Center Stage: The Water Temple (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time)

In “Center Stage,” Wolfman Jew discusses environments and level design across the games industry. They may be single levels, larger sandboxes, or broader settings. They may be as small as a room and as large as a world. Some may not even be good. But they are all interesting.

Thanks to AShadowLink and Cart Boy for edits.

I am not what you might call a man of “hot takes.” I have plenty of views that go against popular opinion, certainly in the gaming world (Breath of the Wild’s degrading weapons are good! Mass Effect 3’s ending is perfectly fine!). I’ve got a bunch that are controversial (Yooka-Laylee is atrocious! Mr. X is cooler than Nemesis!). But I don’t set out to be contrarian or antagonistic. One of the frustrating things about hot takes to me is that they’re almost universally negative, like they see themselves as punching up but in the pettiest and least additive way imaginable. When I take a contentious side as a writer, I try to bring more to the discussion.

So permit me to give one of the most contrarian opinions in the history of video games: the Water Temple is good. And I’m gonna do my damndest to prove it.

Image: Nintendo via Fandom. Official art of the temple’s entrance, at the lowest point of the lake.

It’s a tall task; the name alone sets teeth a’grating. The Water Temple is the sixth dungeon of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, one of the greatest and most influential games in history. Nintendo’s attempt to bring its celebrated Zelda series into 3D wound up a central text on game design. Its ideas were brilliant, its innovations plentiful. It had a wild, time-bending story that crafted the origins of the franchise. Almost everything in it, from the beloved characters to its sprawling land of Hyrule, became famous the moment of its 1998 release.

That includes the Water Temple, but for purely negative reasons. The dungeon at the bottom of Lake Hylia combines several of the most maligned features in games. It’s a water level, for one thing, a stock level archetype that slows your movement and limits your abilities. In this case, just walking underwater requires Iron Boots that slow you down, while most of your gear is made useless. And the only way to progress demands you regularly hit the menu and take them off or put them on, adding needless delay to the already slow pace. The art direction is drab, the enemies difficult and weird, and even the special item, the highlight of most dungeons, is just an upgrade to a preexisting tool. All for a level that’s complex and challenging to navigate as it is.

Image: Source Gaming. The dark, less exciting grays and browns were exacerbated by being underwater.

And it’s not like the stuff around the place is much better. Just accessing it requires an item that lets you breathe underwater but is gated by an absurd cost. You can get it for free, but the person who gifts it and the shop that sells it are both frozen in magical ice. The flame that melts it (and the Iron Boots) comes from a mini-dungeon that’s weak after the wonderful Forest and enjoyable Fire Temples. For many players, the Water Temple was a perfect storm of bad design, and an odd black mark in a game that was so revelatory and brilliant. Nintendo themselves recognized that—a short-lived 2011 remake of Ocarina of Time brightened the area and made it much easier to toggle the Iron Boots on and off—but that only helped its reputation so much.

I’m not going to dismiss these issues. They’re problematic, fine in isolation but building on each other’s problems in practice. And people are valid in wanting something with more pizazz after a spooky manor and volcano temple. But I also think the Water Temple has a lot of good in it, to the point where I’d place it as one of Ocarina’s best and most creative dungeons. And here’s why.

Image: The Video Game Atlas. While players were limited to a top-down set of maps, this shows how everything connects to the central room.

Let’s start with the structure. Like a lot of Zelda dungeons, it’s built around a central large room; the bulk of the adventure involves you going into side rooms, finding a clue or a key, and returning with the ability to access a new side room. The large thing around which everything orbits is a great layout for many genres (3D platformer Banjo-Kazooie and most Pokémon RPGs follow it), since you immediately have a recognizable space and a way to cordon off different features. In this case, the Water Temple has a large, three-story main room with a large pillar in the center. There’s a two-story room inside the pillar, too.

The main challenge, though, is that you can’t actually get anywhere. Most of the doors either need a key or only open one way, and that doesn’t include the ones that are inaccessible. Those are on the second and third story, jutting out of the wall without even a platform on which you can grab the handle. You have an amazing item, the Hookshot, that can pull you to wooden targets, but most are out of reach of the grapple gun’s short chain. This is all made more disorienting by the fact that when you enter for the first time, the first two floors are completely underwater.

Image: Source Gaming. The inside of the pillar room, after the water level has moved to mid-height.

How you get around—and the biggest point of consternation—involves altering the water level. There are three royal plaques on different rooms: in a room on the second floor, inside the pillar room, and on an alcove above the third floor. Playing “Zelda’s Lullaby,” a song identified with the royal family, by a plaque causes the water to rise or fall to either the second floor, third, or drained (other than a basement and several side rooms whose water levels stay consistent). That’s what gives you the option to go through those doors on the second and third stories; the platforms you need to stand on to open them are buoyant and will automatically rise with the water.

So if you want to get to a platform on Floor 3, and the water level is drained, you have to go through a process. Access the pillar room. Play the song at its plaque to raise the water to the middle height. Get back to the foyer. Go through the Floor 2 west door (which you can only do when the water’s mid-height). Go through an easy puzzle room. Exit on the alcove and play the song to raise the water to the top height. Thus, you’ve managed to effectively move the water to where you needed it to be: exactly where it was when you entered the dungeon.

Image: Source Gaming. The alcove is at the highest point of the dungeon; you need to go through the right set of rooms to access it and raise the water.

A lot of this excursion is spent wearing or removing your Iron Boots, since Link sinks like a stone with them and steadily rises to the surface without them. On the ground, he walks at a slightly lower pace (curiously, the Iron Boots slow you down much more on dry land) and struggles a bit to turn. Without a middle ground or more elaborate swimming mechanic, you use the footwear to repeatedly rise and fall to whatever level you need.

In practice, it can be a bit grating at times. The dungeon is incredibly ordered, and getting around (and doubling back again and again) involves repeating the same path. It’s aided by the special item, the standard prize at the halfway point of a Zelda dungeon. But instead of being a crazy new weapon, it’s an upgrade to the Hookshot. The Longshot isn’t bad at all—it has twice the distance, and the regular Hookshot is already one of Link’s best and most beloved tools—but it’s a device of practicality and nothing new. It lets you access more areas and cut some of the backtracking. It’s also the only weapon Link can use underwater, so it’s both an incredible lifeline and a symbol of how ill-suited he is for this mission.

Image: Source Gaming. Link fends off submarine scalawags with his entry-level Hookshot, the only thing that works.

But it’s also really cool how much the level explores the water motif. Oftentimes, dungeons in games can be somewhat static, especially their floors. This completely alters how you move throughout the main room, and while that doesn’t affect most of the side rooms, several have their own water puzzles that work on the theme. One requires you to constantly shift the level up and down slightly to position a set of Hookshot targets at the right angle; others have water spouts thick enough for you to climb. But even if they aren’t physically affected by the main water level, they’re still affected by virtue of only being accessible at certain points (though a few do get impacted, like side passages whose breakable wall can’t be bombed while they’re submerged). Your actions in solving puzzles impacts how you go forward.

This makes the Water Temple somewhat unique in Ocarina of Time. Every other dungeon has interconnected areas and backtracking and puzzles that alter the setting, but none is built so aggressively around a single mechanic. The Forest Temple has this incredibly cool room you can twist around, but it’s only one room. The Fire Temple tasks you with rescuing prisoners, but they’re far apart. This is also true of the switches in Jabu Jabu’s Belly (which require you to work with Ruto, the princess who hints at the water altering mechanic here), the destructible webs of the Deku Tree, and the hodgepodge of invisible traps in the Shadow Temple. All of them have compelling mechanics, and they all have rooms that loop and interconnect, but none really use their mechanics to drive the interconnection. The Water Temple does.

Image: Source Gaming. You get to know this central room very well.

The closest analogue it had at the time was Eagle’s Tower from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which was built around destroying one floor to access the top. This isn’t to say the other dungeons are weaker without it (Ocarina, Awakening, and A Link to the Past before them each contributed some of the series’ best mazes), but there’s something special about a dungeon that’s more like a puzzle box than a gauntlet with puzzles in it. Ocarina was moving in this direction already, but this dungeon takes it further.

There’s also all kinds of wonderful little tricks and details. The room in that big central pillar? One of the keys is in a basement below it, but the entrance is under a giant block that only floats up with the water level. It forces you to reconsider vertical space in a way that was novel for the time. This was something Ocarina of Time relentlessly explored, but I’d argue it was at its most interrogative here. The general Hookshot trickery is fairly brilliant after having been a fairly minor in the game up to that point (where it mostly existed as a way for Link to access the Forest Temple); targets are placed on walls, ceilings, and even a set of sinking platforms you have to grapple to before falling to your doom.

Image: Source Gaming. The vaguely dreamlike mini-boss room, which presaged the surreality of both the Shadow Temple and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.

Even beyond the mechanics, the whole place has this sense of oddness. The pace is slow even accounting for the water; it’s much more about quiet navigation than anything else. The soft music imitates water sounds to build a sense of unthreatening mystery. The mini-boss, the super tough doppelgänger Dark Link, lives in this inexplicable ethereal chamber that is revealed to be an illusion, but… why was it an illusion in the first place? The main boss is a bulbous thing who controls water, which is cool (you have to dodge water tendrils and use the Longshot to drag it out for a pummeling) but kinda low-key after crazier, flashier bosses. It’s unsettling more than frightening.

It’s also something of an act break. You spend the first three dungeons as child Link, meeting the people tied to the Forest, Fire, and Water Temples. The bulk of the game is then spent as a time-warped adult Link, and dungeons four through six are the Forest, Fire, and Water Temples; they’re about him reconnecting with the friends he met long ago. After that, the final three dungeons involve newer areas; he discovers horrifying crypts underneath the familiar and innocuous Kakariko Village, travels west to the Gerudo Desert, and finally besieges Ganon’s Tower. The middle act has a theme of Link and the player acclimating to this future, which is important because right after the Water Temple, the game begins demanding that you regularly jump backwards and forwards in time instead of staying as adult Link.

Image: Source Gaming. Putting characters you know into the later dungeons helped give an urgency to solving them.

These virtues were, for better and worse, largely ignored when Ocarina of Time was first released. The Water Temple was known as “torture,” interminable, the one where most of your time is spent toggling on or off a pair of boots no one liked. It’s one of “the” Zelda memes in the culture, and given that Zelda garners almost universal praise by critics and enjoys an unimpeachable legacy, it’s a fairly glaring bit of notoriety.

But while the temple was bad for players, it may have actually been instrumental to The Legend of Zelda. The very next entry, Majora’s Mask, had four main dungeons, and three followed and expanded on the puzzle box structure (Snowhead Temple had a breakable central pillar, fellow water level Great Bay Temple had you redirecting currents, Stone Tower Temple could be spun upside-down). And while not every sequel included it, this structure got standardized over time and became somewhat emblematic of Zelda dungeons. Even Breath of the Wild, which otherwise ran cool on conventional dungeon design, took the format further with ones you could physically control from a handheld device. Nintendo has often viewed Zelda as something of a “garden” for player expression, and spaces that force you to think three rooms ahead are a great way to put those expressions to the test.

Perhaps it’s why the Water Temple has endured in its own way. It was reimagined as the back half of Hyrule Warriors’ Lake Hylia stage, where its unique features were flattened into an orderly combat space. It’s part of a long history of Zelda water dungeons (Swamp Palace, Catfish’s Maw, Lakebed Temple—all of these give you variations on the Hookshot, by the way), and far and away the most iconic if only for its controversy. And it has seen a bit of a reappraisal in recent years. But I think it deserves a better legacy, and not just because of its historical importance. It’s genuinely good, and one excellent part of an excellent game.