The underground labyrinth is a huge rectangular building, and its roof appears to be solid. I don’t have a way to get in from the top. The front and back walls on the short sides have a massive, indestructible, immovable barred barrier, which I suspect may be opened by hitting a switch somewhere, but so far I can’t find it. I walk around the entire perimeter of the building, but don’t see a way in. It’s dark, but not so dark that I’d miss something, unless it were pretty well hidden, perhaps midway up the wall or tucked away in a corner in the shadows, but I don’t think I missed anything. Two laps around, and I give up, and try follwoing statues to the next Light Root.
This ends up being a fairly long trip, but each statue is only about the distance I can throw a brightbulb seed, or two throws, and it’s not hard to follow them. Mostly the ground is level, at a couple of points there’s some obstacles in the form of climbing, chasms, or Gloom. It kind of blurs together after a while. I mark each statue I find, and I don’t know how many there were, but it must have been well over 20.
At one point I encounter another Frox in an open field, and defeat it without difficulty. It drops mostly Frox parts, and only a few gems, nothing very special. But it’s a fun fight.
Moving on, I eventually encounter a large bokoblin mining camp. I put the Bokoblin mask on and infiltrate, looting their equipment crates and everything I can forage from around their site. They don’t catch on to me, even after I drop a bomb barrel on one of them, and I move on without having to fight anyone.
The more I move out to the West, the more Light Roots I see dimly glowing in the distance all around. I mark each one on the map, and geez there must be a good 6 or more of them.
At one point, there seems to be a branching of paths. I can continue west, following the statues, but there are two nearby Light Roots to the north. They don’t look that far away, and I want to light them up, so I take a side trip and go for them.
The first one ends up being on the far side of a very deep ravine. I have to glide across, and climb from halfway up the opposite side. When I get closer, I find there’s a Lynel on patrol just above on the lip of the ravine. It’s precarious, but I cling to the wall and hope he doesn’t spot me. After waiting a long time, he finally walks away, but I could tell he was suspicious. Maybe he could smell me, or maybe he has keen dark vision. Probably both. I switched to my darkest looking armor and hat, not that I know they do anything, but it doesn’t notice me. I move as far to the right (toward the next Light Root) as possible before coming up, and then run and glide over to it, and make it.
After lighting it up, there’s another one, but it’s a lot farther away than I thought, and I decide to break off from here, and fast-travel back to the branching point so I can follow the statues to the west. I’m nervous being in a dark area where there’s not much light and I can’t see well, the terrain is getting difficult, and there’s a freaking Lynel about.
I continue west, then, and discover a useful tactic with the little frog monsters. If they encounter a glowing brightbulb seed, they will be attracted to it if they don’t know you’re around, and will eat it. A group of them will concentrate around a bulb to eat it together, making it an easy target to then take out with a bomb arrow. This makes larger groups of them a lot less dangerous to deal with, if you can lay the trap before they detect you. Throwing a bulb while they’re on you will not distract them. They’re not tough, but they are fast, like to stay out of reach unless you have a long spear, and knock you down with their jumping attack, so when you get mobbed by a group of more than 4 of them they can ruin your day.
Eventually I come to another abandoned mining area, and it turns out to be the Gerudo mine. This is where Master Kohga said he was going to go to next, and here I find him. He’s trying to activate a steward zonai, without luck, because he doesn’t have a zonai arm like I do.
I have the drop on him, and I want to just engage and fight him already, but attacking him while he’s occupied does nothing. It’s story cutscene time again. I walk up to him, and he turns and notices me, monologues a bit, and then we are fighting. There’s a large open field shaped like a circle just next to the mining facility, which is where we’re transported for the boss fight.
This time, Kohga spawns a zonai airplane, which he uses to fly over me, attacking with bombs and fire. I use my best bow to knock him off his wing, using monster eyeballs for homing shots which make targeting him much easier.
The thing about archery in BOTW and TOTK is that your bow is very short range. You can see much, much farther than you can shoot, and it seems like you should be able to shoot much farther than you really can. Firing at anything above you, particularly anything fast moving, is very difficult, and if it’s something that changes course, forget about it. Your arrows fly pathetically slowly, which is part of the problem. But the Keese and Aerocuda eyeballs make up for these deficiencies. I hit him with Fire Keese eyes, to do a little extra flame damage.
When he’s knocked off his plane, he’s stunned, prone, or lands head down and comically buried in the ground for a few moments. But he’s usually so far away that it takes most of his stun downtime for me to run over, just to hit him maybe 1-3 times. I get really frustrated, because every time, I try to use the charge attack on him, but it doesn’t seem to go off properly at the end of a long run. I break the run, and have to tap Y to bring up my weapon, and then tap it again to attack. If I hold Y, nothing happens, and if I tap to attack, it doesn’t result in a charge attack. I seem to have to hit once, then I can initiate the charge, but the wind up is so slow, usually I don’t get a series of hits on him before he disappears with his teleport, and then he’s up in the sky again with a new airplane.
Each new airplane is a bit more difficult. The first one I don’t get a chance to see what its attack is; the next has three or four flame projectors firing down. The third one launches bombs, and the fourth and later ones have some extra shielding protecting the front and sides. I discover the only reliable way to hit him in this plane is to let him fly over me, take a hit, and then recover quickly, and take a shot at his back.
A bonus, when he’s directly over me, he’s going to fall very near, so I can hit him just after he passes, and he’ll land not far from me, and I can run up and hit him an extra time or two before he disappears.
When I defeat him, rather than dying, he monologues some more and escapes, telling me that he’s got plans to destroy the world by giving the Magnificent One lots of zonai ore that his Yiga Clan followers have been mining. We’re going to have to talk about that.
After the battle, I awaken a few stewards, and they give me another machine template stone. They advise that to get to the Lanayru Mine, it is a very long distance, and would be best to travel over the surface and go back underground through one of the chasms there.
Before going there, of course, I want to return to Lookout Landing and report to Josha so she learns about my findings. She’s very excited to learn about the Autobuild power. I demonstrate it for her using a broken balloon craft, and she gives me a template stone for this vehicle. So now I have 4 or 5 vehicles I can autobuild. Plus other vehicles that i design myself, it will remember the last however-many of those, which is cool. This makes building vehicles a lot less time consuming. I can grab nearby devices or spend raw Zonai if something is missing, effectively transforming the Zonai ore into the missing pieces. This is really cool, and if I had completed this quest in the first 1-2 days of playing, I bet I would have gotten a lot more into constructing stuff. Early on it seemed pointless because everything was so temporary and didn’t last long. But now there’s potential, especially if I ever get my battery pack upgraded. Which is probably the next thing I want to do.
Then go back to Death Mountain. And then I guess Lanayru and Zora’s domain and the depths to find and defeat Kohga again, hopefully once and for all this time.