Twink runs back through the byzantine hallways and returns to the central chamber. Now that he bothers to take five seconds to look around, he notices one of the hallways is a short dead end with the same type of blue block he ran into in Dampé’s underground playroom. This time, thankfully, he doesn’t need Naggy to tell him what to do–one time was humiliating enough. He plays the Song of Time to evaporate the block and finds a door leading to another room. This room is actually outside, and includes vines climbing the walls, covered with frightening spiders; a lovely manicured lawn, unfortunately infested with flower vagina weeds; a moat, complete with blowjob-mouth Octorok; and a well, full and likely stagnant. All the trademarks of a Ganondorf-designed hellhole. Twink climbs the vines on one wall and manages to reach a hole with a door in it before one of the spiders he couldn’t reach with the Moneyshot murders him. Best dungeon ever!
Defeating a lone Flamer Skull in the next room provides Twink with the map, thank Christ. From there he returns to the courtyard but on a balcony set high in the wall. He Moneyshots over to a rusty-looking switch that he should probably get a Tetanus shot after touching, and that drains the moat. Back down to the ground floor to enter the moat and run through a small sewer, where Twink finally finds a Small Key. Well, fantastic! Now Twink is surely on the right track!
Back to the M.C. Escher room and the locked door. Twink is not getting sick of this at all. The door opens to a hallway that is twisted up. Because this is not visually obvious–oh wait–Naggy stops Twink to say, “This corridor is all twisted!” HOLY SHIT, NAGGY, IT IS??? Twink hates her so much. Maybe when he rescues Saria she’d like to adopt a second fairy.
I probably should not have nicknamed the previous room the M.C. Escher room, because that name is a much better fit for this room, which actually has stairs coming out of the walls and chests on the ceiling. I’ll instead call it the Floor Masturbator’s Basement, because guess what’s in here? That’s right. Octoroks.
Seriously, Twink has to move through this room fairly quickly and get to the next door, because if he stands in one spot too long he’ll get goosed by a Floor Masturbator and sent back to the dungeon’s entrance. And that would mean going through the M.C. Escher room again, at which point Twink would, Saria be damned, slit his wrists with the Masturbator Sword and end it right here. Of course, he quickly hops across the platforms to the door, only to find it locked. Bleeding to death in the lobby of the Forest Temple isn’t sounding too bad right now.
Fuck me. Back out to the central chamber. If Twink doesn’t make some real progress in this dungeon in the next five minutes, I think he’s going to go on strike. This time, he heads through the door on the northern end of the chamber. After a short corridor he ends up in a room that locks behind him and finds himself in a fight with two Bone Daddies. The Bone Daddies in this game are more or less the same giant skeletons with swords and shields, but these also have stylish turquoise ankle boots. Like the Wolfos, these fellows are very gentlemanly and agree to engage Twink solo instead of taking him from both ends. Their tip to Twink afterward, unfortunately, is less than generous: a Small Key.
Hoping against hope that this is the last time this will be necessary, Twink makes his way back to the last locked door he found, taking the time on the way back from the Bone Daddies’ room to kill a Gold-Assed Spider. Priorities. Past that door, he finds himself in a rather strange stairwell. At the end of each flight of stairs, there is a painting of the red Poe from earlier. But when Twink moves too close to the painting, the Poe disappears from the canvas and moves to another frame. Not unnerving at all.
Sup.
A FAQ I consulted after the fact informs me that these Poes are sisters, and even have names: Joelle, Beth, Amy, and Meg. I’m not sure I want to know why these inconsequential mini-bosses with no lines of dialogue needed names, or why they apparently needed to be named after the sisters in Little Women. All I know is that I’m going to change them to suit Twink’s tastes more. For the time being, though, Twink can’t do anything in here, so he leaves Irvine the Red Poe to his gallavanting through paintings and enters the next room.
Once again, Twink is locked in and forced to fight three Bone Daddies. These fellows are much more generous, rewarding Twink with the Fairy Bow. Fucking finally! If he wouldn’t get a boatload of grief from Sheik and Naggy, Twink would just walk out right now.
The door on the opposite side leads to a mirror-image stairwell. This one has similarly haunted paintings of Zell the Blue Poe. But unlike the last room, it ends in a locked door. Now, I wish I could tell you that this is the point when I remembered that Twink needed to use his newfound bow and arrows and somehow solve the puzzle of these two rooms, but I may have been drunk at the time. I honestly hope I was. Instead, I said several choice curse words, gently set down my controller, and kicked the wall. Following this, Twink wanders around the Forest Temple for at least 20 minutes, wondering where the next motherfucking Small Key is hidden that will only lead to needing another Small Key. I imagine Ganondorf has some Ingo-like evil locksmith on his payroll.
While Twink is wandering aimlessly, he does manage to shoot the eye above the twisty hallway door and untwist the hallway, which allows him to reach the Boss Key, which has a sparkly ruby nestled between its phallic devil horns. Twink takes a moment to breathe a sigh of relief that he is accomplishing something in this dank shitheap, and in that moment he is picked up by a Floor Masturbator and thrown back to the entrance.
Fuck this game.
I’m really surprised my Gamecube hasn’t spontaneously combusted by now.
Since he’s back at the beginning anyway, Twink takes a moment to regroup, meaning that I paused the game, turned the tape off, and found a fucking strategy guide. It was only at this moment that I remembered how to deal with the paintings of Irvine and Zell, because “Use the item you got in the room in between the rooms with the paintings” was somehow not obvious to me. My only excuse is the thing I did immediately before playing this game was play 11 hours of Xenosaga. But that has to count for something.
Let’s just skip ahead to Irvine’s room. Positioning himself as far away from the first painting as he can, to keep Irvine from skipping to another one, Twink shoots the canvas, lighting it on fire–don’t look at me–and sending Irvine fleeing to the painting above the stairs. Three ruined paintings later, Irvine is at the bottom of the stairs. To kill him, Twink just has to exercise some patience, like he didn’t run out of that an hour ago, and just keep Irvine targeted until he becomes solid, then shoot him with an arrow. He and Zell (the process is identical and I’m not going to tell you about it twice for no reason) go down with five arrows each. Killing Irvine nets Twink the necessary Small Key, while Zell gives up the Comp Ass, at least an hour after I would have liked to have it.
The locked door after Zell’s room leads to another Floor Masturbator’s Basement, which of course leads to another twisty hallway, except this one is currently untwisted. It’s kind of depressing to me how lost I got in a dungeon that is this symmetrical. But since I didn’t bother going any further in the strategy guide I looked up than to figure out my immediate problem at the time, this hallway ends in a locked door Twink has no key for. So it’s time to backtrack again. For all this effort, Saria had better have acquired a five-million-Rupee fortune and a 12-inch penis in the past seven years.
To keep going, Twink has to return to the other Floor Masturbator’s Basement on the west side of the dungeon, with the untwisted hallway, and drop down the hole in the floor across from the Boss Key chest. At this point I need alcohol to get through this–if I’m drunk enough I can laugh at my own idiocy instead of trying to strangle myself.
I should point out that I am killing the Floor Masturbators whenever I can, mostly because I fear them deeply and don’t want to go back to the beginning again, but also because it makes me feel better about myself. Unfortunately, Twink has been at max Rupees since well before he arrived here, and the motherfuckers drop anywhere between 20 and 40 Rupees each. Fuck Twink’s life.
Past the untwisted hallway on the east side, Twink finds a room and contraption that are just a classic example of Ganondorf Glamour, Inc. For no reason, four tall platforms are rotating through a small pool of lava. In their center is a single stationary platform with a lit torch, and on the wall is an eyeball symbol covered in ice. Don’t worry that neither the lava nor the ice patch make any sense for this dungeon, or that this entire room was just invented for Twink to solve. Ganondorf Glamour, Inc. ensures that each evil dungeon experience is tailored to YOU, the discerning adventurer. Twink aims carefully and manages to shoot his arrow at just the right moment to pass through the torch’s fire and hit the ice. I mean, Jesus, he has to get something right the first time in this place, doesn’t he? This act twists the hallway Twink just came through and allows him passage to another room via–hooray for more somehow vexing symmetry–another hole in the floor.
Twink drops through that gaping hole–heh–onto a black-and-white checkered tile floor. “Twink, watch out!” Naggy shrieks. “The ceiling is falling down!” I guess I can give her a pass for pointing this out, given all the completely obvious shit Twink has been ignoring in his time in the Forest Temple. All Twink really has to do is scout out the spots where there are gaps in the falling ceiling, based on where there are obstacles or important items on the floor. So it’s pretty easy to run to the floor switch to open the door, avoid the asshole spider, and open the chest containing a bundle of much-appreciated arrows.
In the following room, Twink finds a painting of Seifer the Green Poe on the wall along with five large blocks floating in the air. Shooting Seifer’s handsome portrait drops the blocks to the ground and begins a one-minute timer, during which Twink must reassemble said handsome portrait using the jumbled blocks. Only four of the blocks are necessary, so Twink leaves the fifth alone so it can jack off in the corner. Once this insultingly easy puzzle has been solved, Seifer emerges from the painting and is killed with the same method used against Irvine and Zell. Seifer, ever the stingy, selfish creep, doesn’t reward Twink with anything other than opening the door, which opens back into the central chamber, so it’s barely even a reward. Dick.
Seifer’s unlocked door to the central chamber opens onto an enclosed balcony. Twink could just jump directly down and move forward with things, but he spots a previously unnoticed eyeball above the last alcove in the room. Shooting it opens a barred door, which Twink assumes is necessary to explore to move on. And you know what happens when you assume, right? Just to illustrate how unnecessary it was to come in here at all, Twink has already been here–this area, not the courtyard on the west side of the dungeon, is where Twink hit the switch to drain the well. But to keep it from being a complete waste of Twink’s time, he Moneyshots across the moat to a small raised island with a Gold-Assed Spider and a treasure chest with…a single heart. What the fuck? Ganondorf must have run over-budget on this dungeon redesign, so he had to fill all the remaining chests with hearts and arrows instead of actual treasure.
After that totally satisfying and rewarding venture, Twink returns to the central chamber to deal with Squally the Purple Poe. (Sadly, he doesn’t wear leather with fur trim.) Squally, as the most fabulous of the Poes in the Forest Temple, is a little more difficult to handle. When Twink runs toward him–possibly hoping to find out if he can get a new tunic in that shade–Squally splits into four identical purple Poes. Twink must use the Moneyshot or the bow to attack the real Squally. Given who we’re dealing with, Twink chooses the Moneyshot. This would seem difficult except, upon splitting each time, the real Squally dances around a little bit, or defaults to the Squally Stance if you like. So Twink just has to watch for the one that can’t resist poncing around and the battle is as good as won.
Twink feels bad about killing something this twee.
When Squally is defeated, all four of the torches are again lit, and the elevator in the center of the floor slides out, probably with a sensuous groan, but I don’t have audio. Twink gets inside the Forest Temple’s buttplug and rides it down to the basement.
There is only one room left to deal with, to our exhausted hero’s delight. To open the way to the boss, Twink must rotate the walls of the room by pushing against movable protrusions, like an inverse set of spokes. After about five seconds I lose track of how many times Twink needs to push, so he just does this until he has access to the Gold-Assed Spider and the lone treasure chest in the room–containing arrows, hint hint–and then pushes randomly some more until he’s hit all the right switches and has the hole in the wall in the right spot. He probably ends up moving the walls twice as many times as is necessary, but compared to the unnecessary labor he endured in the rest of the dungeon, this is a minor annoyance.