In order to avoid the frustration of repeated failing and starting over with the Eventide Island challenge, I decide to complete as many of the other side quests from Lurelin village as I can.
The most challenging of these seems to be to re-take the fishing spot at Aris beach. I hike south down the beach. At first I stay low, on the shoreline, but after running into some monsters early on, I decide that it will be quicker, safer, easier to climb up the hills nearby and run along the edge of the slope near the top, and once I’m close enough to glide in, fly the rest of the way.
Monsters mostly leave you along when you’re in a climbing area, so sticking with climbing and rough terrain and avoiding roads and flat open plains and woods is a great way to avoid monsters and fighting. If you’re social distancing in Hyrule, go climb.
It’s a pretty long hike, but I get there quickly, but I do take the time to climb Tuft Mountain and visit the heart-shaped lake there. I go at night, and encounter a beautiful Geruda woman, and a nervous, confidence-lacking Sheikah man who’s too scared to talk to her, but thinks he’s in love with her. I act as sort of an intermediary, and give the man a blue nightshade flower from my inventory, to give to her, but then he chickens out and asks me to give it to her for him. So, sigh, I do, and it works magic, she loves the flower and talks to the man. He’s clearly unworthy of this woman, but because this is how the story goes, she accepts his flower and decides to go out with him. This is a pretty classic trope for how relationships are started, and I’ve seen it in probably hundreds of examples. The thing is, it’s a pretty poor model for real world relationships. Real relationships aren’t based on being mesmerized by beauty, and being afraid to talk to someone because you don’t know how and are afraid you’ll screw up is not a credential for how well suited you are to be with someone. The reality is that this couple are not well suited to one another, and they have absolutely no basis for a relationship with each other, apart from they both went to a heart-shaped pond on top of a mountain one night and saw each other there.
But, eh, I completed the side quest. But whoever wrote that crap needs to try much harder.
I continue on to the Aris beach area, and it’s a pretty far walk. When I get there, I scope things out from the cliffs near the shore. I spot a raft docked on the shore. There’s two bokoblin platforms just offshore, and it looks like I’ll need to use the raft to get over to them. I’m not sure if it’s possible for me to glide to the platforms from where I’m standing, but I decide against it and take the raft, mainly because I want to inspect the dock area down there.
I’m well armed, well equipped, and at full health, and I’m expecting that I can handle this encounter. And I do! I’m spotted immediately, and the bokoblin sentries sound the alarm, but there’s little they can do against me, as I just run up the spiraling platform, dishing out death left and right like it’s nobody’s business. It’s a very straightforward affair, just run up slice, slice, slice, taking each one out one at a time, and continue making my way up. I get to the top of one platform, and then, using the bow, take out the sentries in their towers, one shotting each of them since they’re very weak. The toughest enemy on the platform is a moblin, who I take down with a flurry of strikes which seems to disrupt his ability to attack, and he ends up doing basically nothing to me, just stands there and takes about 8-10 hits before he dies. None of the rest of the enemies puts up much of a fight, either.
I clear out both platforms, and loot as much as I can. The best items I find are a dragonbone shield and a three-bladed lizalfos boomerang, which has a damage rating of 36, and is second only to a dragonbone spear that I found a while back with a damage rating of 45, and have been saving back at the house in Hateno.
I collect some rupees and arrows, and get back to the raft, and sail all the way back to Lurelin village. On the beach I spot a blue snail, the type that the fisherman’s wife needed for her recipe. Checking my inventory, I needed goat’s milk butter to complete her reicpe, so I teleport to Hateno to shop for it, but I don’t find it in the shop there. So I teleport to Karakiko village, and buy it there, then teleport back to Lurelin.
I talk to the fisherman, who thanks me for retaking the fishing spot, and gives me a decent reward of 100 rupees, and then I talk to the wife, who thanks me for the ingredients, and she gives me some rupees as well, I think 20 or 50. I’m invited to have dinner with them, but I guess that’s just being polite, because there’s no actual depiction of me having dinner with them, and they don’t even give me a free sample meal of the dish she made. I think that the amount of rupees she gave me doesn’t even cover the value of the snail, so it seems that the benefit of completing this quest is the enjoyment of completing it. Which mainly consists of me walking along the shore and being like “Hey, what’s that blue thing?” and finding out that it was that rare snail that I didn’t buy from the merchant during the bad rainstorm that first night in Lurelin.
The village elder had told me after I found the sunken treasure chests in the middle of the triangle of rocks just outside Lurelin harbor that he thought there was still more stuff out there to be found. I did find a couple of floating chests off the shore of the crescent-shaped peninsula between Lurelin and Eventide Island, floating in the water. I recovered their contents, I don’t recall them being particularly memorable, probably a gem and some rupees. I was actually going to try another Island challenge, but the winds were especially bad this time, and blew me into shore so hard that the beach went completely out of the water onto the sand. So I take this as a sign that I should explore the beach here.
The crescent peninsula is quite long, but exploring it is pretty rewarding, and I find several chests in the water and in the sand, as well as lots of crabs. Near the end, there’s a small bokoblin camp, which I clear out easily, using the magesis power to manipulate a heavy box to bludgeon the bokoblins into pulp.
At the very end of the crescent, there’s a korok seed, as I expected, and some decent fishing grounds. After clearing all this out, I teleport back to Lurelin village to rest and save.