Daily Debate: Have You Ever Had An Unexpected Complication In A Zelda Game?

I have a lot of respect for the programmers and game testers. They try their best to pre-empt player behavior and prevent unfortunate oversights to spoil a game. For our Daily Debate today, however, I’d like to know if you have ever had any unexpected complications in a Zelda game?

What do I mean by that? Well, I’ve been replaying Majora’s Mask on my trusty N64, and reached the Twinmolds mini-dungeon on the Moon. For this puzzle, all you have to do is hit the gigantic X on the ceiling with a bombchu. There is even a chest of bombchu after the fight with an Iron Knuckle, just in case you don’t have any in your inventory.  For most players this is enough to see them happily through…not me. I managed the first room without too much trouble, the second I became well and truly stuck.  Through trial and error, I set the bombchu down and watched it explode, but to no avail. I used all my bombchu trying to complete the task. Unable to go forward or back, I was forced to play The Song of Time and try the whole thing again.

I thought Nintendo had really dropped the ball here. How could they leave a player stranded like that with no alternative? Now, years later it seems this wasn’t actually the case! If you play The Song of Storms to the Gossip Stone, it will cause the cracks to break and reveal the target to shoot with your bow. Just goes to show, you really do have to try everything, eh?

So, have you ever had an unexpected complication in a Zelda game? Did you use your own initiative to find a way around it? Or did you manage to break the game and have to reset? Feel free to share your stories in the comments below.

Featured art:  tohsaka-kousaka-chan & The Legend of Zelda Series