Big Poes and Poe Collection in Ocarina of Time
You spend a lot of time in the Fire Temple and Bottom of the Well if you want to track down Poes. The game hides a bunch of them across Hyrule, and not all of them drop useful items. Some are just there to test whether you paid attention during your first playthrough. I walked into the Fire Temple expecting a straightforward boss fight and ended up wasting twenty minutes because I kept trying to shoot Arrows at a Big Poe that was midair. It doesn't take projectile damage unless you're using Fire Arrows, and even then you need to time your shots while it's descending. The spinning attack works fine on the ground, but when it floats above you, you're stuck waiting for it to drop. That's the first thing most guides don't emphasize clearly enough. There are three main Poe-related encounters in the base game, and one of them ties into a long side quest that most people accidentally finish without realizing it. Let me walk through each one in the order you'll actually run into them. The first one you'll hit is in the Forest Temple, though you might not notice it immediately. There's a Poe hiding in the room with the first Blue Warp platform puzzle. It floats near the ceiling behind the broken pillar. You have to wait for it to drift close enough, then hit it with a Spin Attack or a well-timed Arrow. It drops 200 Rupees. I've seen people circle this room for an hour because the Poe stays mostly invisible until it moves, and the ambient music doesn't change. If you're standing still and nothing happens, you're looking at the wrong part of the room. Move toward the broken pillar on the eastern side and wait. It'll materialize and drift downward over about five seconds. That's your window.
Next is the Bottom of the Well. This is where the actual Poe collection happens. There are ten Poes scattered across the illusionary rooms, each one hiding behind a different breakable pot or in a hidden passage. The trick is that you can't see the rooms correctly until you use the Lens of Truth. I spent maybe forty-five minutes in there on my first run because I kept entering rooms without the Lens and hitting empty walls, thinking the game was bugged. It wasn't. Once you have the Lens, each of the four illusionary floors has three to four Poes you can collect. The tenth Poe is the hardest to find because it spawns in a room that only appears after you've broken all the pots on the third floor. You can't miss it once you know where to look, but getting there without the Lens is nearly impossible. Each collected Poe is tracked on-screen with a small icon in the upper left corner. When you've got all ten, return to Impa in the well's central chamber. She gives you the Light Arrows. This is the only way to get them before the Ganon's Castle entrance, and they're mandatory for finishing the game. Without them, you can't damage Ganon in his second form. I learned this the hard way after skipping ahead to the Water Temple with no Light Arrows and having to backtrack three hours of gameplay. Not fun. The third encounter is the Big Poe in the Shadow Temple. It appears in the first room after you enter the Death Arrows trap area. This one is different from the Fire Temple Big Poe because it doesn't require Fire Arrows. It takes normal Arrow damage, but it's fast. It zips around the room in tight patterns, and if you miss three or four shots, it teleports to a new position. You need to predict its movement, not react to it. I usually line up two or three spins first to chip away at its health, then switch to Arrows when it slows down. The whole fight takes about ninety seconds if you don't panic. Panic makes you spam arrows into the ceiling and waste the entire encounter.
Then there's the Fire Temple Big Poe, which I mentioned earlier. It sits in the middle of a circular arena with lava below. You can only reach it by walking across the narrow stone bridges that appear when you solve the fire pillar puzzle. The Poe floats above the central platform and only comes within sword range when it dives. Most players try to climb the pillars and shoot it, but it dodges projectiles aimed from elevation. The reliable method is to stand on the central platform, wait for it to swoop down, and hit it with a Spin Attack. Repeat until it dies. It drops a Treasure Chest containing the Fire Arrows. These are required for the Fire Temple boss, so you can't skip it. There are a few edge cases worth noting. The Poes in the Bottom of the Well don't respawn if you leave and come back, so if you miss one, you have to restart the well. There's no way to go back and fetch it later. I missed one on my second playthrough because I assumed it would reappear after defeating the boss, and I had to reload an old save from four hours ago. The Shadow Temple Big Poe also won't appear if you've already triggered the next death arrow sequence in that room. If you've activated the arrows and the Poe isn't there, you've already moved past the point of no return for that encounter. Another thing nobody mentions: you can sell individual Poes to the Poe Collector for 200 Rupees each, but he's in Majora's Mask, not Ocarina of Time. In OOT, the only Poe-related vendor is Impa, and she only trades completed collections. There's no per-Poe selling mechanic in this game. If a guide tells you otherwise, it's mixing up titles.
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The big limitation here is that the game doesn't tell you how many Poes you've collected. You have to track them yourself using the on-screen counter, and if you lose count, there's no menu to check. I keep a mental note of which rooms I've cleared and which I haven't. Writing it down on paper works too, but I've lost more than one save file trying to remember where I left off. The game should have a simple checklist. It doesn't, and that's one of its more frustrating design choices.
