Ocarina Of Time’s Weirdest Room Holds My Favorite Moment In The Game

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Despite its ubiquity, I tend to consider 's story the series' most profound. Link's triumphant journey to defeat Ganondorf is underpinned by a pervasive sense of melancholy, even in the game's jovial ending: the celebrations highlighted in the credits are followed by two possible outcomes in the series' convoluted timeline. Link's adult era continues without him, and Hyrule is doomed to be flooded prior to; when he's sent back in time, he's now an orphan in the wrong era, stripped of his destiny.

This doesn't even take into account the timeline branch where Ganon is victorious against the Hero of Time, but the events of itself aren't any less tragic. Just when Link seems to be well on his way to rebuffing Ganondorf's coup by gathering the three Spiritual Stones, the kingdom falls anyway. Link has his formative years ripped away from him while he's effectively comatose in the Sacred Realm for seven years. He emerges to a nightmare manifest: Castle Town Market is derelict and filled with ReDead; the home he doesn't belong to, Kokiri Forest, is overrun with monsters; Gerudo City is empty, its residents waiting to be consumed by an ancient, resurrected dragon; and Zora's Domain is frozen in eternal ice.

Seeing Zora's Domain as an adult Link has always pained me. Going to meet the Zora and Lord Jabu Jabu was the final adventure before entering the Temple of Time, and seeing it now frozen shows that not only has Ganondorf won, there's nowhere left untouched. Before the more physical horrors of the Shadow Temple and the desert odyssey to the Spirit Temple, reaches what I think is its most emotional moment in a rather innocuous place: the Ice Cavern.

The Ice Cavern is just a mini-dungeon, a prelude to 's wrongfully maligned Water Temple, but it contains possibly the single most interesting room in the game. When you reach the end of the Ice Cavern, you fight a White Wolfos, get the Iron Boots, and learn the Serenade of Water in a space that truly looks like nothing else in