As I proceed toward the outer gates of Hyrule Castle, there are two Hylian men looking at what appears to be a fallen chunk of skyland that has landed here beside the road.
I talk to them and they are curious about the upper world and concerned about Zelda’s safety and whereabouts.
I take a moment to climb up on the chunk of rock that fell from the sky; I find a Steward, who is stationed to work on producing Zonaite energy, er, stuff, I’m still not clear how all that Zonaite stuff works together. F me, it’s going to take me forever to remember how all that stuff goes together. Anyway, there’s a machine there that I can put stuff into to make other stuff, if and when I’m ready to. OK.
I climb down and head into the castle ruins. Just inside the outer gateway, there’s a guy holding up a sign post, advertising Hudson Construction. He tells me he’s very proud of the company that Hudson has created. Remember Hudson from the Tarry Town storyline in BOTW? He built that town, and now he’s charged with rebuilding all of Hyrule, and he has left stations of material staged throughout the land. Good for him.
Up in the sky, I notice the moon is a familiar shade of blood red… Oh good grief, has NOTHING I accomplished in BOTW been of lasting impact? We have the Blood Moon resetting the world again and again every so often? Oh FFS. Damn it. I did NOT want to see that. One of the things I really grew to dislike about BOTW was how meaningless everything you do in the game feels, because ultimately everything resets every Blood Moon. Every weapon and item you find is temporary, optional, and ultimately inconsequential. Every enemy you defeat doesn’t matter at all, except for the boss battles, because every Blood Moon everything goes back to how it was. Like Groundhog Day, with Link in place of Bill Murray. I guess it’s helpful to have some mechanic to reset the world so that you can replay parts of it that you enjoy, or unfuck something that you messed up so bad that you can’t proceed unless something resets the world for you. The worst thing of all is when a blood moon happens right as you were about to fucking finish something, clear out some area or whatever, only the shit you just killed two goddamn seconds ago gets resurrected because you picked the wrong fucking time of the month to do that part of the mission, and now you basically have to do it twice, back to back. But god damn it, I was hoping that they would have done something different in TOTK, to make it seem more than just BOTW 1.5.
Up ahead, I see a shrine, right there in the open, so I ride over to it. There’s a woman standing there, and I talk to her and then enter the shrine.
Why are there still shrines all over the place in Hyrule? Didn’t I discover and clear them all out in BOTW? Why are there more now? And why do they look different from the ones in BOTW? Who can say. It’s just a thing we do in this game. We go around, we find shrines, we go into them, we do the thing, we get the power.
All right. This one is a battle training exercise. I get to re-learn the basic mechanics to enable flurry rushes: the side hop dodge, the backflip dodge, the perfect shield parry move. I manage to do this pretty well, without too many mistakes, and defeat the little training bot on my first go.
Hold the Left Z-trigger (to focus on an enemy), then use the Left stick side to side (side hop) or back (backflip) when the enemy is attacking to enter bullet time and enable the flurry rush attack. Or press A to parry. The parry seems to be the hard one to pull off.
Well, OK. I manage to break a couple weapons, which is nice because it opens up some weapons slots.
Hey, I should probably use my powers to combine weapons into compound items, to free up more slots, shouldn’t I? I’ve been approaching the combat from a straightforward, BOTW purist mindset. I need to think about the new possibilities this game has given me with the new powers. How do I fuse items together, again? Oh hell.
I guess I need to re-learn how to do that, or look it up, or something. I need to not forget how to do the basics.