I only have a little time to play today. Outside the shrine I just completed in our last entry, I return to that chest I saw but couldn’t open, and this time I have an easy time of placing the platform with Ultrahand, and can open the chest easily. It gives me some minor item, arrows x5 I think, but I’m happy that I do seem to have gotten better with Ultrahand as a result of all the practice I spent in the frustrating shrine last night.
I am right nearby another tower, and I want to go check it out and see if I can get into it. It’s on top of a high rocky formation, which has additional spiked barriers around its perimeter. I climb up, hoping that I can get over the spikes, but there doesn’t seem to be a gap or gate anywhere. I am hoping that this is a fortress controlled by our Hylian forces, but before long I spot a Bokoblin on watch, and know that this is going to be a difficult area for me to get into at my current skill and strength level.
I cautiously proceed around the lip of the fortress, around the edge of the rocky formation, and eventually come to a bridge way leading down to a Bokoblin encampment platform, which is also guarded. I spot a good half dozen or more enemies and it looks like to clear this out I’ll need to have a better plan, or a great deal more skill than I currently do at evading damage.
I retreat back the way I came, and head toward another spot that I had marked on the map, a shrine off to the North of where I’m standing. Along the way, I come to another bokoblin tree stand, also surrounded by spiky brambles, and I engage them briefly, but they are equipped with fire arrows and it’s a little too dangerous, so I run away.
I hide among some trees, and one of them comes alive and tries to kill me. I switch weapons to one of my improvised stone hammers, and hit it, but it doesn’t do any damage, although it does seem to connect.
Maybe I should try hitting it with a firey attack, and see how that does.
But nah, fighting enemies is rarely ever worth it in this game, unless you have to do it to complete a mission. So I just run away again.
I am interested in seeing how to fight these guys, and what sort of loot they drop, but I will bet dollars to korok seeds that they are not worth fighting either, because so little in the game is worth it based on risk-reward. It’s fun to fight if you’re powerful and have some practice with the controls, but in terms of what you get for winning fights, it’s never really worth anything because the only stuff you get for your troubles is temporary and doesn’t actually make you any closer to completing the game’s primary mission.
So I continue running away, until I get close to the shrine I’m trying to reach. Before I get there, I find a little Korok on the ground, on his back, with a heavy backpack. So he’s one of those travelling Koroks who needs your help to get reunited with his friend that he got separated from.
I’m going to try to help him, but his friend is way the hell far away across a field, his smoke signal barely visible in the distance. And suddenly some more bokoblins and a moblin run up from their nearby camp and attack me!
This is pretty cool, because in BOTW encamped enemies wouldn’t really leave their area if they spotted you, and this always seemed to fly in the face of the nature of an enemy. It’s one thing if they defend their home from an intruder, or run off someone from their territory, but it doesn’t feel like they’re being evil when they do this. But if they simply spot you going by and not taking any aggressive action toward them, and yet they still come out to try to kill you, that makes them feel more evil.
Good on Nintendo for making this subtle change in the AI. I’m pleased.
But yeah, still gonna run away. I can’t help the Korok without killing a group of 4-5 bokoblins and a moblin, and I’m at a disadvantage until I get my skill and power up, so I run away like a weakling coward, leaving the poor Korok to what would almost certainly be a doomed fate. Except that, knowing the game design, I’m sure the enemies will most likely not do anything to him, and next time I’m back in the area, the scenario will have reset itself so that I can attempt the challenge again, and so, once again, nothing I do or fail to do actually matters in the greater scheme of things.
I think that’s a recurring theme in these Diary entries and one major criticism or flaw in the design philosophy of these Zelda games.
So I enter the nearby shrine, and it’s challenge is called “spinning things” or something like that. I wish I was better at remembering names and titles, I never can quite remember them exactly, and I can’t remember how to spell Zonaite the right way without looking it up, so this diary is going to seem semi-literate at best, but I’m doing the best I can, and there’s a lot of detail in these entries that I am trying to remember, so bear with me.
So in side this shrine, I’m introduced to these wheeled platforms that roll by from one side to the other. They seem like they would be dangerous if I were to get hit by one. There are three which go from one side of the room to the other, and then the room resets and they do it again. The middle wheeled platform has a treasure chest on it. So if I’m feeling up to it I can try to get on to this platform and open the chest before it reaches the opposite side of the room and rolls under the wall, scraping me off of it, which would probably hurt a lot if it happen in real life.
It turns out it’s a simple enough matter to jump on to the moving platform, and I easily open the chest. It’s almost not a challenge. The chest has a bundle of 5 arrows in it, making it a worthy reward for such a simple activity.
Next, I have to assemble one of these moving platforms. There are two wheels that I need to attach, so it’s really obvious I’m supposed to finish building this half-completed cart and use it. The room has an inclined, conveyor belt like floor section that is moving quickly enough that running on it isn’t going to work as a way to traverse it, not without an insane amount of stamina. But building the cart is pretty easy. I just have to get the wheels attached, then stand on the cart and activate the wheels by hitting one of them with a weapon or arrow, and as long as I’m aimed in the right direction, off I go.
This is also a fairly easy challenge. On the other side of the conveyor belt floor section, there’s a crank embedded in the floor, which opens a gate as long as force is being applied to it. I can push it manually with my own strength, but as soon as I let go, the gate slams down, and I can’t get through it.
It’s easy and straightforward to reposition that cart I made to run it into the crank, turning it, to open the gate long enough for me to run through. Possibly I might even use Ultrahand to glue the cart to the crank, and arrange it so that it permanently spins the crank, but I don’t bother with that; I just aim it to ram the crank, a bit off-center so that it will spin it in the right direction, and that works good enough.
I’m rewarded with yet another Sphere of Light. Now I have four, so I can cash in for a heart container or stamina wheel boost.
When I emerge from the shrine, it’s evening and growing dark.