Moving on. The next door, decorated with skulls that symbolize death, obviously leads to the Wind Temple room. Gotcha! It’s the Earth Temple room! Oh man, you totally didn’t see that coming! The Earth Temple, being all about earth the way it is, consists of solid ground all the way through. No jumping from platform to platform and definitely no freaking flying. Just a bunch of wall coffins (containing monsters or goodies (nice of Ganondorf to stock those for me)) that pop open one by one. Even with all those frustrating platforming dangers removed, this room still manages to be the most irritating of all. “How can that be?” you may wonder. Well, let me tell you.

Past the first set of coffins is a set of stairs. At the top of the stairs, Twink finds three things: a switch in the floor, a patch of unexplainable sunlight, and another hall of wall coffins. The switch causes a stairway to drop at the far end of the hall. “Well, why don’t you just step on the switch and go up the stairs?” you ask. God damn it, just let me write the recap already.

The switch, to my extreme delight, is one of those that can’t stay pressed without a little help. In other words, I need to find something to set on it. But what?! Twink proceeds down the hall in search of an answer. He finds one in the form of a Black Chu lurking slimily in the fourth coffin. He pauses to thank his lucky stars for that strategically-placed light beam. Without it, he would be totally stuck. Then again, that would be the perfect excuse to hightail it the fuck out of here and not have to rescue Zelda. “Yeah, uh, sorry about that, but there wasn’t anything to set on the switch. It’s not like I can actually carry objects through doors or anything.”

Twink briefly considers popping open the remaining coffins just so he won’t have to deal with the lids cracking him in the head when he makes a mad run for the staircase. Then he realizes that the Black Chu will only stalk him and hurl itself at him all the way down the hall. And that’s no good. Fuck it, he’s just going to take his chances with the coffin lids. He’s kind of used to large objects smacking him in the face anyway.

Unfortunately for Twink, it appears that he has come down with a case of the ‘tards. He manages to harden up the Chu just fine (having had lots of practice in that area), but when it comes time to set it on the switch, he loses control of his reflexes and throws the Chu into the wall, shattering it. That’s not what he wanted to do. After looking around to make sure no one saw him in that particular moment of glory, Twink returns to popping wall coffins, hoping there’s another Black Chu in one of them.

There is! Crisis averted! This time, Twink manages to not fuck up royally, hardening and placing the Chu on the switch like a skilled master of dropping things on other things. With the Chu in place and the staircase ripe and ready for Twink to mount it, Twink must run down the hallway faster than a preschooler who’s the bait in a Seymour vs. Guillaume foot race. Once the Chu goes soft, the stairway will disappear, after all. Since rolling is faster than running, Twink chooses that particular method of transport. On a related note, here’s a bit of a tip for you: rolling down the hallway in anything other than a straight line will cause Twink to run into the walls multiple times, not to mention get hit by all but one of the remaining coffin lids. In other words, I would definitely recommend rolling in a straight line. Then again, it’s not my fault that Twink is a total spaz. Shut up!

I’m not sure why, since they’re generally assholish dicks, but the game designers have programmed it so that Twink only has to go up a few steps of the staircase for it to “count.” Meaning that if the staircase is already in the process of disappearing, as long as Twink goes up partway, he pops up to the top level. I’m not sure what to think of this, and am naturally suspicious of anything in this game that works in my favor.

“But Jeanne!” you say again. “That wasn’t all that bad! You made it in one try with only ¾ of a heart missing. I thought you said this room was really fucking annoying! Explain yourself!” Would you please take a chill pill? God. Twink expects to find himself at the boss door after all that. Not so fast! In front of him is another switch, and beyond that, another fucking hallway of fucking wall coffins. Twink stamps his foot pissily. Is he doomed to an eternity of switch pressing and coffin opening in an endless hallway? Who does he have to blow to get out of this place? Probably Ganondorf, he realizes a moment later. And he’s not into megalomaniacal fatties.

Anyway, this is the part of the room that truly sucks. Sucks like Shion sucking off a sucky Tidus inside a giant cyclone. The stairs are at the far end of the hall. The switch is right here. And the shaft of light is also at the far end of the hall. I realize this description might not do justice to how overwhelmingly annoying this setup is, so allow me to explain. Twink must pop open coffins, releasing multiple Black Chus, more than one of which he must keep alive in case he fucks up during the switch placement stage. This means that throughout the process, he has Black Chus constantly throwing themselves at him like fangirls on a leather-pants-wearing Draco Malfoy. Next, he must make sure that the Black Chus stay as close to the switch as possible, since carrying them slows him down, and he must be able to move with the speed of an incredibly homosexual cheetah. He will then proceed to the far end of the hall with the light beam, and freeze one or more Chus near the switch. Before the Chus return to their unhardened state, Twink has to roll back down the hallway to the switch, place one of the Chus upon it on the first try, then roll back down the hallway again like his life fucking depends on it. Again, I will remind you that he’s dodging the active Chus this entire time. Not to mention dealing with his own drunken rolling issues.

Miraculously, this only takes Twink three tries. When he finally makes it to the staircase — which is still all the way down! — a fucking dickhole Bone Daddy emerges from the ground, blocking his way. Shit! The staircase begins to disappear at that precise moment. Twink decides to avoid the battle and make a desperate run for it, but it looks like he’s too slow. Just as his heart drops at the prospect of fighting a Bone Daddy AND redoing that whole annoying switch-pressing process, he’s suddenly mauled from behind by the Bone Daddy’s impressive mace and knocked face-first onto the remaining stairs. AWESOME! Twink takes a moment to thank the three goddesses (and unknown number of gods) for phallic weapons.

It’s time for Twink to once again cross through the interdimensional portal, this time into Jalhalla’s chamber. Luckily for Twink, he’s thrown right into the boss battle so he doesn’t have to relive the painful rejection from the gay ghost disco squad. That last room was depressing enough — he doesn’t need to be suicidal, now. Although he does kind of miss the fabulous multi-colored Poes, now that they’re all the same boring gray. Sigh.

I don’t know if it’s just my innate suckiness, but I have much more trouble finding the constantly-moving light shaft when everything is the same color. Also, it’s fun and not at all frustrating when the light shaft disappears a split second after Twink begins blasting Jalhalla in the privates. As a result of this, poor Twink ends up getting jumped by Jalhalla enough times to make him demand a romantic dinner or at least a bouquet of flowers. Eventually, Twink sends the shadow Jalhalla back to the big All-You-Can-Eat buffet in the sky. See, I made that comment because he’s fat! To drive the point home even further, his symbol on the magical door has manboobs.

Manboobs!

After getting sucked back into the main chamber, Twink heads through the fourth and final door in a bit of a huff. This is SO tedious. He hopes for some sort of random, plot-twisty surprise in the form of a magical gay nightclub behind that fourth door rather than the expected Wind Temple room, but he’s only setting himself up for disappointment. To add insult to injury, a shrieking Jizzrobe immediately attacks him upon his entrance. I am happy to report that the single Jizzrobe is the most annoying thing about the room. Though the room has many of the features that made the Wind Temple so God damn fun — lots of Dicku Shit flying, jumping platforms, pulsating spikes, sliding traps, and cyclones — it…just isn’t that bad. Better luck next time, game designers. Or not.

I’m just going to skip right past Molgera, the phallic beast with the gaping vagina mouth, since there isn’t much to say about this particular go-around that Sam didn’t already cover in hers. Besides, we have lots of other boss battles to recap, so we’d better get a move on.

Et tu, penis?

With Molgera defeated, the final symbol lights up on the magical door. The “You Accomplished Something, Einstein!” music accompanies a stylized red Ganon face (and that is Ganon, not Ganondorf) that appears briefly just before the door crumbles. Twink must pass beneath a tusked skull (possibly Ganon-based again) to enter the tunnel. He admires the long, curving, phallic tusks, but the whole thing makes him shudder a little. Is Ganondorf a furry or something? Not that he’s against interspecies relationships — see Gollus and/or Makar — but the thought of an old, overweight guy in a pig suit is a whole other ballgame. In a bad way.

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The tunnel leads to an ominous, torchlit room with a rather grand staircase. It has a decorative red carpet on it and everything. Twink barely has a moment to indulge his fantasies of Lenzo carrying him up the stairs to an opulent bedroom before a cascade of Shiggyblins comes streaming down the stairs like a jittery cokehead waterfall. He runs past them and into another Ganon-themed door at the top of the stairs. I’m totally going to redo my whole house so I can plaster my furry alter-ego on all the doors.

The next chamber is round, with a bricked-up opening directly across from Twink and doors to the left and right. Prompted by his Strategy Chart, Twink enters the right door. Four decorative torch holders hang on the walls above a large, circular pit. Each one holds a different number of lit torches. I sense a puzzle! Or else Ganondorf has no concept of symmetry. Just in case we didn’t notice this discrepancy, the camera zooms way in on each of the sconces in order of flame numbers. Subtly panning around the room is for amateurs, apparently. In case that completely obvious display was too cryptic for us, Sean Connery/King Daphnes lights up Twink’s buttcheeks via the Emerald of Assitude. “Twink… You must remember well the appearance of this room,” he anvils. “The shape of the floor… The number of items hanging on the walls… Such things are the keys to solving the riddles that lie ahead. Do not overlook anything!” Oh! I get it! It’s the torch holders, right?!

Twink considers chucking the stone into the pit, but he wouldn’t even wish that jabbery fate on his enemies below. Sighing, he tucks the stone back into his butt and examines a tablet located at the far end of the pit. At first, I worry that this will be another torch-related “clue,” making it necessary that I shatter the screen with my controller. Thankfully, it’s actually a helpful clue, one that I missed on my first playthrough of Wind Wanker, to the detriment of my sanity. “The sword-hilts of my servants who lurk deep in the darkness shall be the guideposts that point to me,” the tablet Chrono Crosses. We’ll come back to this later. For now, Twink leaves the room and heads into the door across the way.