Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - Part 2

OK, turns out what I thought was the entry point to the Forest Temple was not. Or that it was, but there was a whole bunch of stuff to cover before I could even go into the Forest Temple.

Now I've played through the Forest Temple.

Between last time and now, you've seen Link transform into a wolf, met Midna, get turned back into human (Hylian?) form, and worked through the Forest Temple.

Link's wolf form looks pretty impressive on the screen, and the animations are good. The "wolf sense" functions as another way to hide stuff on the map, and toggling between the two isn't hard. I'm a bit annoyed with the spin-attack counterpart, mainly in that it feels like it takes forever to execute. Embarrassingly, I died two or three times in the Faron Woods section where you're stuck with three Twilight goblin things before I figured it out.

This section of the game sets up most of the story and the long cut-scenes are really good.

The game feels to me like it's prepared the player very well for the first temple, which I like a lot. In previous Zelda games I feel woefully inadequate for the first few dungeons/temples. At this point you should have a lantern, sword, shield, and two bottles. I haven't found any fairy fountains yet, but there's a fairy in one of the pots at the Forest Temple entrance.

The difficulty level in the Forest Temple seemed a bit easy to me, but I also spent a lot of time just trying to figure stuff out (I got kind of stuck because I *really* wanted to get what turned out to be the Boss Key before I had the item I needed to get it with). You follow monkeys around the first half of the temple, and their beckoning caused me to miss getting the temple map, which is in plain sight in the first main room.

The miniboss and boss of the temple were pretty easy to defeat, although I thought the miniboss (a butt-slapping monkey) was harder than the real boss.

There are a couple heart pieces hidden around in treasure chests. This is new to me because I'm used to finding them "in the open" but in creative places. So don't leave any treasure chest unopened, even though some of them have minor rupee treasures to be found. I left the Forest Temple with almost 200 extra rupees that I didn't have when I started it.

This game really has sucked me in. I wanted to only play for an hour or two but I ended up staying up way past my bedtime.