Zelda: BOTW Diary (86)

I need to fight a Lynel or two in order to get enough Lynel Guts to upgrade the Barbarian Armor set to its maximum potential, and I need Ancient Cores so I can complete the max-level upgrade for the Ancient Helmet, which will max out my Ancient Armor suit.

The Lynels will be easier to finish up quickly, because they’re more reliable in their loot drops, so I start with them.  

First, though, there’s a few korok seeds that I discovered, that I learned about through watching a youtube video where someone happened to collect it.  There’s these fallen tree logs here and there all over Hyrule, and I’ve noticed an immense acorn inside of them.  Not knowing what they were, I figured at first that it was a forage item or perhaps a korok seed, but I couldn’t figure out how to collect it.  I’d walk up and press A to examine/pick up the acorn, but nothing would happen.  In one of my earliest encounters with one of these logs, I remember trying to blow it up with a bomb, and nothing happening.  I also tried swinging a weapon at it, and nothing happened.

In the video I watched, the player shoots an arrow at the acorn, and it reveals a korok.  

I’ve been all over the continent and have probably seen a dozen or more of these logs, in just about every region that has trees.  I can’t remember all the locations, but they’re quite common.  If I’d known, I could have collected a lot of additional korok seeds.

I’m at a stage in the game where I have little need for them any longer, as I’ve maxed out my bow and melee weapon inventory slots, and I don’t really need all the shield slots.  But I still will collect any korok seed that I come across, and I enjoy finding them. As dumb as it is, this is one of the things in the game that I actually enjoy the most.

I don’t know what it is; they’re not too hard to find, and the puzzles are mostly very easy.  I just like spotting them, recognizing that they are a korok puzzle, and solving it. It’s a thing to do, a little reward for fully exploring the world, for visiting a hard to reach spot, and probably about 80% of what I actually do during my BOTW sessions.  The game is literally a near-endless scavenger hunt for forage materials and korok seeds, where you are periodically harassed by weak, minor enemies, and occasionally you find a nice weapon.

Based on the volume of the game that they take up, korok seeds are it, man.  All the shrines, the divine beasts, the memory photos, combat, and defeating Ganon are like a little sliver of the pie chart.

I can remember for certain at least two locations where I had seen these logs: up on Tabantha Snow field, in a grove of trees, and on top of the hill by the ruins of the old Colosseum.   There’s nearby Lynels in both places, so it works out perfectly.

I transport out to Tabantha first, hike out to the log, and collect the seed.  Then I find the Lynel and run up to it and do battle.  I have an alright fight with it, but it only drops one Lynel Guts, and I still need one more.

There’s a second Lynel in Tabantha Snow field, up along the northern edge of Hyrule, patrolling the road leading to the North Lomei Labyrinth. Well, normally there’s a second one, but I can’t seem to find him.  So, I guess the Colosseum it is, then.

I transport to the nearest shrine, the northernmost one on the Great Plateau — in fact, I think the very first shrine I ever visited in the entire game — and glide down from the Plateau to the road leading to the Colosseum.  Walking up along the east side of the Colosseum, I spot a couple of Hylians fighting some Bokoblins, and, because it’s the right thing to do, I run to their aid, slaying the monsters and make sure they’re alright, before I go on to do what I came to do. I’ve saved this couple several times before, and they are grateful once again.

I also happen to spot a circle of rocks that is a telltale sign of a korok puzzle, and see no korok there, meaning I haven’t found this one yet.  So I take a brief detour to take care of that, and then move on.

I head up the road to the ruined Colosseum, and as I reach the bridge, I’m attacked by a Yiga bowman, who I dispatch quickly and efficiently.  Then I cross the bridge.  Rather than go into the Colosseum directly, I veer to the right of the main entrance, to check out the grove of trees and see if there’s anything good that I may have missed on my previous visit here.  I find some forage stuff, and maybe a korok seed under a rock, I forget, and then I climb up the hill, until I’m above the Colosseum, and I find the korok acorn log, shoot it, and get my other korok.

Then I glide down to the Colosseum, and do a mid-air headshot on the Lynel as a surprise attack.  I try to run up to mount him, but accidentally hit him while still on the ground one too many times, and lose my window of opportunity to get a successful mount.  

Somehow, this time, my timing and reflexes are spot on, and I manage to headshot this Lynel repeatedly, and reliably.  He still manages to get in a hit or two on me, but I have one of my best Lynel fights ever, and don’t need to take a heal meal break in the middle of combat this time.  I think that’s a good accomplishment.

Of course, it helps a great deal that I’m wearing a nearly maxed-out Ancient Armor suit, which has some of the highest overall protection rating in the game.  Still, there’s no mistaking that I’ve improved my skill with practice as I’ve fought more of these things, and am starting to get decent at it.

This Lynel drops enough guts and hoofs and horns that I am now all set to finish upgrading the Barbarian suit, and now the only thing remaining for me to do in terms of armor upgrades is collect 4 Ancient Cores so I can max out the Ancient Helm.

I know Guardians are plentiful in central Hyrule near the castle, and I’m directly south of there, so I start hiking out, hunting Guardians.  

Somewhere around Hyrule Garrison Ruins I encounter my first two Guardians of the night, and defeat them handily with the Master Sword.  With the Ancient Armor suit bonus, Guardians don’t do a lot of damage to me if they do manage to hit me, but as long as I see them coming and get in the first strike, I’m pretty good at killing them without taking a hit.

It’s easy:  Get in close, using cover so they can’t see you if you can.  Then pop out and blast them in the eye with your bow, run up and start chopping.  Go from leg to leg, 1-2 hits will cut a leg off and it’ll drop a spring or a screw.  Each leg you cut off disrupts it further, and makes it less mobile and if you’re real lucky you’ll knock it over onto its side and expose the underbelly, where you can hit it in complete safety, unless it manages to right itself.  If it recovers enough to start targeting you again with its super-laser, just back up a couple steps and nail it with another arrow to stun it again, and continue bashing it until it blows.

As long as you can take them on one at a time, this is a pretty safe tactic and works very well.  If there’s more than one in an area, attacking them while they’re at the farthest point from each other is best, and if you can, doing it so that you can situate yourself on the other side of cover so that the second Guardian can’t target you, and ideally so that it won’t even know you’re there until you’re done with the first Guardian is ideal.  If there’s no cover, stun the first one and use its body for cover, standing on the opposite side, keeping it between you and the second Guardian, and destroy it, then turn your attention to stunning, disabling and destroying the second Guardian.

I fight my way north, getting up around the Quarry Ruins, and have taken down 5 or 6 Guardians, and none of them has dropped a single Ancient Core.

In the Quarry Ruins area, my shrine sensor picks up a nearby shrine, and I head in its direction, finding it in a low depression, nestled in the hollow between a couple of hills.  I enter it, and it’s a Minor Test of Strength combat trial. This one is easy.  I equip one of my ancient weapons and test out how it works, and when you pair the Ancient arms with the bonus you get from the Ancient Armor suit, it amplifies their damage.  I think it only takes 7 hits to take out this shrine Guardian.

Still no Ancient Cores, but now I have a 3rd Spirit Orb, which means just one more and I can max out my heart meter.

I haven’t really been up in this part of Central Hyrule much before, and the only other time I was in this area, I had my first encounter with the flying helicopter drone Guardians, learned how dangerous they were, and that they were to be avoided at all costs, and never returned to the area.  Now, though, I’ve dealt with them a few times and know that as long as they don’t see me, I’m completely safe from them.

I explore the area a bit further, find a few more korok seeds, a bunch of forage materials, and an interesting korok puzzle.  There’s a small island near the castle, on the west side of it, called Castle Town Prison, where there are some ruins, and among the ruins are three statues with offering bowls, which I’ve seen a few other times in different regions. Usually you put apples in the bowls, and it summons a korok.  This one, two of the bowls have a rusty shield covering them; the third is empty.  I guess that I need to put a third rusty shield in the bowl for the third statue to get my korok seed, but I don’t have one in my inventory.  Perhaps there’s one lying around here nearby somewhere.  I try dropping one of my shields from my inventory, but it doesn’t work.  So maybe it has to be a rusty one.

Just to be sure, I try moving the two rusty shields, and put apples in all three bowls, and nothing happens.

I mark it on the map with a stamp in order to return to it later.  At the moment, I have over 10 korok seeds, so I can go to Hestu and have him expand my shield inventory slots so I can carry one more shield, so I can pick up a rusty shield if I find one and bring it back here.

I transport to the Korok village to do the shield inventory upgrade, and then transport back to the nearby shrine that I had just cleared earlier, and hike it back to Castle Town Prison.  This time, I find a rusty shield some distance away from the three statues, along with a few other rusty weapons.  But when I go back to the statues, the original two rusty shields are missing.  By picking them up to move them, I think I triggered the item management routine in the game that deletes discarded items that you drop when you leave an area, rather than store the location data for everything you’ve ever dropped in the game.  This will reset eventually, if I travel far enough away from the region and wait a day.  So I’ll have to wait for that, I guess.

On to hunt more Guardians and hopefully pick up a few Ancient Cores.  I’m so close to Hyrule Castle, I decide to investigate the outer castle walls and it’s a good choice, because there are beaucoup Guardians all over the place, both fully functional ones and disabled ones, and a few dead hulks.  There’s also the occasional Lizalfos or other monster, not to mention the odd Keese or Chuchus.  I also have to keep an eye out for the flying Guardians, so I keep out of their field of vision.

There’s a lot of stuff strewn about in the ruins, as well as treasure chests to find, and I spend a good hour or more exploring the outer ruins just south of Hyrule Castle, fighting Guardians at every opportunity, but none of them are dropping any Ancient Cores.  I’ve probably fought a dozen of them, and am getting skunked.  It makes me wonder if Ancient Cores are a special drop that only happens for certain specific Guardians, or if I’m just having a run of terrible luck.

As I make my way through the Castle Town Ruins area, I start seeing patches of Calamity Ganon Goop, with eyeballs that I have to shoot with an arrow in order to clear the path so I can proceed.  I’ve been fighting Guardians and using a lot of regular arrows for this, plus the Lynel fights, which consume a lot of arrows in their own right, and I’ve fired off somewhere around half of the 150 arrows that I had when I started this session.

To my surprise, I find a couple more korok seeds among the ruins of Castle Town.  I wouldn’t have thought that they would occupy this area, so close to Ganon, and so ruined and unnatural, but there are a good five or six that I’ve found here and there.

Before I know it, without really meaning to, I’m at the castle gates, and when I get a little too close, it triggers a cutscene to signify that I’m starting the final part of the game where I am to destroy Ganon.

I didn’t really plan on doing this tonight, but I figure, OK, let’s see what this is like, and rather than teleport out, I proceed further in.

The map changes from the overworld map to a map of the castle itself, similar to the maps that they have for the Divine Beasts.  But this map has nothing that I can manipulate, no switches to activate, just a path to the center where I’ll face Calamity Ganon.

I wonder if I can do it. I’m nearly fully maxed out in power, so it’s really more a question of do I have the skill and can I figure out what I need to do to overcome the obstacles, and how difficult the boss fight is, and if there’s any tricks to it.

So far the boss fights in this game have all been very similar to one another, and all have been only moderately difficult at best.  I had a harder time with fighting Guardians and Lynels than I did with any of the four Divine Beast boss fights, or the Yiga clan boss fight.  And mostly that was because I had a short life meter, next to no armor, weak weapons, and no understanding of how to exploit their attack patterns.  Once I figured out those things, and boosted my power through finding better equipment and powering it up, it’s been much easier to deal with any enemy in the game through direct combat.

The castle is actually a pretty well defensible fortification.  There’s a long, winding path from the main gate that I have to fight my way through, frequently exposed to fire from Guardians and Guardian-like turrets along the way.  In a lot of cases, the only way forward is through a direct frontal assault, and simply tanking through the damage the Guardian lasers dish out as I run up to them with no cover to shield me, and heading on a direct vector straight at them, so unable to dodge their blasts effectively.

Fortunately, the nearly maxed-out Ancient armor protects me very well against the blasts, although their knockdown effect and recovery from them does make it very difficult to proceed in one or two spots.  The worst of it is when I’m in a crossfire zone, taking incoming fire from two directions, and can’t deal with both of them.  There, I have to find cover somewhere, situate myself and figure out the least dangerous way to get close enough to one of the Guardians to take it out of commission with a flurry of up close attacks, and then usually I can just run past the other Guardian, and get out of its field of fire.

There’s a few waterfalls along the path, and these are shortcuts if I want to use the Zora armor suit to swim up the falls.  This helps me to bypass a few Guardians and avoid some tough spots.

Along the way, there are two Gate Houses, both of which contain a fierce looking dark grey Lynel.  These gate tower rooms have less space, which I think gives the Lynel a bit of a disadvantage, since they’re less able to do their running charge attacks on me, which means I have an easier time targeting with arrows to get a headshot stun in on them, setting up the mount attack and finishing it with mid-air bow headshots.

The first Gate Tower Lynel fight goes really well, I keep it off me and stun it repeatedly, en route to a very capable victory, and I hardly take any damage from it. 

 

After the first Gate Tower, the way branches, and I decide to take the left fork.  This actually is a longer route, but by the time I realize that I’m too far down it, and decide to just continue on and see it through.  I’m on a narrower path that wraps around the back of Hyrule Castle, and eventually will come back around to the front, where I’ll end up pretty close to where I would have been had I taken the more direct path to the right. 

But since I’m taking the scenic route through the whole game as it is, I don’t mind.  I’m not exactly trying to 100% this game, but I don’t want to skip stuff that’s optional and miss out on anything cool.

I get around to the rear of the castle, and reach a point where I get pinned down by a crossfire situation.  I duck behind a corner and get cover, and I figure if I want to continue on this path, I can either run around the corner and do a frontal assault on the Guardian turret, or I can maybe try climbing up the wall and see if maybe there’s any kind of shortcut, or if not, it’ll afford me a way to get a bit closer when I take down the turret that’s blocking the way.

But then, I notice an open doorway to the side, at appears to be a way into the castle itself.  Or maybe it’s just a minor outbuilding, but in any case, I should check it out and explore it.  No doubt there will be some good weapons, and even if not, it’s not like they’ll have Guardians inside, so if there’s anything in there to fight, it’ll likely be easier to take down.

I notice as well that the Master Sword has been holding up very strongly throughout this; I’ve fought a ton of enemies with it and it hasn’t run out of power yet.  It’s glowing, and its damage rating is doubled, from 30 to 60.  This is what it was meant for, obviously. 

I dash across the path, exposing myself to Guardian fire briefly, but make it to the entrance and get inside before the Guardians are able to get off second shots, and I manage to dodge their first blasts by sprinting and jumping to change my speed and direction just as they’re about to fight, like I learned to at the Forgotten Temple.  

Entering the building, I walk down some steps and find myself in what looks like a library that has seen better days.  There’s bookshelves, books, tables, and chairs, but everything is in disarray.  I encounter about 6 or 7 lizalfos in this area, but they are no match for me with my full-power Master Sword cutting them down in 3-4 hits, and they barely do more than register that I’m there before they go down.

I’m honestly a little disappointed that their power level isn’t greater, or that their aggression level/AI isn’t tougher.  But at the same time, if I think about it like it’s a real life or death battle, not a game, then I’m glad that I’m at a power level that dominates these enemies and makes defeating them an easy matter.

I feel truly powerful.

On one of the book tables, I find a book that is readable; I read it, and it’s the recipe book for the Hylian royal cooks to make a cake.  I wonder whether this is the cake that the sick girl in Tarrey Town wants, or whether it’s the recipe that the man at the stable wants to try.  

If I wasn’t busy saving the world from the ultimate evil, I’d just transport out of here right now and check on both of those leads.  But I’m so close to the final boss, I think realistically this should not be a priority right this minute.

I take screen caps so I can go back and read the recipe later, and move on.

Out of the library hall, I enter a corridor, where I fight some more lizalfos and a few moblins.  There’s a long hallway with some bombable walls, which I bomb, and they open up into chambers where I find some hidden weapons.  Most of these are rusty, a few are decent stuff, if I needed it, which I don’t, and one or two are new items that I’ve never encountered previously:  a new class above the Royal-level weapons, for Royal Guards.  They look similar to the Royal weapons, but have a dark grey color scheme, and do higher damage, but have less durability.  I pick them up but they do not last very long, only a moster or two.  Honestly, the Master Sword is more than enough here, and if it ran out of energy, I’d be fine with my other 15 weapon slots filled with Royal Claymores, Savage Lynel Swords, and elemental greatswords and spears.

At one point, I enter through a large double door and enter a banquet hall, where there are four moblins. They seem to be extremely dim-witted moblins, for they do not respond to my entrance, and barely put up any fight at all when I start hitting one of them.  The others do nothing, and just seem to wait their turn for me to slaughter them.  I have to give the game designers poor marks for this encounter, this is far less challenge than I should be facing in the final battle, and it’s a letdown to just bash a dumb opponent who doesn’t do anything but stand there being a target.  To be fair, they’re not completely inert, but they’re so sluggish and lethargic.  I can run up to them and they don’t seem to take any action at all until I hit them, which seems to wake them up.  Unfortunately, after the 2-3 hit combo that I dish out with the master sword, they’re a sliver of life bar away from death, and knocked over.  Maybe it starts to make a move like it’s going to try to stick me with their spears, but my follow up attack interrupts and they drop.  It’s pathetic.

Nintendo, I know I’m nearly maxed out in power, but I still want a challenge.  I want it to feel like I needed to spend all this time accumulating all this power.  I should have a somewhat easier time than someone who comes to fight Ganon early, without getting all the power that I’ve accumulated, but if I come in late with a lot of extras that I didn’t need to get, scale up the difficulty a bit so that it’s a decent challenge.  It’s fair; players who rush to the final battle catch Ganon’s minions before they’re able to prepare; someone like me who plays though the whole game and takes his sweet time getting to this point, well they’ve had plenty of warning that Link is back, and they should have had time to make preparations, work out, sharpen their weapons, send for reinforcements, whatever.

I discover an exit in the middle of the banquet hall which leads me back to the outside, and I find myself back at the front of Hyrule Castle, nearby the second Gate Tower.  I enter, expecting to be shut in with another dark Lynel, and am not disappointed.

The second Gate Tower fight goes rather poorly for me, as I can just not connect with the bow for a headshot for some reason.  Both Gate Towers also happen to be covered in Calamity Ganon Goo, with a mouth that issues forth flying skulls that become a problem as they close in and take priority when I try to target my enemy, making it all the more difficult to attack or defend against the Lynel, who is by far the primary threat.  I’d like to just ignore the skulls, but the targeting priority keeps focusing on them for me, and for some reason I have a hard time hitting them as well, so I end up wasting a lot of attack opportunities hitting nothing, while the Lynel continually bashes me and knocks me down.

I have to eat 3-4 fruit meals to recover my health, and start getting frustrated.  I’m also running way low on normal arrows.  Eventually, I just kindof give up on trying to fight properly, and instead decide to just tank my way through the fight, taking the damage and stand toe to toe with the Lynel and deal as much pain as I can between knockdowns, and heal myself with snacks as needed.  It’s not at all a skill based way to win, but it works through sheer brute force.  By the time it drops, I’m down to my last 7 normal arrows.  Fortunately, I happen to have huge stockpiles of fire, ice, electric, and bomb arrows, well in excess of 100 of each variety, and in some cases closer to 200, plus four ancient arrows.  I haven’t really been using the elemental arrows for the last month, plus, other than when they are called for (such as in the Divine Beast entrance missions) and have been mostly stocking up on them.  So I’m pretty well prepared to deliver some heat.

After this fight, it’s not much further to get to the inner keep where Calamity Ganon waits for me.

I reach the threshold of the keep, and take a moment to pause and reflect on where I’m at in the game. Am I sure I want to go in there?  Do I really want to leave the last few things on my to-do list unfinished?  But I’ve come this far, and this is after all what the entire game leads up to.  Surely, I should press on and take on the final boss.  But will I win?

I step forward, and this triggers another cutscene, with a big, dramatic reveal of Calamity Ganon. He’s a spider-like demon with a face that resembles Ganondorf from other Zelda games, but more monstrous and demonic than humanlike.  He has a huge sword in his right arm, and his left arm is a laser cannon not unlike those used by the Guardians.  And, it’s tough to recall the details, but it seems like he has maybe 4 or 6 arms, probably 4 or 6 legs as well, and maybe some kind of abdomen weapon, like a stinger or a tail mounted gun, or something.  He’s all spewing fire and glowing with energy and calamity goo, and most of the time I’m looking in his direction, he’s shrouded by explosions from my bomb arrows and smoke.

I’m not really clear on how to fight this battle, and to the game’s credit, it doesn’t offer me any real obvious clues, or put on-screen instructions telling me what to do.  I have to figure it out.

Before the fight even begins, the four Hyrule Champions let forth a blast from the Divine Beasts, which weaken Calamity Ganon, dropping his health down by half.  Well, that’s awfully nice.  Thanks, guys!

It’s not like it’s a terribly difficult thing to figure out, but fighting Calamity Ganon is basically a lot of the same “shoot in the face with an arrow, then run up and wail on them with the sword” that I’ve had to so with pretty much every other boss-like fight:  the Hinox, the Lynel, the Divine Beast bosses, they all have this familiar pattern. 

I think a little more variety would have been nice, to keep the player guessing and keep them challenged. 

So, basically, I equip my Savage Lynel Bow x5 with Bomb arrows, and launch volleys to the face, and they do decent damage in their own right, and occasionally I’ll get an opportunity to run in and hit him with the Master Sword, if he falls to the floor stunned or something. 

When he gets down to around 1/8th of his lifebar, I notice that my attacks no longer seem to be doing damage, and so I realize after a while that I must need to do something else.  I’m starting to panic a little bit now, because his attacks are pretty hard to dodge, and I keep getting lit on fire.  They’re not hurting me too much, and I have plenty of food, but if I get stuck on figuring out how to damage him beyond this point, none of that is going to help me.  So I need to figure this out. 

I look around to see what I can figure out about his attack routine, to see if he’s opening himself up at a critical point in his windup, when I’m supposed to dash in and hit him. Or maybe I’m supposed to reflect his attack back at him.  Or maybe there’s something in the room that I can use against him.  Or if all else fails, look for the glowing weak point, and try to hit that.  These are common boss fight tropes.

Zelda is giving me advice and encouragement as well, but it’s not quite handholding instructions telling me exactly what to do.  But she’s using her powers to contain Ganon, or weaken him, or whatever, and she can’t do it forever, so she needs me to hurry up and finish him. I’d like to do this as well.

I continue to try to dodge and buy time, hoping to observe some clue that I can use to figure out what I must do to continue dealing damage. I’m getting sick of being set on fire, so I down a meal and a fire resistance elixir, the one time in the entire game I’ve bothered to use an elixir to buff my power up.

I notice that when Ganon unleashes his firey laser blast, a lot of the ground around Link burns for a few seconds, resulting in updrafts.  So I reason that I’m probably supposed to take to the air for this part of the fight and hit him from the air with arrows, maybe from a high angle I’ll see some part of him that is an obvious target.  

I try this, and I do manage to get airborne, but I don’t know that it really helps.  I shoot at him and there’s a lot of explosions from the bombs, so it’s hard to see what actually happens, and what part of him I actually hit.  But it doesn’t seem to be getting him past the quarter mark, and I need to come up with something else.

So the next thing I do, I try running in close, and then unleash an Urbosa’s Fury on him.  This does definitely do damage, and knocks him down to the ground, so I can stab him in the face as much as possible and hopefully get the rest of his life bar to turn black.

One or two Urbosa’s Furies, followed up with as many sword strikes as I can manage, seems to do the trick.

There’s another cutscene, an elaborate death sequence, and then Ganon’s final form is unleashed:  Dark Beast Ganon.

Link is teleported outside of the castle, and Ganon transforms into a gargantuan quadropedal monster, something resembling a cross between a bull and Godzilla.  

There’s a horse here, for some reason, and not one of my own horses, just some random horse. I presume it’s supposed to be Epona, Link’s Official Horse since Link started riding.  Zelda drops a special bow for me to use, called the Bow of Light.  I run forward and grab it, and it’s a pretty damn spiffy bow.  It does more damage and has more range than any bow I’ve ever contemplated.  It must be just the trick.

I run back over to the horse and mount it, and we’re apparently well acquainted already.  Just exactly where this horse came from is never explained.  I kick him into high gear and we mostly just watch from a safe distance as Dark Beast Ganon makes angry faces and spews death beams out of his facial orifaces.  Thankfully they do not appear to be aimed at me or the horse, but are kindof just spewing indiscriminant rage and destruction around the world at large.  

It seem like these attacks are probably capable of destroying entire sectors of the map at a time, so maybe I should treat this situation with some sense of urgency anyway.

OK, so the idea is I gotta run around with the horse, Zelda will do her thing, causing some glowing spots of vulnerability to appear on the Dark Beast Ganon, which I then have to shoot with the bow.

This is actually super easy to do.  Ganon never really comes close to hitting me, and my main challenge seems to be to remember to control the horse, to keep it reasonably close to pointed in the general direction of Dark Beast Ganon, so that I don’t have to contort myself at too strange an angle to nail his glow spots with the bow.

He has glow spots on his left and right sides.  And a glow spot underneath.  And then he has one on the top, and to get at that one I do have to ride up a wind updraft created by the heat from Ganon’s attacks.

Then finally, there’s one final spot, an eyeball that appears on his back, and opens and closes, and is only vulnerable when it is open.  So I wait for it to open, and shoot it once, and then that’s that.

Honestly, it’s one of the easiest boss fights I’ve ever had.  I did it on the first try.  It’s not Kid Icarus easy, but it’s not hard.

Ganon is defeated, and Hyrule is saved.  At least what parts of it were not incinerated by the 20-minute barrage from Dark Beast Ganon.  It seems to be implied that Hyrule is going to be just fine now.

The King of Hyrule’s spirit appears, along with the four Champions, for a final goodbye and thanks.  Zelda asks Link if he really remembers her.

The end.  Fade to black.  Roll credits.

Updated: 2020-Jun-19 — 4:16 am

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