Forest Temple

So the Forest Temple is where the game starts to get challenging.  This dungeon focuses around a primary room, which we must constantly revisit in an attempt to go down a floor for our big fight.  The theme here is evil spirits, as the temple is beset by ghostly foes called poes, which pose puzzles for Link now that he has the almighty Fairy Bow in his posession.  Other such redead enemies appear along with a few, forest themed ones which are pretty ho-hum.  While the game has finally given us our first tastes of real puzzles (for instance, there are hallways here which lead to two rooms depending on which way it "twists"), it's nothing that we can't handle.  In the thick of things it seems impossible and irritating, of course, but afterwards, you always think to yourself, wow that was nothing!  Yeah, right.

Anyway, the boss of the Forest Temple is a phantom of Ganon himself, but is nothing compared to the real thing (hey, even it admits to its shortcomings as a cheap imitation).  While a bit of a challenge, and this is the first real boss that really has the power to kill us (despite our augmented life capacity).  But he's not too big of a deal, it's a really cool fight as well.  Completing the Biggoron Sword sidequest before this dungeon, however, helped everything a great deal.  (That sidequest is really not that big of a deal...you just have to know where you're going and have good luck with Epona!)

So either way, we discover that Saria, our childhood friend, is the sage of the Forest Temple.  She doesn't really recognize us now that we are big and strong (too bad) but she does sense something familiar about us...and thanks us for our courage anywho.  This is kind of sad that Link is spending all this time saving Hyrule, and no one will ever really recognize that it was him who did it because of the paradox of time.  But now her power is added to our own and we're better than ever, especially with a bow in our hands!

First thing I did with the bow is I went out to Hyrule Field and took care of all the Big Poes.  It's really probably the easiest long side-quest there is in Ocarina of Time, if you can time your shots with the bow well.

Master Quest - As with the childhood dungeons; the layout of this dungeon is very similar to that of the previous, the action level is (much) less severe, and while the puzzles retain the same theme they could be considered slightly more challenging...in all reality, I just think this was flipped a little bit, the only thought was in figuring out what was different and where.