Our Lord Ditto died for your sins so that His prophet, this regular ordinary human child, could rebuild a society for Our Blessed Trainers to return to.
Well, it took me (checks) three and a half weeks
I feel this. I'm on a Stellaris bender and I'm only responding now... :sweat:
spoiler'd because ¯/(ツ)/¯
The iron boots are definitely a pain, and they fixed it in later releases. I'm glad the port takes care of that detail. Maybe I didn't have too much trouble with it because Mario 64 has a similar level. I think what makes it different, as you found out, is there isn't a straightforward "start" unlike other dungeons that lightly shepherd you. Taking notes was a great idea!
Finally Dark Link! Probably both the hardest and my favorite fight in the game. He even has the same heart containers as Link, so it can get more punishing the higher your progress. That whole room is a vibe, and I'm always kinda disappointed that it goes away after. You can see why I didn't want to give away any spoilers.
The final boss had a really great and scary intro cinematic—felt like something out of Alien or something!
It's such a great entrance! You should do yourself a favor and watch James Cameron's Abyss because it feels like it's ripped straight from that movie. It's also kinda overshadowed these days because it was released between Aliens and Terminator 2.
The boss room is a risk-reward on the perimeter vs the platforms. The longshot takes forever to hit it's target, which can (a) make you miss the target entirely, especially when they move, and (b) leaves you exposed to attacks. The platforms make it easier to hit the moving boss, but you are also more exposed to the tentacles.
I couldn't really see a use for the Cucco (beyond fun) otherwise, since you can longshot directly to the aforementioned roof.
Yeah, nobody knows what that is for. At least with that cucco you can fly to just about any place in the village, including roofs, so there's that. But you have the longshot at this point, so yeah. I'm also not sure why you didn't get Bolerlo of Fire. That might be a bug in the PC port? I know the dude on the roof only gives you the heart piece.
On my next play session, I'll hopefully find that elusive fourth prisoner and see where things go from there.
Once you find the last prisoner a number of places and sidequests open up. The Gerudo Valley theme as well as the next dungeon theme are my top 1 and 2 favorite songs in the game. Just two absolute bangers IMO.
I'm glad it ended up that way because pre-rendered cutscenes would not have aged nearly as gracefully.
They didn't even look good at the time. The first time I played both MGS and FFVII was with official PC ports, and at computer rendering quality it was painfully obvious when the in-game models were superimposed on a prerendered cinematic. Despite those flaws, I still felt VII was properly cinematic^[After Super Mario RPG, FFVII launched me into the Final Fantasy series and RPGs proper. Midgar is by far my favorite bit to play in that game.]. Comparatively MGS is entirely^[I think, but I could be mis-remembering some bits.] in-game, and translated far better even at the time. Talking was just a pixelated face moving around slightly, but it worked! I mentioned in another comment (somewhere...) that MGS at release was memed as the best movie to play at the time because of all the cinematics^[MGS definitely planted the seed of my leftism because it introduced me to much of :amerikkka: as it was. You could say I'm thoroughly :kojima:-pilled from a young age.]. I highly recommend playing the original (PS1 or PC port) and not the Twin Snakes versions.
I think in-game rendered cutscenes was also necessary on the N64 because it had very little ROM space. It's the same reason every N64 game has blurry textures. PS1 (as well as PC games) had a full CD and took advantage with a bunch of FMVs and prerendered cutscenes. They looked OK on TVs at the time, but yeah they really do suffer from their low resolution these days. FMVs can be done right, like Command and Conquer, but the growing power of 3D tech and the influence of other games, like Half-Life, that were entirely in-game would nudge us away from FMVs. The PS2 era is a showcase of how far real-time rendering had come.