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So much is familiar about Kakariko Village, yet so much has changed. Pretty much everything is new, or transformed. It’s like starting all over again.

Paya is the new village chief, after Impa retired. I haven’t seen Impa yet, and I wonder if she is still alive, but no one has mentioned that she has passed, only that she has retired. So I hope she is still with us.

Dorian, one of the village guards, has two small children. Dorian’s wife died and is buried in the village cemetery, but with the Ring Ruins having fallen, and the one that is off limits per Zelda’s strict orders, they are unable to visit her grave.

I meet a man on the streets who is a visitor to Kakariko, who wants to see the Ring Ruins up close, but is afraid of heights, so cannot.

Tauro, the leader of the Zonai Investigation, who is working on learning the mysteries of the Ring Ruins, has an underling named Calip. Calip is ambitious and wants his name to be remembered, while Tauro seems to be all but consumed with the discoveries that he can make. Calip guards the forbidden ruin, and will not allow anyone near it, not even me. Even Tauro is unable to go against Zelda’s orders.

The clothing shop in Kakariko has fallen on hard times due to the illness of the family’s grandmother. They have raised prices on everything, but if she returns to health they say they will lower them. The Stealth and Radiant outfits are here, but everything is marked $5000 rupees. The shopkeeper also mentions that her sister wants to study fashion in Hateno Village, which has become renown for its fashion design.

The house up the hill is where I find the clothing store’s family. I talk to the younger daughter, she is trying to discover a recipe that will cure the gloom sickness that has affected her grandmother, who is stable but can only eat porridge and rest in bed for now. She has most of the ingredients needed to make porridge, but is missing some ingredient that will be a cure for Gloom. So it’s up to me to find that ingredient and bring it to her, only I don’t know what it might be.

Back in the rest of their property, I find the grandmother in a small house. She is resting and doesn’t have much to tell me that I find useful.

There’s a couple of gardens on the property, one growing carrots but I am not permitted to take them. There’s also a water well on the property, which I notice has a ladder leading down. I climb down it to explore, and find a surprizingly large cave complex, where there are brightshrooms growing along the walls, and some other plants as well. There’s even a chamber with a few brightseed bulbs glowing, and they evidently provide enough light to enable a small crop of pumpkins and carrots to grow. I even find a treasure chest, containing a weapon called the Eight Fold Blade, which seems to have some bonuses to stealth. I don’t need it right now, so I leave the weapon there for later, but I take everything else I can find. There’s a small fire and a cooking pot, and I discover a recipe notebook which suggests a few things to prepare:

• Pumpkin + meat
• Apple + goat butter
• Honey + apples

It seems that the notebook of recipes was written by the deceased wife of Dorian, so it seems to be a hint that if I produce these recipes and give them to her family, that will probably be rewarded somehow.

I like this.

I don’t have all these ingredients, so I need to come back with Goat Butter and Honey. But I intend to make them in this specific kitchen, to make it that much more like the home recipes that Dorian and his children will recognize.

I try to find the exit for the well, but it’s dark and the passages are twisted, and after a while I use Ascend to transport myself to the surface, and come up on the hillside next to Kakariko Village, and in the immediate vicinity I see one of those Zonai gumball machines, and a shrine a bit further off in the distance. Next to the gumball machine, there’s a girl from the Zonai investigation squad, named Cori, who talks to me about Sundelions. She tells me that they grow in the sky level, and seem to repel Gloom. She is studying them, trying to see if they can be cultivated on the ground level here.

Perhaps this is a clue to cure Gloom. I think I have Sundelion in my inventory.

I put some Zonaite items into the gumball machine, and it spits out a bunch of balls. Some of the items produced are new to me: Big Wheel, Stabilizer, Balloon. Cori is impressed. She’s also interested in studying the Zonai tech.

I run up the hill a bit, to collect some forage objects I see. I also want to gain some altitude so I can more easily glide across the valley to reach the shrine that I spotted.

I keep going up, up, and it looks like I’m near one of the Ring Ruins. I find two older looking men standing, arguing about which is better: offense or defense, and a younger looking man sitting under a lean-to. The young man is frustrated with the bickering, and only wants to get rid of some monsters that have occupied the ring ruin, before they damage the inscription on the stones there.

This sounds like a job for Link.

It seems like everything I look at or see is something else for Link to do. I’m just walking around the village and I’ve already picked up a half dozen or so things to do, and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface here.

I wonder how many hundreds of hours it will take me to do all these things.

I wonder how people will react to me differently based on the time of day, or what things I’ve seen and done, or what equipment I have, or what clothing I’m wearing. There’s an astronomical number of things I could conceivably try, and no way to try them all in a single lifetime.

I take out the bokoblins at the Ring Ruins. First, I hit them by surprise from a distance, using a bomb arrow to nail one of them in the head. The explosion does some extra damage, and as well they are set on fire, causing further damage. The two bokoblins who survive the initial strike get up and run at the two Hylian swordsmen discussing combat strategy, and engage them. This enables me to come up from behind and deal killing blows without taking any damage.

The swordsmen are thus impressed by my fighting ability, and each learns that focusing solely on offense or defense is not the best way, and that balance is the key.

The younger Hylian thanks me and is able to access the Ring Ruins again, and studies them. There is a stone carving with runes, which he wants to discover the meaning of.

I leave the area and head over to the shrine that I wanted to get into. This one is called An Upright Mechanism. This one gives me a lot of trouble.

First, I know that there are these Zonai devices that stand upright. They act like anchors, so if I attach something to them, they will stay upright, like feet planted firmly on the ground. This makes it possible to raise blocks and keep them upright that normally would fall over due to balance and gravity.

I am able to solve the first part of the challenge with ease. I use Ascend to get through an overhang to reach the first area, then take an L-shaped platform and raise it upright, climb it, and use it as a platform to glide across an open chasm to the other side.

There, I am in a larger room. There is a high wall of bars to my left, which I can see through, but cannot climb. To the right there is a locked room, barred, and a platform with a bowl attached to it, and a ball. There’s another L-shaped platform in the main area where I am, and I can use it to climb over the high wall, then use Ultrahand to glue the ball to the bowl platform, and use another uprighter to stand them up so I can climb them and get over the wall again. Throwing the ball into a small socket in the center of a depressed part of the floor in the main area opens up the barred room, and gives me access to another platform.

From here there is another, wider chasm to cross, only I can’t do it. I think that I could create a lever using the L-shaped piece and the two bowl platforms, gluing them together, using the bottom of the L as a fulcrum, and the weight of the ball in the cup on one side to launch me across the gap.

Only, I can’t get it to work. There’s no way to generate enough force with the ball.

I next try using the three platforms to create an ultra-high ladder, but it still isn’t enough to get me high enough to glide across the gap.

I try many times, and cannot solve the puzzle.

The original idea I had to launch myself using the ball and bowl platforms is so close to the solution, but I’ve missed a critical bit of information about the uprighter device. It can be activated by striking it with a weapon. This exerts the necessary force to launch me like a trebuchet over the gap. Only, I don’t know about hitting the uprighter. I just know that it seems to have inertia when it is set upright, and it can balance things that ordinarily would fall if not attached to them.

So in the end, I have to rely on my first cheat, I look up the solution for this shrine, and it shows me how to activate the uprighter device. There is a clue at the very first challenge, that was too subtle for me to catch: an activated uprighter next to the deactivated one attached to the L-shaped platform. I never activated it previously, just placed it upright by manipulating it with the Ultrahand ability and natural balance. I might have solved it in 20 minutes instead of two hours if I had observed this.

I emerge from the shrine at night, just before the Blood Moon.

After it passes, I look around to see what else there is to check out in my immediate vicinity. It appears there is something more nearby, up higher. I climb and find one of the Ring Ruins. This one is being actively investigated by the Hylian people of the Zonai Investigation Squad. I talk to them, there is a stone slab with Zonai writing on it. One of the investigators is sleeping, or ill, I’m not sure which, and is talking in his sleep about Hearty Truffles. So I bet if I bring him a Hearty Truffle something good will happen.

I continue climbing up above this encampment, and find a treasure chest, which has a Big Zonaite in it. And climb further still, until I reach the top, where there’s a rock that I lift to reveal the hiding place of a Korok. Well, I guess some things never change.

I’m way high up above Kakariko village, with all the climbing that I’ve done, and I can see in all directions, quite a long distance.

I have so much to explore and do. Not only is the game world vast, but it is also especially dense with points of interest and things to do. I can’t imagine fully exploring this game, it’d take years at the rate I’m able to put time into it. It must be incredibly easy to overlook things, or to miss a hint, or to forget something that someone told you about.

How could anyone keep track of all this without taking notes like I’m doing as they play?

Up in the clouds. Gliding to a floating rock wasn’t difficult. But there’s nothing on it of interest, other than the view. I’m a long, long way up, and yet there are skylands towering above me off in the distance, at even greater heights. How shall I reach them, I wonder?

I have a clear view of Hyrule below, in all directions, except where clouds are passing over, between the land and my position. Some clouds are at my level, or higher, but most are below. Some even seem to be dark and raining, with lightning illuminating them frequently. It’s a marvel to behold. I spend a few minutes just taking it in. Surveying the land, I try to note and pin a few more Map Towers, but there’s far too many interesting things to note, and not enough pins.

The world is mind boggling in its vastness, and I’ve done so little to explore it. I feel like if I just continue going from one thing to the next, like in the ADHD Heaven picture, I’ll miss so much and never see all of what the game has to offer. On the other hand, if I go methodically, slowly, and “mow the lawn” back and forth over every square inch of the world map, it will take forever and be very tedious, yet be faster and more efficient than sporadically skipping about all over the place.

Nearby, floating just a little below, are a few more “stepping stone” skylands, leading to a larger mass. It seems this is the natural path forward, and it’s a bit more to explore, so I go and check it out.

There’s nothing much about, at least in the way of living beings, although there are plentiful birds who have landed up here, and seem to be a bit surprised to see me.

After they take off, the skyland I’m on is clear, and it’s just me, the trees, and the breeze through the leaves. It’s very peaceful, and beautiful. For a moment, I wonder why I should try to solve the world’s problems, when up here they seem so small, and I could live happily, eating mushrooms and apples and hearty radishes that grow here.

But I want to explore, more than forage, I want to find something cool, something useful, something that will inform me about what this place is, and what it was.

Looking around, it seems there are clues, but I don’t know enough yet to make much out of them. Mostly it is just a peaceful, beautiful ruin. These rocky skylands have some verticality to them, which I can climb down the sides a bit and see if there’s perhaps a small ledge containing a secret, or a sub-level sheltered beneath the top level.

I see a structure on a nearby skyland, a short gap that I can cross with the glider, and it looks to be Zonai, so I go for it. Up close, it’s one of those giant gumball machines, so I put in some Zonai materials and it spits out a bunch of balls, including some new items that I haven’t seen before. I still haven’t played around with these much to make use of them. A cannon, a time bomb, a spring, I’m starting to get more interested in playing around with this stuff. But I suspect that it will be a lot of trial and error, save and restore, until I figure this stuff out and how to control it well. I have a strong suspicion that it will be even harder to control than the horses, which I’m still not very good on.

I can just imagine setting up a platform with some wheels and fans, and having no way to steer it once it’s turned on, being frustrated as the machine careens out of control in not quite the right direction, and I end up deciding that it’s not worth it and that I’m better off just doing things on foot. But I hope the game isn’t like that, really. I want for there to be controls that I can sit at and steer a vehicle that I’ve built, but I haven’t seen anything like that yet.

Next to the Zonai gumball machine, there’s a large stone platform, which I can aim by turning a crank wheel. The platform retracts, only to violently launch at an angle. It looks like it would pulverize me if I were to stand in front of it, but that’s exactly what I do, and it launches me across to a nearby skyland. I land there, and look around a bit, and there’s a hole in the center of this one, a well that goes all the way through, showing the Hyrule landscape far below.

I notice what appears to be some kind of Zonai device dangling from a long cord or vine. I’m puzzled about how I might retrieve it, forgetting for the moment about Ultrahand, and I climb down to try to get a better look, but after my stamina meter drops about half way I think better of this, and climb back to safety.

I continue looking around and see what looks like a Korok challenge tree stump, the kind where if you stand on it, something will happen for you to try to do. I try standing on it, and indeed a thing happens: a flare shoots out, and starts falling far below. I guess I’m meant to chase after it, then? So I dive off the platform. I fall faster than the flare, and end up shooting past it. Trying to slow my descent, I try deploying the glider, and then try to look back upward to see if I can still track the flare, but I’ve lost it. I maybe see it, but it’s hard to tell, as there are other streaks of light streaming down near it and it’s hard to tell which is the real thing.

I decide to just continue falling and see what happens at the bottom. I end up plummeting into Kakariko Village, splashing down in the moat surrounding Impa’s place.

I climb out of the water, and enter, but the place is empty. No Impa, but there’s some books strewn about and I read them. I find that Impa retired as chief of the village, and turned the responsibility over to Paya. After the sky fell, Paya became fascinated with these “Ring Ruins” that came down from the sky and surrounded Kakariko Village. There’s a Hylian man named Tauro, who leads the investigation squad, and who is an expert on the Zonai culture, and who can read their language a bit, who is here to learn what they can. Tauro wants to check out one of the Ring Ruins in particular, but was forbidden to do so by Princess Zelda, who declared them off limits. Apparently Zelda appeared in the village sometime after we disappeared during our exploration under Hyrule Castle, which triggered this geographic transformation.

It’s a bit of a mystery, then, how and where Zelda appears, and how she is traveling about, and why she doesn’t stay with her people. It’s almost like seeing a ghost.

I guess there’s a lot to catch up on and discover here, with a lot of potential side quests and storylines to advance, and I’m not sure where to go next or what to do, exactly.

I feel like instead of reading a book, cover to cover, in page order, I’m doing random seek and playing a 10 second sample of a Compact Disc, skipping around from one snippet to the next in a completely random fashion, and it’s so distorienting. It’s a very postmodern way of constructing narrative, and I find it a bit difficult to get into.

I feel like I should take a break and pick it up again when I have more time. But not having a sense of a direction I should go in next leaves me feeling a bit lost.

The next place I had marked as a point of interest on the map is a mapping tower. This one is in Necluda, on top of a rocky hill. To get to it, I have to cross the river. I make a go at it a few different ways, but it’s too wide to swim and I don’t have materials nearby to create a decent boat with. Plus even if I did get across the river I’d still have to climb up some sheer rocks, and I don’t know if I can make it with one Stamina meter.

I end up almost drowning in the river, but I use the Purah Pad to fast-travel back to the stables I found a few sessions ago. This is a cheap way of getting out of death, if you ask me, but the game allows it, and well there’s not much consequence for dying in this game anyway, so I’m not going to feel guilty about it.

I take another look at the map, and it looks like if I take a roundabout path I don’t have to try to swim across that river. It’ll be longer overland, but worth it, I think, so I try that route. Along the way I run from every monster I encounter, not wanting to waste my time with them. I also pick up whatever forage ingredients I happen to find along the way, but I’m not really trying to divert from my goal to pick stuff up right now.

I eventually get to the tower, and find that it is locked. There’s a Rito birdman with a puzzled look about him, and he explains he came to try to fix the tower, which he was part of the construction crew of, only to find that he was locked out. He says he’s hungry and wishes he had some of the mushrooms that grew in the caves below the tower.

I take the hint and go to look for the cave he’s talking about, and find one. When I set foot in it, the game tells me I’ve made a Discovery. The walls of this cave are breakable, and I happen to have a couple of stone hammers, so I go to work clearing a path through. A few broken walls later, and I realize that there are some monsters in this cave, and they’re alert to my presence. I haven’t seen these creatures before, and I’m not even sure whether they are humanoid, or more like some kind of giant frog-lizard thing. They’re called Horriblins, and they seem menacing, but are not actually too difficult. I hit one in the face with an arrow, and knock another one into a pool of water at the back of the cave. To my great surprise, it’s not capable of swimming, and ends up taking damage while it struggles in the water, and eventually drowns. The final Horriblin goes down to my melee weapon, a rusty claymore topped with a bokoblin skeleton arm, which deals the most damage of anything I’ve been able to fuse together in the game so far.

With the cave cleared out, I’m hoping to find some of those mushrooms, but I don’t find anything except mineral deposits that drop when I break the stone walls, and some glowing cave fish, and maybe some other stuff, one random mushroom but it doesn’t seem like a special type.

I walk back up to the Rito and talk to him again, hoping he’ll tell me I found what he wanted, and help me, but he just tells me the same thing. I wonder if I should try holding one of the mushrooms from my inventory and offer it to him, but only after the fact. There’s so many ways to do things in this game, you never know what will work or if you’ve tried everything — almost certainly, you haven’t.

I noticed a Stone Talus walking along the path below the tower, which had a battle platform manned by three bokoblins, and decide it would be fun to see if I can take it down. I’m high enough that I can glide down and divebomb them, and they’re just puny red bokoblins, not particularly well arme, and I figure why not.

I attempt it, but after taking the bokoblins down easily, as soon as I hit the Talus in its weak point, it bucks me, and I go flying clear off the platform, all the way down off the side of the cliff, to a fatal landing below. Dang it.

I go back to talk to the Rito, this time holding one of each mushroom variety, and drop them in front of him, hoping that this will be what he wants, but that doesn’t seem to interest him at all. OK, well I’ll go back to fighting the Battle Talus, then. At least that will be fun.

It takes several tries, but I eventually take down the Talus. It isn’t too difficult, a decent challenge, but I keep screwing up. When I get knocked off, it takes me a while to get back on my feet, during which time I’m vulnerable to the Talus’s attack, which does me in with one hit more often than not. And if it doesn’t, it takes me nearly down, and sends me reeling. Climbing onto the Talus’s back to finish it off is more difficult, almost impossible due to the platforms built onto its back, which I can’t get on top of when climbing from below. I find that the best way to get back on top is to ride a thermal with my glider, after a fire is started. Fortunately, the last surviving Bokoblin has fire seeds that he throws, which make this easy. When he goes down, though, I’m left to my own fire devices. I happen to have a Zonaite fire generator fused to one of my shields, which I can use to set the grass on fire in front of me, and then zip up on my glider, and as long as I can ride it up high enough, and don’t get stuck in the Talus (which screws up the camera controls, leaving me effectively blind and turned around) I can get back onto the platform and take another whack at the Talus’s weak point.

After I hit it a few more times, the Talus is down to its last few hitpoints, and my stone hammer breaks, leaving me with no good melee weapon to do damage to it with. Anything else I hit with will do minimal damage and shatter quickly, so I jump back off, and fire bomb arrows at the Talus, which ends up actually being the best method.

It dies, dropping a bunch of gemstones, and a heart-shaped rock, which I fuse to my rusty claymore. The Stone Talus Heart Claymore seems like it will be an effective rock smasher.

I go back into the cave to look again for the mushrooms. I smash some rocks with the new Stone Heart hammer, and it does indeed do a fantastic job of smashing rocks. I blow up some more rocks and discover an opening I didn’t see before. There’s another monster in there, I make quick work of it, and pick up some more forage, including some more gems. Looking around, I still see no mushrooms that this Rito might like to eat. I decide to try Ascend, and sure enough that works, and I find myself inside the tower, coming up through the floor behind the locked door.

There are two long wooden sticks propping the door closed, jamming it, and I remove them and then the door opens. The Rito enters, and puts some oil on the machinery in the Tower. I then activate the tower, shoot up into the sky, and map the area. On my way down, I see some nearby floating rocks, and glide toward them.

I think it’s time to explore the sky world for a bit.

I have no idea what I’m doing, really, but it doesn’t seem to matter. In this game, there is no urgency, and you’re free to do things in any order at all. Any distraction you choose to follow is the right direction. You can come back to any mission or challenge at any time, so it literally doesn’t matter what choices you make, to do this, or do that, nothing matters.

Only, I would like it to matter, at least a bit. So I can feel like I’m a better player if I make better decisions, or like I’m on the right track. Anything to give my actions in the game more meaning, importance, substance.

Looking to where I can go next, the closest pin to my location is a short distance north, across a river. I head there to check it out. Before I get close enough to see what it is, I find another Korok looking to find his friend. It seems these guys are ultra common in this area. So far they’ve been easy to help, give me two korok seeds, and I have a working theory that they are there to lead me toward a nearby shrine that happens to be within a short distance of where the friend is camping. I’d like to clear another shrine, so I take the Korok to his buddy.

This time, I have to cross two rivers to get him there. I see a bridge, it’s a bit out of my way, but easiest way to go given that I’m carrying the Korok with Ultrahand. So I walk down river, carrying the Korok with me, and get to the bridge, cross it, and run into Addison. Addison wants help too, and this too is generally pretty easy, so I stop to help him. I put the Korok down, and go find a large rock that I can use to help him prop up his sign. He thanks me, and gives me his usual rewards.

I go back to my first task of helping the Korok. I tried assembling a little cart for him to ride on, thinking that might make it easier to cross the river with, but so far I haven’t needed it. I’ve just carried the cart with the Korok riding on it, all using Ultrahand. But there’s one more river that I need to cross, and this time the cart comes in handy. It floats, and I put it in the middle of the river, as far as I can reach with Ultrahand. Then I go swim out to it, and get on the cart, floating down river a ways. Then I pick up the Korok, unglue him from the cart, and put him as far out into the water toward the shore we’re trying to reach, and swim to shore, then pick him up from the shore with Ultrahand, and from there is just a little walk to get him to his friend.

At this point, an Octorock floating in the river wakes up and starts trying to kill us. I snipe it with the bow, and take it out, then grab the Korok and get him ashore. Fortunately the river current isn’t too fast and doesn’t take him far off downriver.

I get the Korok to his friend, but there’s no shrine nearby for me to discover. So there goes that theory.

I note that I’m in the area of Hyrule that I recognize well, the road from the Great Pleateau that leads to Kakariko Village and Hateno Village, through the broken mountain with its twin peaks. I feel like I’m at home in Hyrule for the first time. This area is one of the first parts of the map that I explored in BOTW, and feels more “home” to me than Hyrule Castle does, which in TOTK is so distorted by the changes to the map that it feels very different.

I look around, and spot a flying creature. It is large and looks a bit like a fish, not so much like a bird or a dragon. I spot another one, a bit further off, and it seems to be carrying something. I look at it with my Purah Pad telescope, it’s a bokoblin. Wow, so that’s something new.

I decide that I want to go back to that area that I had pinned on the map, before I got distracted by the Korok, and the most direct way is basically right under the zone this flying creature is patrolling.

I am feeling brave, so I just go for it, and when I get close enough that I’m spotted, I nock an arrow and loose at the creature, which drops the bokoblin. I’m hoping the fall will injure the bokoblin, but it seems that enemies are very resistant to falling damage in this game, just as they were in BOTW, and he survives the fall with almost no damage taken. The flying creature dies, however. I don’t like the look of the bokoblin, it is blue and seems to be a more powerful type, so I opt not to bother fighting it, and sneak away through some ruins that hide me from its line of sight, and I’m able to break off from the combat easily. Somehow I come across the dropped monster parts of the flying creature, and learn its name, it is called an Aerocuda. I guess kind of like Barracuda.

I re-check the map to find the pinned location I wanted to check out, and it’s still a ways off but not too much farther. I head that direction, and when I get there, it’s a tall stone pillar that I had spotted. Nearby is the same river I crossed with the Korok, and I’ve now crossed back over to get to this location. There’s a large, hollow tree stump at this point in the river, and I go in to check it out, and find a korok puzzle, a block that I have to re-assemble with Ultrahand, which is much easier to manipulate than the similar puzzles in BOTW were with the Magnesis ability.

I turn my attention back to the pillar, and try climbing it. I only have one Stamina wheel, and it gets me about 4/5 to the top, but I need to take an Elixir to get all the way to the top. I happen to have one, so I use it. On the top of the pillar I find what looks like a huge dandelion. I try picking it, but that doesn’t work. So I try hitting it with my weapon, which cuts it down, releasing one large, glowing seed. It falls slowly toward the ground below, and I jump off, intending to use the glider to land right next to it so I can pick it up. When I land, however, a chu chu blob spawns and attacks me, I turn to face it, and lose track of what happened to the dandelion seed, which disappears. I slay the chu chu, and look around for it, and it’s gone. I am annoyed.

Nothing I can do about it, other than reload the game and try again, but I decide to just accept it and proceed forward. The next place on the map that I had pinned is a bit of a hike, but I plot a course and run straight over the terrain, over hills and through trees, until I get to it. It’s a shrine, and I am interested in getting one more Light of Blessing so I can get another Heart Container or Stamina Wheel when I return to Lookout Landing.

But before I get there, I find something interesting. On the ground, there’s a circular pool of water, perfectly circular, about the diameter a humanoid would take up standing. It’s right in my path, and so as a get close to it, I check it out. It triggers a cutscene, much like those random map points in BOTW would trigger memories of Link’s amnesiac past.

This time, I see a vision, of Ganondorf summoning a large herd of Molduga, who stampede through a valley, apparently to attack the Hylian people. Rauru, Zelda, and another Hylian woman stand at the edge of a high point overlooking the valley, watching this happen. Rauru uses some power, which unleashes a massive blast of energy, which destroys the entire stampede of Molduga. Ganondorf recognizes this as a Zonai power, and muses that brute force alone will not be enough him to win, and he considers what his next plan should be.

OK then. That’s all the time I have to play tonight. Guess I’ll find that shrine next time.

Outside the shrine I just completed, there’s a little lost Korok not far away, looking to be reunited with his friend. I help him out, just picking him up and carrying him over by walking, using the Ultrahand ability. This is slow but involves no difficulty, and is probably easier than trying to build a vehicle of some kind. I’m rewarded with two Korok seeds for my trouble.

Near the Koroks, I spot a lady with a horse and wagon, and go talk to her. She is trying to get a load of stuffed sand seal plush toys to the children of Hateno village. I startle her, and her horse kicks the cart, causing the merchandise to go flying into the water. I offer to help, but she wants me to give her 20 rupees as a deposit in case I steal her wares, and I have to complete the task under a time limit.

Forget you, lady, pick them up your damn self then. I offered to help, and I have better things to do with my time.

I only hope that bringing toys to the children of Hateno doesn’t unlock something else that’s worthwhile down the road.

I look back to where I left the Koroks, and there’s a tall pillar with a platform atop it, with a long ladder to make it easy to climb up. I do so, hoping to get a good view and maybe it’ll be a good spot to glide from to get to something interesting.

At the top of the pillar, I’m looking down into the river which flows nearby, looking almost directly at a large boulder. I wonder, most likely there’s something to do here, perhaps I should try gliding to that rock, and see what happens.

But looking at my map, there’s already several pinned locations nearby that I would like to check out, so I decide to try to focus on finding and completing Shrines for the time being, since that is basically one of the only ways that I can earn permanent rewards.

I pick a Shrine location that I’d pinned and run towards it, but before I get very far, I see another shooting star fall from the sky. I try running toward it, but this time I don’t have a horse, and I can’t cover the distance before its shining beacon gives out, and I lose it.

There’s a shrine nearby when the beacon fades, and I go into it; it’s a combat challenge, a tutorial for throwing weapons. There are a few rusty halberds, and a Zainite soldier to practice throwing at. I hit him a few times, and earn a Zainite spear and a Light of Blessing.

Exiting the shrine, now I’m right by another Korok who wants to be reunited with his friend. OK, this is easy enough, and he’s right here. I just pick him up with Ultrahand and walk him over to his friend, and collect my two seeds reward.

Only, on my way walking over, I’m ambushed by some moblins and bokoblins who spotted me from their tower, and come over to fight me. I’m surrounded before I know it, and get killed. I respawn and try again, this time keeping more distance between me and the enemies, and deliver the Korok safely to his friend, earning another two seeds.

There’s another shrine near their camp sight, off the trail and back into a wooded area. I enter and it’s another combat challenge. This time, I’m stripped of all my gear, and have to win the challenge with the provided armaments: a shield, bow, 10 arrows, and a club.

There’s 3 or 4 Zonaite soldiers, one armed with a bow, the others with melee weapons. I have a fairly easy time defeating them, nailing them with a few arrows before they get in close to where I need to finish them off using the club. The club only lasts a few hits, before breaking, but I’m able to disarm another Zonaite soldier and take his weapon, and use it to defeat the rest of them.

Not bad.

There’s a treasure chest with a Zonaite weapon, and then I get another Light of Blessing. I’m up to 7 now, and if I get one more I’ll be able to cash them in for 2 more heart containers or some extra stamina.

Yes, please.

Outside of the shrine I just completed last time, I note on the map that I had actually set a pin nearby, not on the shrine location itself. I think there was some interesting rock formation that I wanted to check out. So I run off in that direction. As I approach, I notice a huge block of skyland falling down, and it lands in the field. I am curious and concerned. What if one of these falls on me, or what if they keep falling, and the entire sky world falls back to land on Hyrule and do massive damage to everything?

I don’t have long to ponder this, as night falls and a pair of bokoblins who were camping nearby notice me and run over to attack. One swings a stone hammer at me, while the other tries to hit me with a lit branch. I manage to fight them off, with some difficulty, sustaining some damage. After the fight concludes, another huge block falls from the sky. It reminds me of Tetris.

It doesn’t seem like there’s anything particularly interesting about these falling blocks, so I look at them for a bit and continue onward. A bit further into the field, I spot a small herd of horses, and decide to grab one to tame it. As I do so, I see a falling star fall from the sky. It’s right in the middle of my field of view, and a long way from where I am, so I use the horse’s speed to cover the distance more quickly. When I reach the shooting star fragment, to my surprise it’s right outside the entrance to an honest to goodness horse stable. Wow, how convenient!

I decide to register and board my new horse here. The inn keeper/stable master guy tells me that I have boarded horses with them in the past. I’ve heard that you can retrieve your horses from BOTW for use in TOTK, so I gather this is how it is done. However, I decide to board this horse, which I name Pony. I also notice our old friend Beedle is sitting nearby, but I don’t bother talking to him at this time.

I check Pony in, and walk over to check out a nearby shrine.

The shrine puzzle is called “Building with logs” or something like that. I need to use Ultrahand to cross a series of obstacles of increasing difficulty. The first three are easy enough; I simply use the logs as bridges and walk across the gaps to the next platform. The final challenge is a small body of water, with a current, and I use the logs to construct a raft, attach a fan that happens to be at the last station, and use it to propel myself across the water. Only, my angles are off, and I end up blowing the raft into the wall off to one side, where I get stuck. I try repositioning the fan, which gets me a little closer, but then I start going in circles. I try re-adjusting again, and get a little closer, this time I just wait for the circle to get as close to land as it will, and jump for it, hoping that I can swim against the current quickly enough to get the the shore before my stamina runs out.

I just barely make it, and earn the reward of a Light of Blessing.

Well, that wasn’t too bad.

I’m in an unmapped area on the Hyrule Plains, or adjacent enough to them that the terrain is pretty much the same. It’s time to explore a bit.

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.

Well… you’re not going to believe this.

Getting out of the underworld is EASY.

All you have to do is use the map to quick-travel. All levels of the map are accessible; you just have to use your eyes to notice the control hint on the screen, which tells you that the D-pad up/down will select the layer that you’re looking at on the map.

I figure this out after spending an hour or more in the underworld. I actually found it fun and rewarding to have the extra challenge, to actually need to use those foods and items that I had found, and to have some fear that I could actually run out of the stuff I needed most to keep me alive. I loved the unknown fear of not knowing how to get back to the safe and familiar area. But now I feel a little disappointed that it’s that easy to leave. I was expecting to have to earn the capability to get out, to have to fight my way up to the surface, to have to explore an extended time down there with little chance of survival and having to run away a lot and use my wits to their maximum, and find something that I would have to activate in order to be able to leave the underworld at will.

Instead it’s just a quick travel feature that I didn’t realize was given to me “for free”. This is how quick-travel can cheapen the game and remove opportunity for challenge. I would expect quick-travel options at some point, but let me appreciate quick-travel by not giving it to me so early and with so little done to earn it. Make me feel just how big that Hyrule map is.

Sigh. Well, whatever. I explored down there a bit more. I found an area where there was plentiful Zainite or however the fuck you spell it. I used up my stone hammers, but the combats with the bokoblins down there yield plenty of them, as they seem to be mining the stuff down there also. But I found that bomb arrows are even more effective for mining the stuff. They will destroy several blocks of the ore and drop all their yield at once, giving you many times more Zainite per action than pounding it out with a hammer weapon.

I also found these items called “poe” which are souls of some kind. They seemed important, but they also seemed like insects that you can gather as raw material. And there was a lot of them, so I grabbed all I could.

I couldn’t find anyone to talk to down there, or any clue about what I should be doing, so once I realized that I could just leave any time I wanted to, I decided to get back up to the surface. I’ll obviously need to go back down there again, at some point, once I learn more about what’s going on down there, and likely after I’m a lot more powerful. I will be much better off when I have a few more heart containers and some decent armor, and more supplies, especially light generation.

Without knowing more it seems like it’s going to be important to activate all the Roots of Light down there. Or Light Roots. Or whatever they’re called. Once they are turned on they brighten up the environment, fill out an area of the underworld map, and give you another quick-travel point. So probably once you light them all up, the evil power of the Gloom coming from below ground will be seriously weakened or destroyed. Beyond that, I expect as the story unfolds I’ll learn more.

I’m not sure what the right path is to do more story; I can look at the quest log and figure that out easily enough, but I’m just exploring right now.

Back at the surface of Hyrule, I return to the point near the chasm that I had jumped down. There were multiple points of interest within line of sight of this area, and I pick one at random and head toward it.

I pass by a little fortified zone full of at least a half dozen or more bokoblins and a moblin. It seems like this game must have been coded more efficiently to make it possible for you to have to fight more enemies at once. Which is a good thing. But I’m not powerful enough right now, and fighting is so pointless in a game where you use up your gear about as fast as you replenish it from these fights, nothing is permanent, and leveling up from combat only means that they throw tougher versions of the enemies at you.

It feels like a sisyphean treadmill, honestly. There’s no sense of progress other than the opening of the map and the completion of quests in this game. And yeah, that’s a criticism.

The thing I’m headed for is a shrine. I get there, and discover Addison, holding up another sign nearby. So before I go to complete the shrine, I help him get his sign erected, and he thanks me, gives me three rewards, all paltry, and then heads off to put up another sign somewhere else in Hyrule.

Another nearby rock formation has a treasure chest high up on a shelf, which I can’t seem to get to. I try using Ultrahand, but I can’t move the chest, and although I can put a platform right next to it, it doesn’t seem to want to open for me for some reason. I guess I just suck.

Oh well, it’s bound to be a crappy weapon that will last about 10 hits and then shatter, so who gives a fuck.

I go to the shrine. This one is another ultrahand challenge. It’s a bit of a tutorial. There’s these tent-spike objects that you can manipulate with ultrahand, and this helps you learn how those work. Not everything in the game world can be manipulated by ultrahand, and the things that can’t be manipulated, you can pin stuff to using these tent pegs objects. The pointy end will sink into the ground and anchor there. And you can attach other ultrahandable objects to them, so they end up being like anchor points. This is useful and I’m sure will prove important to solving many of the challenges ahead.

So, this puzzle takes a long time to figure out because I don’t know how the stuff is supposed to work.

First, I cross a bottomless trench, by jumping onto a platform that is rotating on an arm, which carries me to the other side of the trench. There, I find a floor switch, and a hittable switch. I stand on the floor switch, and a large section of wall in the chamber before me rotates around a 180 degree spin, and on the other side of the wall is a big orange bullseye.

There’s a chute coming out of the ceiling, and a ball drops from this chute, and rolls down the floor, and drains off into the bottomless pit, and then appears again at the chute, endlessly.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but evidently I need to get this ball to hit the bullseye.

On the ground there’s a couple of those tent spike anchors, and two sections of rod.

In the center of the floor is an object that I don’t understand, but I can’t control it with ultrahand, and the ultrahandable objects won’t stick to it. Eventually I figure out that when I hit the hittable switch in the room, this object rapidly spins. I deduce that the solution to the puzzle is to glue the ultrahandable parts together, and somehow attach them to this spinner, which I can then use as a baseball bat to hit the ball into the target.

It takes quite a bit of trial and error to realize that the anchor spike is the only way to get the log-shaped pieces to stick to the spinner. But once I figure that out, it’s pretty easy. I just have to get the angle and the timing right, and then I can hit that target.

I managed to do it on the 2nd or 3rd try, and open up the Spirit Light room, and collect my Light reward, completing the trial.

But there’s another room, locked, and the second target in the puzzle chamber must be the solution for it. This second target is more difficult, because there’s a section of wall hanging from chains, blocking it. The chains are unbreakable, but the hanging wall section is ultrahandable. Eventually I figure out that I can use more of those anchor pins to attach to the wall section, and pin it to the ceiling so that it is up and out of the way. This is really awkward and difficult because I’m so bad with the controls, but that’s the point of these shrines, to get you to figure out how to solve these puzzles in a trial that is challenging without trying to kill you.

So it take me a long, long, time to fucking pin that section of wall to the ceiling, but once I do, I figure the next part will be easy. Nope! The positioning is awkward; I have to change the angle of the “bat” that I created with the ultrahand objects, and the angle that the ball rolls in is really awkward. It’s like I’m batting lefty, and I am trying to swing at a pitch while standing in the batter’s box in a weird, oblique angle that makes it so that I almost have to hit a foul ball to hit this target. Most of the time when the bat connects with the ball, it doesn’t make good contact, and the ball rolls slowly, without enough energy to hit the target even if it happens to be hit in the right direction, which is only maybe 1 in 8 attempts, if that.

I fiddle with the positioning of the bat again and again, hoping to make the adjustment so that it will be easier and give me a better chance.

Eventually, I manage to do it, but it takes a good hour, hour and a half. And it’s frustrating. And for all that effort, the reward in the chest is an Elixir of Speed, which is a craftable item that I could make, and is a temporary item that I probably will never actually need to use, or will rarely want to use.

Totally not worth it. Fuck’s sake.

This is a cool game, and I know everyone loves it, you can’t say anything bad about Legend of Zelda without hordes of Zelda fanboys wanting to hunt you down for having a contrary opinion, but Nintendo could make the challenges better and make the rewards better. I don’t hate it, but I feel like it’s less fun, more of a chore, and has little to nothing to do with advancing the storyline, or completing the mission of the game.

I felt this way during much of BOTW, too, but I kept faith that all this stuff would be rewarded, like the shrines were going to be some kind of practice for a real world battle where I could use the abilities that I was training with. But really they’re just like little mini games built out of the engine’s physics systems, and they’re alright, but not when they’re ultra frustrating and give you so little in reward for the effort.

Could be it’s super easy in reality, and I just really suck at the game, but as I’m new to these things and learning the mechanics this way, I kind of feel like these kind of tutorial puzzles are supposed to be a reasonable challenge, with a reasonable reward for solving them, not a pain in the fucking ass with a jack shit reward that’s not worth it.

But because every Legend of Zelda game is supposed to be the Best Game Ever Made in the History of Video Games, I feel kind of guilty feeling like this. Only… I’m not wrong. I don’t think I am.

Well, it looks like I’m probably stuck down here for a while.

The underworld is dark and dangerous.

I have a bunch of those brightbloom berries that I can use to light up the immediate surroundings. These are pretty essential, and I hope I don’t run out of them before I can figure out how to get out of here.

Without them, it’s so dark I can’t see shit. It’s practically pitch black, and I could be walking straight into a wall and not really know it.

There’s patches of Gloom all over, and walking into it drains my life meter, and I can’t replenish health with food until I recover from the Gloom. I can do that if I’m in the vicinity of one of the underground travel towers. I tried fast traveling back to the one point I saw on the map that I could travel to, and it turns out that it was the underground light source that I had activated earlier, not a way back to the surface.

I’ve run into a couple of Bokoblin camps, and fought them. They are plentiful, they move pretty quickly, and they use bows. They can kill me if I’m not taking them seriously, and I’m pretty weak with only a 4-heart health meter, weakened by Gloom, and basically no armor.

Weapons are plentiful. There’s skeleton bokoblins and if you kill them their arms are a 20-damage weapon, which is far more powerful than anything else I’ve found so far, although they break very quickly. Living bokoblins and moblins seem to have a fire affinity, and will use fire. You have to watch out for that. I’ve also encountered some weird giant toad looking things that hop around and are a nuisance.

I found a couple of skeleton horses, and tamed one, and discovered that I can safely travel over pools of Gloom while riding them. So that is handy. But riding fast in the dark is bad. So I ride a bit, shoot off a glow berry arrow a distance ahead, explore and grab any forage I can find, and repeat.

I make my way around the perimeter of the area that illuminated when I activated the travel tower, and then pick a direction at random, and head to the west on the map, and after a bit of peril I find and activate another travel tower. Handy.

But how do I get back to the surface? That’s what I really want to do right now. I feel like I don’t really belong here just yet, but I’m surviving OK, and should be able to handle it down here as long as I don’t have to fight too much, and don’t go through all my supplies, which… I’m going to run out of food pretty soon and I’m going to be pretty screwed if I do, and I’ll also be pretty screwed if I run out of light source.

The forage here is different. There’s a plant that can confuse enemies, causing them to fight each other. Which seems like a good thing to put on an arrow, and then shoot into a camp and let things sort themselves out while I stand off at a distance and avoid getting into any fights.

There’s also bomb plants, which as you might expect, give you a form of bomb. It’s apparently pretty powerful, when I used one it really trashed the boko I hit with it, although that might have also been due to secondary explosions from an explosive crate.

And some kind of spore producing mushrooms, which I don’t know what those do yet.

I don’t know if I should continue to explore laterally, or maybe try to climb. There’s some elevated things that look like tree roots but are probably rock, since I can’t imagine tree roots being at this depth, given how far I fell to get here… it doesn’t seem like climbing would be a fast way out of here, and might take like hours.

When I exit the shrine, it is raining. But not a thunderstorm. The rain lets up after a short time. Near the shrine, there’s a rock formation, what looks like something that fell from the sky realm. I go over to investigate, climb it using Ascend, which works better in the rain than does conventional climbing, and find a fire seed plant at the top, and a rock, under which I find a Korok.

I take the vantage offered from atop this small rock to peer around in the dark using the Pura Pad’s telescope ability. I’m in the middle of a pretty much wide open field, with gently rolling hills and lush meadows surrounding me in all directions for a good distance. Off in the distance, there are numerous points of interest, and I try to pin as many as I can, but the Purah Pad doesn’t allow more than 6 or so pins. I spot several shrines off in the distance, and try to pin each of them. There are several towers, and some buildings, mostly ruined looking places, some interesting looking geological formations, fallen rocks from the sky above, and a Bokoblin camp or two.

Near the Gloom hole I passed by on my way to this shrine I just completed I notice that there is a hot air balloon, and I wonder whether that had been there before, and if so how I could have missed the thing. I walk over to take a look, and there’s another Hylian standing near the edge of the chasm. I talk to him, startling him, and he tells me he’s on the Chasm Investigation Squad, or something. He’s trying to discover what’s up with the chasms and the gloom, and is working with one of the guys who I talked to back at Lookout Landing, who is working with Hoz and Purah.

I decide since I’m here, I might as well jump down the dangerous looking hole and find out what I can. I leap off the edge and fall quite a long way. It is very dark and I can’t really see the ground below, which must certainly be rushing up to me at an unsafe rate. I unfurl my glider, and try to assess where I’m at, but it’s no good, too dark, and I really can’t see how much farther I might have to go.

I don’t want to run out of endurance so I drop again, risking everything, and then re-deploy the glider. I do this two or three more times. I pass through a sparkling mist about midway down, and then I get the idea that maybe I can take one of those glowing seeds and drop it, and it will help me see the bottom. I can’t quite figure out how to do this, though, but as I am continuing to fall I eventually see a light that I’m heading towards — must be the ground — so I pop the glider one more time and land safely.

So this is how I learn that TOTK has a THIRD map level, for the underground. I might have guessed, it wasn’t too much of a secret, really. But man is this game going to be extra super big.

It’s very dim, but the Gloom doesn’t seem to be too abundant right here, and I’m not feeling any ill effects. I wonder how I will return to the surface, or what I will end up finding down here. I look about and see some glowing fireflies, which I stealth sneak up to and capture. They’re a new species, native to the underworld. Then I spot something that looks like a large plant pot, almost reminding me of the fairy ponds from BOTW. It looks like I can walk up to it and do something with it, so I try to do that, and it lights up, illuminating a small part of the area surrounding it, and also fills in a bit of the map on the Purah Pad. So it’s a little like a Tower.

I wonder, can my Ascend power really take me through so much rock to the surface of Hyrule? Is that the way back? Or can I use the Tower transport system, even from way down in these depths? Or will I have to climb out? Or find a route to the surface through caves? How am I going to survive?