Spirit Temple

The last of the game's real dungeons, there are two halves to this dungeon (and adult link quickly discovers he'll have to come back here in his past to do anything...) the first being in his childhood, the second in his adulthood.  The structure of this dungeon is built around this theme, with two wings leading into a central hub room which leads into the boss room.  Each wing is designed for the one part of Link's time period.

In Link's childhood, we have to face a good many enemies that would be nice if we had our adult weaponry to face them with, but alas, we are back to the Kokori Sword and other little kid weapons.  The puzzles here are nothing the mind can't handle, but they're starting to get a little more hairy...the days of the legend puzzles, though, are behind us.  The hardest puzzles of this game are found in the Water Temple, and the silver rupee puzzles that are prevalent in this dungeon as well as those involving light just don't compare in difficulty.

At the end of Child Link's venture through the Spirit Temple, he finds an Iron Knuckle.  These enemies haven't made an apperance yet and don't make many appereances in this title.  They are hated in every title before (in Zelda II, they were the staple enemy used to irritate the player) and they are no real exception here...but thanks to a new spell that we got just outside of this temple, he's no problem...Nyaru's Love makes these guys a piece of cake.  All you do is make yourself invulnerable and then attack away, dodging as best you can.  Eventually the soldier falls, revealing the way to the Silver Guantles...which he can't even put on!  What a gip!  But alas, there's Nabooru, the chick we met at the beginning of this temple, who told us to go in and find these treasures for her.  She's been captured by Ganondorf's minions.  Well, to the future to rescue her, right?

Adult Link finds the silver guantlets a nice fit, and ventures forward where he couldn't before.  Adult Link's half of the temple is geared more towards puzzle than action, and the Iron Knuckle that he must face is even more of a chump with the Biggoron Sword in hand.  He'll find the Mirror Shield in these confines, allowing him to complete the light puzzles within this dungeon.  You'll make your way from there, quite quickly, to the boss chamber of the dungeon.

Twinrova is an entertaining, easy but most of all unique boss.  You fight her using sword and shield, but mostly, you will fight her using the shield.  The goal is to reflect spells back at your enemy (in both phases, though it differs how they are effective in both phases) and then in the second phases, after stunning them with an elemental blast, slashing them to pieces.  Also, the second form of Twinrova, though she is formed of two old hags, is some kind of enchantress.  These two calls us "stupid for coming all this way to be a sacrifice to Ganondorf."  Yeah, right.

Once they die, you get an entertaining cameo, where the two of them squabble about their age as they float to heaven...really?  Either way, you are transported to the chamber of the sages to meet the awakened Nabooru, who is safe from harm, and is the Spirit Sage.  She entrusts the Spirit Medallion, the final one, into your care.  All right, that's all there is to it, right?  Onto the Temple of Time...well, the game does deposit us there anyway...

Master Quest: Remember how I was complaining about how all of the dungeons are relatively unchanged, and the past few dungeons may have even been toned down?  Not this one.  You really have to use your puzzle-solving skill to get through this completely re-vamped dungeon; and it's no cake-wake, involving time-travel, precision and some intense action that the original did not have.  The Spirit Temple has succeeded where the Shadow, Water and Fire Temple failed: so I guess only this and the Forest Temple are really "masterful."