Ask a fellow forest temple disliker, please tell me more
To give credit where credit is due, the forest temple is beautiful. The design work of the outdoor garden areas, the weird little well that you go underneath, that one room with the empty hole in the middle where you fight two Stalfos', the middle hub room with the torches, it's all visually great. That room that twists and turns and gravity shifts as you walk past it, I genuinely don't understand with early graphics like that and early 3d programming, how they managed to do that. When you compare it to how simple the Deku Tree is, its so clear that the programmers had learned a lot about 3d graphics, level design, and programming by that point while also respecting your understanding of the 3d space.
The idea to make a Forest Dungeon be themed around a HAUNTED CASTLE is so cool, I don't know why they didn't just go with some tree monsters and call it a day but I'm so glad they didn't. Ghosts, skeletons, castle courtyards, that's so fucking cool.
My complaints: The Forest Temple is just kinda bad? Other than the impressive visuals, the middle hub area is kind of tiresome and full of annoying backtracking that leads you to a locked door, which you'll go back and grab a key, only to reveal another locked door, and then you repeat this several times. One of the most poorly aged things about the game in my opinion is how cartoonishly slow Link can run at some times. It's very obvious in Hyrule Field and the Forest Temple. So much of the design has empty space to just walk and walk and walk with not much in between. It feels like an early draft they didn't get to fix. There are several rooms in the hub area that just lead to hallways with a Skulltulla that does nothing but take your time, and then goes to the room you wanted to go to.
All the enemies in that dungeon, aside from the Deku Baba plant things and the boss, are just games of waiting. They block, make you wait, then attack (and you attack them when they leave themselves open) rinse and repeat. Stalfos, the Flaming Skulls, the Skulltullas, the Poes, the Wolfos that linger outside of the dungeon entrance, they all do this. There is little to no enemy variation in that dungeon. It's annoying to deal with. If this was a small grievance, like if the traversal of the dungeon wasn't tedious, or the enemies didn't have you wait fifty years to do anything, I'd like it way more.
The other temples have similar things to this. The Water Temple has a few enemies that make you wait, backtracking, and a slow descent and ascent but I don't hate the water temple because it feels like it was designed to backtrack, there's much more enemy variation so it doesn't feel the same, and the slow ascent and descent feels intentional. (I'm not defending the pausing to use iron boots they should have fixed that) The Shadow Temple has similar enemy choices but with a streamlined level design and funner puzzle gimmicks, I never minded it.
Also Phantom Ganon is so cool. A piss easy boss if you know what you're doing, yeah, but it's a great introduction to Ganon's personality, a teaching lesson on how to fight final boss Ganon, and I'm so glad its not like a tree or a spider or something that would normally be a forest boss. It's a spirit that hides in paintings. That's fucking awesome.
That's my ramble about the forest temple being the weakest.
