Facing Difficulty

There are a lot of Game Boy era adventure games where a single misstep in a dungeon can leave you completely screwed. Those are the games where such missteps aren't forgiven, and the only options you're left with are to restart the game from the beginning, or to just give up.

Thankfully, Link's Awakening isn't one of those games. But the Face Shrine is troublesome. It's like the Water Temple of its time -- if you don't know where you're going, then you'll be doing a lot of backtracking and wandering. Why? Mostly because of those switches that raise or lower floor blocks.

In A Link to the Past, these blocks were orange and blue, but in Link's Awakening (even the DX, colour version) they're just a sort of brown.

Nonetheless, the challenge of the binary system remains, since you have to keep straight which position you've hit the switch into as you wander off only to find another set of blocks in your path that make it impossible to progress. Man. Not to mention the layout design of this dungeon; there are a lot of screens that have a lower and upper part to them, and this can become pretty disorienting.

Plus, I don't have the boomerang yet (which has to be in this game, just as it's in nearly all the Zelda games), so my only options when fighting this dungeon's wizzrobes are bombs or arrows. Bombs have to be set so that they go off while the wizzrobes are opaque, and it takes four arrows to fell one wizzrobe.

Well, to quote a possible alternate universe action hero: "I came here to set bombs and shoot arrows...and I'm all outta arrows."