Top Ten Worst Legend of Zelda Dungeons

help give kids an extra Life by donating today to help sick and injured children Link in the description and pinned comment below I have a sword I have a rock [Music] [Music] another month another long overdue topic and yes it's yet another negative countdown I'm pretty sure that makes three in a row I promise this will be the last time for a while but with the Legend of Zelda tears of the Kingdom having them fresh out of the oven by the time you see this I figured it was time to do another Zelda video and since I covered my favorite dungeons just over two years ago I suppose it's only fair to rip into the ones I don't like whether it's for the dungeon design the gimmicks involved or the boss battle at the end these dungeons make me think yeah I'd rather scrub all the floors in Hyrule a couple of asterisks on the list by the way first only one per game will be in here though others from the same game might land in the dishonorable mentions and second nothing from tears of the Kingdom since it is way too soon as of the release of the video alright squadala it's game time [Music] okay let's get this out of the way now we all know Ocarina of time's legendary status at least many of us should by now but that doesn't mean it's Immaculate there are at least a few parts of the game that could have done with a bit more oversight and while yes the water Temple's infamy may have been overblown just a bit that doesn't make it a good dungeon organic of the temple is Raising and lowering the water levels to access different parts of the dungeon but the fact that it isn't always clear where you need to go combined with the fact that you're constantly putting on your iron boots pulling yourself out of the water taking off the iron boots and literally rinsing and repeating makes the whole thing a slog and the punishment for screwing up is that you have to waste more of your time by going back to the spot where you change the water level again it gets repetitive and boring and the water doesn't really do it any favors due to just how much it slows down your movement and the fact that rudo shows up here you know the girl you had to carry around the innards of a fish that doesn't help here either not to mention it's a big dungeon item is just a longer hook shot at least the darkling fight is pretty cool and definitely should have been the boss instead of the tentacle monster and thank hylia that the 3DS made some key improvements to make this dungeon more bearable like highlighting where to change the water levels and more importantly making the iron boots a mappable item certainly makes the swim a lot more bearable if you asked me [Music] I've talked about how the general mood of Twilight Princess is well Moody the ever-present Gloom of Twilight is absolutely everywhere and the supposed source of this is the king of Shadows Zant throughout the game he's built up as this big imposing threat overthrowing the Twilight capturing Hyrule castle with barely a fight and leaving poor Minna within an inch of her life the second half of the game is spent Gathering the shards of the mirror of twilight so that you can take the fight to him only when you get to the Palace of Twilight it's boring yeah Twilight's fitting for a place like this because it makes me want to fall asleep it's the game's penultimate dungeon and yet it is surprisingly basic and dull you know the exact opposite that a dungeon at this point should be the main gimmick in the early going is this creepy Shadow fog that can force you into wolf form where you can just sense your way through it oh but you can also dispel it while carrying balls of light after you clear the room of enemies but that also makes you the target of disembodied hands of evil which is never fun and you gotta carry that Soul all the way back to the entrance with two of them that means wandering to the fog beating the mini boss grabbing the soul and dragging it back again and what's your reward for this a sword upgrade that lets you do what the soul already did so no cool toy to have fun with throughout the rest of the dull boring dungeon isn't it lovely how there's so much fog to cut through and how there are so many Twilight Vermin simply wonderful in fact it's so relatively short compared to last dungeons that it doesn't even really feel like a full dungeon the only real highlight is to fight with Zant himself being chaotic as it is and how it tests your skills in different ways acting as a pseudo Boss Rush the dungeon itself however watching the sunset never felt so dull [Music] one thing that almost never works in video games is stealth sections and games that aren't designed around stealth not every game is Metal Gear Solid and we can't have sections and games that pretend to be more often than not arbitrary stealth sections are done very poorly with strict punishments for getting caught up to and including instant death and getting through successfully can be an outright slog as you're waiting for enemies to turn their backs and for spotlights to move just far enough for you to make a break for it and if I could go back 10 years I would have a damn serious talk with my younger self that thought the first visit to The Forsaken Fortress was actually good yeah that was the coolest part of the whole thing and that's very telling look like I know you want to save your sister and all that but you were woefully unprepared for this even if you didn't lose your sword on the baggage claim so you gotta sneak around this place without a permanent weapon and dodging the various search Knights to get from one area to the next and if even the smallest polygon of your model gets picked up by the searchlights right to jail and you gotta smack the coblins with sticks to disable the searchlights huh how about that this game foreshadowed the early game of breath of the wild and even when you manage to disable the searchlights and enter the next area there's moblins you gotta sneak by unfortunately Hyrule never invented cardboard boxes so you gotta use the next best thing a barrel you sure we can't call Solid Snake on this one and no sooner does link find his sword and his sister then the bird brain that caused all this mess shows up and tosses the boy aside like last week's trash so you go through all that slow tedious and poorly implemented stealth and all you get is thrown into the sea you see this is why you can prepare for this back pass me with such an idiot [Music] if you've been paying attention you may have noticed that our first three victims have one very important thing in common they're from 3D Zelda games well don't you worry arcade Nation I happen to be an equal opportunity Ranter Link to the Past come on up and face your Fates in the second phase of the game you're dealing with the task of finding the six captured maidens and finally Princess Zelda before reaching ganon's Tower to confront agadon each of the dungeons in the dark world has a gimmick or theme to keep things interesting and in top down games in particular one of the worst gimmicks you can give a level is ice ice yeah what you see is what you get with the ice palace it's basically saying hey buddy you are about to have a real bad real pulled really slippery day check your traction at the door if you've watched me long enough you know I hate ice physics and games and this level is a good illustration as to why when you're sliding all over the place it's hard to dodge enemies and if you're not careful you'll end up slamming right into them instead of positioning yourself to kill them trapped like a tedious moving floor and inconsistency of where you need to place bombs to move to the next of the dungeon seven basement floors don't make things better oh and what's the one thing that is almost always paired with ice physics and 2D games be a top-down or side scrolling it's Bottomless Pits and yeah we got those here too and that blue male that reduces damage which serves as the dungeon item isn't gonna help much when knockback has the potential to completely throw off your momentum and toss you around like a ragdoll either into spikes or Worse into a bottomless pit and all that annoying slipping and irritating traps and risk of getting launched into hazards by knockback All Leads up to a fight with an eye on a cloud that's contained in a block of ice you know I should have expected as much from a dungeon that is either annoying or dull with nothing in between [Music] you know I can appreciate when a dungeon tries to do something different and exciting I mean there's a reason why the Stone Tower Temple is so beloved among Zelda fans but here's the thing it needs to be different and exciting and unfortunately for skyward Swords finale the only exciting part is the final fight with Gira him the fight with the mice that comes after is over in a few minutes and the dungeon that comes before is well it's a slide puzzle we just had enough sliding and now we're talking about a slide puzzle dungeon look slide puzzles is a puzzle in stage are one thing but when your entire dungeon is a slide puzzle itself then we're gonna have words in whatever language you speak I'm sure I could find a good translator somewhere for context the sky keep is the final dungeon of Skyward Sword as well as the hiding place of the Triforce which at this point is the only hope of keeping the imprisoned well imprisoned as you know by this point that freak has a bad habit of breaking out now like Skyward Sword itself this Temple tends to be rather divisive people either really love it or really hate it take a wild guess which side of the fence I'm on like I said this is a slide puzzle where you slide all the rooms around you at specific places in order to find the three pieces of the Triforce and you are going to be doing this a lot you gotta arrange the rooms in such a way that you can progress to the next point where you can make your next rearrangement rinse repeat pull your hair out the rooms them elves are pretty cool as they call back to previous areas in the game like the Ancient Cistern and the Skyview Temple each of these rooms will test your skills in different ways and most of your inventory and abilities will come into play here when you're actually traversing these rooms that is but when you're stopping every five minutes to rearrange the damn rooms it stops the flow of the dungeon in its tracks faster than a hair clog stops the flow of your drain not to mention there's liable to be quite a bit of backtracking throughout the rooms look I get that one of the elements of the triforce's wisdom but they could have come up with a better way to implement it all right another month another long overdue time wait hold on didn't I start the countdown this way oh I get it yep it's time to revisit Link's Groundhog Day Adventure Majora's mask's three-day time Loop leads to a lot of interesting scenarios sadly most of them are in the side quests the dungeons are very hit or miss with the major highlight being the Stone Tower Temple woodfall and snowhead temples being okay and remember how I said that I'd rather eat an octo Rock than have to go through the Great Bay Temple ever again I still stand by that statement imagine having a dungeon with an aesthetic that gives the impression of a water treatment plant well that sounds cool but full disclosure that aesthetic is the only thing about this dungeon that I really like the rest makes me feel like I'm drowning it's basically a similar stick to the water temple but made arguably worse by the fact that this is Majora's Mask which may I remind you is on a time limit the deal is that you're swimming from room to room with your new Zora mask which is admittedly cool but that's due to the mask itself and instead of controlling the water level you're turning gears to change the currents which determine which room you're swimming to and once again if you leave a room too early you gotta waste more of your time turning the water currents just so you can go back which is something you do not want to have to do and this can be especially painful when tracking down the Stray fairies and you're going to be switching the water flow a lot in this dungeon and the ice arrows you get here aren't exactly the most intuitive considering what I've already said about ice physics and you need to create ice platforms to cross certain parts the small all slippery ice platforms after that the fight with George arguably the worst boss in the series where it's rarely clear if you're winning or not and you'll get a dungeon that gets me boiling mad and what puts it above the water temple is that instead of improving it the 3DS remake actually made it worse in two key ways the first was nerfing zoralink swimming so that you need magic to swim fast something that you'll need to do in order to complete the dungeon in a timely manner the second was making the fight with Georg worse by having you be more specific and how to kill it instead of giving you options and making that specific way a wedding game in Majora's Mask where you can ill afford to have to wait what they think [Music] the Oracle games were an interesting experiment depending on your point of view they could be seen as both two separate games and as two parts of a greater whole the interactivity between the two titles either through passwords or Link cable connection was the main hook of these titles each game had their own unique items unique stories and unique Dungeons and as it turns out each of the games had a big stinker among their dungeon lineup in the case of Oracle of Ages it was jabu jabu's belly long story short this is basically the water temple if it were 2D the main gimmick is hitting switches to change the water level so that you can progress to the dungeon and you can already probably see the main issue with that at least with the water tempo as tedious as it was at least the idea worked because of how it used 3D space here you can only see one floor at a time and that makes going from one floral to another repetitive and annoying granted all the switches in the dungeon are in the same room but while that sounds convenient on paper in actual practice you're gonna have to enter this room for multiple angles to get to the switch you need need so you're likely to be running in circles and getting confused as to which switch you need to push next granted backtracking and Zelda games is nothing new in fact in many cases it's to your own benefit but when you're retracing your steps over and over trying to find which path will get you to the next key only to find out you are standing in the wrong place at the wrong time hit the wrong switch it doesn't feel fulfilling it just makes me think uh can I move on yet there's just so much trial and error involved in raising and lowering the water and seeing how it affects each floor that it makes an already boring dungeon even more tedious and boring when you've done pretty much everything that one of the most hated dungeons in the series does except even worse and in a worse perspective for it you know something is definitely very wrong I know making levels centered around water isn't an easy task giving the way the mechanics change when introducing water but I know that it's at least possible to get it right I mean the Ancient Cistern was able to pull it off beautifully but this this is how it must really feel to get swallowed by a fish with no way out if you need a guide to get through this dungeon without pulling your hair out from loss of patience I completely understand because it is so easy to get lost I will give a credit for one thing though like kind of looks cute as a fish [Music] breath of the wild was a massive game changer for the series with its massive open world and open-ended structure this was a game where exploration was King and distraction was Queen but while I was playing the game I couldn't help but notice a few bits of inspiration from the game that started it all yeah despite the levels having numbers to them the original Zelda was surprisingly open-ended just with a significantly smaller map than what we have nowadays of course a lot of stuff was really hard to find without a guide but that's excusable due to the limitations of the NES at the time what isn't excusable is the final dungeon and Death Mountain nowadays we have the internet so that we know exactly which block to push and which walls can be bombed so that we can progress but back in the day you'd have to be some kind of wizard to get through this without Nintendo power or something like it this is a maze with no apparent Rhyme or Reason as to what does what no way to tell which walls are breakable what blocks are pushable or how close you really are to Ganon that alone is bad enough but it's maze-like quality makes the enemy selection of the dungeon even worse obviously you expect the final dungeon of the game to have the hardest enemies and Death Mountain is stuffed to overflowing with them whiz ropes like likes landmolas and the all-new Petras which are arguably the hardest enemies in the entire game move aside lionels these flying eyeballs had you beat from the very start normally open rooms give you enough space to handle them but you don't always have open rooms now do ya but the worst part is how this dungeon can essentially soft lock you unlike most of the previous levels which only have one special item Death Mountain has two of them the first is the red ring which boosts your defense and makes the grueling enemies easier to handle the second item is the Silver Arrows the problem both are missable and the Silver Arrow is essential once you step into gannon's chamber you're locked in until you win doesn't help that he immediately turns invisible sure you can hit him for at least a few times eventually he turns brown and shrugs off all of your attacks guess what the Silver Arrow is the only thing that can finish him off if you don't have it you're stuck until your last heart Falls at which point it's right back to the start of the dungeon which means you have to deal with all those powerful enemies all over again and what's more the localization left this little bit of all important info out of the mix so again unless you have a guide you have little idea that Ganon is even weak to these things but you do need them to even win so let's hope for your sake that you didn't miss those Silver Arrows or else you will die [Music] foreign the NES was an interesting time as far as sequels were concerned and at least a few cases sequels tried something radically different as opposed to tweaking the gameplay of the original coming up with new levels and slapping a number on it Castlevania 2 was an early prototype for games like Symphony of the Night the American version of Super Mario 2 was a far cry from the masochistic level pack that Japan got and speaking of masochistic let's talk about Zelda too this game did a lot of things differently from the first game the level up mechanics the side-scrolling format the emphasized magic system the towns with the pen healing touch but I seem to be forgetting something else hold on give me a minute oh yeah the merciless dick twisting tit strangling difficulty when people think Nintendo hard this is one of the games that come to mind because the combination of Miz like Dungeons and caves and unforgiving enemies that tend to be either harder than a Dialga boner or placed ever so conveniently close to a lava pit if I were talking strictly about palaces I'd pick the malignant Labyrinth that is the great palace I don't know what I was thinking making that an honorable mention on my favorites maybe the Euphoria of finishing it back then clutter my memories the only reason it's not on the list is because Death Mountain exists again while not a palace per se this place is too much of a rage quit moment to ignore look I'm angry and I'm not in the right headspace to debate let me have this all right the place is a goddamn maze packed to the brim with enemies you wouldn't expect to be able to handle from boomerang throwing glorious to the dyrus who come packing more axes than your standard issue Belmont not to mention that even the smaller enemies pose a significant threat due to how they tend to hang out on narrow legislative pair oh so well with lava as if that weren't enough any wrong turn can lead you to a dead end a phrase taken very literally when all those enemies you quad and scraped your way through respawn upon re-entry and it's not even consistent which ones will give you experience on a repeat kill so unless you have a guide this place will make you wish that games came with seizure warnings before 1991. yeah I looked that up again the great palace is barely harder than this and about as confusing there are two big caveats that kept me from picking it one if you get a game over in the Grand Palace you start at the beginning of the palace instead of back at the starting point of the game and two that's the last dungeon while Death Mountain pops up after the first palace in the game oh but I'm sure all this pain is worth it right well this is all for a hammer plane box standard Hammer which you only use once or twice in the whole game you know it would have been a lot easier if I could just smash ganon's skull with that hammer save us all a lot of trouble and let's just get Zelda Some Enchanted alarm clock or something I don't [ __ ] know and before we move on here are some dishonorable mentions the sword and shield maze from Oracle of Seasons part Fire part ice all frustrating the great palace from Zelda 2. this is where it actually belongs City in the sky Twilight Princess I hope you like looking at the scenery because you'll be doing that a lot Temple of droplets from Minish Cap water and ice in the same dungeon it's like puking on a pile of crap Eagles Tower from Link's Awakening I'm taking my balls and leaving and the yiga clan hide out from breath of the wild in a game that did a lot of things right stealth was not one of them and now let's see what the arcade nation has to say with this month's Patron picks Stone Tower Temple from Majora's Mask I don't like getting to the dungeon I don't like using the old corner so many times and the mechanics are way too stressed [Music] usually even the worst dungeons are at least somewhat bearable because of one mitigating Factor the reason for this is simple you only have to go through them once twice at most but when a single dungeon takes up about a third of the adventure there's a goddamn problem and this is where Phantom Hourglass comes into play the game wasn't too bad the touch controls were competent the exploration was pretty cool and most of the dungeons were okay but one Infamous part of this game has led people to throw up their hands and cast this game aside like a broken Giants knife this is the notorious Temple of the ocean King the first time you enter this place is in the beginning of the game when you're tasked with finding Lineback so he can give you a lift and almost immediately you see the first problem with this the place is cursed to suck the life out of you so once you free line back he gives you a key so that you can get a c chart no big deal so after you free the first Spirit you have to get the next seed chart which is also in the temple but this time you get the Phantom Hourglass the namesake mcduffin which will keep you safe but only for 10 minutes max which is upgradable so you go through the First puzzles again to reach the next floor where you're met with Invincible Phantoms who can one shot you in knock 30 seconds off your clock oh boy stealth we all know how well Zelda handles that [ __ ] so once you get the chart go to the next dungeon free the spirit he unseales the next chamber so you gotta go back a third time do the same puzzles and go a little bit farther to the next C chart use that to free the final spirits and we can finally board that ghost ship and save Tetra oh she's been turned to stone so now we gotta find the pure metals to forge the Phantom sword to defeat Bellum and they're in Uncharted areas so it's back to the temple a fourth time to go to the same puzzles again with maybe a couple of shortcuts to find another C chart and maybe a second one if you have enough time so you get the pure medals Forge the Phantom sword and do I here five yeah we gotta go into the temple again this time with the means to actually kill the Phantoms and defeat Bellum yeah all that from one dungeon the whole thing transmutes a mishmash of smaller problems into a chimera of tedium boredom and frustration time limits arbitrary stealth with insta kill enemies and puzzles that reset every time you re-enter all in a dungeon that wreaks so much of petting that Salvia from Toho would knife this dungeon on site it would be bad enough if you only had to do this once but five times possibly even six well excuse me princess but that is overkill and again Phantom Hourglass is an otherwise solid Zelda game but it's really telling that the game is named after the gimmick that's meant to accompany the worst part of it and honestly Phantom Hourglass would have been so much better if the sea charts were just scattered across the islands instead of being gathered on different floors of the same place yeah it still would have been obvious padding but it would have been padding with variety instead of having to do the same floors over and over and over and over again and need I remind you the idea of a hub dungeon was done better in spirit tracks with a tower of spirits yeah you have to go into the tower several times but you can skip all the crap you've already done and at least it's more interesting than anything in its predecessor guess we all have to learn sooner or later huh I'm the quarter guy and until next time the arcade is closed [Music] okay let's do this one last time my name is Adam Lutz I was not bitten by a radioactive spider but for the past 11 and a half years I've been the one and only quarter guy I think you know the rest I made a bunch of videos gained something of a following made some friends along the way wore a couple hacks bounce my videos with a full-time job and now I'm doing this next time qg at the arcade Spider-Man it's game time hey everyone qg here if you enjoyed the video please like subscribe leave a comment and share the video around feel free to check out my Twitter and my quick streams and consider supporting me through patreon and donating to my extra life campaign to support children's Wisconsin thanks for watching foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Quarter Guy

Views: 24,086

Keywords: The Quarter Guy, Quarter Guy, Quarter, Guy, Video Games, Gaming, Zelda, Worst, Dungeons

Id: B23BnVIQUsQ

Length: 27min 13sec (1633 seconds)

Published: Thu May 25 2023