Widely regarded as one of the best games ever made, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has had fans constantly exploring its world and finding the many secrets within it. However, as one fan points out, there’s a secret area that even some of the most diehard Ocarina of Time fans might have missed.
Posted to the subreddit r/Zelda, Reddit user u/nintendatos showed a video of Link jumping through a lava waterfall in Dodongo’s Cavern to reveal a hidden area behind it. The area in question doesn’t have much to it, simply containing a single recovery heart, but many are puzzled by its existence.
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The Legend of Zelda series is known for its hidden secrets and as Ocarina of Time is one of the most popular in the franchise, it comes as something of a surprise that so few fans know about the hidden area. This is likely in part to the fact that there are no signs in Dodongo’s Cavern that players would interpret to mean that there’s a secret behind the lava waterfall especially as Link goes there in the earlier part of the game without the fire-resistant Goron Tunic.
[OoT] How old were you when you found out there is a secret cave behind the lava waterfall in Dodongo's Cavern? from
zelda
What’s more, commenters on the original post by nintendatos did some research to see if the Lens of Truth revealed that the lava was indeed fake. As it turns out, both the 3DS remake and the original N64 versions of Ocarina of Time didn’t have the Lens reveal anything about the secret room. As it’s the only item that’s able to reveal hidden paths as exampled throughout the game, there doesn’t seem to be any official way to know that the room is there.
Because of the stealthily placed recovery heart, it seems like the secret area was once a potential hiding spot for one of the many Heart Pieces scattered across Hyrule. In the end, it didn’t end up being a finalized hiding spot, but the area was kept all the same. Now those who are in on the secret are able to effortlessly jump through the lava waterfall and recover some much-needed life.
With a game as jam-packed full of secrets as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, players are bound to continue finding new details about it. While plenty of secrets have been revealed in the 23 years since Ocarina of Time released, Dodongo’s secret room is perhaps one of the most obscure and an impressive piece of trivia for all diehard Zelda fans.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is available on Nintendo 64 and 3DS.
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