Zelda: BOTW Diary (29)

Resumed from my previous session, standing under the lean-to in the thunderous downpour outside the stable in the Jungle zone. I stood around for about 2 minutes and decided I was bored with standing in a downpour.
 
The girl from the stables who is standing by me doesn’t have much to say, just repeating the same thing over and over again. In real life, this would have been a situation where two people could have taken time to get to know one another, but video game conversations are very, very limited imitations.
 
The rain doesn’t seem to be letting up any time soon, so I teleport over to to the shrine near Lurelin village, and decide to explore the beach area just north of town.
 
I find a really nice shield, a Knight’s shield with a defensive rating of 40, nearly twice the dragonbone boko shield which are my previous best, and some ice arrows. I manage to find another korok seed, and some rupees.
 
There’s some horses near the beach, and I try to catch one, but he’s got too much spirit, and throws me. It seems the solid black horses must be something special. I either need to make a stamina boosting elixir, or else come back once I’ve completed a lot more shrines and boosted my max stamina by another quarter or half meter.
 
There’s some skeletal Lizalfos on the beach, but it’s daytime and I manage to avoid disturbing them.
 
After I’ve explored the shoreline, I decide to have another go at the Eventide Island challenge. I don’t succeed, but I have another good run on my first attempt, only to screw up on the Hinox, glitching through him as I try to charge up an attack while he’s sleeping.
 
I think what’s happening is as I start charging up my attack, it makes enough noise that the Hinox wakes up, and as soon as that happens, he starts to stand, and I just clip through his body as he starts to go vertical.
 
This time, I run away and avoid the instadeath, but then I turn around and he claps his hands together, and one-shots me anyway. I’m annoyed at the screwup and fail, but I at least got to see a new attack mode, and maybe got a little bit of insight into why I’m not able to land an attack on the sleeping giant and then run off.
 
After respawning, I decide that rather than try to do a full island run, I’ll just focus on the Hinox encounter, and experiment with it and figure out what I can and can’t do.
 
There’s a number of options:
 
I can magnetize heavy boxes from the nearby bokoblin camps, walk them over, and drop them on him from max height. I try this twice, but it’s very awkward, and doesn’t do much damage.
 
I can time-freeze two boulders atop the southeast corner, and golf them into the Hinox, but this is terribly inaccurate and doesn’t work well either. I get one to sortof nudge him and it doesn’t do very much, but it does wake him up. Maybe if I managed to land a solid, high energy strike it might do a worthwhile amount of damage, I don’t know. Although the Hinox wakes up, I’m a bit out of sight, and after a few moments he goes back to sleep. Interesting and good to know.
 
I can just walk up and try to pour on the most damage I can and fight him. This is when I notice that both of this Hinox’s legs are armored, which means that I probably can’t do any damage to him while he’s standing. Maybe with a very strong weapon I could break his shields, but most likely I’d just waste my weapon on them.
 
So my only possible way to defeat him in combat would be to hit him in the eye with arrows, knocking him down, and then run up and wail on him for as much as I can. I only have maybe 10-15 arrows, max, on a good run, and I’m only hitting him in the eye maybe 1 in 4, 5 shots.
 
Could it be I’m not meant to best this Hinox in combat?
 
I can sneak up and try to steal the orb off his necklace. This seems feasible, except there’s no way to sneak off while carrying the orb, and if I throw it, it’ll clang on the ground and wake him up too. Can I just run for it? It doesn’t seem very likely. Even if I’m not carrying a heavy object, running from a Hinox only seems to keep me barely out of its reach. I don’t think I can move fast enough.
 
Can I steal an orb, hide it, or put it out of the Hinox’s reach and run away, and see if he’ll go to sleep? I don’t know. It seems a bit far-fetched, and apart from throwing it into the sea near its sleeping place, I can’t think of a location that I could put the orb out of reach. And it might just not go back to sleep if it loses its orb.
 
I don’t get to find out. After my first good run on the island, every subsequent attempt is frustrated by wind and weather, and I have a series of bad approaches to the island.
 
I finally get onto the island in good shape again, but this time I try going to the upper bokoblin camp at the north end of the island, and get one-shotted by the moblin up there, when I get surrounded while trying to raid them. I was going to try to clear out the camp and use the higher elevation to hopefully put more energy into the droppable boxes and see if I could knock the Hinox’s health an appreciable amount that way.
 
Frustrated, I put the controller down, and give up. I know I’m close to being able to finish this challenge. It sucks that just getting to the island takes at least five minutes.
Updated: 2020-May-04 — 8:07 am

Leave a Reply