Truegold Tower almost too easy

The final two chains of Truegold Tower are a breeze to break. As I opened the door to the fourth and final, I couldn't help but think: "This was too easy."

But maybe that's the point.

As a final dungeon, Truegold Tower's not meant to be long, but instead it's meant to be dense. That is, it should do a lot with a relatively small number of rooms. And that is just what it does. Puzzles, monsters, roundabout routes - all of it.

The thing with Pandora's Tower though is that much more often than in any Zelda game (for example) what it considers a "floor" is actually a physically recognizable piece of a structure.

As an example, Truegold Tower has five floors.

This is obvious in its floor plan and in what you encounter within it, spatially. There's a central column that's open on the bottom two floors for the statue of the Aiosian goddess the tower represents, and that central column continues through floors three to four with Truegold's generator. Atop that central column, on floor five, is the Master's room. And so Truegold Tower feels like a real structure, like the thing that it purports to be: A tower.

Going back to Zelda, most of the dungeons in those games feel more like a collection of similarly-themed rooms. Of course, dungeons that are called "Towers" do look like towers. But what exactly is a Water Temple supposed to look like (and why does it have so many rooms)? Or is the inside of a whale really that compartmentalized?

For all of its fantastical setting and plot points, I think that making dungeons more accurately reflect what they are (and making that a recognizably real thing) helps to give Pandora's Tower its edge. It also makes the differences between the towers stand out all the more - beyond simple thematic differences. Every dungeon being a tower makes it easy to feel the different ways that you're (sometimes) forced to progress through them.

After running through fire and swinging over water, simply climbing upwards and knocking a few giant hammer heads loose is just plain easy. Though I didn't have quite enough time left to take a peek at Truegold's master. Ah well, I'll just have to wait until Thursday.