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I haven’t played the game in over a month, because I’ve been too busy with other things. I’ve been wanting to get back into the adventure and advance in the quests, but I’ve been away for so long now that it feels like I’m going to have to review my old entries to recap where I’ve been and what I’m doing. Which is great, that’s the whole point of my keeping these diary entries.

In the meantime I wanted to post something, and I was just ruminating about this, and thought it was worth sharing…

One of my favorite new enemies that they added to Tears of the Kingdom is the Gloom Hands.

They’re super creepy and the first time I encountered them, I thought they were fantastic. I didn’t know too much about how they worked, I just kept my distance as much as possible, climbed to high ground where they weren’t able to reach me, and hit them with distance attacks. But later on I got into melee with them, and found that they pick you up and squeeze you, draining your life and afflicting you with Gloom sickness, which has the effect of draining heart containers from your life bar, temporarily.

If you kill the Gloom Hands, a Phantom Ganon sometimes will appear, seemingly to enact vengeance on you for defeating the Gloom Hands. Or maybe the Gloom Hands are like Phantom Ganon’s herald.

My initial take on Gloom Hands was that they were Wall Masters, only they appeared in the open spaces in the overworld, and not in dungeons. And I loved the callback to LOZ1 part of that.

I also immediately connected Gloom Hands to the Gloom plague that came with the Upheaval, and connected it with the Underworld, because that’s all plain and obvious.

I think a missed opportunity the designers could have taken advantage of was that the Gloom Hands should drag Link into the Underworld, if they manage to grab him and hold him for long enough.

Imagine being grabbed and abducted into the underworld, weakened by the drain of the Gloom sickness, only to be dragged downward through the earth, in a manner opposite of the Ascend ability you gain, creating a neat “bookend” to the design idea of Ascend. And once you’re pulled under, they drop you into that world, and rather than finish you off, they just drop you, leaving you weakened and lost in some random part under ground where you have no idea how to return to the surface, and you are forced to explore and rely on stealth as you fight your way out.

That would have been really great gameplay, and I’m sad that they just grab you and squeeze you until you break free or drain to 0 hp and die. They could have done more with them, and I wish that they had.

It’s been about a week and a half since I last played, so where was I?

Oh yeah, outside Lookout Landing, I had just expanded my zonai charge battery pack, and now I have a lot more power to run contraptions.

I guess I ought to go back to Death Mountain and help Yunobo and look for Princess Zelda.

I fast-travel back to the shrine near Goron City, and ride the rails out to YunoboCo HQ. I’m hoping that I can buy the rest of the fireproof armor suit here, but I find out that they only sell the body piece of the set. So where the hell am I supposed to get the pants and the helmet from? I don’t know.

I figure I’m going to need this in order to explore Death Mountain, but for the time being the temperatures are not deadly to me, so I’ll explore the area. Yunobo said that he saw a Hylian woman matching Zelda’s description at the peak of the mountain, and wants to go back there to look for her again. The game doesn’t often tell you that explicitly what to do, so I figure I better get on it.

Walking out over the lava plain from YunoboCo HQ, walking in the general direction of Death Mountain, not far from the HQ I come across a pair of Bokoblins and a Moblin sitting around a fire. I use Yunobo to charge them, and he does a lot of damage, and also triggers some explosive casks near their camp, and takes them out pretty easily. I pick up the loot and move on, climbing up over a rise, and before too long I come to a mining camp, where I find a few gorons, still zonked out on marbled rock roast, some digging, some eating. They tell me I can go ahead and take one of their mine carts if I want, and that the rails here run right up to the summit of Death Mountain.

That’s all they had to say. I hop in the art and hook up a fan, and start it up. I don’t go very far, when I find a spot where there’s a cave that I’d like to explore. It’s the Eastern Death Mountain cave, and blocked with explodable rocks, which I destroy with Yunobo, since I don’t want to waste bombs, and there’s a lot of places where bombs will spontaneously combust here, and I need to be careful.

Inside the cave, there’s a rail system, and the temperature is hot. There’s a lot of lava in the cave, and the only way forward is to ride a rail cart. Fortunately there’s another cart and fan here, which are easily assembled and allow me to make ingress. When I get to the end of the line, I see a green gem, which I recognize as a shrine gem, embedded in a pile of glowing rock, which I rightly presume to be an Igneo Talus. I’ve come this far, I might as well fight the thing.

This is tricky, since I’m not protected against heat fully. I can hit the Talus with frost weapons, which cool it down to where I can stand on it, but I still take damage doing so. I equip my heaviest hitting hammer weapon and run a spin attack, hitting 9-10 times, before being thrown. I also manage to use Recall to reverse the path of the Talus’s arm when it hurls it at me. This requires some close timing, but it works pretty well, I avoid the damage it would have dealt, and it hits the Talus, doing some decent damage. I re-freeze it and jump on to finish it off, and it drops hardly any gems, but I do get an Igneo Talus heart which I fuse to my most powerful sword. Taking this Talus down broke my Flux Construct Core club, which kind of sucks, but at least I won the fight. I also got the shrine gem, which is now projecting a beam in a direction basically pointing back out of the cave. There’s some ore deposits and brightbloom bulbs here, so I take the time to clear out the cave entirely, then grab the shrine gem, put it back on the mine cart, and ride it back out of the cave.

Once out of the cave, the shrine is not a very long walk away, on the other side of the minecart tracks, and I pick up a Rauru’s Blessing, refilling my life meter, which the Talus fight had taken me down to about 1/3.

I feel like I missed something when I was in the cave, so I return to have another look. Sure enough, between the rock island where I fought the Igneo Talus, and the opening of the cave, there was a smaller island, almost like a sand bar, which had some additional forage materials, and a hard to see crack in the wall, which lead to a tunnel, where I found a bubbul frog. I slay the frog and take its gem, and then I decide to check my location on the map to see how close I am to the summit of the mountain. Since I’m inside a cave, I might as well see if perhaps Ascend will get me to the top quicker.

I pop up maybe 2/3 or 3/4 of the way up the remaining slope of Death Mountain, a fairly short climb away from the summit. And it’s an easy climb. I check the temperature, and change out of my Flamebreaker armor and into my Climbing Gear, and get all the way to the top.

The crater of Death Mountain is desolate and empty, devoid of anything. I see no sign of Zelda anywhere. No story cutscene triggers, and I’m left standing wondering what I was supposed to expect. I walk around about the caldera, avoiding hot pots and gloom puddles, hoping to trigger something. Eventually, I do trigger the story cutscene. Apparently, based on the camera angle and the way the scene looks, I was supposed to go back and keep riding the rail cart all the way up. On the other side of the mountain, the final destination of the cart, a platform, is where the cutscene unfolds. Yunobo recalls what he can of his last moments before putting on the mask that Zelda gave him, and then his memory goes blank. It’s pretty clear that this Zelda is a lookalike impostor, but the characters don’t seem to get it yet. I feel like this is maybe storytelling aimed at a younger audience, because it seems to me that if I can tell what’s going on, the characters in the game ought to have some suspicion as well. But it feels like this is a deliberate design choice to allow younger gamers to feel smart since they too probably will have an idea that something’s not right, and figuring it out ahead of the characters in game will make them feel like they’re solving a mystery. But as an adult gamer, it’s not much of a mystery. “Zeda” clearly isn’t Zelda, and we’ve already seen one impostor in the Yiga Clain’s trap on Dueling Peaks, so this Zelda sighting must not be her either, since she’s not behaving like Zelda would, using mind control to take over Yunobo and enslave the Goron people with the drug-like marbled rock roast.

Just then, “Zelda” appears before us, and disappears into the volcano, which suddenly erupts! A huge monster appears out of the crater! It has three rocky, worm-like heads. It spews giant flaming rocks which don’t seem to be terribly well-aimed, thankfully. Yunobo wants to fight it, but says it’s too high in the air for him to charge it. He asks what should we do?

Well, there happens to be a pre-built Zonai wing with two large batteries, four fans, and a cart bottom and control stick laying right there. I grab it with Ultrahand and set it upright, hop on and start to take off. It is extremely heavy and slow, and clumsy to fly, but it does get us up to a level where I can fire Yunobo off at the heads. The heads are extremely easy to target, it seems like the game is auto-targeting Yunobo for me. Which is fine, I’m very happy with that since controlling the wing sucks so much, I couldn’t do much otherwise.

It only takes three hits, one on each head, and the thing is defeated. Zelda is no where to be seen. A deep chasm in the bottom of the volcano crater has opened up. Yunobo thinks she must be down there, and jumps in. I hesitate, but follow. But the temperature is too hot, off the scale.

I notice that although the temperature gauge is telling me it is deadly, I don’t seem to be taking any damage as I fall into the chasm, transitioning between the overworld and the underworld. So I end up having a lot more time than I should. I fall all the way down, and am inside a huge cavern — it looks like the whole mountain is hollow. I spot a Light Root and try to glide toward it, but I run out of stamina and fall, and would have died from the fall but for the fact that I have a single fairy left in my inventory, who revives me. I run to the light root, and activate it. So now I can fast travel back down here. I’m going to need to get more elixirs or flame resistant meals, or find the rest of the Flamebreaker gear if I’m going to explore down here. But for now there’s nothing I can do.

Well, if there’s only one more SkyView Tower to unlock before I can fully activate the power of the Purah Pad, then maybe I should make that my next goal. Gerudo Highlands, it is.

I fast-travel to the Gerudo Desert tower, shoot up in to the sky, and glide as far toward the Gerudo Highlands Tower as I can. As I’m in the sky, I can see a long way in all directions, and note two Geoglyphs that I am sure I haven’t visited yet, as well as several Shrines dotting the landscape, and numerous glowing lights on the ground, possibly fires or but they look a bit larger than typical campfires, and I wonder about what they might be.

My flight path goes nearly directly overhead the nearer of the two Geoglyphs, so I attempt to make landing there first. It’s quite a bit short of how far I could have glided had I wanted to maximize my distance and reach the tower directly, but I figure this will be worth my while. As I descend, I can see that this Geoglyph is painted on the side of a steep and very tall mountainside. Nearly all of it is near vertical, and I am not sure where the reflecting pool may be. I pinned the spot on the glyph that I thought looked most likely, but it’s on a sheer face, and as I climb to the spot where the pin was, I can tell this isn’t the location. I have little choice but to try to move around until I can find it, but since it’s so vertical, that’s really difficult, and it’s even harder than normal to get enough distance to be able to see the features of the geoglyph’s image so I can tell where might be another likely spot to check.

I climb down very far, and then head back up. Maybe 2/3 of the way up, or so, I think, there’s a long, flat, wide ledge covered in snow, cutting the Geoglyph about in half. I run along this ledge, looking for the pool of Tears. I collect a lot of forage and encounter a Ice Lizalfos, some wolves, chuchus, and keese, before I eventually find the Tear.

The vision is of Ganondorf, pledging his loyalty to King Rauru, long ago in the distant past. Although he accepts the pledge, Rauru knows of Ganondorf’s evil nature, and as he explains to Zelda why he accepted him, it’s in order to keep Ganondorf close so that he will be aware of his actions.

Awakening from the vision, I return to finishing collecting the available forage, and then return my attention to the SkyView Tower hunt. By now I’ve climbed so high on the Geoglyph that I’m able to get a long glide in, and get myself most of the remaining way to the tower.

When I get there, I find no entrance at the base of the tower. Next to the tower, though, there’s a tent, with a note from the building crew, who say that due to heavy snow they had to take shelter in the nearby cave.

I look around for the cave, and find one at the base of the north face of the nearby cliffside. I enter, and discover a tunnel leading down to a warm, dry spot. There’s an underground river running along, and some construction materials. Another journal left behind by the construction crew explains that they had to shelter due to the cold weather and heavy snow, but explored the cave and found that it was safe and warm, and that the river runs directly beneath the tower, so they’ve undertaken a project to shore up the tunnel to provide a stronger foundation so that the tower will not cause a cave-in.

The key then is to realize that when I get to the foundation of the tower, I can Ascend upward and enter the interior of the Tower, and hopefully activate it.

The cave is rich with forage materials, and I pick up a few brightbulbs, some bomb flowers, and a few miscellaneous other things. There’s fish and lizards too.

I use the building materials to construct a raft, and then float down the river. I go over a waterfall, and continue until I hit the structure the construction boys wrote about in their journal. There’s still more forage material around to be scavenged, so I take my time and clean the place out as best I can. Not all of it is easy to reach, and what I can’t reach easily, I ignore. I discover a well hidden, tight passage, which leads to a small inner cave, behind the waterfall I came down, and here I find a treasure chest, containing a decent bow.

I return my attention to getting into the Tower. The raft I constructed is now wedged under the foundational structure, making a nice platform from which I can Ascend into the Tower.

I do so, and once inside, I find that the tower is in perfect working order, although the doorway to the outside is completely snowed in, and not even my fireseeds seem to do anything to melt the snow.

I activate the Tower and shoot up through the top, and add the map data to my map.

I note that I’m near a sky archipelago, and drift toward it. It seems that gravity is much weaker in this area, perhaps due to the altitude, or if not then I’m not sure why. But my falling speed is like that of a feather. I come to a landing on the nearby sky island, which is inhabited by two Soldier Constructs, one of whom activates and starts shooting rockets at me. I hit him with a shock fruit arrow, and take him out in one shot, then do the same for the other Soldier, who doesn’t seem to notice me.

Both Soldier Constructs were standing guard over a floating stone platform, which have two rockets lying on them. I use the rocket to attach to the platform, and then activate it, flying much higher and farther than normal, with considerably more momentum, and end up high over the archipelago, with a commanding view of it. I descend to the next highest island, and destroy another Soldier Construct, but there’s nothing much of interest here. Looking far down below, I’m very near the second Geoglyph that I had spotted earlier, and I also note that there is another one of those five-petaled sky islands that all seem to have some interesting carvings on them, which I know now need to be photographed and shown to the scholar man who works in Kakariko Village.

I glide down to this island, and snap a picture. As I do so, the center of the island falls free of the ring of stone “petals”, and I fall down with it. As we fall together, a shooting star falls from the sky, almost directly next to me. As I fall with it, I attempt to match speeds with it, and eventually get close enough to it that I’m able to snatch it right out of the sky! This is really cool.

I’m so high up, I still have a tremendous distance to fall, so I re-orient myself and attempt to glide the rest of the way to the second Geoglyph. I think this one looks a bit like Rauru’s Queen, Sonia. When I land, it has just started to rain, and I have to switch my gear to non-conductive materials in order to stay safe. To my surprise, I find Impa and Cado have traveled here, apparently to study this Geoglyph themselves. I talk to them, and then run around until I find the Tear pool, and view the vision it unlocks.

This one is of Zelda and Sonia. Zelda expresses a desire to master the power over Time that Sonia has. She thinks it is the key to returning to her own time. Sonia tells her how to approach it, saying it’s like seeing the memory of the object that you wish to reverse time for, and then coaxing it backward. She also tells Zelda that she has another power, more powerful than control over Time, which is the power to disspell the power of Evil with her power of Light. This is a bit cheesy, admittedly. Zelda tells Sonia and Rauru about Link — and Rauru is not familiar with that name. Sonia advises Zelda that it is OK for her to return to her own time, and return to Link.

There’s a ton of things to explore and discover here, but right now I’m just here for that final SkyView Tower, and that’s done. Time to return home, across the entire continent, to see Robbie and get that final Travel Medallion for the Purah Pad.

So I zip back to Hateno Village, talk to Robbie, and max out the Purah Pad, other than the Compendium, which I ain’t payin for. It’s too much money, and I have plenty of opportunities to take pictures of things if I just remember to do so.

Speaking of which, I have one new photo in my album of ancient runes to show the guy in Kakariko, so I fast travel there, and show him, he tells me this one tells of ghostly sightings of a figure resembling Princess Zelda in the ancient past. I guess she’s been doing some kind of fast travel herself, only maybe through time as well as space.

Then I fast travel to Lookout Landing, and talk to the Well Girl, who gives me 50 rupees for finding 5 new wells. Now there are 36 remaining wells in the land, which I don’t remember how many there were to start out, but I’m probably down to a little more than half of them at this point… She suggests that if there was a way to search for things, it could help, which I take as a suggestion to add a photo of a well to the Compendium so I can search for it using the Search+ feature on the Purah pad. Sure enough, that works.

I also talk to Hestu, and I have 10 korok seeds, which is just enough to expand my Shield stash one more slot, so I do that. Now I need at least 17 for the next cash-in.

I’m low on rupees, so there’s nothing else I can buy here.

I go talk to Josha and Purah again. Purah says I should go to Lurelin Village and invetigate the reports of Pirates causing trouble there, but also tells me that I should avoid the southern lands, because there’s a lot of monster activity there, and I still have three Regional Phenomena to check out, so I guess that’s probably my next thing to do.

I buy 20 bomb flowers from the weird statue, and buy the location of another of his bretheren in the underworld. I’ve now gotten 3 locations and have yet to visit a single one down there.

Finally, I stop outside the front gate of Lookout Landing, and there’s a fallen sky rock, which I’d all but forgotten about from when I checked it out a long time ago. But there’s a hylian man standing next to it, staring at it on wonder, and it reminds me that there’s something up there. So I go there and there’s a Zonai construct steward there, and I talk to him, and he tells me that he can expand my Zonai power pack by 8 cells for 800 zonai charges. So I give it to him, and he expands my battery. 8 cells is equal to two 3-unit batteries, plus another 2 units, so in all I now have 3.75 batteries worth of charge capacity on my belt. Which is a HUGE upgrade from the single battery of 3 cells that I’ve been stuck playing with this entire time.

I only have 5 Zonai charges now, which kinda sucks, because now that I have all this battery capacity, and the QuickBuild power, I suddenly have a lot more useful things I can do with Zonai. I have a feeling that the things I can build are finally going to come into their own, and I’ll be making use of them a good bit more than I have been so far.

I fast-travel as close as I can to the Akkala Ancient Technology Lab, the Akkala SkyView Tower, fly into the sky, glide as far toward the Lab as I can, and then hike it the rest of the way on the road.

The first place I come to is the Akkala Stable. It’s one I haven’t been to before, so I stop and talk to everyone. Penn is here, but says there’s no leads for any Zelda sightings, and he needs to move on. There’s a few people here who I talk to, but I can’t really say they said anything memorable. I catch a nap to get the extra pony points, visit the well, which this one has a hidden prayer statue, which I use to cash in for another Heart Container, and then I visit the shrine near the stable.

The shrine has an interesting challenge. A Jenga tower of metal blocks, atop which sits a ball. If I glide over to the platform where the Jenga tower stands, the platform opens up like a trapdoor and dumps the whole tower, resetting the challenge. If the ball rolls off and falls into the pit below, the whole thing resets. Apparently, I’m supposed to Ultrahand blocks out of the tower, and then catch the ball as it falls, before it goes into the bottomless pit and triggers the reset. I manage to do it after 3-4 tries, and it’s not that hard, just takes the right timing.

There’s some electrical circuits, which I can use to activate a moving platform to ride out nearer to the Jenga tower, where I can grab a treasure chest. There’s another chest on a high platform, which I can use a Jenga block to climb to. All in all, a decent puzzle, but not as challenging as all that.

I get the Light of Blessing and continue on. Further up the road, I encounter a Hylian, actually a Yiga ninja in disguise. I fight him on the road, and then two Moblins in a nearby camp take notice of me. I’m surrounded and not doing well. I manage to take everyone down, but I burn through some food and two fairies. I am pretty annoyed. Fairies are much harder to come by in TOTK, and I had just the two left, and hadn’t managed to come by any more in ages. I wasn’t wearing my best armor, the Moblins were well armed and carried shields, and all I can seem to manage to do against any enemies in melee is to run away from them, while they plod behind me, but somehow keep up, and then before I can turn around to face them, or get the camera pointed the right way, they’re already on me again, and I’m sick and tired of sucking at combat in this game already.

I go still further up the road, and find Addison, help him out with his sign, and then make it up the rest of the way up the road, and I’m at the Akkala lab, which has been taken over by Yiga, and mostly destroyed. I go to enter the door, but am greeted outside by two Yiga, a ninja and one one of the heavily muscled swordsmen. By this time I’ve switched up my arms and armor, and am better prepared, I deal with these two pretty easily.

And then that’s it. Inside the ruined Tech Lab, there’s a guy who makes clothing, who had been kidnapped by the Yiga, and was making their uniforms. He gives me one, so now I have Yiga Clan body armor. He says if I can get the complete set, I should be able to blend in among them and infiltrate their organization. So that’ll be a fun mission when it comes up, I’m sure.

I find the travel medallion in a locked chest, and check out the rest of the Lab before fast-traveling back to Hateno, where I quickly give Robbie the medallion, and he upgrades my Purah Pad so that I can now use the fast-travel power from anywhere I place the travel medallion. He also tells me he can further upgrade the Purah Pad so I can have as many as 3 travel medallions. I’ve already explored enough of the world to unlock the 2nd one, and he says I need to visit more SkyView Towers to unlock the 3rd. It looks like there’s only one more place to go to unlock a tower, in the Gerudo Heights area, where I have yet to travel to. Despite ranging far and wide all over Hyrule, above and below, there’s so many places that I’ve barely been to for any length of time: Goron City, Zora’s Domain, Lurelein Village, Hateno, Gerudo Town. I’ve barely been to any of them, really. Goron City and Hateno being the most explored of these, but still just one real visit so far to each.

There’s a lone cherry tree blossoming on a mountaintop near Hateno Village, and I glide out to it, to make offering and summon Satori, Lord of the Mountain. He appears, and reveals the locations of hidden secrets all around in this part of the world. I try to mark a few of them, but again the topography hides a lot of the cave entrances from view, so I can’t easily mark them with Map Pins. It seems like it’s easier/better to visit them in person.

I travel back to Dueling Peaks Stable, to get some more of my armor upgraded at the fairy fountain nearby. I am able to upgrade a lot of my stuff up to level 2, but it’s expensive. These fairies in TOTK need rupees as well as materials in order to do upgrades, and for 50 a pop to go to Level 2, per item, it’s a fuckload of rupees. This game is going to make me grind forever to get everything. I don’t have even half of the armor sets, and not even one complete set yet. While I’m here, I visit the well there, and screw up, scaring 3-4 fairies away by whistling accidentally. FML.

I give a lot of meat the the dog here, but apparently once you’ve found the hidden treasure for a given dog, it doesn’t regenerate, so I just end up wasting a bunch of meat feeding the dog.

I talk to the guy who thinks there’s some special Pumpkin in the woods nearby, and I go again to look for it, but don’t find it. I do find a bunch of other forage, and end up fighting some bokoblins, an evermean, and the Hinox, who has re-spawned here. This Hinox fight is very wasteful, as I lob probably 8-9 bombs at it, and hit it with a bunch of arrows, missing the eye almost every time, I’m just sucking at everything I’m trying to do today in this game. I do manage to take down the Hinox, and decide that’s enough for now, and give it a rest.

Robbie has headed to Hateno Village, and Josha wants me to go there too. They have a technology lab there, and if I go they can enhance my Purah Pad some more. They mention something about activating my sensor, so I can detect things nearby. I barely used this power in BOTW, and found it more trouble than it was worth, to be honest, but it won’t hurt anything to get it. Plus, I’ve been playing the game for two months plus and have yet to go to Hateno village even once yet.

I fast-travel to the shrine nearest to the road to Hateno, which just happens to be the Dueling Peaks Stables. The shrine is halfway up the mountain, so I use the altitude to glide halfway across the field. When I land, I find a korok nearby, and spot a Hinox wandering about in the field. It’s a bit of a novelty, I think every one I’ve ever encountered has been asleep when first encountered. I’m not afraid of a Hinox, so I run right up to it and get in a fight. I am not very accurate with the bow, and waste several arrows trying to hit it in the eye. Also, after I do manage to hit him and put him in a stun, I find out that he has wooden armor on his legs, and I can’t hurt him even if I’m not trying to hit the leg armor. I light the legs on fire, then, and go another round with him. My more powerful melee weapons do enough damage to put him within a hit or two of death during the second stun, and I finish him off with a final arrow to the eye.

A bokoblin on horseback spots the fight and comes to join it, but Tulin takes care of him for me, which is pretty awesome. I manage to take them both down without taking any damage.

Continuing on, I get on the road East toward Hateno, and before not too long I’m at the stone fortress wall. I find the gate has been taken over by a moblin and some bokoblins.Not wanting to fight them all, I spot a fallen piece of sky island, and use Recall to raise it back into the sky, and once I’m over the wall, I glide down.

There’s a treasure chest on a column just on the other side of the wall, and that small wood cabin that I remembered being abandoned in BOTW. I check them both out, and pick up a shield, some mushrooms and apples, some wood, and discover that the inhabitant of the cabin is none other than the guy I met in Kakariko Village, the scholar who’s studying the Zonai culture. His journal says he’s going there to help decipher the zonai glyphs on the ring ruins.

Continuing along the road, I encounter two Koroks who need to be reunited with their friends, and two Hudson Construction sign guys. I help them out, and fight a couple of bokoblins on the road.

After helping the second korok, I’m just outside Hateno Village.

I enter, and start talking to everyone. It’s a large village, I think it’s even bigger than it was in BOTW, with new construction. The traditional farming and fashion shops are still going strong, with a new fashion designer, Cece having gained influence. The town is decorated with mushroom-inspired designs from her shop. The Mayor of Hateno, Reede, feels threatened by her popularity, and she challenges him to an election. Then she asks me for help, and wants me to hand out Hylian Mushrooms to citizens to buy their votes. I guess this is acceptable, then?

I visit a few more shops, a vegetable shop, the dye works, a few houses, a school… everything opens up new sidequests. Both Cece and the Mayor are up to something at night and I’m supposed to try to find out what. A guy in town has a crush on someone, and wants to know what he can do to attract her attention. I talk to her, she says she wants 100 frogs. I don’t think this guy’s getting laid any time soon. I find three different wells in Hateno, each which seems to be connected to the same large cave complex, which I explore thoroughly. It’s got some monsters and a lot of forage: keese, chuchus, horriblins, mushrooms, frogs, fish, bomb flowers, brighbloom bulbs, some ore. It’s not plentiful, but large and spread out, and I collect everything I can while I’m down there.

Mayor Reede’s shed has a secret, and in order to get into it to find out what it is, I need to Ascend through the cave underneath it. I mark the spot on the map, and get in there. There’s a journal with notes saying that Reede is working with a farmer to create a new type of Pumpkin, in an attempt to show his leadership so he can continue to serve as mayor.

There’s children running around Hateno, and they seem to have some kind of game pretending to be secret agents and adventurers, keeping the village safe from monsters.

There are some elders in the village, who don’t care much about fashion, or understand it. And some fashionista villagers, who look down on everyone else. And some tourists visiting the village as well.

The Dye guy tells me he can dye my glider, which I’m not sure why I would want him to do that, but maybe there’s some quest where I’ll need to do that. Who knows.

Up the hill, I spot a shrine, so I need to go there and make it easy to return to the village quickly in the future. This one is a puzzle with a wheel that I need to attach a scoop to in order to scoop balls form below and move them to a higher level, in order to unlock the gate. I work it out, it’s not that hard. But I find it’s easier to just attach the balls directly to the wheel, rather than try to attach a scoop to the wheel.

Having solved the shrine, I’m getting near to the Hateno technology lab near the top of the hill. I’m heading up there, finally, late at nigh, and a shooting star appears. I attempt to retrieve it, but it’s already 4am, and when the sun rises the star fragment disappears. But by the time it is lost, I’m already pretty close to the SkyView Tower for this zone, so I decide to go there. It’s on the peak of Mt. Lanayru, so I need the cold weather gear and climb a lot. I take the most direct route possible, climbing straight up, and when I get to the tower, I find it is in good working order, no task or puzzle to use it.

i I unlock the map, and take a look around at the sky world level — there’s a couple of interesting-looking sky islands to check out. Later.

For now, I’m trying to stick with Hateno. I return and finally visit the Tech Lab. Robbie is there, and he has several upgrades: the shrine sensor, sensor+, Hero’s Path, and one more mode that I have to travel to Akkala for, which will allow me to set up a fast travel destination anywhere I want.

After enabling the Shrine Sensor, Robbie wants me to test it out, and I discover a new shrine nearby, in a cave near the road that leads to the Tech Lab. It’s a Rauru’s Blessing, so no puzzle, but there’s also a Bubbul frog in this cave.

After I get back to the Tech Lab, Robbie tells me about the other modes, and it turns out I’ve already done the things that need to be done to unlock them, so I get a bunch of Purah Pad upgrades all at once. He also tells me about the Hyrule Compendium, but I already know all about that. Ever since I got the camera feature, I’ve been trying to take pictures of as many monsters, items, and materials as I can.

I guess my next destination will be the Akkala Tech Lab, then.

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.