For all the dire online warnings about how hard the quest for the Flame of Din would be, and our own general distaste for All Things Eldin and Lava Related, we admit with only a hint of humble bragging that the Fire Sanctuary dungeon wasn’t that bad.
The Sanctuary’s “trick” is a green plant with thorny fruit that hangs from the ceiling and is super useful in that it is filled with liquid. Splash them into the lava to make a platform; it helps you move about. And practice holding the water bulb, unbroken, with your sword because you’ll need that ability to defeat the scary lava hands – known to their friends as Magmanos, a clever use of Spanish or Latin or some Romance language. Piece of cake, as Marie Antoinette would say, if she weren’t dead and all.
Just to be clear, the goal of the Fire Sanctuary (other than to Just Get Through It so the game ends, opines Itzal) is to obtain the Mogma Mitts, an upgrade from the Digging Mitts. The Mogma Mitts allow you to burrow underground, not just dig for buried treasure. In the quest for these improved gloves, you’ll interact with a few more Mogmas, those vaguely Disney-esque weasel creatures who apparently spend their lives half in, half out, of the ground throughout Eldin. (That is, when they’re not suspended from the ceiling in a volcanic dungeon, as we found them in the Fire Sanctuary.) Our new favorite was a very old Mogma, with long hair, a hillbilly beard, and what appears to be a carrot for a nose. Flounce around the dungeon long enough and you’ll meet him and all his friends, and you’ll have the Mogma Mitts in hand or rather, on hands.
And then you’ll burrow underground and wonder why you bothered.
There are a couple underground mazes in this dungeon, which serve no purpose other than to move you along and make you wonder what their purpose is. We found the Fire Sanctuary, with this upstairs/downstairs traipsing about, to be somewhat geospatially disorienting, but not nearly as much so as the Silent Realm where Din shed all those tears and we found ourselves shouting “Is this west, or east? “and “Look at the map!” a good deal. But that was then, and this is now, so just keep traipsing.
According to the Internet, there is one room with a treasure chest containing the Mysterious Crystals, but Itzal cannot remember, as he is writing this paragraph, if we obtained them. He is certain we did not, and he expects here a highly agitated regurgitation of the “You left our heart in the Goron Mines!” refrain from, lo, these twenty years of playing Zelda games and leaving treasure behind. We pause, therefore, for Editor Demelza to take the stage…
OMG, cries Demelza. The Mysterious Crystals are the Tetris-key thingy we needed to unlock the dungeon, which indeed we obtained, elsewise there would have been no completing this dungeon! We earned the Mysterious Crystals after we turned some orange switch thingies in a particular order and subsequently battled a Molderm, which is the PURPOSE of burrowing underground that you seem also to have forgotten. Perhaps you’ve FORGOTTEN the Mysterious Crystals, Itzal, because you flung the controller at me when we arrived at the dungeon lock and it didn’t immediately respond to your random flailings, and I was the one who had to skillfully twist the Tetris-key piece this way and that until it could be inserted properly! Naturally you choose not to remember this!!! I never get any credit for what I do!
(Itzal: Sheesh, simmer down, it was just a stupid lock and key, you can’t possibly compare that to the work I do; who defeated the Tentalus after all? Who does all the fighting? Can’t believe you used the word elsewise, by the way. And I’m shocked this diatribe didn’t include leaving a heart in the Goron Mines.)
Well, then, that was a thing, wasn’t it? Back to our regularly scheduled dungeon traipsing.
It turns out we did, we did, we DID find the Mysterious Crystals (Demelza is here invited to retract her regurgitation – Demelza huffily declines said invitation) because they’re the key to open the final door. Again, Itzal has no memory – other than how EASY it was for Demelza to open this door, Itzal having once (or twice) failed at doing so.
Now, as we’ve noted before, we are planners, and we’d planned to save the Fire Sanctuary Boss for another day. Memories of the abysmal Abyssal Leviathan Tentalus still danced in our heads, like so many sea creature sugar plums. Having traipsed and traversed the dungeon, we found ourselves through the door like Alice through the looking glass and we thought, “Oh, heck, let’s just try it once. Kick the tires. Give it a whirl, get mad, practice up a bit, then live to fight another day.”
The Demon Lord Ghirahim died too easily. (Yes, we recognize the irony in our making that statement. Don’t be rude.)
Ghirahim is a creepy fellow, with all that tongue licking and leaning up against Link as if to whisper something vile about fava beans and a nice chianti, but he gave up the fight, if not the ghost, in anti-climactic fashion after Itzal thrashed about some with the sword and performed some fancy footwork (i.e., running away). What we planned to be a practice session kept going…and going…and going…and then Ghirahim was gone, and we were looking at each other with an “I can’t believe it” expression.
We hadn’t even had time for the appropriately paired drink, and for us, that’s nearly tragic. We were, in fact, drinking something else (more on that in another blog) and thus our PLAN for a Demon Rum cocktail to accompany the Demon Lord’s downfall was foiled by our own late-blooming aptness with the sword. Fear not, however, we still made the drink and offer it for your enjoyment with our SSHD Cocktail Menu.
But we still can’t believe we did it.