So here’s my Zelda story: I was wandering around the world when I found a bear. Since this was the first (and only so far) bear I’ve encountered, I took a picture and then tried to sneak up to it so I could ride it. It noticed me and was about to react when A GIGANTIC FUCKING SKELETON CAME OUT OF THE GROUND AND STARTED THROWING TREES AT ME
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Wow, that part really spoiled tonight’s session for me. Combining the worst parts of Skyward Sword, the guardian Spirit Realms and the Death Mountain escort mission with that one Scrapper robot really was a bad call. Same with not being able to teleport back to get arrows, which just forces you to mess with the goron guy’s ai, which loved to get caught on rocks for me. Ugh.
So some fairly minor early game armour spoilers, but this is kind of a subtle but pretty darn useful thing I only figured out after going through a lot of the game so: at Karakiko you can buy the Shiekah set - you really wanna do this. The stealth bonuses on it let you walk up to critters without 'em reacting, which makes gathering them up so much easier - especially lizards. It also makes stealth in general a lot more fun and viable if you’re into that sort of thing, but the main utility for me is just how much easier it makes gathering. Also the set bonus after the pieces have been upgraded twice gives you a movement speed bonus at night which is pretty nifty! Like I seriously wish I’d considered this might be a thing back when I got to Kakariko but gosh would it have been useful throughout the game :v
Anyone got a hint for where the second great fairy is? Like where the quest is that points you towards her, not where she is, I don’t want it completely spoiled…
Okay, I thought back on my weekend of exploring the far corners of the map to hit all the towers, and I realised I do have some stories to tell that I just kind of glossed over before.
Akkala (north-east): As far as I can tell, there is no way to safely approach this thing. It’s covered in Calamity and sentries patrol the area. I didn’t know about parrying lasers, so I was frantically running and trying to hide from them as they moved past and spotted me. I also didn’t have that many good weapons for the bokoblins and moblins on the way up and only had five hearts, which resulted in me taking cover against a tiny staircase for a solid minute, desperately hoping the sentry wouldn’t come any further out and spot me. Another sentry was patrolling a clear stretch of ground with no way to avoid its gaze; I ended up picking up a metal box and holding it over my head, carefully moving forward to keep in its blind spot. Even knowing what I do now and having some ancient weapons to fight them with, that would still be utterly terrifying to me, and it was awesome.
Today, I discovered that Pikango can give you help finding memory locations if you show him the Kakariko Great Fairy Fountain, which I had completely missed somehow until today. I went to the top of Mount Lanayru and felt my breath taken away for that entire sequence, one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever experienced in a game. I finally got my thirteenth heart, and climbed up the Great Deku Tree’s face. I found a certain something in the northern labyrinth that I was constantly thinking I needed to look out for, yet was sure would never be in this game. I tamed a brilliant white horse that is far too majestic for Link’s dopey self. I broke most of my shields parrying guardians. I also broke a couple of weapons on a Lynel that I accidentally glided down onto, thinking it was an NPC. I bought the house in Hateno, which finally somewhat solves my issue of having too many good weapons all at once (which I also solved by just getting way more weapon slots). And I spent probably two hours running back and forth around Faron trying to find the shrine of courage.
There just never seems to be an end to all the cool little things you can do while running around. I started opting for turning the HUD off and riding around on horseback by the roads, gathering information from nearby NPCs and exploring things off the roadside that look interesting. It highlights the immense cohesiveness of the entire world, everyone should definitely give it a try at least once.
I’ve been more or less deliberately distracting myself with side quests, but I’ll almost definitely be visiting the Hebra branch tomorrow night, and now I’m excited to see what, if anything, the game does to progress the story afterwards, or if it will just remind me that Hyrule Castle is still in the middle of the map.
Yeah, the way the game tells you to do that part (try to sneak around them) is a trap. What you should do is climb up to one of the ledges overlooking the Goron escort path, grab one of the many metal boxes sitting up there with magnet power, and thwack all of the flying sentries out of commission. I found my first box immediately after the first cannon.
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There are 120 shrines in this game.
I only just passed up shrine #60.
This is going to turn into trying to find all the Zygarde Cells in Sun/Moon, isn’t it? Or are the Zygarde Cells in this case the Koroks?
I don’t know the context for the Zygarde Cells, not having played Sun/Moon, but there are nine freakin’ hundred Koroks in the game, according to the official guide.
Also this is the first game in like twelve years to make me break down and buy a guide. At least it gives my wife something to do when I’m playing, help me out with the puzzles and finding shrines and Koroks and such.
Yeah I’m really glad the game map keeps track of where you’ve found Koroks.
I think that leaves three upgrades short of maxing out both meters, if I recall correctly how many hearts are on each line. Filling out an extra two stamina wheels would be 10 upgrades/40 orbs, so the four dungeons plus the remaining 20 upgrades would put Link at 27 hearts.
Akkala’s Lomei Labyrinth Island/Tu Ka’loh shrine is exactly the ruin-type shit I’ve always wanted to be/be back in Zelda
Oh my god. God, holy Christ. This game is so good, I just keep on being taken aback.
I’ve been on an adventure and a half tonight through the Gerudo Highlands. With as few spoilers as possible:
I decided I wanted the Thunder Helm from Gerudo Town, which requires solving all of the townspeople’s problems. Went and did that for about an hour and I was sure I’d done every quest the Gerudo had for me. Took a stroll around the outside of the town and found a guy who gave me a quest that would take me up into the highlands, so I figured maybe that counted as a townsperson’s problem. I warped to the Gerudo Tower and the hunt was on!
Glided over in the direction of the highlands and climbed up to where the snow starts. At this point I certainly could have just glided the rest of the way and climbed up jagged edges until I found what I was looking for, but I figured I’d embrace the area I hadn’t actually explored yet, and decided to walk the long way around. Incidentally, this also made me realise that the really good stories are going to be not those of “I totally just climbed up that mountain,” but “I spent an extra 20 minutes going the long way because it was so much fun to do it”.
The ambience of the mountains is breathtaking. For most of my journey it was either nighttime, where all you can see and focus on are your close surroundings, or shrouded in fog, which bathes the world in a surreal green glow. I cleared out a skull cave, threw a metal box in the air which accidentally landed on my head, then came upon a field full of camouflaged lizafos. Suddenly I remembered: elemental damage. Suddenly I was much better off, taming this new horizon with flame spear and fire arrows in hand. Feeling confident, I reached the top of a mesa and suddenly found myself having to tango with a much tougher Lynel than any I’d fought up to this point, and wearing cold weather clothes that provided basically no protection whatsoever. Long story short, went through several pieces of food and wound up killing it, got a giant sword.
At this point I was waiting before I glided over a large gap to the rest of the highlands. Earlier, when it was night, I had seen Farosh in the distance, a long way from where I was expecting to see them. It was such a serene, majestic sight, watching them twist up into the sky. I spent most of last night trying to chase Farosh and searching for the courage shrine in the Faron region. The moment I see any of the dragons it’s an instinctive urge to catch up to them that always fails, and I’ve probably covered half the continent in my chases. Now I was much closer when they flew by, so I started gliding to try to catch up to them, and doing that led me to find what I was unwittingly looking for: a great stone gate with a lightning painting in the side of the mountain. I haven’t yet managed to get it open, but it was such a momentous discovery for me; I’d been looking for small springs like the one at the top of Mount Lanayru and didn’t think to just wander around. It’s so huge and yet so insignificant, impossible to spot from most angles, especially a top-down map view.
I landed near the top of the mountain and then immediately dove off it to grab one of Farosh’s scales I’d shot off that was down at the very base of the mountain, instantly undoing an hour of steady progress and forcing myself to climb up a different path that had yet to be cleared out. I slowly worked my way back up to the top, getting smacked back down a long way more than once, found the thing I was looking for for my original quest that I’d long-forgotten about, and then decided to keep looking around. I worked my way up to the summit of the mountain, the last place I hadn’t yet passed over, and upon reaching the top, found…another Lynel. Not my luckiest streak. This one had even more health, and I was expecting to break all of my weapons trying to kill it. I ate some high-tier attack-up food and actually did much better at fighting this one in general, not really getting hit by many attacks, though losing most of my shields in the process. I went through several weapons and got it to about half health when I finally got the chance to use Urbosa’s Fury, which I remembered having after the previous Lynel fight. Turns out that move is really strong and really good against Lynels. At least this one. I didn’t noticed exactly how much damage it did: I know it was at about 2,000 health when I hit the first time, which stunned it. I then got a much longer charge with a greatsword (which hits multiple times during a charge) and struck it with lightning a second time, and when I got a proper look at it again it was dying. So that seems really, really good, and was such a triumphant sequence of events that I put the controllers down for a minute to walk around my apartment.
I then went back to the bottom of the mountains and figured I’d keep looking around, specifically for the key to unlock the lightning gate, which I figured must be at the base of the mountain, the challenge being to bring it up through a giant enemy gauntlet. By the time I decided to finally warp back out to Gerudo Town I was on the far west end of the map and very nearly up to the Tabantha tower. If you have those regions charted on your game, take a look at those two towers, and imagine practically every piece of land being traversed between them.
That was basically my entire evening of Zelda; unlike several other nights this week that were a lot more scattershot, with me running around doing whatever looked interesting to me on the map or in my quest log, it was pretty much all a single cohesive thread. I did a little more after that around Gerudo, and did finally get the Thunder Helm, but the majority of the night was so unexpected. I figured I’d do stuff around Gerudo quickly and then go tackle the Rito branch of the main quest, and instead I went on an hours-long, isolated journey through the cold, filled with so many moments and stories within it.
This game is so good that I’m still reeling from how good it is.
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Oh god.
[spoiler]The dragons.
I was exploring Hyrule, going on a tower-based pilgrimage to uncover all the map, when I finally reach Lake Hylia upon my Royal Steed. As I finish wiping out the local Lizalfos for their heresy at not posing when I took a picture, I look up and see a giant fucking green dragon firing electricity at me.
I did what anyone would have done and tried landing on it, got electrocuted, and died.[/spoiler]
Try shooting arrows at it. Slightly more detail but also slightly more spoilery: there’s a very good reason to do so and it probably won’t get you killed.
I’ve already taken care of all three of the dragons. I just need the blue one’s horns now for armor upgrades.
I wish any shop in the game had more than 2 or 3 bundles of arrows in stock at once.
That’s what I spent a good amount of time last night doing. Just gotta get the last Great Fairy and get dragon horns from the last one to max out my Champion’s Tunic, hell yeah.
How do you even hit the dragons when they’re so far away? Most of the time when I see them, they’re miles and miles away, except for when Farosh was passing right underneath a bridge in Faron and I didn’t know to shoot them for materials that I’d need for the tunic 
Are you just supposed to grab your horse and catch up to them?
They create an updraft as they fly over you. You can paraglide up to them in it.
[spoiler]There are places that they fly nearby. For example, Farosh often flies near the bridge east of Faron Tower. When they’re nearby, they create updrafts you can use to glide up and take a shot. To get the materials for the tunic, you’ll want to shoot their horns–ideally towards the end of the horn, or you’ll probably hit the face instead and get a scale and have to camp out and try again the next day.
The easiest place to get Naydra is the Lanayru Promenade. If you can get up on the ruined walls, she often flies through the valley in the morning and gives you a really easy shot. This is assuming you’ve done the thing that makes Naydra start flying around, at least.[/spoiler]