Just tell me how to change the water level in this temple...

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Loyal subscriber to Nintendo Power, bought quite a few of the official guides. I became gamer tech support amongst my friends, they would call me when they got stuck and I would consult the sacred texts.

It's amusing to me how true this was when I was a kid playing. Now as an adult, the 'clues' they give you are so obvious I feel like I'm barely even playing.
You can't go ~~home~~ adventuring again
- I had the opposite experience. I played the game growing up and the Water Temple was one of my favorites. I always saw the memes about how difficult it was and laughed it off, since I didn't remember anything particularly hard about it.
  Then I played the game a few months ago and FUCK ME I could not figure that level out! Eventually had to look up a guide online.
  
  I think the part that threw me as a child was when the central tower area raised a platform when you raised the water level. The camera super focuses on the new hole, but I never saw it. Cue the endless frustration that I had to overcome by looking up a guide.
- Did you play the original again as an adult? Because I remember reading that for a re-release they updated the water temple to make figuring out where to go easier. I remember that temple being kind of a pain and I wasn't a kid at the time.
  I think it wasn't so much about not knowing where I wanted to go but there was a room with water currents that you had to navigate carefully or you'd get pushed out to another section and have to trek back and try again.
  
  I don't have the original N64 golden cartridge anymore (there's a fun story, involving an insane fundamentalist christian mother), but did play both the 'Master' edition and the 'original' edition that they put together on a gamecube disc. I remember that the 'master' edition water temple was easier than the original, despite the point of 'master' being that everything was harder.
- The first one was really vague with the clues, especially with the kinda bad translation. The second one is better with the clues but incredibly difficult. I cannot beat Ganon in 2.
  
  2? You mean majora's mask?
  Oh, you mean the very first games. I never got to play through those for real. My first was ocarina of time. I tried LoZ2 on the super disc that you got with wind waker on the gamecube, but I was still young enough (and spoiled from ocarina, majora's mask, and wind waker) that I didn't really get into it and beat it.
- Senior gamer's experience.

You think that was bad, try Tomb Raider 3. With limited saves on PS1.
I played the remaster recently and I've no idea how I completed that shit back then with no guides.

Hey! I had that one.
Good times.

I love Ocarina of Time but my god they didn't provide a whole lot of instruction.
And don't even get me started on that little flying bastard that's supposed to help you.
- Hey!
  Listen!!!
- You talking about Navi or the owl? Navi was kind of annoying but I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle that owl.
  
  Nah just keep hitting B and imagine you're literally exhausting the dialogue and making him miserable 😂
  
  I was talking about Navi, I think the owl was in Majora's Mask, which I haven't had the chance to play yet.
  (I haven't even had the chance to finish Ocarina of Time)

The end of strategy guides was Final Fantasy X. Most of it was filled with "Go to this web address to see the solution!". And the game even has the website featured on the title screen with as much space as the game title.
- FFX came out in 2001. GameFAQs was started in 1995. If you had the internet as a kid back then there was no reason to pay money for strategy guides any longer!
- I have my Final Fantasy X still, even used it when I played the remastered version recently. It didn't ask me to use the website for anything. I thought it was the Final Fantasy IX guide that required you to use PlayOnline for the actual solutions.
  
  I guess so. This was twenty years ago lol
- I don't recall that, although you're more or less correct on timeline. FFX-2 I used a strategy guide, no website links and the damn thing was practically mandatory. I'm glad there's better guides from fans, now.
  
  Completely agree. The Internet has been great for that sort of thing. The advent of per game wikis, especially. You tube and even steam guides are good too.
- Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire mini guide was the goat in quality.

Supposedly there was an other floor planned for the water temple you could raise water to but devs scrapped it because they thought it’d be too confuting.

This kind of thing really turned me off adventure games. I'm here to have fun, not reverse engineer what some dude thought was the solution to some random problem.
- huh. I think I'm the exact opposite. I don't go looking for just "action" in my adventure games (I have fps and rts for that). I literally want to stop battling for a few minutes to try and reverse engineer something lol. I guess my experience comes from tabletop games and the adventure games are the closest to that but still lacks... something.
  
  I really like TTRPGs because I can try literally anything and the GM will adjudicate on it. Computer based puzzlers feel very constrained because it always seems like there's a right answer and I don't know what it is.

I know that there's one dungeon that I usually skipped (the one where you fall where you could push a block into a button) so I could go get the red staff and then come back and magic a block onto the fucking thing.

The Versus Books guide was better.

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