I want to find the memory spot from the photograph that the old painter at the stable told me about, and it’s to the West, by a lake. The road leads out that way. As I get closer, I can see that I have some choices. I can either go straight to the area where the old man told me I’d find the spot where the photo was taken, or, if I go a little further down the road, I’ll reach another tower that I can unlock, and get map data which will likely be helpful in pinpointing the exact spot where the photo was taken.
The tower doesn’t look too difficult and it’s nearby, and not too far out of my way, and if I can reach it and activate it, I’ll be able to return here any time I want with ease. So it’s a pretty easy decision.
I head toward the tower, and come to an area where there are some ruined old stone buildings. I carefully pick my way through them looking for any chests that I can loot along the way, and find couple.
When I get about halfway through, I spot a Guardian, a fully active one, patrolling the ruins. It hasn’t spotted me yet, but it’s in my way, and as soon as I leave the ruins, it’s going to be on top of me like nothing. There’s no two ways about it, I’m going to have to take it on and take it out if I’m going to advance any further.
Or maybe not. Maybe I can take a slight detour and sneak around it, using cover to block its view, and get past it without fighting.
I try it, and as I’m sneaking around a broken stone tower, I get lit up from the other side. There’s another guardian! I don’t see where it is, only have a vague idea of its general direction, and I need to get out of its view or I’ll be toast. I duck around the corner of the tower, getting cover from the second Guardian, only to immediately be acquired by the first one. Now both are locked onto me, and my only chance is to run back to the cover of the stone building that I was sneaking from.
I make a dash for it, and of course the controller goofs up, I always either press down on the left stick and activate sneak/crouch right when I need to sprint, or I press down on the right stick and activate my telescope right when I need to be able to see in 3rd person so I can navigate obstacles cleanly. So what would have been an exciting and epic dash for safety instead turns into a comedy of errors, I get blasted into cinders, and respawn.
This time, I decide to try to isolate the first Guardian, the one in the middle of the ruins. I carefully sneak up, moving from rubble pile to rubble pile, and get pretty close. Soon I’m on the other side of the pile it’s next to, and if one of us rounds the corner, we’ll be face to face.
Just then, a bokoblin on horseback starts riding up, and of course it spots me. It charges right at me, and now I have no choice but to delay engaging the Guardian, and hope I can manage to take out the bokoblin in one arrow, without the Guardian noticing.
I manage to pull it off, and nail the bokoblin right in the face with an arrow, knocking it off its horse and somehow the Guardian fails to detect the bow twang. Maybe my stealth gear helped. Then again, the bokoblin rider saw me straight on, so maybe not.
Maintaining the element of surprise is crucial with Guardians, as is keeping a cool nerve when aiming. If you can nail it in the eye with your bow, it’s blind for a few seconds until it resets itself, and its only real weapon is that fearsome laser. In close, with a chopping weapon that does decent damage, it’s easy to cut their legs off, immobilizing and hopefully upending them, and once that’s done, they’re mostly harmless, and you can just smash them to bits from their blind side. If need be, you can hit them repeatedly with arrows, but if you’re good and quick, it only takes one or two, and then it’s done.
This combat goes off exactly to plan, perfectly executed. The only real downside to fighting these things is that they have a ton of hit points, so you’re almost always going to wreck a good weapon or two, maybe even three, before you take them down. After this fight, I am a bit short on heavy hitting weapons that I can hope to take out the second Guardian with.
I reason that I can likely get to the tower without the second one noticing, as long as I’m careful about it and observe its patrol range for a bit before finding a smart path from the ruined town to the tower.
It turns out though that this place is crawling with live Guardians. No more ambulatory ones, but two or three more half-dead hulks surrounding the tower, and I end up having to take them all out in order to have a safe ascent. Twice I attempt to climb the spire only to get laser painted, and have to bail, jumping down off the tower and getting to cover at just the last second.
I finally have found that their blasts are not auto-kills, but if you jump or dash just at the very last second when they fire, they’ll barely miss you if you’re not behind cover yet.
These smashed Guardians are not hard to sneak in close to using the available cover, and once I’m there, I can easily come up from behind when their rotating eye is on the far side, wait for it to track around to face me, and then nail it point blank, and hold down a charged shot for extra damage to finish them off more quickly. It usually takes 2 arrows to do it, and I end up going through a lot more of my weapons, and am starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel now, by the time I finish off the last derelict Guardian. There’s no way I have a good enough weapon to take on the last one that is still walking up and down the road near the tower.
But if I keep to the far side of the tower, it won’t see me, and I can climb up safely. I do this, and activate the tower and download my map data update.
From here, I need to find a way safely down from the tower and glide as close to the spot where I think the camera photo was taken, and I’ll have accomplished all my objectives.
I take a moment to survey the surrounding countryside, and note the location of a few more shrines, mark them on the map for later, and then spend a few minutes observing the patrolling Guardian. I see the pattern it follows, and decide that I should be able to make it if I glide off of the tower at the right time. The Guardian takes a short walk down each of three directions on a three-way intersection of the road, and when I goes down the middle fork, I think it’s next going to head right, so I take off, gliding toward the left. But the Guardian goes down the left fork, and is close enough to me that it spots me. I try to run for it and get behind tree cover, but it’s not thick enough, and the Guardian keeps lighting me up with its laser aimfinder. I manage to dodge two, then three blasts, but the fourth one nails me, and I am incinerated.
The second attempt at this plan works without a hitch, though, I properly wait for the Guardian to go off toward the right side, and glide a little further left than I did the first time, and get into the wooded area and out of sight safely.
There are a lot of wild animals about in this woods, and a couple of bokoblins, and a moblin, but I am able to defeat them all pretty easily. As I head toward the spot on the map where I figure the photo was taken, I scavenge all sorts of forage — meat, monster parts, and vegetables and mushrooms. I also find a couple of korok seeds.
Eventually, I pinpoint the spot on the map where the photo was taken, and unlock the memory. Link and Zelda are walking together, and she challenges him by asking how well he really knows how to use his sword. He seems young and untested in the memory.
I head back from the memory spot, and find myself back near the ruins that I had hid out in and looted, and I spot the horse that the bokoblin rider had charged me on, and I grab him, and we go on a little joyride.
I push further west, past the newly unlocked Central Tower, and follow roads a ways, until I get to a large round ruined building that remind me of the Roman Colosseum in our world. As I get closer, I spot the silhouette of a Lynel proudly marching around inside, and decide I better not go any further, so I turn around and head back the way I came.
I find two more shrines, the second of which is nearby yet another Stables, this one is called the Outskirts. I clear both shrines, and neither one is particularly hard, but a little tricky, requiring a bit of thinking. One of them has a very powerful sword in it, which does more damage than any other weapon I’ve found so far, with an attack power of 50.
The people at this stable tell me clues that give me hope that I will be able to find the Master Sword soon, and I’m also told about a pure white horse that I should try to capture. And one guy at the stable will give me 100 rupees any time I bring him gourmet prime meat from a hunting trip.
By now I have over 3000 rupees saved up, there has been an abundance of rupees in this area, and I should be able afford a few things at the Geruda jewelers. But I think I have a few more things that I need to accomplish here before I return there.