I decide to go back to the underworld to scout a bit more and try to light up more Light Roots and collect Poes.
I get a bunch of Poes and spend a long time down there, and explore some territory that is dark on the map, but can’t find a Light Root to wake up to open up the map any more than I have it.
I spent a long time down there, and had relatively few encounters. I did see a huge creature called a Frox (?) I think it was. It looked like a Hinox sized Frog, or maybe a bit like a Molduga. It was seriously whale sized. I avoided it, not keen on getting myself killed not knowing how to fight something I haven’t seen before, when I’m only trying to farm and scout.
Eventually I run out of arrows and decide to give up on trying to find another Light Root in the south west region of the map, and Fast Travel back to Lookout Landing.
There’s a nearby map tower to the west, which I have had pinned for a long time; the one inside the Bokoblin fortress. I decide it’s time I tried to get it unlocked.
I fast-travel to the nearest shrine that gets me most of the way there, and then run up. I take a dumb, frontal assault approach, and hope that I can handle it.
I really should be able to, but I can’t. I get flustered with the controls and the camera especially, when I’m trying to use weapon focus.
Just about all of my weapons are augmented to be two-handed, so I basically don’t use shields, and this also messes me up. The lack of shield is one thing, and then on top of it the slower weapon. I do have good reach and do very good damage, though, which slightly makes up for it.
I run up the wooden ramp to the fortress hill entrance, and encounter a blue Bokoblin, who I destroy quickly with my melee weapon, which breaks. I’m supposed to face a Moblin next, but he somehow triggers some explosive barrels and blows himself up, kindly enough. I press the initiative, and make it into the fortress, where there are three Bokoblins on the ground, carrying shields, and a Boss Bokoblin, and another Bokoblin or two on watch towers, armed with bows.
I select bombs and throw one, because it’s the most effective way to deal damage to a massed group, particularly when they are armored. This is effective against the little Bokoblins, who all catch fire and die within a bomb or two. The Boss Bokoblin is tougher and doesn’t take much damage from the bomb. I can’t figure out what else I can use against him that will be effective. He’s big, moves quickly, has a long reach, and does heavy damage. He’s also not a base red, but a more upgraded version. I keep running, hoping to get some distance and continue throwing bombs at him, because I have a bunch of bombs from my underworld farming run, and they’re not doing much damage to him. I’ve hit him with 5-6 bombs, and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m failing to hit him, and he’s getting shielded by the surrounding terrain and walls, or what it is. I try to switch over to fire seeds, but I’m getting flustered and panicked, and keep running into fucking walls which causes the camera to glitch out, hiding the wall that I’m running into, and making it seem like I’m stuck on something invisible. I manage to survive a good while despite this, and at one point I climb over the inner palisade wall just as the Boss Bokoblin is coming around the corner to get me, and it seems like this is a great move, but I can’t capitalize on it, I’m all turned around and confused as fuck, and I am frustrated as fuck that the camera isn’t fucking cooperating with me to look where I need it to in order to be able to figure out how I need to move and where I can run to to get an advantage. I don’t care what, pick up a dropped weapon, cover to protect me, a thing I can grab with Ultrahand, anything!
Eventually I fuck up one too many times and get clobbered by the Boss Bokoblin, who seems to be the only one left standing, and I get the Game Over screen.
I Continue, and respawn directly in the middle of the fortress, and square in front of the door of the sky tower. Wow wouldn’t that have been great if I could have fucking found the fucking front door and walked in, like I’m doing right now, just before I got killed in the last fight? Then I would have seemed awesome. Instead I feel like I suck. But I’m more pissed again at the camera for continually messing me up. This is 2023 and 3D games have been around for 30 years, and we should have better camera control.
I need someone to explain to me WTF I’m not getting, because I watch people who are competent with BOTW run fantastically well, and I know it can be done. I was starting to get decently good toward the end of 300+ hours playing BOTW, but my skills are rusty, and I’m not as good as I was.
I do get the tower activated, which is my goal, and I shoot up and scan the terrain to update my map. So, Mission Accomplished, then.
While I’m up in the sky, I have no reason to go back down to where I came from, and probably a few good reasons to not do that, so I opt to glide toward the nearest sky island, and land on it. This gets interesting.
There’s a couple island hops, and I make it to a place that has a floating movable platform that I can glue some rockets to, which I can aim to take me across a fairly wide gap to a nearby sky island at the same altitude. I do this, and find another, similar platform, which can get me about halfway to the next sky island. When I get to that point, the rockets give out, and I’m stuck but I’m high enough that I should be able to glide in to the next sky island. But I see a huge humanoid made of boxes stomping around. It looks like a robot of Zonaite origin, and I imagine it’s going to be hostile, and I don’t feel in any way prepared to deal with this thing, especially now that I’m completely out of arrows.
I have little choice but to go for it, so I Save, and glide in. I try throwing bombs at the thing, but they’re minimally effective, if at all. Melee weapons are a joke as well, and going toe to toe with this colossus is no way to stay alive. I am mostly running, sprinting and then resting to regain my stamina, trying to stay a few steps ahead of the thing. I have my back turned to it most of the time and can’t actually see what it’s doing, which is part of what messes me up win combat. If I try to use the Left Z trigger to focus, it doesn’t seem to help, and causes me to run slower, making me vulnerable to its attacks. I’m not good at dodging to trigger bullet time, either, because I don’t know it’s attacks.
I’m starting to panic again, but for now I’m managing to keep a step ahead of it. I switch my arm power to Ultrahand, and use it to grab on to one of its boxes. I try to target the head but I’ll take any old piece. I manage to rip a few off, and even manage to grab the head one time. This seems to cause the Construct to fall apart, disrupting it temporarily. I run up to the one box that is glowing, I guess it’s the heart or something, and I do a spin move attack, using all my stamina, with my hardest hitting weapon, and manage to knock off maybe a tenth of its life bar.
Then it reforms itself and I have to run again.
So basically this thing has me seriously outclassed, and if I mess up even once it’s going to kill me, and I probably don’t have enough weapons to take it down even if I broke all of them on it.
I decide to try to grab pieces of it and throw them off the edge of the sky island, to see what that does. This is hard because I can’t run fast with Ultrahand, so mostly I can grab a box, swing around, extending the range of the grab as far as I can, and get a box close to the edge, before I have to drop it and run to get away from an attack. But I manage to do this a bunch of times, and eventually I do manage to dump one of the boxes off the edge. Maybe if I do this to all the boxes, I’ll win?
I think doing this triggered it to adopt a new mode, and instead of coming at me in the form of a humanoid composed of boxes, it turns into a cube, like a 3×3 Rubik’s Cube of Death, and starts tumbling at me, like a huge boulder in an Indiana Jones movie.
I’m really having a hard time keeping away from it now, and I don’t know how much longer I can keep dodging it like this. At this point, it’s attacks are coming at me so fast I don’t really have any time to counter attack effectively, and my tactic of ripping pieces of it off, while seeming to be somewhat effective, is now too difficult to sustain.
As I’m running around, I happen to notice a chest laying on its side on the ground. I have no time to wonder where it came from, but I do manage to run up to it and open it, and its contents are revealed: an Old Map.
It marks a location on my Purah Pad map, and I have no clue what this is for, or what I’ve discovered. I now just want to survive, so I dash for the edge of the sky island and dive off, falling a good ways before I trip my glider, and glide away to safety.
I land OK, and I’m on the Great Plateau in central Hyrule, the starting region in BOTW.
As I’m coming in for my landing, there’s a shrine nearby, and I head for it, landing right on it, and go in.
This shrine is a challenge to use motion from turning cogwheels by gluing sticks to the cogwheels with Ultrahand in ways that will engage them with other parts of the shrine to do useful work.
I connect to cogs with a rod, and get them turning to open a door. Then there’s a puzzle to figure out how to get these wheels to raise two platforms that are riding along a vertical rail. A combination of gluing rods to the cog wheel and using vertically placed rods so that the first platform raises the second works for me. I wonder if that’s the intended solution or not, but it works effectively and seems straightforward enough.
I collect my Light of Blessing, and exit. There’s another shrine nearby as well, that I saw as I was coming in to land, but I lost track of it when I landed at the Shrine I’m at now, which is nestled inside of a rocky ridge.
I climb up over the ridge hoping to see that other Shrine, but the first thing I see is a yellow Wizzorobe, and without arrows I’m in no way prepared to deal with it, so I hide and take a long way around the zone it is patrolling.
I figure I’m so disoriented now that I won’t be able to find the second shrine I saw, but I end up coming up right near it, and just have to glide over a little, then climb a bit to get to it.
This shrine is the most complicated one I’ve seen. There’s moving platforms, a spinning wheel, a huge steel ball falling that I need to redirect somehow toward a large bowl in the floor to trigger the shrine’s inner chamber to open. It seems more complicated than it really is. I need to use Ultrahand to create a platform to attach to a rising and falling platform, which I ride like an elevator to a higher level. From here there’s a fan in the floor blowing air upward, which I can use to glide over to another platform, where I see the ball falling. There’s pegs stuck in the wall, which I can manipulate with Ultrahand, to change the path the ball takes. The next part involves positioning a peg to get the ball to fall into a spinning platform that will dump the ball into a curved bit of rail, but the spinning platform is spinning the wrong way. This is easily handled with the Recall ability, but getting the timing is a little tricky, as the ball has to be falling just as the spinning platform is in the right position to catch the ball, and roll it into the curved rail section.
The ball doesn’t have enough momentum to roll up the curved section of rail to land in the bowl, and needs help, but that’s straightforward. The wall has a large spinning wheel, and the curved rail seems to perfectly match the bottom circumference of this wheel. I just need to use Ultrahand to pin a platform to the wheel, in such a way that it will push the ball up the rail and into the bowl.
This works perfectly, and then the only remaining challenge is to get back over to the starting platform so I can enter the inner chamber and collect my Light of Blessing.
When I emerge from this shrine, I’m right by a Stable, so I go to it. It’s Outskirt Stable, and there’s a lot going on here. There’s a Fairy Fountain right near here, but the Fairy has locked itself inside, and hasn’t come out since the Upheaval. There’s talk that the Fairy loved music and may need to hear a song played for it to entice it to return. The Stable keeper mentions a place called Diggdogg Bridge, and says that the largest Zonai ruins fell near there, and says I should check it out.
It seems like there’s going to be a lot of new information and sidequests here.
The walls have some interesting posters on them as well. There’s a cooking recipe, and a map of Hyrule with some large trees indicated at various locations on the map. I take pictures of both with my Purah Pad for later reference.
Behind the Stable, there’s a well, and I go down to explore it. I’m a bit surprised to find a young woman in there, talking to herself. I startle her, but she is friendly and says she is a Well Enthusiast. She says that there are 58 Wells in Hyrule, and tells me that she will give me 10 rupees for each one I tell her about. I’ve been to four, so far, so I get 40 rupees from her. She tells me she is going to the one in Lookout Landing next, so I should go there if I want to see her again. OK.
This well is especially good because it has fairies in it, and I manage to capture three, along with some glowing mushrooms and glowing cave fish, and some sticky frogs that I can use to make myself stick to wet surfaces while climbing, which sure sounds like a great idea.
After I leave the well, I visit the Fairy Fountain, and the Fairy indeed tells me that she needs to hear the sound of a flute before she will open her bud and come out again. She also mentions having a sister in another part of the world, although I neglected to remember where.
Where am I going to find a flute? Or a flute player? Some of the people at the stables mentioned a traveling group of musicians, maybe they have something to do with it. I wonder where they are…