Shadow Temple

The Shadow Temple involves two parts...you must travel back to your childhood and obtain an item from a mini-dungeon in order to advance in the Shadow Temple itself in your adulthood.  This same concept is copied into the Spirit Temple, though it's different there in that the Temple itself hosts both items for both time periods.

Let me start by saying that, though the Water Temple I despise for its difficulty, the Shadow Temple I despise because it's outright creepy!  The walls talk to you, guillotines are everywhere and there are scythes and spikes everywhere looking to make Link stew.  Not to mention bottomless pits and invisible walls and floors.  This, coupled with the presence of wall and floor masters, makes this level disgusting.

But first, as a child, we must visit the Bottom of the Well by playing the Song of Storms for the windmill manager.  (Another contingency of time: we played the song here as a child, and the manager teaches us this song as an adult because he never forgot the medley we played that made the windmill screwy, but in the sequence of the game's events, we learn the song BEFORE we screw up the windmil in order to explore the well).  This is the easiest mini-dungeon ever, even easier than the Ice Cavern.  Situated around a main room, Link's goal is to explore around several invisible walls and floors and find the Lens of Truth, which then lets him discover a few hidden Gold Skulltullas.

Traveling to our future, the Shadow Temple doesn't offer any really hard puzzles (the Lens of Truth pretty much does all of our guess work for us) and we quickly get the Hover Boots, a set of boots which really only serve to get us from Point A to Point B in certain scenarios.  A heavily limited item, as no one would want to use them in regular battle (they have absolutely NO traction, the game isn't kidding when it tells you this to describe them).

The boss of the Shadow Temple follows along with the "evil spirits not put to rest" theme that flows through the entire Shadow Temple.  After all, Shadow isn't necessarily evil, as an element, it is simply souls that are not at rest and in their disturbed nature, torment the living!  His name, though, is hilarious.  Bongo Bongo.  And, with the Lens of Truth, he is exceedingly easy!  This is the first, and the only, boss which you do NOT need (and shouldn't) to use the dungeon's treasure.  The Lens of Truth is the treasure of the Bottom of the Well, even though it is linked to the Shadow Temple, it really doesn't count.  All you simply need to do is use the bow to stun him, then slash like mad.  The only difficult part of thing in this is that you can't see your enemy.  But that doesn't really make this fight much of a challenge.

Master Quest: Like the other adult dungeons, Shadow Temple isn't any harder in this new version.  I was expecting more of a challenge, and only really got one in childhood.  Some of the adult dungeons seem almost tame; of course this could be my experience with the series, the game itself and its original version.  So maybe to others all of these dungeons are impossible to figure out; I don't know, seems I'm having a much easier time with Master Quest than I did with Ocarina of Time.