shovel Knight which I somehow still haven't covered in the channel yet when I replayed the game I was shocked to find that my opinions were the exact same as my 11 year old self guess I always had good taste anyways that's enough reminiscing it's almost time to cut to the meat of the video and talk dungeons just before we do that though I'd like to thank our patrons we really appreciate your support and for those of you watching do consider joining them enough intro stuff let's get into it foreign [Music] the creation of this dungeon with any normal development team the question do you want to be inside of jabu-jabu would have been met with a Swift no and yet here we are if nothing else I applaud the art Direction here as an appreciator of all things bizarre and grotesque the setting is right up my alley and for a game made half a decade before I was conceived they sure made the aesthetic bed within pretty much anything ever made sense of all the insides some creatures guts levels I can recall none of them are quite as viscerally unpleasant looking as this one something about the moving pink sludge abundance of tentacles and bizarre creatures and sound design make this a uniquely disgusting experience once the Mystique of the creative environment wears off though you come to realize that it is not the belly of a whale you have wandered into but rather than Nine Circles of Hell while the first two child dungeons merely commit the sin of being easy to the point of being relentlessly uninteresting inside jabu jabu's belly is up front and in your face about how much it hates you every aspect of the level design is transparently sadistic from the random sinkholes to the confusing samey looking rooms it even has elevator placement that would make kakihara from Ichi the killer kneel in admiration I'd also like to call attention to the big octo mini boss which I have always found to be a baffling and unintuitive fight with how gimmicky Zelda bosses usually are with their weaknesses who the hell would ever try something as Brazen is just running around the middle to flank him that's like if you were given a math test and the answer was to just rip it to shreds piss on it and jam it down the teacher's throat nothing indicates that this is a viable strategy leading many players myself included to humiliating and infuriating debts at the hands of this wicked creature enjoys slogging back through half an hour's worth of hallways made of this stuff McNuggets are made out of make sure not to lose Ruto on the way yeah I never mentioned that did I you have to carry Nintendo's second most obnoxious assisting NPC in history around everywhere using her as a weighted tool to open doors or whatever if you leave her to her own devices even for a moment she gets dragged down to jabu-jabu's bottom floor bash for you to pick up at whatever the opposite of your leisure is whenever you do decide to bite the bullet and give her another piggyback ride to a tumor switch she has nothing but words of score and for you link is quite the gentleman for a kid his age my 10 year old self would have lifted a drown in digestive juice and bile if she gave me that kind of whip you were bored for enduring approximately an hour of eyeball gouging torturous gameplay as the most confusing boss in the series I'll save my full thoughts on baronade for the boss ranking but just know that for better or worse this boss makes no sense to me whatever feelings of Pride the developers May hold towards this dungeon have to be analogous to how jigsaw regards his traps finely tuned mechanisms of Torment that nobody but the Creator finds amusing [Music] I have similar thoughts on all the ganon's towers of the series in a general sense but for the record this one is Miles more tolerable than the one from Wind Waker more than unpleasant they're mostly just lazy they rehash old dungeon Concepts but remix them into the most irritating imaginable Arrangements yeah the Shadow Temple is cool but you know what it was missing like likes apparently if you wanted the developer's professional opinion nothing quite like getting your gear slurped off to put you in a good mood don't even get me started in the fire temple room having to restart the coin collecting thing every time you fall into the lava sounds fair enough Until you realize that this will happen like a lot unless you have the mental fortitude of a monk this room will be among the most trying of your patients of any in the game the ice room is just a boring puzzle about shoving some giant ice block around these are the sorts of things they use in nursing homes to amuse senile hospice patients with nothing better to do than themselves and watch Jeopardy reruns for anyone cogent of the passing of time this will strike you more as a time-consuming bore than a titillating mind teaser I could go one by one moaning about the rooms but it doesn't really matter Beyond just giving a few examples some are fine some are miserable all of them are unoriginal padding with zero Amusement value foreign [Music] sure went inside a lot of things didn't he poor kid no wonder he never talks better than the opposite I suppose this dungeon is the break-even point of the video where the dungeons go from a fronts to mankind to Simply average I don't really have any issues with the great Deku Tree from an objective standpoint it's the first dungeon so the difficulty is about what you'd expect and it's at least got some cool moments like jumping down into the basement for the first time it's also fairly quick if you know what to do I wasn't speed running or anything but it still took me around 20 minutes to get through the spiders are sort of a pain in the ass but most of the damage I suffered at their hand was out of impatient negligence on my part more than anything else so I can't in good faith give him the finger the slingshot is definitely the most fun kid like dungeon item in my opinion or at least the most broadly useful this dungeon establishing Deku shrubs as fully sentient beings is sort of funny considering how many of the things link has unceremoniously put to the sword over the years my best guess is that they're somehow socially divided between civilized and Savage ones although whether or not that renders one worthy of Slaughter is Up For Debate the video game ethics Rabbit Hole runs deep but the same cannot be said if this unremarkable Queen dungeon leaving it in the lower ranks of the pack not even halfway through the video when all the kid link dungeons are already out of the running Ocarina of Time Has a strange way of organizing its content for sure historically it's far more common for a game to have a strong first half and a Severe drop in quality around the midpoint I'd appoint you to Dark Souls 1 as the poster child but the same trend is observable to lesser extents in a number of other games Ocarina of Time however is a type of game that saves Best For Last this is a far more effective model since it minimizes player disappointment by all means get me accustomed to the boring fodder dungeons before unleashing the crazy in phase two I have similar thoughts onto dongo's Cavern in the great Deku Tree both are perfectly serviceable dungeons with little in the way of memorable moments but didongo's Cavern wins out for a couple reasons for one dropping bombs into giant eye sockets as cool as it makes perfect sense from the perspective of a player versed in video game logic but I like to imagine link just being like dude what if I put a bomb here huh and then being surprised it actually did something I will say that the bombs as a whole are sort of a mediocre item in my eyes despite their destructive potential they're almost never used in combat to much effect say for vapor rising starfost and instead are basically a demolition tool for rocks and whatnot a lot of people don't realize just how big of a deal being able to detonate bombs at will and breath of the wild was that's honestly one of the biggest quality of life changes they made waiting for bombs to explode doesn't take a while individually but the time spent watching paint dry adds up over the course of a whole playthrough not much else to discuss the setting is sort of cool although it feels like a fire Tempo light once you've experienced the Big Kahuna the zolfos are also neat I always liked fighting them in this game much more than any of the other ones very average dungeon comparable to eating a piece of bread without butter or Jam yeah foreign the water temple is notorious for being levels of heart which definitely hurts it to some extent but there are a couple of reasons that I don't necessarily hate it like some people do for one it's way less frustrating and it's difficulty than jabu-jabu's wretched stomach and that dungeon the difficulty came from stuff like having to pick up Ruda or navigate hard to differentiate rooms here it's all about awareness as I've stated in many of the past dungeon ranking videos the best dungeons are usually ones that require you to think on two levels how do I solve this room and how does this one room fit into the grander puzzle of solving the whole dungeon it makes you think a lot more about where stuff is how to get where you need to and stuff like that this is the sort of challenge that I think dungeons ought to have although there are still issues with the water temple for sure for one the way keys are handled here is atrocious Ocarina of Time dungeons in general have a problem with this but two in particular really the bed on this front there must have been at least two times where I make it to the end of a room only to realize I need a key to progress this is annoying in any dungeon given it demands you backtrack everywhere and scrounge around for it but doubly so in the water temple this is because of the water level mechanic which requires you to go to certain rooms to adjust which rooms are accessible based on how much is underwater while I like that this provided the aforementioned feeling of the dungeon being one large cohesive puzzle rather than a series of single room puzzles it makes backtracking a logistical nightmare just for a mere chance at finding a key you must do the entire dungeon backwards multiple times over which is a lot like finding hay in a used needle stack the iron boots being handled as they were is just the cherry on top of this Sunday I don't find it as horrible as a lot of people seem to but it's definitely a nuisance having to poke around in the menu every time I realize I forgot my keys in the dragon statue room or whatever when you aren't aimlessly roaming around hunting for keys or watching links sink down with his cement shoes this dungeon is actually pretty cool though the hook shot is my favorite item in the series and it's always great getting use out of it the music is interesting also the water temple has this strange feel to it that a lot of the better dungeons and older games have I wouldn't say any of the modern dungeons quite have it except for the city in the sky the whole Dark Link segment is a great example of this you fight him in this bizarre open room that appears to go on forever in every direction no explanation is ever given as to what he is or where you are and nothing overtly obvious seems to kill him best mini boss in the game I love this guy while the water temple has surely extracted enough tears from players to fill its volume many times over I can't help but have some amount of grudging respect for it all the same Believe It or Not deciding whether to rank the forest or water temple higher was the hardest choice of this video for me they have very similar pros and cons possessing some of the best atmospheres in the series but suffering from key hunting slogs and other issues a lot of the puzzles in this dungeon are the boring drawn out block pushing ones which for some reason Nintendo seems to think people actually enjoy you don't even think for this one they literally give you arrows telling you where they go it's just a pointless five minutes taken out of your day to watch a link develop a hernia there's also the floor Masters who kick you back to the start of the dungeon and make you go all the way through again because why the not what were they thinking when they made these it's not like the NES era where games had to have so you took more than half an hour to beat them the N64 had no need for that sort of thing as a kid I was really frustrated by how many people professed this to be their favorite dungeon in the game because I had an outred horrible experience with it for the reasons mentioned earlier if there's one convention I'm glad they largely abandoned after this game it would be having easily missable keys that you would need 20 minutes later in a random door that all aside there are plenty of pluses too the real room rotating mechanic was a really cool one as far as puzzles go and to this day is one of the best Dungeon gimmicks they've thought up making it a haunted mansion was awesome too I'm kind of impressed they thought to do that if someone told me to make a forest temple it probably looks sort of boring but these guys really struck gold with the look and feel of the place I also love the strange Mario 64 feeling rooms with the tiled floor textures falling ceilings spinning platforms all that well they don't have much respect for it from a game design perspective the Forest Temple is creatively impressive and marginally less unpleasant than the water temple earning at a spot above oh [Music] from here out I actually like the dungeons a lot let's get that out of the way weirdly enough I don't see too much praise for the fire temple it's got lots to love the way I see it the Megaton Hammer fire Tiki's everywhere and in the original edition of the game affirmations of the glory of Allah I guess the gorons had to keep up morale somehow freeing all the gorons sounds like a daunting concept for a dungeon but it actually totally works none of them are hidden in stupidly obscure places so you can easily find them as you go through everything I'm not quite sure who locked the gorons in here but we're talking about people who eat rocks and burn themselves alive for fun so for all I know they just got him with the old turkey leg on a rope trick the fire mazes are fun set pieces that make navigation more interesting and the rooms as a whole are much more interesting in layout than most other dungeons it's deceptively vertical which gives a lot of mileage to the awesome Megaton hammer and its elevator creating prowess the enemies are great in here big fan of the Flaming scarecrow guys with the hook shot being the key to beating him at all the way I see it this Temple is straight fire all right the fire temple may not be loved but the Shadow Temple seems to be outright hated by most people the level of Rage I see directed here is honestly baffling what the hell did it do to these people their mom for starters this is one of the coolest looking dungeons ever it's got skulls Galore and a horror aesthetic That Remains unrivaled by any other dungeon to date in my opinion the creativity here is incredible not just visually but in the layout and puzzles as well this is one is one of those rare cases in a Zelda game where a dungeon essentially has two items it's based around in this case the lens of Truth in the hover boots walking through walls and running over bottomless chasms is cool as hell infinitely more so than blowing up rocks or hitting switches with nuts or whatever you've also got interesting mechanics unique to the dungeon like those Goblin Airman statues on the wall I don't know that's what I call them I can't not mention the Ghost Ship either unlike a normal ship where you'd have to worry about rat's starvation and syphilis on this one you're contending with swords Shields and maybe syphilis again depending on what killed those two stealthos it's pretty easy much like the mothers of Shadow Temple haters but it's the spectacle that counts here you know what else they have in here blood real legit Bonafide blood Nintendo really went out loud back in the day unless they're playing the boring pussified version on the 3DS where they paid a janitor to swing by before link shows up in which case it loses a few cool points lots of vague but cool lore about hyrule's Bloody history which seems to imply that the royal family used to be torturing prisoners of war in here if it's torture they wanted they would have been better off walking these guys in a room with that annoying owl but hey hindsight 2020 all in all a very fun creative dungeon that places among my favorites in this series as a whole beaten out only by the one true Masterpiece of a dungeon remaining [Music] if you ask someone about the most iconic visual from Ocarina of Time you'll get a lot of possible answers ganon's transformation at the very end pulling the master sword from a sheath or perhaps even the first time someone laid eyes on the desert Colossus just outside the spirit Temple well for me it's watching those two pots levitate at you the moment you walk into the spirit Temple that is genuinely the first visual that shows up in my head when someone brings this game up to me something about the score for this dungeon really resonates me and sells me on the setting as well the power of sound design here is not to be ignored just talking about it brings back fond memories of sitting on my toilet watching music theory videos I didn't understand whatsoever about why everything Koji kondo has ever composed makes Beethoven look like a by comparison as well as the music the aesthetic design absolutely nails that desert templey feel down to all the statues and Sun iconography it pulls a lot of inspiration from Zoroastrianism according to an article I read on zeldauniverse.net the other day which lends a compelling sort of mysticism to everything in here in terms of memorability this dungeon doesn't just blow all the other dungeons out of the water it bombards them with nuclear warheads and atomizes them into quantum paper it's the only dungeon you tackle as both kid and Adult Link meaning the puzzles are split up between the two kits allowing for massive variety the puzzles for both sides are solid hard to pick a favorite Adult Link gets to give the statue an amateur nipple piercing with a hook shot so I guess he wins it's kind of weird when naburu tells kid links she'd him but I suppose I'd rather be inside her guts than jabu jabus if it came down to it ultimately the spirit Temple represents the Zelda series at its best from cool design to entertaining gameplay making it a no-brainer for the top spot in my eyes thanks so much for watching and I hope you enjoyed stay tuned for a boss ranking and coverage of the other games down the road coming in the near future make sure to like And subscribe while you're at it that's all for now deuces

Channel: Cytonox

Views: 23,604

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Id: 28wwGlrk-cQ

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023