Every once in a while we'll be playing a game or watching a YouTube video, and something will come along and pique our interest, giving us an idea for a new mystery to investigate for the site.
Quite often, this can end up leading to nothing with the topic turning out to be much less interesting than initially thought and dropping off our radar entirely, but recently, we stumbled across a fascinating mystery involving a puzzle in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which has seemingly divided members of the fanbase over how it was meant to be solved. As a result, we decided to dig a little deeper to find out all we could about this puzzle and try to get to the bottom of things.
The mystery in question is related The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Master Quest, which was originally released for the GameCube in 2002 in Japan (and 2003 in the US and UK) and is a reworked version of the N64 classic with newly designed dungeons. Specifically, it relates to the Deku Scrub Brothers who guard the door leading to Gohma's lair in the Great Deku Tree, the logic behind the puzzle, and how players are meant to solve it.
If you've played the original Ocarina of Time, you'll know that the solution to the puzzle in the main quest is revealed to the player after defeating a Deku Scrub in one of the Deku Tree's other rooms, with the character telling Link "You will never beat my brothers up ahead unless you punish them in the proper order. The order is...231. Twenty-Three is number one!" Defeating the players in this order will lead to them opening the door, allowing Link to then explore the rest of the dungeon.
In the Master Quest, however, there is no such clue given to the player and the order in which they need to be defeated is different, leading people to speculate over whether there is a proper solution to the puzzle or if it is just a case of needing to be brute-forced.
To investigate the solution, our first port of call was obviously checking out the Nintendo Power guide released alongside the game's Western release, but this simply revealed the new order in which they needed to be defeated: 312. No reasoning was ever given as to how players would have arrived at that sequence naturally. So, as a result, we then went to the effort of obtaining a copy of the Japanese guide for the game from Softbank Publishing, to see whether an answer was provided there. But yet again, the solution was simply presented outright, with a caption below simply teaching people how to use their shield to repel the Deku Scrub's attacks.
Clearly running out of official sources we could draw upon, we checked out some of the other fanmade guides and this is where we came across some of the uncertainty and disagreement over how the answer to the puzzle should be arrived at.
In one GamesFaq guide from 2004, for instance, a contributor named Winnie_The_Poop wrote, "I found this out by trial and error, but I've heard that you can get the info from somewhere else, but I don't know where." Meanwhile, a StrategyWiki article states the answer "is obtusely hidden in this very room", suggesting that the position and number of hearts in the water indicate the order in which the Deku Scrubs should be defeated (there is one heart in front of the third scrub, two in front of the first, and the last is revealed by the process of elimination).
We've seen a few debates about this online, including recently in this year-old VOD from the streamer/speedrunner Adef, arguing over whether this was the intended solution, or whether it's simply a case of Apophenia or people recognizing patterns in unrelated things. But sadly it doesn't seem like any of Ocarina of Time's staff has ever commented on this mystery in interviews or likely ever will, to set people straight and reveal what the original intention was. Our personal pet theory is that the main solution may be related to the hint in the original game — "Twenty-Three is number one" — with the "one" in this scenario representing the first playthrough. With this in mind, it doesn't seem so farfetched, then, that players would guess that the final order should have a two at the end to represent the second playthrough or second quest.
One potential piece of evidence to back this up comes in the form of the 3DS release of Ocarina of Time, which also featured its own version of Master Quest. In this version, the whole of Master Quest is entirely mirrored and the solution to the above has been changed from "213", which it should naturally become, to "132", again emphasizing the two's positioning being an important factor.
What's specifically interesting about this change in the 3DS version is that it seems to make the solution a lot more logical on the whole, as it is now simply the reverse of the original order — something that is far more likely for players to guess naturally.
What do you think? Is this just a random order or is there some method to our madness?