And I thought Level 6 was bad. Level 7 is downright awful. At one point I got stuck and spent two hours randomly clinking my sword against walls. The cause? A stupid design oversight.
The following is an excercise in catharsis. I recommend that nobody read it as it contains no interesting content whatsoever. This was written purely to get something off my chest. It was a choice between writing a long, rambling, bitching post, or throwing my 3DS out the window. I chose the cheaper option.
When wearing the Mermaid suit the player has to repeatedly press the
directions in which they want to swim (which by the way is a f***ing stupid
idea) and at one point in level 7 you come across a lock which is submerged
underwater. I didn't have a key when I found this part of the level, so having
found the compass I was able to discover a chest which gave me a key to use.
Simple enough right? So I return to the submerged lock, constantly tapping left
on the D pad to swim towards it, and instead of the lock opening as it normally
would I simply bump against it unable to proceed. I try 5 or so times, slower
this time, grinding myself against the lock and surrounding wall to make sure
that there wasn't something I was missing.
Defeated, I spend the next few hours checking every nook and cranny of the
dungeon, growing increasingly more frustrated. The whole dungeon is based around
rising and lowering the level of the water (sound similar to any other
frustrating Zelda Dungeons?), so my thinking was that there must be a way to
lower the level of the water so that the lock is no longer submerged, because
clearly I'm not able to use keys underwater.
After banging my head against a brick wall (which in the game I did
literally) I finally watched a youtube video in which some player seemingly
does the impossible. They use a key underwater! And they do so to bypass
the very lock that had defeated me! I was clearly not the only one who
was gobsmacked by this miracle. Many more people had apparently
been brought to their knees by this all-powerful lock because the
comments were flooded with players who were in awe at
this youtube prophet who had performed the unthinkable.
As it turns out, however, it was not a miracle. It seems that in this one
very specific spot in the game pressing in the direction of the lock
while in possession of a key is not sufficient. In this one very specific
instance, and for some bizarre reason, you need to HOLD in that direction
for a second or two. Now, you might think that sounds like a dumb mistake to
make, but hear me out. All throughout this game the manner in which you open
these locks has been to walk through them when you have a key in your possession
('through' being the important word). So when you find one underwater,
your natural inclincation is to try to swim through it, right? How do you swim in this
dungeon? Answer: You repeatedly tap in the direction you want to go.
Logically swimming through the door should work. But it doesn't!
For some unknown reason the designers deemed it necessary for the direction
to be held down rather than tapped. Holding down the direction makes sense when
you're walking, but when the game requires you to tap the direction you want to go
rather than hold, then why should a tap be deemed insufficient? Why would holding the button be necessary if it doesn't actually propel the character through the door? IT MAKES NO SENSE!
Sometimes I f***ing hate video games!