I am looking for things to do beyond farming forage materials that I need to upgrade my various armor suits, but not things that are directly related to finishing the main quest to defeat Ganon today.
I think about taking on the Eventide Island challenge and getting that crossed off my list, finally, but I don’t feel like it today.
Instead, I try transporting to Gerudo and see if I can get the sidequest completed for the little girl, Dalia, who wants to start an orchard but can’t due to the garbage in the water. I go there, and it’s daytime, so Dalia is out, and she has new things to say to me when I talk to her this time. After talking to her, I climb up on the walls and talk to Calyban, the Gerudo vai who is eating melons all day long, and she is still rude and doesn’t want to be bothered at first, but I tell her about Dalia’s problem, and she feels a bit guilty, and offers to quit polluting the water with her melon rinds if I bring her some wild berries. I happen to have the 10 berries she needs in my inventory already, so I just talk to her again and give them to her. She takes them, and apologizes, then goes to help Dalia clean up the garbage. After this, I talk to Dalia and she is happy and starting to plant wildberry plants, because Calyban gave her the berries that I gave her.
This completes the quest, and so I go to visit Riju, to see if I’ve solved all of Gerudo Town’s problems yet, so I can borrow the Thunder Helm. But apparently there is still more for me to do in this town, only I don’t know what else there is. I go around and talk to everyone I can find, and don’t pick up any new leads.
I’m puzzled by this, but perhaps it’s one of those things where it depends on what time of day it is. Several of the Gerudo I speak to do seem to have problems but non starts a quest. There’s a vai who complains that she has a headache, and another one who I keep interrupting when I go to her house and she’s practicing talking to men in her bedroom, and gets embarrassed that I’ve seen her doing this. I’d help her out if I could, and I’ve met a few Hylian fellows who are looking to score with some Gerudo hotties, but nothing ever seems to come out of these conversations. I guess Link is just not in the matchmaking business.
There’s the old woman who sits by the goddess statue and likes to talk and tell me about how she traveled all over Hyrule looking for the heart-shaped lake where you’re supposed to meet your true love. I go back to the tavern, and the women who you can eavesdrop on are talking about one of their friends who went out by this lake; I’ve already helped her hook up with a Hylian dude, a long time ago, but hearing them talk makes me think maybe I should go back out there and see if there’s anything new going on with them. I do so, and there’s nothing new going on with them at all.
So… I dunno. Somewhere in Gerudo Town there’s someone, at least one more someone, with a problem that I’m supposed to solve, and I guess I’ll find them someday, or not.
Since I’m way the heck out east now, I think about what else I could do. I’m near the coastline, and I am in need of Hightail lizards, for my armor upgrades. I forget which suit I need these for, maybe the climbing gear, I forget. But I need a bunch. I recall that there seemed to be many lizards along the shoreline on the beach, so I go for a very long walk down the southern coast of Hyrule, and find a couple of the lizards, but only about 3 Hightails. I also find numerous crabs, and maybe a half dozen korok seeds that I hadn’t found on my first pass through the area. In Faron I run into another stalnox, the skeletal Hinox who sleep during the day as a pile of giant bones, and then wake up at night, and defeat it, earning a Great Flameblade, which I swap out for my old Great Flameblade, which was probably starting to get close to being badly damaged anyway. I mine ore wherever I find it along the way, and kill lots of lizalfos, and bokoblin skeletons, keese, and chuchus who harass me along the way, a few bokoblins on horseback, a couple of Yiga bowmen, a Stone Talus, and a Guardian on the beach, who drops an Ancient Core, which is another item that I need. I think I need at least 6-8 Ancient Cores, though, and it’s going to take a long time at this rate to get that many.
A little bit further on down the beach past where I fought the Guardian, I come across a Hylian woman on the beach who is caressing a Sheikah orb like it’s her favorite thing in the world. She is calling it Roscoe, and seems off her rocker. I try to talk to her; there’s a nearby shrine pedestal, where I know if I put the orb in it, I will reveal a new shrine that I can clear, but she won’t let go of the orb until I show her four photos of guardians.
That’s going to take a lot of work to track down the different types of Guardians that she wants to see, but I’ll make an effort to do it when I run into them.
I continue along the beach still further, and come to a river channel that leads inland to where Lake Tower is. I follow the river, along the east bank, and find a few more korok seeds. This is an area I hadn’t really been through previously. I also find yet another stalnox skeleton, but it’s day time and so inert; this is the third Stalnox I’ve discovered now in the game.
I explore around the area and find some treasure chests, and get some more rupees and gems out of them. Then I see a few horses, and one of them looks like a good one, so I tame it and ride it to the nearest stable, which is Highland Stable to the southeast. I get there and try to register it, but it’s not as good as my horses that I already have, so I don’t bother.
I still need a bunch of Hightail lizards and have a new sidequest to photograph Guardians, so I continue on with those objectives.
I guess I’ll take on the Guardian photo safari first, since I know where I can find at least two of the types of Guardians that the weird woman wanted to see.
I transport out to the Akkala Maze and photograph the flying Guardian and walking guardian there. Then I transport to a shrine where there’s a combat trial and photograph the guardian there, and warp out back to the nearest shrine to where I met the weird Hylian Girl, and run over, show her the photos, and she gives me “Roscoe” and I unlock the shrine. There is no trial here, I just get a spirit orb and a chest.
Next, I decide to return to Gerudo. There’s one more place I didn’t check in Gerudo for more sidequests: the military training academy. I go there, and sure enough there’s a quest for me. Barta (I think she’s the one who I rescued from the Yiga Clan when I went to recover the Thunder Helm) has gone missing (again); this time she was last seen by the Leviathan skeleton out in the desert. I transport to the shrine there, and find her. She is exhausted and near death, and her last request is to taste a Hearty Durian one last time. I give her one from my inventory, and it heals her (of course) and she’s fine again. I tell her the royal Gerudo Guard is looking for her, and she returns home. Mission accomplished.
I talk to Riju, and she agrees to let me borrow the Thunder Helm. It is a bit underwhelming: 3 defensive rating, and cannot be enhanced, and immunity to lightning. But it doesn’t seem to work — I still take damage from lightning strikes, Farosh, and other elemental attacks, but I guess it doesn’t cause me to drop my weapon. But it doesn’t repel lightning to being attracted to me if I’m holding anything metal, and the lightning still does damage. Maybe (probably?) not extra damage for being elementally vulnerable due to holding metal, but WTF, the dang helmet created a huge bubble of lightning repulsion when we went up against Vah Naboris, so come on! I think the Thunder Helm is a huge disappointment, and would just give it back to Riju, as it’s worse than just wearing the complete Rubber Suit from what I can tell.
I spend the rest of the session running around the desert, looking for Yellow Lizalfos to kill for their tails; I need a total of 20 in order to max out the remaining pieces of the Rubber Suit. It takes hours, but I eventually manage to get all the Yellow tails I need. With all the practice, I get pretty good at taking down Lizalfos when I’m prepared for them. They like to lie dormant, and camouflage themselves, but you can easily see them, due to their shape. I just run up and toss a bomb at them, blow them away, and run up, and ready another bomb as soon as I can, and keep hitting them with it, knocking them around, stunning them, causing them to drop their weapon. If they get too close to me to use the bomb on them, I whip out my weapon and hit them 3-4 times, and when they go down, I run right over and hit them 2-3 times extra while they’re down. Depending on the strength of my weapon, and the toughness of the particular Lizalfos, they don’t last very long, and I keep them stun-locked to where they can’t manage much if any counter-attack.
I also found a great many chests in the desert as well. And one additional shrine, out in the western part of the Gerudo Desert barrens, there’s a set of four stone braziers in a square; I lit them all with my great fireblade, and a shrine appeared. This one had a minor test of strength trial, and I defeated this guardian easily, loosing only 1 1/2 hearts. The Ancient Armor really helps protect you from them, and the Master Sword apparently does extra damage to them as well. Plus, I’m just getting better at learning how to exploit their weaknesses though tactics.
While exploring the desert, I find three more swift violets, which means I have enough to enhance to maximum one of my two pieces of climbing gear that still needs to be enhanced.
I have enough spirit orbs to add another Heart Container to my life bar, and that will leave me two short of two rows of hearts, which is the maximum you can have. I think there’s now fewer than 10 shrines left in the game for me to discover, and I know where two of them are. The rest are likely somewhere in Central Hyrule, near Hyrule Castle, or else very well hidden elsewhere. There’s so much territory in the world map that it’s easy to completely miss an area, but I’m starting to feel like I’ve been just about everywhere. I know there’s still some places that I have only barely explored, but they’re no longer entire regions, and are more like small sub-areas where natural boundaries channeled me into other areas of the map that I explored instead when I first came through the region.