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A few steps from the entrance of the A Major Test of Strength shrine in the area past the bridge, marked Ancient Columns on the map, I find another memory photo location. 

This memory triggered is not a very pleasant one.  Zelda is trying to unlock the shrine, but is unable to because it is only unlockable by the one who wields the Sword of Destiny. She’s trying to figure out another way to open it, when Link rides up on a horse. Zelda is not happy to see him, tells him she doesn’t need protecting, and to begone.  I can’t help but think about the Legend of Zelda cartoon that aired when I was a kid, and imagine Link saying: “Well, I only happen to be holding the one and only sword that seals the darkness, so I thought maybe you’d want some help here!  Excuuuse me, princess!”

I proceed from the area further along the road, keeping to the high ground, until I’m close enough to see the Tower for this region.  It is covered in evil looking purple goo, which I know from my encounter with it in the Labyrinth in Gerudo that it is harmful if touched.  Looking up the road ahead of me, I spy at least three heavily armed moblins, and elect to not try taking them on, as it would only serve to wear out weapons that I don’t need to waste.  I glide from my location to a high spot on the far side of the rise where the tower stands, far away from the road leading to it, and manage to avoid the moblins notice.  From what I’ve noticed, moblins seem to have rather dim senses.  But also, I am wearing some of my stealth outfit, so I’m sure that helps.

So I need to figure a way up this tower that doesn’t involve touching the goo.  There’s goo all around the tower, but maybe there’s some way I can get around it.  But if I take a long route, it will sap all my stamina, and then I won’t make it.

There are a few free-standing columns about the tower, and I try climbing the nearest one, to see if perhaps from there I’ll be able to glide to a spot on the tower above the goo with a clear shot straight to the top.  There’s no such route visible from the first column, so I glide over to the second, climb it, and check again.  And so on, to the third column, where I spot a disturbing looking eyeball creature below, down at the base of the tower, in the goo. 

I don’t know what the thing is, but it doesn’t seem to see me, despite having multiple eyes, or if it does, it doesn’t seem to care that I’m there.  I look down at it a while, and zoom in using the Sheikah scope for a close-up.  It looks a bit like a Beholder from Dungeons and Dragons.

I don’t know what else to do with it, so I fire an arrow at it.  I use a flame arrow, and am fortunate enough to hit it on the first try.  The fire arrow is powerful enough to kill the thing in one shot, and as it dies, something happens, an earthquake or something shifts the goo, and a column nearby where the eyeball-creature was topples, leaning into the tower, creating a climbable bridge to get me over the goo!

I run over to this spot, walk up the leaning column, and climb the tower, activate it, and download the map data for the region I’m in.

I take a moment to survey the surrounding landscape, and spot a number of interesting geographical features:  a tower of rock that looks like a skyscraper-sized magic wand, or something; a likely fairy fountain spot, very nearby; a couple of shrines; and a few other odd geographic sites that unless I miss my guess are likely korok seed spots.

I have a mission to see that fairy and give her 500 rupees, so I glide that way and unlock her.  She is grateful, and offers to upgrade my clothes, and so I upgrade everything I can.  I have plenty of the materials she needs to do everything.  I upgrade my climbing gear and my stealth gear and my cold resistant jewelry that I bought in Gerudo, and my rubber pants and helmet from Faron. So far as I can tell, this doesn’t augment the special power of these items, only their armor value. But I don’t really know the underlying mechanics, so it’s possible that by augmenting the base protective value of these pieces of gear, they also improve the elemental property for resisting that type of damage.

I also manage to catch 3 of 4 fairies that are floating about the pond, restocking my fairy supply.  Good, I always need more fairies.

Having succeeded in the fairy quest, I decide to return back the way I came to see the man at the Stables who sent me out here with his money to offer to the fairy.  I head down the road back toward the Stable, and it’s night time.  I spot a moblin sitting by a fire, and it looks like I’ve found a camp.  I get a little closer, and I sure have.  The moblin is the only one awake, and is apparently on guard, watching over SIX sleeping bokoblins — and not weak-looking red ones.

I in no way need to mess with these monsters, but I feel like the game is challenging me to see if I can defeat this many enemies at once.  I think about trying to sneakstrike them, but with the awake moblin watching over them, that’s going to be just about impossible.   I don’t have any ranged weapon that can one-shot the moblin — maybe a bomb arrow would do it, if I could score a headshot, but even then, the upgraded moblins have a lot of hit points.

I try it, and it wakes up the whole camp, as one might expect. I don’t score the head shot, and I don’t take out the moblin. It does set all the bokoblins on fire, though, but this does only a little damage to each of them.  It seems that bomb arrows do great damage if they score a direct hit, but their splash damage and the damage from the secondary fire that is generated isn’t necessarily a lot.  It can take out a crowd of low-level enemies, but anything powerful can just shrug it off.  For an arrow that costs 50 Rs, it seems a bit underwhelming for use against more powerful opponents.  

I switch to regular arrows and try to headshot the remaining enemies from long range, which is pretty difficult and I loose a bunch of arrows but in the end I take out the whole camp at no actual risk to me, albeit at great expense.  I’m down to about 60-70 normal arrows, 8 bomb arrows, and a little under 40 of the other kinds of special arrows — fire, lightning, cold.

I go down and loot their camp, and they’re well equipped. I upgrade a couple of my weapons, discarding weaker stuff that had been filling my slots, and move on.

On my way back, the road goes down into a valley or canyon, and I stick to the high ground, and take a ridge running along the right side of the road.  This leads me to a section of the road where I spot the helicopter drones patrolling the valley below.  I’m above them, and they don’t seem to see me or pay me any notice.  

I want to assess how strong they are, and whether I can take them out, so I create a save point and engage.  Holy crap are these things tough. It’s clear that the designers intend for these things to be enemies that you sneak past and run from.  I hit the nearest one with a bomb arrow, and it does a sliver of damage, barely anything at all.  Immediately, it retaliates with a massive blast from its underturret, and the only thing that saves me is the fact that I’m far enough back from the edge of the cliff that the blast impacts the cliff wall, shielding me.

A wall of explosion and flames flares up in front of me, temporarily obscuring my vision, and when it clears I see the drone is hovering there, looking around for a bit, as though checking to see that it got me. I back away, and a few seconds later it resumes patrolling its programmed route.

I nail it again with another arrow, and the same thing happens.  No matter what I do, it never leaves its zone that it guards, and it only deviates from its patrol route if I hit it with an attack, and only then just for a momentary pause while it scans the area looking for targets.

I decide to see if I can take one of these things out, and just how much it would take.  I run through every special arrow I have. There’s a few misses among those, but I nail the thing with 8 bomb arrows and between 100 and 115 fire, ice, and electric arrows before it finally drops.  Every time I hit it, it fires a retributive blast at me with its eye-cannon, and I’m able to establish a pattern, a routine, of hitting it, backing off to use the cliff wall for a shield, and then running back up to nail it a few more times while it’s stationary and scanning for targets.  I hit it 1-3 times per cycle around its patrol route, and it takes maybe an hour to bring the thing down — and in game time, it probably takes a day and a half.  It’s a pretty epic fight, in a way, but in another way, it’s tedious — it’s a repetitive cycle where I attack, do damage, run away to disengage, it retaliates but never follows up, and never deviates from its programming, and this is the only reason I’m able to wear it down.  It’s very powerful, but not smart — if it were smart, it would call in reinforcements, at the very least alerting its partner, or summoning a ground party, or divert from its route long enough to ensure that it has effectively neutralized the threat that it keeps detecting.  All it would have needed to do to defeat me is fly to an altitude that gave it a firing angle that denied me the cover I had from the cliff face. 

It’s an accomplishment to bring it down, even so, but in no way worth the high cost of arrows, so I restore from my save point and continue on.

The two drones are patrolling around two tall pillars of stone in the middle of the canyon road, and I spot a couple of treasure chests on them.  I try to glide in to see what’s in them, and the drones pay me no heed. They appear to be looking down only, and are only interested in something on the road below if they see it, or in attacking me if I attack it.  If I leave them alone, they pretty much leave me alone.  So I leave them alone.  One of the treasure chests contains an opal, and another contains a flame rod, and it’s a powerful one that fires 3 fireballs at a time,and has a +7 attack bonus.  Worth it.

I wait until the coast is clear and then glide down off the treasure chest pillar to the road below and run. I manage to avoid detection, and the drones leave me alone. I get to the bridge, cross without incident, and make my way back to the stables.  I talk to the guy who sent me to the fairy fountain, and he thanks me.  Link holds his hand out as though he’s expecting payment, and the man tells him that his reward was getting to see the fairy.  Yeah, really, Link.  That dude said 500 Rs was all he had. What more do you want?  You collected 3 fairies and got your clothes upgraded and you got to see another fairy.  Don’t be greedy, dude.

Another guy at the stable tells me that there’s a strange platform on Washa’s Bluff.  I hadn’t been on the Bluff, only around it, so I decide that’s the next thing I’ll check out.  It’s a long walk, but not too bad.

On my way there, I’m attacked by a swarm of 20-30 Keese, and this time I’m ready for them, see them coming, and lob a bomb into the swarm just as it swoops in at me, and blow it up with perfect timing, taking out about half the swarm and the rest of them abort their attack and fly away.  Cool!  I collect a bunch of Keese parts.

The Bluff is large, and it takes a minute or two to travel from the road side of it to the far side, where a few of those giant mushroom-like structures are growing, like a small grove of tall trees, and I find the platform.  It’s a circular man-made looking platform made from stone or metal, it’s hard to say, and I can’t tell what it’s for or what to do with it.  

I can hear the accordion music of my bird-man friend Kass nearby, so I try to look for him.  He’s up on top of the tallest mushroom platform, and I have no idea how I can get up there.  It looks like trying to climb is out of the question, as the mushroom caps are quite wide, and I’d be inverted upside down, climbing on the ceiling to get to the edge.

I try it anyway, and find that I can do it.  There’s a series of steps, I first climb a small shroom, use it to jump/glide to a larger one nearby, and do the same to get to the tallest one, where Kass is, and I just barely make it.  I get up there, and he has a little house or something, more like a gazebo, in the middle of the mushroom cap.  He has a book of his songs and notes in the gazebo, so I take a minute and read through them all, and get some tantalizing clues about places I haven’t been to yet and songs I haven’t heard.

I then go up to Kass and talk to him, and he explains this place. That platform is where I need to stand during a Blood Moon, and I need to take off all my clothes and that will cause the shrine to appear.  Cool.

I don’t know when the next blood moon will be, but there was one just after I cleared out that shrine with the Major Test of Strength, so it’s going to be a while.  Probably longer than I’m going to care to wait. But I’m not sure what else I can do.

I glide down to the platform and stand on it, and about the same time I do that, I observe a strange teal glow from a distant mountain.  It’s not as far away as the other end of the world, but a neighboring mountain.  I wonder if the timing is coincidence or if standing on this platform triggered something over there.  I look at it on my scope, and it’s the spot where I was earlier in the day, the mountain with the shrine I transported in to, and more specifically it’s the place with the beautiful cherry tree in full blossom.

I decide that I have to check this out immediately, and transport back to that shrine, and quickly run over to the cherry tree.

Here, I see an amazing sight:  a gathering of maybe a dozen or twenty of those strange glowing blue rabbits that you sometimes see at night and if you shoot them they don’t die by drop coins and run away.  And they’re all surrounding a glowing blue, goat-like creature.  I stand at a distance, and it’s pretty clear that I need to keep quiet and avoid detection or they’ll just disappear on me.  I don’t know what to do, so I take pictures, and zoom in for a better look.  The goat thing has four eyes — two faces really — and is very strange — but beautiful.  It seems to exude power, but it doesn’t really do anything, other than just walk around in the vicinity near the cherry tree.

I’m baffled.  This feels like an X-files moment.  I’m witnessing something paranormal and out of this world.  In a world with magic and ancient technology and weird monsters and skeletons rising out of the grave every night like clockwork, and dead monsters resurrecting once a month, somehow this seems extraordinary and truly magical.

I observe this strange gathering for as long as I can, but eventually I get too close and cause some of the rabbit-like creatures to disappear.  Then I get a little closer, and as soon as I touch the water in the pool where the goat-creature is standing, it disappears from view.  I back out of the pool, and a few seconds it re-appears, only to disappear again for good a short time after that.  The rest of the rabbit-creatures are gone as well.

WTF was that?  What do I do?  Will it ever happen again?

In the Hyrule Compenium, the goat creature’s entry reveals that it is called the Lord of the Mountain.

But I have no idea what to make of it, other than I feel privileged to see a wondrous spiritual thing that probably no mortal was ever meant to.

There seems to be no quest associated with this; if it’s just a thing that serves no other purpose but to create a sense of wonder and awe about the world of Hyrule, my hat is off to the developers.  Bravo.  They really created a moment, and I almost hope that there’s no further explanation, and they let the mystery remain a mystery.

I wake up in Hateno village at my house early in the morning, and have a look at my map. Looking at the region I had been exploring yesterday, there are a lot of places I had passed by but did not truly explore. Unsure of what I might find, I transport back to the shrine on Satori Mountain, and being a slow, spiral descent around it to see if I can find anything interesting. There’s a lot of crows up here, for some reason, and I mean a lot.  Most bird wildlife comes in groups of three, but up here, it seems like there are dozens of crows about. I wonder if it could mean something.

Partway down on the north face of the mountain, I come to what appears to be an abandoned camp tucked away between a split rock topping the mountain like a miniature Dueling Peaks.  There’s a cooking pot under a dead fire, and some signs that someone has been here recently, but I see no one.  I take what I find that I can use, and feel like a thief for doing so. 

A little below the camp site, I come to a flat part of land with a small orchard of apple trees.  There are many dozens of apples here, on the ground and still on the tree.  I find a wood cutter’s axe, but I don’t feel like felling the trees and ruin the orchard just to get at the apples more efficiently. Then I find a farmer’s hoe, and discover to my delight that smacking the tree trunk with the hoe will knock loose apples down, saving me time spent climbing up to get them.  I pick a massive amount of apples, and last I had really paid attention, I was down to around 20 or so, as I’d sold a bunch off and had eaten a bunch more for little quick-heals, but when I look again, I’m back up to nearly 140.

I continue onward, and explore down to Rutile Lake, more of a pond, really, in a wooded area between Mount Satori and the larger mountains to the south.  I find plenty of korok seeds here, a few abandoned weapons, some buried chests, plentiful forage, and only a few monsters to fight.

It rains off and on, and I am a bit discouraged because of how the rain slows my progress when I need to climb up to explore somewhere. But here, I’m mainly going downward, and it doesn’t impede me too much, 

After I get done with this area, I proceed further down, into a low-lying gully at the foot of the larger mountain at the south, and here I find a stand of the baobab-like trees.  They’re so tall, and wide, and they just look like there should be something at the top of them to reward me for climbing all the way up, but after reaching the top of 4 or 5, I’ve found nothing, and there’s a lot more trees to explore, and I don’t feel like taking that much time to maybe find something largely inconsequential.

At the end of the gully, the elevation drops even further, and far below me, perhaps 100 feet, maybe 200, there’s a river.  The far bank is a lower elevation than where I’m standing, so I try gliding down there, and check around for more korok seeds.  I don’t find any immediately, but after going down to the river itself, I find two more.  There’s plenty more forage around, as well, and I take whatever I find, mostly mushrooms.

I poke around to the north a short distance, until I get between two high points that are labeled Washa’s Bluff and Illumeni Plateau on the map.  I then backtrack, to explore the rest of the valley to the west, and go through the Lake Illumeni area, and stumble upon two moblins in a wooded area, and take both out with ease.  They have such poor vision that they don’t see me until I’m right on them, and are so slow that even with a two handed club, which is one of my slowest weapons, I still manage to hit them first, and do so hard enough that it stuns them long enough for me to follow up with a second attack, which is all I need to kill them.

This area has some ruins in it, barely anything more than a stone foundation and a decaying wagon, but I search and find some minor things like an amber gem.

Having finished my sweep of this area, I proceed to the north, along the outside slope of Illumeni Plateau, along the edge of a deep canyon that borders the known map region.  Continuing the broadest orbit of my spiral sweep of the area, I circle around the base of Illumeni Plateau and Washa’s Bluff, and as I come around to the east end of this area, I spot a bridge spanning the canyon, and the road that I have traveled up previously on my first excursion to this area.  

I still didn’t check out the Plateau or the Bluff, but rather than return to explore those spots, I decide to head to the bridge and see what I can find on the other side.

It is raining as I approach, and as I get a bit closer, I can hear faint, familiar accordion music from my Rito friend, Kass the bird-man.  I find him on the far side of the bridge, sitting on some odd looking rock formations, and he sings me a song about firing an arrow through two rings to make a shrine appear.  Seems straightforward enough; the rock formations here have a multitude of rings, but I can’t seem to find any two that line up easily.  I explore a bit wider, and find a pair that look like I can just barely take a shot at this challenge.  It takes only three arrows, and then I succeed in my trial, and the shrine erupts out of the ground.  Kass is impressed that I found the secret so easily, and I go back to the shrine to see if I can pass the test.

This trial involves standing on floor switches to tilt platforms in order to make a ball roll down a ramp to land in a basin.  I have to time the order in which I stand on the switches to make the ball drop to the correct path, and land two balls in two basins.  It’s very easy, and I collect my spirit orb quickly.  After I emerge from the shrine, Kass is nowhere to be found.

I wander a bit east, into the meadow past where I met Kass, and find a small herd of horses.  Figuring it will be quicker travelling if I can snag one, I manage to grab one and tame it.  Then I hear the sound of a slumbering Hinox nearby. I’m not looking for a fight right now, but I look around and find the Hinox, and give it a wide berth lest I disturb its repose, and travel onward.  

I want to ride the horse back to Outskirts Stable and see what its ratings are and possibly register it.  On my way back, I am nearly there, when I spot a shooting star in the sky, just at the edge of my vision.  It seems to crash into the mountainside, and then I observe a shaft of light piercing the sky, marking the spot where it had landed. Obviously, I’m meant to investigate this.

I mark the point on the map, and then take my new horse off the road, and get as close to the landing spot as I possibly can, dismount, and climb the rest of the way.  It’s a good distance, but more walking uphill than climbing, and I get there in a few minutes time.  I find a meteorite, and pick it up. I’m not sure what I can do with it, but I’m sure its use will become apparent in time.

I make my way back down the mountain, search for a bit until I find the horse again, and ride him back to the Stable, where I go to register him and find that he’s not a particularly strong horse, so I don’t bother.

Instead, I transport back to the shrine on the top of Mount Satori, and return to the vicinity of the Illumeni Plateau and Washa’s Bluff, intending to explore them.  Instead, though, I get to a point where I see something more interesting:  a windmill. It looks like a metal tower with a weather vane on the top, and at first I see just one, but soon I spot a second, and then several more, going off down into the canyon into the unmapped part of the world.  A bit further past the first windmill that I spotted, I see a new shrine, and decide to head toward it.  

I don’t get too far, when I spot a bokoblin rider. He sees me about the same time, and gives a shout and starts riding in my direction.  Quickly, I see three or four more riders, and then more.  Altogether, it looks like there maybe as many as 6 or 7 of them — and I’m out in the open, without a horse of my own, I have little hope of outrunning them or outfighting them.  If I’m lucky, they’ll be relatively weak and I’ll be able to take one or two out quickly, but if they surround me and gang up, they may knock me around a lot and might be able to kill me by knocking me from one to the next and beating me every time I’m about to get back to my feet.

There’s a large boulder just to the right of me that I passed a short way back, so I retreat to it, climb up, and now they can ride around me and shoot arrows, but otherwise I’m fairly safe.  This turns out to be a tactical masterstroke.  The bokoblins aren’t terribly good shots under the best of circumstances, but on horseback, riding at full gallop, they’re positively terrible.  They fire dozens of arrows at me and I hear them clattering about my feet, but none really stand much of a chance of hitting me, although eventually one or two manage to — although for barely any damage.  Meanwhile, I’m able to stand off and return fire with my own bow, and it does the job rather more effectively.  I knock bokoblins off their horses, and then follow up with 2-3 more arrows to put them down permanently.  The moving ones are rather difficult targets to hit, but occasionally they’ll stop to scream, or to try to take an aimed shot, and once they do, I’m able to plug them, often scoring a headshot for extra damage.  It takes 2-3 arrows each, and I miss quite a few shots, and so go through maybe 20 arrows or so, before they’re defeated.  

I climb down and pick up as many dropped arrows as I’m able to find, but it’s only a handful.  Then a straggler rider comes up and hits me.  I didn’t notice him at first, and he snuck up, the bastard.  I get back on my feet and run over to a nearby horse, jump on it, and try to fight the bokoblin on more even terms, but for some reason I’m struggling to close to melee distance with him, while he nails me repeatedly with 3-4 arrows, and takes my health down to where it’s starting to become a concern.  I get knocked off the horse again, and get angry, and just sprint after him on foot, and finally connect with a spear weapon, unhorsing him, and deal him a mortal blow. I’m low on health now and need to consume a meal to replenish. 

I continue on now, and arrive at the shrine. As I approach it, I spot another Stable, and grow excited, because I’ve come to love Stables. They are smaller than villages, but pack a lot of adventure and story into a smaller space, and I always get several leads on things that I can do in the general area.

But first, the shrine. I get to it, and this one is a ball puzzle called Aim for the Moment. There’s a large ball, continuously being launched into the air by a piston-like platform that goes up and down. It’s on a platform slightly above the ground floor, and behind a fence.  I puzzle over this for a while, trying to work out what I need to do. Somehow I need to get the ball out of this loop, and knock it into a basin below the piston platform.

A short distance from the starting point, there’s a small slightly raised platform that I can stand on.  When I stand there, I can see the ball flying up and down pretty clearly.  I try using the time-stop power on it, and it’s in range, so I stop it in mid-air, but after the effect wears off it just goes back to being launched up in the air again by the piston.  I try again, this time waiting for the ball to be high in the air, above the fence that stands between me and it, and here I have a clear shot with my arrows.  I shoot three or four arrows into it to impart some kinetic energy, hoping that it’ll knock it out of the way enough that it won’t fall back on to the piston, and maybe will rebound off the far wall and come back to rest in the basin.  It doesn’t really move enough, and resumes bouncing after it unfreezes.  But I apparently knocked it offcenter just enough so that it eventually lands askew and rolls off the piston platform, and ends up rolling into the basin.

This in turn activates the platform I’m on, which shoots me up into the air.  I spot an alcove high up on the wall, where I see a switch pedestal.  I take aim with my bow and manage to hit the switch, which unlocks the door to the shrine master’s chamber.  I collect a treasure chest that I noticed in the room, behind where the bouncing ball was, using the piston platform to launch me high enough into the air that I can glide down to where the chest is.  Then I go to the shrine master, and claim my spirit orb.

I visit the stable, and talk to everyone there, and get a few new missions.  There’s apparently a fairy pond nearby here, and one of the travelers at the stable wishes he could go, but he can’t manage the trip, as it’s too difficult.  He asks me to take the fairy an offering of 500 rupees, and so I accept. Pikango the painter is here too, and he tells me another location for one of my memory photos is nearby.

I decide to go seek the fairy first, as it is near a tower, and unlocking the tower will reveal more of the world map to me.  I head down the road, and spot a drone copter flying above the road, patrolling, and I try to avoid its detection by diverting to the left and hiding behind a small hill, and manage to evade it.  A bit further up the road, very nearby, there’s another hill to the left of the road, and on the top of it is a shrine that I can see clearly.  I head toward it, climbing up the far side of the hill to stay well clear of the copter drone.  I get up there without any real difficulty, and unlock it and enter.

This shrine is another combat trial, and it’s called A Major Test of Strength.  I’d seen another Major Test of Strength shrine earlier, on a little island on the east end of the Hyrule map, and it kicked my ass repeatedly. I doubt I’ll fare much better here, but I decide to give it a try.  I have a few more heart containers in my health meter, and some very good weapons.

I equip a lizal forked boomerang, guardian shield and my strongest bow with lightning arrows, and step into the arena.  The shrine guardian comes out, and it’s similarly equipped as the other guardian I fought on the Major Test at the island shrine, but this one somehow seems less aggressive.  It’s attack timing seems slower, its defense seems a bit less tight, and I’m able to stun it with electric shocks from the arrows, run up and hit it several times, then back out of its way before it unleashses its attacks, which mostly miss feebly.  Then I nail it with another electric arrow, run in, and pound it some more. 

It has a very large health bar of 3000 hit points, and my attacks don’t do a lot to it, but gradually they wear it down. I break the forked boomerang, and switch to a stronger weapon, my greater Thunderblade, which I’d been saving for special combats.  I can’t use a shield with it, as it’s two-handed, but I discover that I can keep a shield equipped, and if I sheath the weapon, by pressing B, it allows me to bring up the shield, by holding the Z-left trigger, nearly instantly, and thus I can defend myself a bit better than I thought I could while armed with a 2-handed weapon.  It’s a little bit slower, and more button pressing, but more than manageable.

I bring the shrine Guardian down to about 1/2 of its health with the Thunderblade, when it, too breaks.  Next, I switch to my most powerful weapon, called the Blade of Duality, a monstrous 50 attack rating 2-handed greatsword that I’d found somewhere recently and had been saving for a combat such as this.  

I break this weapon on the Guardian as well, but by now it’s down to about 1/4 of its health, and I feel confident that I’ll be able to beat it.  I’ve taken damage from a few of its attacks, though, and had to eat two prepared foods in order to bring my hitpoints back up. But I note that my improved armor and my larger life bar now mean that one attack from this thing is not enough to one-shot me into fairy resurrection territory — and that’s a very good thing, because at the moment I have 0 fairies.

It does one of those spinning attacks that are unavoidable, but I manage to duck behind a pillar, which absorbs the attack for me, and then blast it again with a lightning arrow, stunning it, and run in and wail on it with the Blade of Duality.

After the Blade of Duality breaks, I switch to a Guardian Axe+ that I had won in a previous combat shrine challenge.  I beat on the guardian until it can’t walk anymore, but now it’s using its beam weapon to shoot super blasts at me, and it destroys two of my shields, and forces me to eat another meal.  I can’t get close enough to hit it with a melee weapon, and arrows don’t seem to stun it any longer.  It only has a little bit of life bar left, but I need to take it down quickly.  I switch to bomb arrows, and it takes three of them to do the job.  

It explodes, sending a shower of ancient parts and drops its weapons and shield, which I pick up, and then I go collect my spirit orb.

I’ve done it! I defeated a Major Test of Strength!  It took nearly everything I had, but it was do-able.  I have clearly made tangible progress in this game!

I have a small celebration involving alcohol.

I want to complete a few of the sidequests at the Stables I recently discovered. There’s a rumor about a pure white horse at a hill nearby, which I would like to check out. But I do not find the name of the hill on the map. It must be on one of the regions I have yet to activate the Sheikah Tower.  Maybe if I venture out I will find it anyway.

I try heading north up the road from Central Tower, to see how far north into central Hyrule I can get.  I see Hyrule castle off in the distance, and it is pulsating with an evil looking purple glow. I’ve seen it off in the distance many times before, but never this close, and I aim to get closer.  The road I am on seems like it was once well traveled, though now abandoned and disused.  I encounter little on the way.  The field are wide open with low, rolling hills, and a tree here and there, a busted wagon occasionally, and little else. 

I make my way easily until I spot a Guardian up dead ahead, patrolling.  Looking to see if I can simply detour around it, I spot a second Guardian to my right, on the other side of the road.  Neither seems to see me for the time being, so I have some time to try to formulate a plan.

I note the grass is fairly tall, and I wonder if, using my stealth outfit, I might be able to sneak slowly past and go between them.  I decide to try, and get about halfway between them before they both spot me, the eastern one first, and then as I duck down below a low ruined rock wall, and begin to equip my weapons, figuring I’ll see if I can take it out, the other one spots me.  The first Guardian is right up against the other side of the wall, and I’m in its blind spot, but I’m directly in line of sight of the other Guardian, and have nowhere to hide. 

I pull out the Sheikah slate and bring up a safe shrine on speed dial, going back to Central Tower.  I head out from there again, this time to the northwest, up to an area called the Giant’s Woods, where I discover a sleeping Hinox. I am not interested in fighting this one right now, and leave him alone, and fortunately he does not stir.  

There are a couple of horses about, and I think maybe if I ride a fast enough horse, I could get by the guardians. These horses look like the more wild type, and so I try to get one.  They’re very skittish, though, and won’t let me get close enough to grab one. I chase them around a while, eventually grabbing one, but not the one I really wanted. There’s also no sign of this supposed pure white horse, either, although that does not surprise me as I am still not in the right spot for that, and still don’t know the location where it is to be found.

I do manage to grab a horse as it runs past me, spooked, and get it under control. I ride it back to the Outskirts and register it, naming it Horstimus.  I want to name it Horstimus Prime, but horses can only have names that are nine letters long. He’s not quite as good as Horsier, in terms of stats, though.

I decide I don’t want to try to ride past the Guardians after all, after talking to the old man about the white horse again, it sounds like it’s more west of where I’ve tried to go so far, and I decide to strike out on foot, as it looks like there’ll be a lot of climbing in that direction.

I go out that way, following a road at first, and uncover a couple more koroks.  And it’s not too long before I am diverting offroad for this purpose, when I detect a shrine nearby.  I start climbing up a mountain, and it starts raining, making it difficult for me to continue up.  I’m very close to the shrine, but don’t see it yet, when I spot what looks like a bomb-able rock doorway, so I head over to it, and blow it up, and there’s nothing — a false door.

I head back the way I came from, and the pinging gets louder.  I continue to move up and to the south a short distance I find the shrine. This one has a bunch of objects that I have to move using magnesis, to swing from platform to platform, and to move massive spiked balls out of my way, and to create a staircase out of some platforms that slide along rails.  It requires a bit of thought, and planning, but is not overly difficult.

I continue further up the mountain, and near the top of it, I find a beautiful cherry tree blossoming, and I get to see it in the last minutes of sunset, and it’s really beautiful.  I just knew that there had to be a blossoming cherry tree somewhere in this world.  In the vicinity of the tree, I find a couple more korok seeds.  

I have an excellent view of terrain that I’ve only been able to see from a great distance from this spot, and so I spend considerable time just looking through my scope, marking shrines on the map, and gauging how likely I am able to reach them.  But I’m really more interested in Towers.

I spot a couple of shrines, and a couple of towers.  I decide to try to glide as far toward the nearest tower, and then run the rest of the way, and not get distracted by anything other than an obvious korok seed or a shrine, and if I don’t see it in plain sight I’m ignoring it.  I get maybe 2/3 or so of the way by gliding, and land right nearby a woman being attacked by a bokoblin. I come to her aid, but she seemed to be handling herself OK.  She gives me something, and tells me about a doctor who makes a monster extract of some kind, which can make better elixirs.  I make a mental note of it and move on, the tower is not much farther.

As I get to the tower, I can see that the surroundings here are a bit more alien than the rest of Hyrule.  There’s a forest off to my left of what appears to be enormous, tree-sized mushrooms. And a massive thunderstorm seems to be permanently above it.  I keep running on, and as I approach the Tower, I can see that it’s emerging from the middle of a flooded shallow lake.  

As I get even closer, I observe that it’s not actually shallow — the shallow parts are actually the flat tops of submerged mushrooms.  The actual depths go far below to what used to be the mushroom jungle floor.  The tower appears to be well guarded, with a number of yellow lizals and three yellow wizzorobes surrounding it on all sides, and with the water, the electrified powers of these monsters are going to make them really tricky to deal with.  I carefully take out the closest wizzorobe with enhanced arrows, finding that the fire ones maybe do the best damage.  If I make the first shot connect, it stuns him, making follow up shots easy to connect.  I end up needing to kill 2 or 3 lizals as well, in order to clear an approach to the tower.

I don’t need to clear the entire area around the tower, thankfully, and am able to get up the tower once I knock out the monsters on the side nearest to me.  The actual climb itself goes smoothly.

At the top, I activate the tower, download the map data, and talk to an odd man who is stuck up there. He studies the bird-men, and is interested in flight.  I tell him about my glider, and he asks me to do a test glide from the tower to see how far I can get. 

I get pretty far, and return automatically, and he gives me 100 rupees for my trouble, but this is after he takes a 20 rupee registration fee.  On the glide, my shrine sensor goes off and so I take a second swing out that way to look for it.  I find it rather easily, and land there and clear it out.  This on is a ball puzzle involving some waterways and a tilting chunk of the room.  It take a while to puzzle out how to solve it, but it’s not too bad once I figure it out.

I had also spotted a small lake a little past the shrine, with a tree growing on an island in the middle of it, and it looks like a likely korok spot, so I head over to it, but it’s actually an abandoned-looking enemy outpost.  It’s dark and raining when I get there, and lightning crashes around continually, and I switch into my rubber gear, and it saves me as a lightning blast clips me one time, but doesn’t do a whole lot of damage due to the protective gear.

I pick up what loot I can from the outpost, and move on.  Morning breaks, and the rain immediately ceases, and it’s suddenly a beautiful clear day.  I’m pretty close to Hyrule Castle at this point, although it’s still a pretty safe distance away. I think about scouting it out, if I can.  I start by scoping it from the top of this ridge that I’m standing on, when I spot what appears to be some kind of flying drone quadcopter patrolling the area from the sky.  Oh hell no.

I don’t like the look of that one bit, and decide that I’m going to stay way the hell away from those things.  I do spot a shrine inside a cave a little further up ahead, and I reason that if I am quick, I should be able to glide right to it, and get in before a drone copter spots me.

I glide in, but as I get closer what looked like a cave from a far distance is actually covered over in rock rubble, and then the whole side of the rock slope that the cave entrance is about halfway up is covered with thorns.  I crash the glider right into the thorns and take damage.  I think they look flamable, and taking out my flame spear, I find that indeed they are.  A little burst of flame, and the brambles burn away, and I’m able to blow up the rock wall and enter the cave, where I find the shrine.

The challenge here is a Minor Test of Strength, another combat trial, and this one I am able to prevail capably.  I do take a little damage in the fight, but I take the shrine Guardian down with relative ease.

By now I have more than enough spirit orbs for another heart container, so I return to Kakariko to pray at the statue for it, and do a fairy run, pulling down 3 more fairies to replenish the ones I’d used up during the fights on this excursion.

I also have over 55 rushrooms, so I transport to the Gerudo stables, to trade them to the old man for the diamond.

That’s enough for now, I think, and wonder what the next logical step should be.

I want to find the memory spot from the photograph that the old painter at the stable told me about, and it’s to the West, by a lake.  The road leads out that way.  As I get closer, I can see that I have some choices.  I can either go straight to the area where the old man told me I’d find the spot where the photo was taken, or, if I go a little further down the road, I’ll reach another tower that I can unlock, and get map data which will likely be helpful in pinpointing the exact spot where the photo was taken.

The tower doesn’t look too difficult and it’s nearby, and not too far out of my way, and if I can reach it and activate it, I’ll be able to return here any time I want with ease. So it’s a pretty easy decision.

I head toward the tower, and come to an area where there are some ruined old stone buildings.  I carefully pick my way through them looking for any chests that I can loot along the way, and find  couple.  

When I get about halfway through, I spot a Guardian, a fully active one, patrolling the ruins.  It hasn’t spotted me yet, but it’s in my way, and as soon as I leave the ruins, it’s going to be on top of me like nothing.  There’s no two ways about it, I’m going to have to take it on and take it out if I’m going to advance any further.

Or maybe not.  Maybe I can take a slight detour and sneak around it, using cover to block its view, and get past it without fighting.

I try it, and as I’m sneaking around a broken stone tower, I get lit up from the other side.  There’s another guardian!  I don’t see where it is, only have a vague idea of its general direction, and I need to get out of its view or I’ll be toast.  I duck around the corner of the tower, getting cover from the second Guardian, only to immediately be acquired by the first one.  Now both are locked onto me, and my only chance is to run back to the cover of the stone building that I was sneaking from.  

I make a dash for it, and of course the controller goofs up, I always either press down on the left stick and activate sneak/crouch right when I need to sprint, or I press down on the right stick and activate my telescope right when I need to be able to see in 3rd person so I can navigate obstacles cleanly.  So what would have been an exciting and epic dash for safety instead turns into a comedy of errors, I get blasted into cinders, and respawn.

This time, I decide to try to isolate the first Guardian, the one in the middle of the ruins.  I carefully sneak up, moving from rubble pile to rubble pile, and get pretty close.  Soon I’m on the other side of the pile it’s next to, and if one of us rounds the corner, we’ll be face to face.  

Just then, a bokoblin on horseback starts riding up, and of course it spots me.  It charges right at me, and now I have no choice but to delay engaging the Guardian, and hope I can manage to take out the bokoblin in one arrow, without the Guardian noticing.  

I manage to pull it off, and nail the bokoblin right in the face with an arrow, knocking it off its horse and somehow the Guardian fails to detect the bow twang. Maybe my stealth gear helped.  Then again, the bokoblin rider saw me straight on, so maybe not.

Maintaining the element of surprise is crucial with Guardians, as is keeping a cool nerve when aiming.  If you can nail it in the eye with your bow, it’s blind for a few seconds until it resets itself, and its only real weapon is that fearsome laser.  In close, with a chopping weapon that does decent damage, it’s easy to cut their legs off, immobilizing and hopefully upending them, and once that’s done, they’re mostly harmless, and you can just smash them to bits from their blind side.  If need be, you can hit them repeatedly with arrows, but if you’re good and quick, it only takes one or two, and then it’s done.  

This combat goes off exactly to plan, perfectly executed. The only real downside to fighting these things is that they have a ton of hit points, so you’re almost always going to wreck a good weapon or two, maybe even three, before you take them down.  After this fight, I am a bit short on heavy hitting weapons that I can hope to take out the second Guardian with.  

I reason that I can likely get to the tower without the second one noticing, as long as I’m careful about it and observe its patrol range for a bit before finding a smart path from the ruined town to the tower.

It turns out though that this place is crawling with live Guardians. No more ambulatory ones, but two or three more half-dead hulks surrounding the tower, and I end up having to take them all out in order to have a safe ascent.  Twice I attempt to climb the spire only to get laser painted, and have to bail, jumping down off the tower and getting to cover at just the last second.  

I finally have found that their blasts are not auto-kills, but if you jump or dash just at the very last second when they fire, they’ll barely miss you if you’re not behind cover yet.

These smashed Guardians are not hard to sneak in close to using the available cover, and once I’m there, I can easily come up from behind when their rotating eye is on the far side, wait for it to track around to face me, and then nail it point blank, and hold down a charged shot for extra damage to finish them off more quickly.  It usually takes 2 arrows to do it, and I end up going through a lot more of my weapons, and am starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel now, by the time I finish off the last derelict Guardian.  There’s no way I have a good enough weapon to take on the last one that is still walking up and down the road near the tower. 

But if I keep to the far side of the tower, it won’t see me, and I can climb up safely. I do this, and activate the tower and download my map data update.

From here, I need to find a way safely down from the tower and glide as close to the spot where I think the camera photo was taken, and I’ll have accomplished all my objectives.  

I take a moment to survey the surrounding countryside, and note the location of a few more shrines, mark them on the map for later, and then spend a few minutes observing the patrolling Guardian.  I see the pattern it follows, and decide that I should be able to make it if I glide off of the tower at the right time.  The Guardian takes a short walk down each of three directions on a three-way intersection of the road, and when I goes down the middle fork, I think it’s next going to head right, so I take off, gliding toward the left.  But the Guardian goes down the left fork, and is close enough to me that it spots me.  I try to run for it and get behind tree cover, but it’s not thick enough, and the Guardian keeps lighting me up with its laser aimfinder.  I manage to dodge two, then three blasts, but the fourth one nails me, and I am incinerated.

The second attempt at this plan works without a hitch, though, I properly wait for the Guardian to go off toward the right side, and glide a little further left than I did the first time, and get into the wooded area and out of sight safely.

There are a lot of wild animals about in this woods, and a couple of bokoblins, and a moblin, but I am able to defeat them all pretty easily.  As I head toward the spot on the map where I figure the photo was taken, I scavenge all sorts of forage — meat, monster parts, and vegetables and mushrooms.  I also find a couple of korok seeds.

Eventually, I pinpoint the spot on the map where the photo was taken, and unlock the memory.  Link and Zelda are walking together, and she challenges him by asking how well he really knows how to use his sword.  He seems young and untested in the memory.

I head back from the memory spot, and find myself back near the ruins that I had hid out in and looted, and I spot the horse that the bokoblin rider had charged me on, and I grab him, and we go on a little joyride.

I push further west, past the newly unlocked Central Tower, and follow roads a ways, until I get to a large round ruined building that remind me of the Roman Colosseum in our world.  As I get closer, I spot the silhouette of a Lynel proudly marching around inside, and decide I better not go any further, so I turn around and head back the way I came.

I find two more shrines, the second of which is nearby yet another Stables, this one is called the Outskirts.  I clear both shrines, and neither one is particularly hard, but a little tricky, requiring a bit of thinking.  One of them has a very powerful sword in it, which does more damage than any other weapon I’ve found so far, with an attack power of 50.

The people at this stable tell me clues that give me hope that I will be able to find the Master Sword soon, and I’m also told about a pure white horse that I should try to capture. And one guy at the stable will give me 100 rupees any time I bring him gourmet prime meat from a hunting trip.

By now I have over 3000 rupees saved up, there has been an abundance of rupees in this area, and I should be able afford a few things at the Geruda jewelers. But I think I have a few more things that I need to accomplish here before I return there.

I transport back to the shrine near the wasteland stable, and talk to everyone there again.

One of the people was with a group that was attacked by monsters, and he was the only one who made it back. I decide to help him out first, and ride Horsier out to where he said they were when they got attacked. I get out there, and I’m down in a narrow canyon, just wide enough for a road, and not much more. There’s a series of catwalks above me on the right, and they bridge over the canyon to the left. One of the people is being attacked by a couple of bokoblins, and I quickly leap into action and dispatch them. The girl I rescue tells me the rest of her group are up ahead, so I run up the scaffold and fight bokoblins as I come to them. I’m wielding a big spiked bokoblin bat, or was it a moblin club, I forget . It packs a wallop and knocks enemies off the catwalk in two hits, leaving them mostly dead, and the fall to the canyon floor takes care of the rest.

This is weird, but good. When I’ve knocked enemies off of a high place with a bomb, they have survived impossibly long falls somehow, and I had been assuming that enemies do not take falling damage, perhaps by way of compensating for poor pathfinding AI and a tendency for them to fall to their deaths, maybe. But now I am starting to suspect that enemies simply have different falling physics when they are blown into the air by a bomb, and they don’t take extra damage from the fall, perhaps because Nintendo didn’t want to make bombs too powerful, since you get an unlimited supply of them and by themselves they do fairly weak damage. But maybe the enemies do take falling damage if you knock them off with force, such as a weapon. I will have to experiment with this further, and see if knocking enemies off of a height using an object controlled by magnesis also works.

I rescue three of the four people who I’m supposed to find, but don’t find the fourth. I continue climbing the catwalk system up the wall of the canyon, until I reach the top. There, at the top, is a wide, flat, open space, where there’s a large camp, with three lizals and a couple more bokoblins. I attack and wipe them out, but there’s no fourth hostage up here. I loot the camp, and continue forward, and climb and find a few more lizalfos, moblins and bokoblins, and they’re pretty buffed enemies. The lizals have electric powers and I have to be careful with them, but using ice arrows or the ice wand to freeze them, then switching to a powerful melee weapon and hitting them up close hard and quick does them in pretty well.

I also find a few random koroks. I go a pretty far, up and forward, and eventually get to the base of the wasteland tower. Did I miscount and already rescue the four people? I didn’t see a mission update. I think I’d better head back to the stable and see if they’re all accounted for. I return, and talk to the ones who I rescued, but there’s still one more. So I transport back to the tower again, and glide down from it back to the canyon where I started.

In the midst of this, a new Blood Moon happens, resurrecting all the enemies I had just killed, much to my annoyance. I’d broken the boko bat, and in the meantime had picked up a bunch of lizal boomerangs, which are fine weapons, but they don’t have the knockback power of the big club I had before, which makes the fights a little bit harder this second time through.

I make it to a point where I had a fork in the path on the catwalk, and go the way I didn’t go the first time, and find the fourth hostage, being menaced by two last bokoblins. I take them down and complete the mission.

I find Horsier and mount up and ride to where the man I had met on the road way earlier was stranded, and looking for a new horse. He offers to buy Horsier, but I’m not selling him. But I decide to sell one of my other horses, so I ride Horsier back to the stable, and take out another horse I had, who I had named Horst, and ride him out to sell to the stranded man. He gives me 300 rupees, which ain’t bad.

I transport back to the shrine near the stable, and glide down to the stable area, and talk to the old painter man, who tells me again about the oasis nearby, and I decide that’s where I’ll go next, because that’s where one of my 12 memory photos was taken.

I start out that way, and it’s hot in the wasteland, and in the midday heat, the temperature is too much to endure, and I start taking damage. I retreat back to the shadow of the canyon wall, and hang out for a bit to consider my options. I use the Sheikah scope to scout out a bit and see what’s up ahead.

The road becomes fainter as it extends into the desert, but I can see it runs alongside a slight rise where there are some boulders, and it looks like there may be a few monsters lurking there. I scope a bit more and, yeah, there’s a lizal or two, and a couple of bokoblins, and a couple of yellow chuchus. They’re sitting out in the middle of the sun, and it’s a problem. If I go out there, I’ll take damage from the heat, and I’m slow in the sand, so I won’t be effective at keeping my distance and engaging the enemies on my terms. This means they’ll have an easy time surrounding me and ganging up on me.

I think about lobbing a bomb arrow into the camp and seeing if it will even the odds by softening up multiple targets with my opening shot. A good hit on one of the monsters would kill them, and the splash damage and ensuing fire would likely destroy the chuchus, setting off their lightning burst death throes, and that could in turn fry more of them, leaving them with only a couple of hits worth of life bar left for me to take down with a Sheikah bomb or up close with the boomerang sword.

The shadow of the canyon is long in the morning, and extends nearly to where I would be able to optimally attack from, but I screw it up. I can’t get a good angle to fire the bow with any accuracy, and so instead I try lobbing a Sheikah bomb into the camp. It goes off and does do some damage, but not nearly as much as a bomb arrow would have. Worse, the blast radius isn’t as big, so mostly it has no effect, and only serves to alert the enemies to my presence, and there’s no secondary fires. One of the chuchus does get caught in the blast, and its death explosion may have caught someone in its radius and fried them for me.

The rest of them come streaming out of the little depression they had been hunkering down in, and they come to engage me. I fight pretty well, using my shield, which is something I haven’t done much because for the most part my weapons inventory has been all two-handed weapons, and using the shield, it gives me a number of advantages. I can protect myself against melee attacks and arrows, naturally, but also it seems to confer upon me some additional opportunities to attack quickly when I am engaged with them up close and they attempt to strike me.

I remember this happening in one of the training shrines, but I’m not sure how I’m doing it here. I’m not deliberately trying, but it is apparently fairly easy to trigger the condition that allows you to get extra attacks in. Which is good, because otherwise I’d probably be screwed in this fight.

I prevail, and clean out their camp and then continue down the road to the oasis. I talk to everyone there, and it’s mostly Gerudo. Gerudo are all women, like amazons of the desert, and they have a different language then Hylian, so they throw in some foreign sounding words for flavor. They all make a big deal out of explaining this to me, over and over.

I talk to a Gerudo standing guard as I approach the oasis, and she tells me about Gerudo town and the Divine Beast nearby, which is creating a sandstorm with lightning and is making it dangerous to travel, and no one can approach it. Also, as I am a voe (male) I’m not allowed to go to Gerudo village.

I talk to another Gerudo woman who is looking for a husband, and she tells me she is a skilled tailor. This gives me the idea that I could buy clothes from her, and perhaps pass as female, and get in to Gerudo town. But she doesn’t seem to be interested in selling me clothes. I wonder what she needs from me.

I find a bird-man, a different one from Kass, and he tells me it is too hot for him to go on, and he needs an elixir to cool him down. It so happens that I had whipped up a couple of elixirs before I went into the desert, and offer one to him. This completes a mini-quest without me having to actually do anything, but the reward is a paltry 50 rupees. I sure hope this guy does me a big favor later on, because those elixirs are worth a lot more than that. And now I only have one.

I don’t need it, though, because as I discover, when I equip the frost wand that I won in battle against the ice wizzorobe, it radiates a cooling effect that reduces the temperature around me. This is awesome and makes me feel immersed in a realistic world. I’m very impressed that Nintendo’s designers put so much thought into these details.

The downside is that the wand is very fragile, and it’s not a great weapon by itself. Switching to a different weapon immediately removes the chill effect, but if I actually use the want to create a frost blast, it does cool the immediate area for a bit, which is useful to keep me cool while I switch weapons. So if I get into a fight, I can freeze enemies, switch to a powerful weapon, and finish them, and then switch back to the wand.

In theory, at least. My wand is unfortunately near the end of its life, and will break if I actually use it for anything at this point. So it’s a very fragile lifeline that’s keeping me cool indefinitely, at least until I use it up, and then I’m down to one cool elixir that will give me about 11:30 to figure out what to do before I have to transport out of the desert using the Sheikah slate.

I can also stick to the oasis, which is cooler, and I can travel at night, and stay in shady parts of the desert.

It’s so cool that the game gives you multiple tools that you can potentially use to make your way and survive in these extreme climates. Now that I know aobut this, I’m going to have to make sure I pick up a flame wand when I want to go back to some of the colder parts of Hyrule, so I can explore thoroughly and without time pressure.

I’m not sure what to do next, but it seems like the thing to do is rest up at the oasis, make a few more elixirs so I have something to fall back on when I break my ice wand, and try to plan out the next leg of this journey, and figure out how I’m supposed to get into Gerudo town.  I think about maybe going back into the Gerudo highlands to do some more wzzorobe hunting, but I dread facing their frosty might again.  I need to get lucky and hit them with my fire arrows before they can freeze me and thaw-kill-thaw-kill me.

I should also try to restock on fairies so I can endure a few combats.  I seem to go through them pretty quickly when I’m in a close quarters fight, and in the desert it’s a lot less likely that I can use stand-off tactics with arrows and bombs to avoid having to risk my heart meter.

Starting at Wasteland Tower, I notice on the map that the tower is standing on Spectacle Rock. It doesn’t feel like Death Mountain to me, but what do I know. To me, Death Mountain is in the upper northwest corner of Hyrule, and this is not the north.  The tower is standing on the northwest “spectacle” so I decide to check out the other end of it before I take off. It is just a desolate, flat mesa, from what I can tell, and I don’t even find so much as a korok seed on it. Although, I do find one on a smaller hill nearby.

I continue following the East Gerudo Mesa, and start climbing another mountain, called Mount Garajh on the map, and find another korok on the top. This mountain is tall enough to have snow on the top, and it’s cold enough that I take damage even wearing the warm doublet, unless I eat a cold-resistant food, so I can’t spare a lot of time up here.

Nearby, there’s what’s left of an old shack, and here I find a journal left behind by whoever lived here. There’s some clues about how to find a shrine that is nearby. It mentions a pedestal on the top of the mountain, which glows faintly at night, and to reveal the hidden shrine, I have to “cast a cold shadow on it”. I don’t know what that means. What casts a cold shadow?

The tall mountain nearby where I found the korok has a couple of stone pillars topping it that seem like they’re the only thing around that could be a “pedestal”, and I can’t quite tell if they glow or not. I’m not sure, but I think I can see it, maybe, but it may just be the reflected moonlight. It’s hard to tell. They certainly aren’t illuminated like towers and shrines are.  But the book does say that it glows “faintly”.

I stand around overnight watching to see if there’s any clue revealed overnight, but there’s nothing to speak of.

I give up and continue south, descending altitude until it’s no longer cold enough to hurt.

I find a few more korok seeds, and a couple of Guardian hulks, and a couple of live ones, which I fight and defeat, earning a bunch of busted ancient technology parts.

Nearby, I find an Ice Wizzorobe, and try to fight it, but I miss with my first arrow, and he’s alerted, and completely destroys me. He freezes me with his ice wand, it one-shots my healthbar, I resurrect with a fairy, and as soon as I thaw out his attack timer has counted down and he freezes me again. I have no chance, and it’s shameful. It wastes all my fairies, and then I die-die.  It feels a little unfair.

I restore from my last save, and go at him again, this time using a fire arrow, and it does the trick, he is destroyed with a headshot, well placed and very effective. He drops his ice wand, and I pick it up.

Later on, I use it to take a couple of coyotes that attack me, and discover that it changes their meat drop to “icy prime meat” which has heat resistive power. So that’s very interesting. Not only does it matter what you kill, but how you kill it, and it can drop something different if you destroy it through an elemental attack. This game is full of thoughtful touches like this, it makes me wonder how much I’ll never find because there’s simply too many possible combinations of things.  After getting the frozen meat, I die stupidly, and decide to restore from my last save point, and lose the meat. But I make it a point to pick up some if I can get another opportunity.

Continuing down hill back into the Gerudo desert canyon, I find an interesting circular emblem on the canyon wall, and puzzle over it, wondering what it could be, and what it means. There are no answers forthcoming, but I take a snapshot of it for later, in case I see anything similar.

I’m very annoyed with the limitations they programmed into the Sheikah slate camera. I can only take a limited number of photos, and if I add a discovery to my Hyrule Compendium, but later delete the image off of my camera roll, it also deletes it from the Compendium as well. There are way, way more things to take pictures of for the Compendium than there are slots on the camera memory. This is really unfortunate, I would have liked to get a 100% Hyrule Encyclopedia, or at least try to.

I reach the southern border of Hyrule’s west end, an unclimbable cliff face, and can’t continue in this direction. The game explicitly tells me you cannot go further in this direction, so that’s that. I reverse direction and head back north, this time at a lower altitude, the mountains I’d just come over to the east of me.

My Sheikah sensor starts picking up a nearby shrine, and I head in the direction of it, and come to a huge rectangular building with very tall walls. I’d seen it from above, so it’s not a surprise, but it’s still impressive how big this thing is in person.

It is a labyrinth. I glide down to it and land on top, and walk around the outer perimeter first, trying to see if I can make out anything of the layout of the place, but it’s not possible. I run into two bokoblins, both fairly tough ones, and decently well-armed, but I’m fighting with my Soldier’s Claymore, and it hits hard, knocking both of them right off the wall, out of my way to where I can’t fight them. I don’t want to jump down and finish them off, and when I end up down there later I don’t want them to surprise me, so I lob bombs down on them until they die. This takes a while but is the only way to do it that doesn’t involve wasting a lot of arrows for no good reason.

I glide down into the labyrinth, and it’s revealed that it is a shrine challenge. The shrine is in the exact center of the maze, and I just have to find the way to it.

This is easier said than done. I explore the twisty maze of passageways, all alike, and find three treasure chests in the middle of the three quadrants of the rectangle, but have a hard time finding a way to the center.

I get wise and climb the walls to get back on top of the labyrinth, and using a stamina elixir am able to do it. This lets me cheat a bit, I take a random guess and drop down a shaft into the unexplored fourth quadrant, and it leads me to the shrine at the center. I get there, and am rewarded with a suit of armor that buffs my attack power. It’s not great armor, but perhaps it can be enhanced at the fairy pond.

I don’t bother searching for the fourth treasure chest that I infer must be somewhere in the last quadrant of the labyrinth. The others had 50, 100, and 300 rupees, or perhaps an opal, and it’s not worth the time and effort to find it when there are so many easier ways to get those items.

I move on, checking out the corner of the valley, to the northeast of the Labyrinth’s main entrance, and find a couple more korok seeds.

Next, I proceed west, through a narrow pass called the Champion’s Gate, and run into a few lizals, who I kill without much fuss, and pick up a few nice boomerang weapons.

Further up, I reach the barren wastes of the Gerudo desert, where it is too hot during the day to survive in my current outfit, and I do not have any cooked dishes that confer heat resistance.

I find that if I stay in the shadow of the canyon wall, I am just under the heat limit to take damage, so I continue along, following the canyon wall, and hope that the sun doesn’t kill me if it comes around to cast shadows on the other side of the world. It doesn’t, and I eventually make it to an area where I’m close enough to the Divine Camel Beast that I can hear it’s thundering hoofsteps crashing in the distance. It sounds awe inspiring.

I’m at a position just south of the ring of giant statues, and all I need to get to them is to climb over the canyon wall. The first time I attempt this, I run into a live Guardian, who immediately activates and starts advancing towards me. I’m climbing and don’t have any fighting gear equipped, so I jump down to what I think is safety, arm myself, and climb back up, only to find myself nose to nose with the Guardian, who is already targeting me and ready to fire. I miss with my arrow, and it blasts me off the canyon wall, and I die.

I respawn and return to same general area, but climb up a bit further down the wall, and don’t see the guardian anywhere. I cross the mesa and drop down into the ring of giant statues.

At this low altitude, the heat of the day is again damaging, but I can stay in the statue’s shadows and survive as long as I am patient.

Toward the evening, the temperature dips, around 4:30pm I am able to move about freely. I find a ladder going up to a scaffolding around one of the giant statues, and use it to climb up, then look at it up close, find nothing interesting, and move on to the next statue, and the next. I find a korok seed, and then I find a large metal orb, too heavy to lift. I try pushing it and it is too heavy to push. I try placing a bomb next to it, and it shoots off the statue’s arm and crashes into the ground below.

I glide down and, using bombs, nudge it toward a basin with a hole that looks like it was meant to receive the orb. This takes many bombs, but I eventually succeed in bomb-golfing it into place. Nothing happens. I look around and see many more orbs. At this point, I realize that I should try ot use the magnet power, and sure enough this works, and it is much easier to manipulate the orbs this way.

I spent so long with the first orb because of how awkward it was to bomb it into position that the rest of the orbs takes me until the heat of the day has returned, and I have one orb left to go, and I don’t see it anywhere.

Eventually, I discover that I had accidentally put two orbs into one basin, and correct my error. Then, nothing happens. I’m puzzled, but eventually I figure out that the badges that I noticed on the statues match with glyphs on the orbs, and they have to be placed in the correct basin. I use the map to mark the basins that I have correct, and check each on in turn until I have the solution.

A shrine erupts out of the ground, and I’m awarded a spirit orb and a flaming spear.

I now have 6 spirit orbs, so I go to Kakariko village and upgrade my stamina meter again, visit the fairy pond to upgrade my   clothing and get my rubber pants enhanced, and then I go to the arrow shop but they are out of normal arrows, so I transport to Hateno village instead, visit Purah, and get my Sheikah slate upgraded to improved bombs. I try to upgrade the Stasis power as well, but I don’t have the right materials for it still.

I visit the shop in town and replenish my bomb arrows and normal arrows, both.

I also talk to a few townspeople, and uncover two new side quests. One has to do with finding a shrine that I already found, it’s in line with the three trees on the mountain tops to the north of the village. I found the korok up there, but didn’t realize that the shrine was in line with them until the lady from the village pointed this out to me.

Then I meet a young boy who asks me about weapons, and he wants me to bring him back some weapons to show him. Specifically, he wants to see a traveler’s sword. OK, fine, I’ll use an inventory slot to store a shitty traveler’s sword so you can see it. I’ll even give it to you. I guess I’ll probably have to show him a few other weapons, and then he’ll give me something. Probably it’ll be shitty, but maybe it’ll be something that belonged to his grandfather and is moderately not-shitty.

In general, the vast majority of rewards in this game are not that great, relative to what I expect to find. Like, in the original Legend of Zelda, I liked finding sword upgrades, the magic wand, the book of spells, the red candle, the red ring, and the magic boomerang. But in BOTW, everything you find is only temporary, and thus can’t be so powerful that it is essential to completing your quest, and so isn’t all that memorable or essential, so it seems like a letdown when you complete a challenge and all you get is some weapon that’s maybe not even better than what you’re already carrying, or like 50 rupees, which is what ONE bomb arrow costs at Hateno market.

Another sidequest I can’t seem to figure out is the guy in Hateno who has a crush on the girl who runs the inn. I’m supposed to talk to her to find out what she loves most, so I can tell him, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to talk to her other than to rent a night in the inn, and this doesn’t advance the quest any. Maybe I need to arrive at a different time of day, but I don’t know. I don’t go to the inn much, and I haven’t gotten anywhere with this sidequest.