Ocarina of Time 3D: Water Temple

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D's pre-release interviews made a fairly big deal out of the idea that the devs were overhauling the Water Temple to make it less of a pain to navigate and whatnot. Personally, I never found it that bad, but okay, whatever.

Now, here's the changes in the actual final product:

Firstly, both Boots items have been made into regular items. In conjunction with Ocarina of Time 3D increasing your item slots to 4, this means that it's much less of a nuisance to switch in and out of the Iron Boots for water sequences: in the N64 game, you needed to pause, press the Z button to scroll to the Equipment screen, maneuver to the relevance boots, switch to them, and then unpause every single time you needed to put on or take off the Iron Boots. As some rooms expect you to change your Boots multiple times over a 10-seconds-of-actual-gameplay sequence, this could get fairly tedious. The 3DS version makes switching in and out of the Iron Boots a single-click affair.

That's genuinely a pretty significant improvement.

Secondly, the Water Temple has colored lines that draw a path to each of the song points that you use to change the water level in the Temple.

This is a completely baffling, nearly pointless change. These points were never difficult to find or remember the locations of. They're only a relevant painpoint inasmuch as you'll end up going back to them repeatedly if you get lost, and that you have to do them in a specific order so if you realize you cycled the water level one further than you should've you'll have to cycle it two more times instead of just walking it back. Neither of these points is affected by the colored lines.

More importantly, that's the sum total of what was done to make the Water Temple less of a pain to navigate, which utterly fails to address the actual issues with the Temple that make it a nuisance to navigate.

Here's the actual issues with the Water Temple that would need to be addressed to improve the experience:

Firstly, making your way to the middle song point requires finding a Hookshot point that is extremely easy to overlook. It can only be seen by entering the middle tower, going basically all the way up to the wall at the end, and then turning around and looking up. This isn't intuitive behavior; a player is more likely to go to the center of the room to get a clear look in every direction, and so miss the Hookshot point. This can then lead to a player becoming stuck, unable to figure out why they can't make progress in the Water Temple. And no, the colored line dragging their attention to the tower doesn't really help.

Solution: Move the Hookshot point to the other facing of its ledge.

This would instantly solve the entire problem. If one wanted to avoid getting returning players lost, simply leave the original Hookshot point intact as well. Problem solved.

The second issue with the Water Temple is its Key doors. It has a lot of them, Key doors are not marked on your map even in the 3DS version, and the actual Keys are hidden in various strange locations; a particularly memorable example is a wall you have to blow up with a Bomb. This particular wall is only liable to be noticed while swimming up past it while it's underwater, at which point you can't blow it up, and doesn't even look distinctly bombable in the first place. This can easily lead to a situation where you're wandering around everywhere, unclear why you can't advance, because you haven't found this one Small Key. Worse, the Water Temple has a nasty habit of placing the actual Key doors past serious obstacles, such that you can end up making your way through a harrowing series of challenges, succeed at great cost... oops, you need to turn around and leave, then come back and do it all again once you have a Small Key. The Boss Key chest is a particularly cruel example, requiring you to travel through several rooms of fairly challenging obstacles to finally be confronted with an innocuous door that you probably can't open because seriously the Keys are not well-placed.

Solution: Make Key doors on the Dungeon Map, including in rooms the player hasn't visited if they have the Dungeon Map.

This wouldn't eliminate the entirety of the above problems, but it would certainly prevent the worst of them, and to be honest fixing this problem would require a fairly significant redesign of the dungeon, or a removal of several Key doors.

The third issue, as mentioned before, is that you have to go bottom->middle->top->bottom for adjusting the water level. If you know exactly where to go in what order, this isn't an issue at all, as the correct route through the dungeon always involves cycling in that order anyway, but for a player who has realized they need the water level one step back? This means a ridiculously long journey.

Solution: Don't arbitrarily design the middle song point to be accessible only when the water level is at its lowest level, and make it so that using the top song point generates a Hookshot point next to it so the player can travel back to it more easily in future.

I'm honestly not sure why this isn't how things were handled in the first place. My first impulse was to assume a hardware limitation of some kind was why the middle song point was blocked off like this, but the fact is that the Master Quest version of the Water Temple allows you to access the middle song point at any water level, throwing doubt on that possibility. The top song point has no excuse at all, and never did. Regardless, this is a really simple solution that almost completely eliminates the problem with basically no side effects, and I'm fairly baffled as to why it wasn't implemented.

The fourth issue is that the Water Temple has multiple cases where a route cannot be completed without first taking a different route to do something like shove a block out of the way. As with the Small Key issue, this leads to a lot of gratuitous time-wasting, where you travel partway down a path with no evidence this is a mistake, ultimately having to turn around with nothing accomplished. The game provides no map marking of such issues, and in conjunction with how the Water Temple's routes frequently cross floors of the dungeon while the game's map system is poorly-suited for keeping track of such connection points, it's easy to lose track of what areas you've only made partial progress on vs what areas actually are that brief of areas, leading to a lot of running back into the same dead ends because you don't remember which is which.

Solution: Overhaul the map system. At minimum, either add in marks for the relevant obstacles, or allow the player to add their own memos to the map. The ideal scenario would be to rip out Ocarina of Time's map system entirely and plug in something better at representing 3D environments, but this probably never had a chance of happening.

Just marks or memos would instantly make things a lot easier, especially if this was on top of Key doors being marked. (Which they really should've been, regardless: the Water Temple is the worst offender here, but most of Ocarina of Time's dungeons would've benefited a lot from Key doors being marked on the map)

Fifth and final, the Water Temple has a strangely high concentration of repetitive, tedious tasks. The two big offenders are the room where you have to hit a crystal switch to raise and lower the local water level repeatedly, and the room where you have to bomb two sides to a tunnel and then painstakingly push a block to one end, then run around to the other end to drag it partially out, then run back around behind it to push it the rest of the way, but they're not the only rooms like this.

Solution: Completely overhaul the relevant room puzzles.

This is, as far as a wishlist of Water Temple Fixes, by far the lowest priority. It's the other issues that coil together into a snarled mess of frustration and time wasting. This only stands out as much as it does because it's part of a larger pattern of the Water Temple having unnecessary time-wasters.

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The bizarre thing is that Ocarina of Time 3D includes Master Quest, and Master Quest's version of the Water Temple does address basically the entirety of these problems. Admittedly, it does so in part by virtue of cutting out large parts of the dungeon, but it also does things like add Hookshot points throughout the central area so you don't need to raise the water level to reach the higher floors. The Master Quest version is actually possible to beat without the Bow, that's how heavily overhauled it is. (Which you shouldn't do, mind, since beating the Water Temple gives you the perfect opportunity to get the Fire Arrows, which requires the Bow, but still, it's cool)

Regardless, I was pretty disappointed to see that 'fixing' the Water Temple was so horribly misaimed in its focus.

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