#totk

Now that Switch 2 has released, it has given me cause to revisit all of Tears of the Kingdom's Temples. After hundreds of hours of gameplay, I am far more critical of TotK than the general public; however, I do not think that it is an exaggeration to say that, while the general public mostly still loves TotK, it is generally accepted that TotK's Temples fall short of the standard set by previous Zelda games's dungeon design, with many considering them to be at best a slight improvement over Breath of the Wild's Divine Beasts.

Despite this consensus, and without seeking to make comparisons to previous traditional Zelda games, I enjoyed the Temples in TotK. The Temples are only a relatively small portion of the game rather than the majority of content in the game, but, as with the shrines and the major story set piece moments, the Temples appeal to my desire for structured challenges making use of Link's abilities/items. The Divine Beasts comparison is also interesting in that TotK's Temples essentially reuse the same format/structure of locating four or five terminals, but without the central mechanic of manipulating the entire Divine Beast itself to progress, which allows for larger and more aesthetically varied dungeons but also raises the question of whether the Divine Beasts were actually more mechanically deep than the Temples.

To be honest, I haven't replayed BotW recently enough to answer that question with confidence, but I have replayed TotK extremely recently to generate this footage, so, in the interest of balance, I will extoll some of the virtues of the Temples. In his critique of BotW, "Not Enough Zelda," Joseph Anderson noted that despite BotW granting Link all of his core abilities in the tutorial, the Divine Beasts inexplicably rarely used these runes in combination with each other to create more involved puzzles, despite the developers guaranteeing that players would have them. In my experience, TotK's Temples make tighter use of Link's updated runes, and feature many scenarios that either encourage or require use of several runes in tandem. For example, the Fire Temple has Link use Ultrahand to build a curved ramp to launch Yunobo, the newly-acquired sage of fire, up to the ceiling to destroy a suspicious pile of rocks (foreshadowing the dungeon boss), causing a large metal crate to fall from above, which Link can then Recall to gain access to a new area. As another example, the Lightning Temple has Link construct a basic hot air balloon using Ultrahand, Fuse a mirror to his shield to create a mirror shield, and Ascend into the balloon platform in just the right spot for an ideal vantage point to reflect the light from his mirror shield onto a temple mechanism, all the while Recall serves as a convenient "reset" if the balloon gets too far away from Link. (While there are other ways to solve this puzzle, ranging from cheese methods involving hoverstones to more "legitimate" methods like building a slightly more advanced version of the hot air balloon with a mirror already attached in an optimal position, the Lightning Temple's focus on reflecting light means that none of the possible solutions stray too far from some combination of, at minimum, Ultrahand, Fuse, and reflecting light with a mirror/mirror shield.)

Admittedly, this could be a byproduct of the overall enhanced utility and tighter synergy of TotK's runes as much as the improved Temple design itself, wherein the combination of "Ultrahand + Recall + Ascend" is almost overpowered and can trivialize entire shrines (and where Recall also serves a dual purpose as a universal "reverse" button for any vehicle that Link can dream up). That caveat notwithstanding, at least three of the five Temples, in my estimation, deserve to be considered proper Zelda dungeons with everything that entails, although we can still quibble about where they rank in the pantheon: Namely, the Wind Temple, the Fire Temple, and the Lightning Temple. Sadly, there is less to say about the Water Temple and the Construct Factory, which do fall into the trap of feeling like a series of disconnected shrine puzzles, but the other three Temples come together as something greater than the sum of their parts owing to three factors: 1.) aesthetics, 2.) density of content, and 3.) a core navigational challenge.

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My #totk playlist:    • Zelda TotK  

Timestamps:

0:00 Wind Temple Ascent
15:41 Wind Temple
44:14 Water Temple Ascent
51:50 Water Temple
1:12:10 Fire Temple
1:49:05 Queen Gibdo Phase 1
1:51:19 Lightning Temple
2:25:43 Construct Factory
3:40:56 Spirit Temple