Zelda: BOTW Diary (44)

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Back at the Outskirts, Pikango the painter told me that one of my memory photo locations was nearby, and someone else at the stable told me of a pure white horse that had been spotted in the area nearby, so I go to check both out.
 
I head out walking down the road headed north, cross a bridge and start heading uphill and west.  Around a bend to the right, I go further uphill, and I find the white horse, almost exactly in the spot I had guess-marked the map.  I try to catch him, but he’s too spirited and breaks free. 
 
I look for the memory photo site, and find it easily, at a fountain where there’s a prominent statue of a rearing horse. After going weeks wandering about Hyrule and not finding any, it seems that any time I run into Pikango in a new location, he tells me where I can find one, and it’s making life easier than I had made it out to be when I had no clue how to find them.
 
Somehow or other, I didn’t learn very well from the very first interaction with him that this was the way the game would provide clues to me about the 12 memory locations. In the early going, when I had only been to Kakariko village and Dueling Peaks Stables, my understanding and expectation for these places wasn’t fully formed yet; I didn’t expect to run into recurring characters in many locations throughout the land, and that many of these characters would fulfill a similar role in whatever part of the world I’d happen to run into them.
 
I don’t know precisely how the game could have communicated this to me better, and I don’t know that it needed to, exactly — maybe it was just something that I needed to figure out, or maybe I did it to myself by avoiding reading too much about the game so that I could have the experience of discovering these things on my own, rather than following a walkthrough that would rob me of the joys of solving problems on my own.
 
But I did spend about a 2-3 week period feeling lost and without direction, and spent probably close to 100 hours, where I hiked all over the place, wondering how to find a second location to unlock Link’s memory, finding dozens of korok seeds and occasionally a shrine or two, but not making much progress at all on the main quests. 
 
I think that, if I’d been a bit more constrained to following the roads, I might have bumped into more friendly characters who I could interact with and learn things about the world, and this might have helped.  Being able to climb any nearby mountain relatively easily and then glide a long distance made for a more disjointed and solitary experience, which in retrospect I believe contributed to a disjointed unfolding of the game’s story to me, which resulted in me getting off-track and not knowing how to resume the main quest. 
 
What I did in the meantime wasn’t unenjoyable, but I’m not sure I could have endured such a long period of not knowing where to go or what to do next if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m shut in my house on a shelter-in-place order in response to a global pandemic, and have a lot of time on my hands that normally I would not have.
 
I don’t know that I’d say I’m complaining about having had that experience; but I did spend a long time wondering WTF I was supposed to do and how to get back on track with the main mission.  I spent a lot of that time using either Kakariko or Hateno as a central hub from which I’d go exploring, rather than finding a next village or stable, but now that I’ve found several more, it’s starting to make more sense to me the role that they serve in presenting Link’s core mission to the player.
 
I recall that initially I pretty much did what people told me I should do, and it felt like the game was leading me on a path:  the old man revealed himself to be the spirit of the King of Hyrule, and he suggested to go east to Kakariko, so I followed his advice.  At Kakariko, I did what people told me to do, and found a shrine, my first memory photo location, and then Impa suggested that I travel onward to Hateno village.  And in Hateno village I had a number of local side quests and minor quests, but from there, little direction about where to go next. Bolson the house builder suggested that I could find one of his crew far to the north, but when I went north, I found the Lanayru mountain area to be difficult going, and haven’t pressed any further beyond in that direction, and instead tried going south.  Maybe I was supposed to keep going north?  The people in the beach village of Lurelin and the jungle area in Faron haven’t given me a lot of leads. 
 
I guess this was where the game was designed to let go a bit from hand-holding and let me decide what to do. And from that point onward, my further exploration had been hampered a bit by dangerous environments:  the damaging cold of Lanayru mountain, the lightning storms in the jungle area, deadlier monsters for which I was not yet prepared. And so it has taken me all this time to acquire enough heart containers and inventory slots to fill with decent weapons so that I can make forward progress — but forward has been anything but a clear direction, as this game is not at all linear. 
 
Then again, I don’t think that’s any different from the original LoZ, either.  How many hours did I wander about the overworld looking for dungeon entrances, bombing every rock, pushing on every statue, and burning every bush? When this occurs to me, it fills me with a nostalgia, and I realize that I’m having that same experience again now, and if I allow myself to be patient, the reward of finally figuring out these things on my own is worth it. This is not a game to play in a hurry, at least not on your first run.
 
Granted, BOTW is an open world adventure game, but was this what the designers expected my experience to be like? It seems that the game’s design is such that it intends to reward world exploration, and wants you to go off-road every chance you get.  Everything is beautiful and calls to you to go there to see it up close and in person.  The developers truly wasted no space in this vast world. And nearly every spot along the way gives the player some reward for traveling there — in addition to the beautiful vistas, there’s often a korok seed, a shrine, or a treasure chest. It’s almost too much — when I get to the top of a hill or a tree and there isn’t something there for me to pick up, I find myself wondering “Well, why is this place even here?” 
 
And while I have complained that these rewards aren’t meaningful enough, they’re enough that they encourage me to continue seeking them.
 
At any rate, back to the adventure at hand: 
 
I find the memory photo location at the horse statue, and I watch the video clip, but it doesn’t really tell me much. It seems these story fragments serve mainly to heighten dramatic tension and establish the sense of desperation that existed 100 years ago when Link fell in the battle against Ganon. 
The thing about that is, a century since then, the situation has no urgency, and little desperation.  People seem to go about their lives, and their towns are safe.  It’s far from ideal, but it’s not like Ganon’s wiped everyone out by now, and yet he’s had a century to do so where he easily could have, I would think.  Supposedly I guess Princess  Zelda has been holding him back with her power for all this time, but there’s no explanation as to how a stalemate could exist for so long, and. well, I’d like one.  Because it seems a bit farfetched.  Zelda must be ancient, unless she’s also in suspended animation or gone through reverse aging, but we don’t really know.  If she’s old, it could be her powers are weakening.  But something tells me when we see her she’ll be Link’s age.  Or if  not, she’ll probably return to Link’s age after visiting Purah.  I guess maybe she could just be in spirit form now, or trapped in a spirit world where aging doesn’t happen.
 
It’d be nice if these unlocked memories also provided a bit more in the way of clues as to what I need to do, how to deal with a Divine Beast, where to go, an item that I need to recover, something.
 
Anyhow, after unlocking the memory, I return to the Outskirts Stable and at the cook pot there, I concoct a stamina potion, using a Hinox part and four frogs that boost your max stamina, then head back to find the horse again. I do so, and this time it goes easily.  More so than the Giant Horse.  This horse has a good top speed and high stamina and strength, and I run back to the Stable to register it. 
 
On the way back, it’s dark, and I spot a strange orange glow up on the mountain near the road I’m traveling. I can’t go up there just now, but I scope it on the map and mark it for later.  I don’t see a shrine, and the glow doesn’t look like a shrine or a tower, so it’s a bit mysterious what it could be.  Coming back toward the stables, over the bridge, I run into a bokoblin marauder harassing another Hylian traveler on the road, and I stop to fight it from horseback, charging it with a spear, repeatedly until I defeat it. I talk to the guy to make sure he’s alright, and I think he gives me something, rupees or some minor reward, like a food.  I get back to the stable and register the horse, naming him Horsimus, replacing Horstimus, who I had to let go because I didn’t have any free horse slots.
 
I show the old man who was interested in the white horse, and he thanks me and gives me Zelda’s personal bridle and saddle, so the horse may be properly outfitted in something befitting a horse that is thought to be descended from royal stock. 
 
I take the horse out to explore the mountain in search of the source of that orange glow. I get to the base of the mountain near the spot I had marked on the map, dismount, and begin climbing. This takes me aways further than I had guessed from looking at it on scope. Distances are deceiving in this game, and I always think things don’t look that far away, and it turns out they’re always a little or a lot further than I estimate.
 
Making my way up, I find a few korok seeds, and run into enemies any time the ground levels out.  I don’t have too hard a time handling them.  The mountain gets steep and I get to a spot where I can’t get up to the next level even with my augmented stamina, and so I have to walk around the base of the mountain, looking for an easier route.  
 
This ends up taking a lot longer than I had planned, but I end up basically exploring most of the mountain.  On the map, I’m back in the Gerudo Highlands now, and it gets to an altitude where it’s permanently icy, and I need to carry my flame spear in order to stay warm enough without using my cold resistance foods.  This makes combats a little trickier, as I don’t have much life left in this spear, and I can’t afford to waste it on weak enemies. But I’m not going out of my way to get into fights anyway, and manage to avoid most of them, and deal with weaker enemies by using bombs, either blowing them off the edge of the level I’m on, or taking them out.
 
I get to the very top of the mountain, and find nothing much.  A couple of korok seeds, a White Wizzorobe, patrolling around three oddly shaped blocks of ice, which I melt with arrows to see what happens, and they melt, which is tantalizing at first, but nothing else interesting happens.  This area seems like it should have some significance, but I can’t really say that I found any.  Further upward, I encounter some lizals here and there, and at the very top, a bokoblin cave, but none of it turns out anything great, not even a skull treasure chest as a reward for clearing this one out, although in the surrounding area I do find a couple of treasure chests half-buried in snowbanks.  I rely mostly on fire arrows this time, and they’re very effective, as well as good for keeping me warm when I have to switch to the bow.  Fortunately, I have a large supply of these.
 
I eventually make my way back to the side of the mountain where I spotted the glow, and by this time it’s dark again, which makes finding the glow a little easier, although I had the spot perfectly marked on the map.  What I find when I get closer is that the glow fades away and disappears.  I’m on a snowy ledge with a small boulder, the kind I can lift over my head.  And below is another snow covered ledge, this one with a circle of similar sized boulders, with one missing.  I’ve seen a ton of these in various locations, and they’re all korok seeds.  This one is no exception, although getting the boulder down to the lower ledge without dropping it off the mountain completely is a trick.  But I manage it, after a few tries and restoring from my save point, and claim my reward.
 
Looking out a bit further, I spot something odd-looking in the distance, and decide to glide down to it to get a closer look.  It turns out to be a large ice formation, and it’s being patrolled by three White Wizzorobes — the kind I had such a hard time dealing with on my first encounter, where there was only one to deal with.  These three don’t seem to spot me, as I am quite a far distance out.  I have difficulty hitting them with arrows at that range, but after several attempts, I connect with one with a fire arrow, and it snuffs out of existence in one shot.  Fire items are super effective on things that are vulnerable to fire. I eventually take down the other two, and none of the three seems to notice when one of his buddies gets killed, which means I can continue to plink at them without much risk to myself.  They’re more or less oblivious, except when I have a near miss, and they stop what they’re doing to look at the spot where the arrow impacted nearby, as though studying it.  This is perfect for me, though, as it means they’re holding still an right near a spot I just hit, so I can follow up with a second shot, adjusting my aim slightly, and *wink* they go out of existence in a poof of steam.
 
Some of the my missed shots hit the ice formation, and it melts a little bit, so I continue shooting at it, until it all melts away completely, and a shrine is revealed beneath it.
 
I glide down to the shrine and enter it.  This challenge involves carrying an ice cube through an obstacle course made of flame jets.  I need to use the magnesis power to manipulate a large metal box to shield me from the flames while carrying the ice cube to the end of the shrine, where I offer it to the master, and he gives me my orb.  I also claim a frost blade sword, a decent weapon on par with the Thunderblade.
 
There’s a lot more territory up here to explore yet, but I think for now it’s a good time for me to return to my Horsimus and head back to the stable to board him and rest.
 
I had left Horsimus at a spot not far from where I’m at now, but a direct line there involves climbing up this mountain again. But that’s within my capability, so I go to it.  At the first level spot, I find myself face to face with a bear.  He’s close and spots me, and I have only seconds to decide whether to try to fight, or run.  The bear rears up on its hind legs, and what happens next is pretty great.  I run up to it, get behind, and press the A button, and mount the bear, riding him like a horse!  The bear is surprisingly docile and I soothe him almost immediately, although he gets cranky easily and requires more frequent soothing to prevent him from throwing me, and he doesn’t seem to take direction quite as well as horses do.  I want to find a path down the mountain so I can ride him to the nearest stable and see if they’ll register him, but it seems that there’s no direction down from here that doesn’t involve climbing down a sheer cliff, so after a bit I give up and dismount, and the bear just goes off, leaving me alone.
 
I re-check the map to get my bearings again, and resume heading back to where I had parked Horsimus, and end up wandering through the same region where I had awakened the Frost Talus on my first trip up Gerudo Heights.
 
This time, I decide to stay and fight it.  Fighting a Frost Talus is a bit different from fighting a normal Stone Talus. I find that if I try to climb the thing, it freezes me solid, which makes me an easy target for it to finish off with a mighty blow. So this one I’ll have to take out from a distance.  I shoot it with fire arrows, and this de-frosts it temporarily, giving me a few seconds that I could use to climb up it if I wanted to. But I don’t even have an iron sledge hammer in my inventory, and the only smashing weapon I do have is a dragon bone moblin bat — a pretty decent weapon, it has an attack power rating of 27, over double what a sledge hammer has.  
 
I run up, and standing on the ground behind the Talus, I unleash a charged attack, spinning and hitting multiple times, doing a hefty amount of damage, until my club shatters, and now the only weapons that I have that will work on this guy, I think, are fire arrows, bomb arrows, and sheikah bombs.  And the Talus still has about half of its life bar left.  I keep my distance and shoot arrows at it, and they do slight damage if I connect with the body or limbs, but keep it defrosted, and when I manage to hit his weak point, it does a lot better damage.  The fight goes on for several minutes, but I manage to bring it down, and he drops a bunch of gems that I quickly scoop up.
 
I’m also pretty injured by this point, and just want to get back home, so I adjust my priorities to reach Horsimus as directly as possible, not stopping to pick up or investigate anything.  I glide down the mountain, taking several stops to do so, and eventually make it down to where I left Horsimus.  I call him over to me, and we ride back to the Outskirts Stable.  I board him there, and then transport back to the shrine in the river by where I fought the skeleton Hinox, because there’s a bear in that woods, too, and it’s close to the Dueling Peaks Stable.  I find the bear, and manage to mount him and ride him down to the river where there are some bokoblins, and I expect the bear will help fight them, but he doesn’t seem to have any kind of attack, and doesn’t even want to fight.  He just gets upset and tries to throw me.  So I calm him down and run away.  We get back to the stable, but the stable refuses to register him.  They’re horses only.  Well, that sucks. I dismount the horse right there and let him wander about the place.  People start freaking out that there’s a bear loose, and acting fearful, which is a great touch on the part of the designers.  But then, the bear just suddenly disappears, literally despawning and vanishing in front of my eyes.  Bye bear, I’ll always remember you.
 
Now I want to know why I can’t ride the water buffalo that I encounter in the mountains.  
 
I am at about half hearts, so I transport to Hateno village, where I sleep in my own bed to recover my life energy.

Zelda: BOTW Diary (43)

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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.

Zelda: BOTW Diary (42)

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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.

Zelda: BOTW Diary (41)

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Now that Gerudo town has opened up to me, things have gotten more exciting.
 
I went through the city, and met a woman who needed flint to run her business making jewelry.  I have a shitload of flint, so I gave her what she needed, and now her business is open again and I can buy jeweled items that will confer bonus resistance to various elemental effects.  It’s all super expensive though, and I just spent most of my money on the Kakariko stealth outfit, so I only have about 220 rupees.
 
The most expensive item requires three diamonds and 1500 rupees, but it gives resistance to Guardians, which seems like it would be worth the expense to procure. The thing is, in all my time playing the game so far, I have only found ONE diamond.  There’s a man back at the wasteland stable who says he will give me a diamond in exchange for 55 rushrooms.  Rushrooms grow mostly along sheer climbing surfaces, and I don’t usually prioritize going out of my way to get them because it’s time consuming to climb to them, and if I happen to be climbing I’m more interested in getting to the top safely than I am in diverting to pick a mushroom, so I’ve only managed to get about 40 so far. And who knows where I might find a third diamond.  Most of the rest of the stuff also looks like it should be worthwhile and I can afford it once I replenish my rupees. But I also worry about managing my inventory slots.  Perhaps the worst thing about this game is that I can’t properly hoard items and aspire to obtain a “complete” set of one of everything.  But while I am annoyed by this, I recognize that it makes the game more balanced and challenging.  But I really wish that I could take chests that I find back home and put things in them, or bury them in places that I can mark on the map and return to later. This would make chests far more interesting and useful than they currently are.  Most of the time when I find a chest, I am disappointed because the stuff I have already is better than what’s in it, or if not then I don’t have any open inventory slots anyway.  But if I could put useful stuff away to use later, by now I’d probably have over a hundred of the more common weapons and shield and bows stockpiled, and I’d need a warehouse to keep them in that’s bigger than the Labyrinth of Lomei.
 
I find there’s a second sand seal place on the east end of town.  There, they tell me about sand seal races. I figure renting a seal will sign me up for the race, so I take one out, but it just lets me use it for general transportation.  I head out due east from Gerudo, and very quickly I come to a Gerudo outpost building, very close to Vah Naboris, the Divine Camel Beast of legend. It’s dangerous to stay outside for more than a few seconds, so I get inside quickly, and talk to the Gerudo vai who is there to monitor the situation.  From the window, I can look right outside and see Vah Naboris, and it looks like he’s right next to us!
 
I discover that this outpost has a bed that I can sleep in to recover from injuries, so I do so. There seems to be nothing more that I can do here, so I leave, but my stubby walrus ride is nowhere to be found, and I have to hoof it all the way back to town.
 
On the way, I stumble onto the seal racing course, and talk to the people there. There’s no seal races due to Vah Naboris disrupting them, so if I want to see or participate in any races, I guess I’m going to have to deal with the Divine Beast first.  
 
I continue back to Gerudo town. When I get there, I run into the guy who’s running circles around the town, looking for a vai to woo, the guy with the fancy sand boots. I talk to him again, and since I’m in drag, he thinks I’m a woman, so he is nicer to me, and I lead him on and he gives me a pair of snow shoes so that I can go into the north and find something, that if I get it, he’ll give me the sand shoes.  Side quest activated.
 
I’m a bit far from the gates to the city, so I climb over the wall in the south east corner, and find myself in a courtyard where a Gerudo is tending to a blue sand seal.  I talk to her, and she tells me the seal belongs to the Gerudo chief, and that the seal is an oracle, and it will tell me secrets in exchange for fruits.  I give it some fruits, and it tells me a couple of things, neither of which are particularly memorable or important-seeming, and I’ve forgotten them by now.  Whoops.  It’s amusing but stuff I pretty much figured out by now.
 
I see a stairway leading to an adjacent room, and walk up them. Here, I find the chief of Gerudo’s courtly hall.  I walk up and talk and am revealed to be a voe, but also the champion Link, hero of old, resurrected and returned to save the land, so they decide I can stay.  I keep dressed as a vai, though.  I’m not sure whether it’s acceptable or not to change back to my old clothes, and besides these are more comfortable in this heat.  They tell me that in order to calm Vah Naboris, I will need to recover a stolen heirloom called the Thunder Helm.  If I have this, it will protect me from the lightning so that I can approach close enough to do the thing. I still don’t know what to do when I get close, but now I know how I can get close.  The Gerudo guards tell me more about the thieves who took the Thunderhelm, and a general idea of where I might find them.
 
A civilian Gerudo is telling me about her husband who has fallen ill and needs the guts from some monster that I’ve never heard of in order to make a cure.  Another side quest activated. I wonder how these women keep husbands around if they’re not allowed in Gerudo. Do they all move out of the town?  Or what? It seems inconvenient.
 
Finally, I have a bunch of things I can do, and some of them even have to do with saving the world. After all this time, I still have just 7 heart containers on my life meter, and I wonder if I’ve leveled up enough to what I need to. Regular encounters with moderately powerful enemies still feel like a serious threat unless I am able to use the terrain to my advantage and keep a safe distance from my foes.  Somehow or other, it feels like I should have found a lot more shrines in my travels than I have, and as much as I’ve covered of the parts of Hyrule that I’ve been to, my shrine sensor hasn’t been pinging a whole lot, yet there’s a lot of regions with low shrine density, compared to the first few regions I went through en route to Kakariko and Hateno villages.
 
I think about the shrines that I’ve been to but haven’t completed, and wonder if I can overcome the ones with the combat challenges. I decide that with my good equipment and 7 heart containers, it’s at least worth another try.  
 
I warp to the first one, called A Minor Test of Strength, and defeat this shrine guardian easily.  Next, I try A Modest Test of Strength.  This one is considerably more challenging.  It takes me down twice, but with four fairies in inventory, I manage to prevail.  In this fight, the guardian seems to keep its distance from me, which makes it harder to hit.  When I do get up close, it uses its shield well, and I have a hard time landing a blow on it.  Then I get knocked back, and when I get up I have to do it all again.  It also has a charge attack, which I’m able to handle by getting behind one of the columns holding up the ceiling, and using it as a shield.  This destroys the column, but is effective at blocking the attack one time.  Additionally, it has a spinning laser turret attack which I can’t seem to dodge, and it’s a tough one to deal with.  I manage to get in a few good hits, using a jumping attack as well as a shield parry to open up some opportunities.  But after the second time I get knocked down, I switch to a bomb arrow attack, running backward and nailing it again and again, my aim improved through focus, and I manage to hit it every time.  But now I have broken my Thunderblade and my two tri-forked lizal boomerangs, and am running low on good weapons again.  I doubt very much that I’m capable of defeating the Major Test of Strength shrine, but perhaps when I get a bit more combat experience and some even better weapons.
 
I return to Kakariko village and get another three fairies from the fairy pond. I upgrade the clothing I bought from the Gerudo jeweler, as well.  And I try to buy more arrows, but the store is completely out of normal arrows.  I have over 170, though, so it’s OK.
 
I want still more fairies, so I try the other pond where I found them sometimes, but none are there.  I wonder what causes things to be there or not be there when I go looking for them.  It seems stores will replenish stock slowly on some kind of timer, but I’ve never seen the Kakariko arrow shop completely out of arrows, and they haven’t replenished since my previous visit when I cleaned them out.  And fairies are sometimes where I find them, sometimes not, but they seem to be there more often when I have few or no fairies in inventory, and when I haven’t been there in a while, and at night. It is a bit mysterious.
 
The second fairy pond is nearby the big river that runs along the road to Kakariko village and stable by Dueling Peaks. It occurs to me that I really haven’t explored much north of this river.  Crossing it seemed unnecessary, and I never bothered to explore that area of central Hyrule from the Great Plateau to Dueling Peaks.  Figuring I’ll probably find a few shrines in the area, I decide to give it an explore.  I cross the river, and follow it along on its north bank.
 
It’s mostly rolling plains with some rocks and some lightly wooded areas, and relatively few monsters, and those that I do encounter are all pretty weak, and I’m not in any danger from them.  I take them out if I need to get them out of the way, the most annoying ones are the octorocks.  I find a bunch more korok seeds, and eventually I make it to the area by Dueling Peaks Tower, where there are several bokoblin camps dotting the shoreline.  It’s night and I’m able to sneakstrike the entire camp, after taking out the sentry with an arrow.  The stealth suit makes it easy. They have a lot of loot for being low level creatures, and I end up finding a bunch of arrows and rupees.
 
The water has many hidden chests submerged here and there, and a few floating boxes, and I find more gems and rupees and a Traveler’s Sword.  Remembering the young boy from Hateno village had given me a quest to bring him this sword, and having an open inventory slot, I pick it up to show him later. I continue to sweep north along the west face of Dueling Peaks, and do a little climbing, picking some rushrooms along the way, trying to get to 55 so I can trade them to the old man at Gerudo Stables so I can get a second diamond.
 
Up the mountain a bit, I come to a flat grassy field with a bunch of rocks. I suspect a Stone Talus lives here, and sure enough there is one.  He wakes up, and this one is a Senior Talus.  I find him very easy to defeat.  I don’t even have an iron sledge hammer, but I do have a bokoblin bat, which I had picked up from the camp that I had raided, and it does good damage against it.  It breaks about halfway through the job, though, and I have to finish the Talus off with Sheikah bombs.  With the bombs now upgraded, this doesn’t take as long.  I just stand on the Talus’s higher shoulder, and then roll the bomb down to his tail end, and set it off. This Talus is especially inept at fighting, and never once manages to do me an injury, but he drops beaucoup gems when I defeat him.  I pick up everything I can find, and continue on my way.
 
A little further north, I’m coming around to the northern slope of Dueling Peaks, when I spot a fully functional Guardian off in the distance, not that far away.  I seriously misjudge the distance, as I try firing an arrow toward it and it falls way short.  I get closer, and try again, and same thing.  I get still closer, and still my arrow drops a little short.
 
Overconfident, I decide to rush in on my glider and drop in from above to do a little extra damage on my first strike.  This goes poorly and I botch the maneuver, and end up having to fight it up close.  I manage to cut off two or three of its legs, but when it charges up its laser blast, I mess up my arrow shot, and fail to stun it, and it blasts me, knocking me down, and setting me and my surroundings on fire.  A fairy is the only thing that keeps me up.
 
As I struggle back to my feet, the thing is already readying another blast.  I try to hit it with an arrow, but again fail, and again the Guardian blasts me.  it gets me a third time, and I’m figuring I’ll probably have to do this fight over again, but somehow I manage to get the upper hand, finally nailing it in the eye with an arrow so that it is stunned, then running in close again and cutting a few more legs, and it becomes helpless. Turned on its side, underbelly exposed, I finish it off.
 
It drops a whole bunch of parts, and I now have the ancient cores that I need to do my final Sheikah slate enhancement.  I’m badly injured and it’s a good time to return to Hateno and Purah’s lab.  I go there, and she upgrades my Stasis power, and then I go visit the little boy in the village who wanted to see the traveler’s sword, and show it to him.  He gives me a 20 rupee reward. Next he wants to see a flame wand.  I had one earlier but it’s gone now.
 
I go back to my house and sleep to regain health, and cook a few dishes to replenish my meals inventory.  Then I transport back to Dueling Peaks tower, and continue my exploration of the northwest face of the northern peak. 
 
I’m trying to return back to where I defeated the Guardian, and I’m pretty close to that spot, which I didn’t mark so I’m not entirely sure where it is, when I hear the familiar Guardian fight music start up and see a targeting laser on me.  Another one?! I didn’t see any more Guardians in this area, and I have no idea where it is or how close, but I just need to GTFO, so I sprint to the edge of the mountain and jump off, and glide away.  The thing blasts at me twice, missing both times, and I eventually descent to where it can no longer target me, and am safe for the moment.  
 
I move down into the riverlands below, and explore more.  Off in the distance I can see a couple of shrines sitting out in the open, and I head in that general direction, stopping to pick up any forage and korok seeds I find along the way.  There are more bokoblins about, and a mounted one attacks me.  I shoot him off his mount with an arrow, and take his horse, then run into another bokoblin on horseback, and try to fight this one hand to hand from horseback, but this doesn’t go as well, and I get knocked off.  I get back up and shoot him off with another arrow, but I’m pretty beat up and have to take a meal break.
 
I get back on the horse I took, and head into a wooded area, where there’s a bunch of forage available for picking.  I dismount to grab as much of the nearby good stuff that I can grab, and have to deal with a couple of pesky octorocks.  I lose track of the horse and can’t find it again.  Oh well
 
I emerge from the woods and see that I’m getting close to the shrines.  There’s one on the other side of a river, and a conveniently located bridge seems to lead right to it.  The other shrine near here is on a small island in the middle of the river.
 
A bokoblin is on the bridge harassing a Hylian, so I run up and save them, but I’m a little late and they got KO’d, and when they wake up are not appreciative at all.  I did my best, sorry. 
 
I go down to the small island first, and this shrine is surrounded by flowers that a Hylian woman planted and tends.  She tells me not to step on the flowers, but I don’t see any clear path to get to the shrine.  I try several times, but each time I mess up and she gets increasingly upset, until she flips out and kicks my ass.  I was trying to climb a nearby tree and glide in, and kept failing at it.  After I wake up from her ass-kicking, I find that there is a subtle trail that leads, maze-like to the shrine entrance, and I manage to get in this time.
 
The shrine is super easy.  Just a series of floating platforms that I have to walk on and cross little artificial river channels.  I don’t even need the platforms, since I have the Cryonis power.  I don’t know why they bothered with this, other than it serves as a very easy tutorial that covers swimming mechanics and currents and climbing onto floating platforms.
 
I get the spirit orb and some ice arrows, and then head over to the shrine across the bridge.
 
As I get closer, I see yet another Stables, and…. Hestu! OMG!  What up, broccoli beard!  I have 120 korok seeds, and I buy 4 additional weapons slots and one additional arrow slot from him before he says he just remembered how to get to Korok Forest, far to the north, and invites me to visit him there sometime.  The first slot costs 2, then 3, then 5, then 8, so it seems that the price goes up according to the Fibonacci sequence, which means those final slots are going to be pretty darn expensive.  Still, I’ve managed to expand my weapons carrying capacity by almost 2x, which is a huge, huge improvement.  I’m going to have a lot easier time getting around prepared now.
 
The painter man who I first met in Kakariko, and have encountered at other stables in the jungle zone and in Gerudo is also here, and he takes a look at my photos and tells me a clue about where one of my 12 memory photos is, and it’s not far from here.  So this is great.
 
My further adventures in Gerudo are going to have to wait a bit longer.

Zelda: BOTW Diary (40)

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By now, I have over 2000 rupees, and I decide it’s time, finally, to buy the stealth outfit that’s available in Kakariko village.  I transport there, do a fairy fountain run, and pick up four fairies, and then head down to the shop where I buy the full outfit, plus a Hylian hood, just because it looks cool, then go back up to the fairy fountain, and get everything augmented.
 
Then I transport to the Gerudo Highland tower to pick up where I left off.  I figure the stealth outfit will be helpful for sneaking around and avoiding fights while I’m focusing on exploration.  This outfit was pretty expensive, and having the whole thing, augmented should make me a lot sneakier.  It probably won’t get me into Gerudo town, but I figure  a solution to that problem will present itself at some point.
 
While in Kakariko, I went to the statue and traded in four spirit orbs for a Heart Container, bringing me up to 7.  I’ve also had 3 Stamina meter boosts, and I’m wondering if maybe that’s enough to tame the Giant Horse in Gerudo.
 
I also have no idea what I would do with the Giant Horse, but if I can get him, I figure I’ll run out to the Horse Goddess and see what she thinks.
 
I transport to the shrine nearest the place where the Giant Horse lives, and it’s the one with the conveyor belt challenge, so I decide to give it another try. This time, I get a lucky bomb to blow the ball off of the conveyor belt right into the basin below, and unlock the door, to access the second challenge.  This one is tougher; there are two little guardians on the conveyor belt, and they are weak, but they shoot blasts at me, and I have to take them out with arrows.  Fortunately, they don’t take much to defeat, and then they don’t come back.  But this conveyor is further away from the platform I’m standing on, so my bomb won’t reach when I throw it, and this confirms my suspicion that bombs weren’t really the best answer for this challenge.  I try time stopping the conveyor instead, which works.  But then I still have to figure out how to get the ball to go into the basin.  I try magnesis, but it doesn’t work on the ball.  Then I try using stasis on the ball, rather than the conveyor, and this works just as well to freeze it into place.  I fire an arrow into it, lining my shot up carefully like a billiards shot, and when the time stop unfreezes, the ball shoots right into the basin, unlocking the second challenge.
 
The third challenge involves two conveyors, running parallel to each other, one carrying boxes, and one empty.  There are several laser blocks firing beams across both conveyors, and an orb.  I can pick up the orb, but not run very fast with it.  At the far end of the room, I can see another basin, and the challenge is to get past the laser beams while carrying the orb.  
 
I try a run at it without the orb, to see if I can figure it out, and it’s not too difficult.  I just wait for the boxes on the other conveyor to block the beam, and cross in the box’s “shadow”.  The second laser is on my side, so the boxes don’t help me here.  I figure out that if I duck, I can go under the beam.  But probably I could also have just grabbed a box from the far end of the room using magnesis and brought it over to shelter me on my side.  That might have been better, but also required a fast and accurate hand, and quick timing.
 
At any rate, after finishing my dry run, I go back and grab the orb, and do it for real.  The final door opens, and I spot a shrine chest coming down the conveyor on the far side of the room.  I snag it with magnesis, and open it, it’s a weapon of some kind, I think a spear or a bow, I forget which.  I take it, dropping one of my weaker weapons, and go to the final chamber to claim my spirit orb.
 
I’m pleased with myself for solving this one.
 
Exiting the shrine, I check the map to get my bearings, and try to head on a beeline toward the Giant Horse.  There’s a lot of climbing between me and there going as the crow flies, so I end up going down into the canyon below, and trace around the edge of the canyon wall rather than try to climb over it.  I end up going a different route than I’ve taken before, and encounter several lizals, and a few yellow chuchus, and have to fight them.  It doesn’t go badly for me, though, and I continue on.  Eventually I get twisted around and take a wrong turn, and end up going through a whole canyon cul de sac that dead ends.  I do manage to find a few more koroks, though, so it’s not a total waste of time.  I turn around and head in the right direction, and have only a little bit of climbing over a rise, to get down into the valley of the Giant Horse.
 
I can see him, standing among the rest of his herd, and I try to sneak up.  I figure with my recent stamina meter bosts, I might have a shot, but my first attempt fails.  I decide I’ll burn an elixir that boosts my max stamina, since I seem to have sufficient stamina to do almost anything else.  But now that I’ve tried riding the Giant Horse once, he’s a lot more skittish, and even wearing my stealth suit and having no other gear equipped, he keeps running away from me, and I spend like 20 minutes chasing him.  Eventually, when night falls, he seems to let his guard down more, and I’m able to get close enough to try to ride him again.
 
The stamina extender elixir does the trick and gives me just barely enough to bring the Giant Horse under control.  I have just a tiny sliver of yellow left on my meter, when he calms down and breaks.  I have done it!
 
Now I just need to ride him safely to a stable to get registered.  I immediately save the game, because there’s no telling what will happen when I try to sneak past the two lynels between me and the nearest stable. 
 
On my first attempt, I try to get the Giant Horse to run fast, past the first lynel, but this horse is the biggest, not the fastest, and he doesn’t seem to have a temporary boost beyond his gallop speed.  This takes me by surprise and the lynel knocks me off my horse, and I lose my weapon.  I run to grab it, but now the lynel is on me and I have to fight him. There’s no getting to the Giant Horse and getting away.  I put up a pretty decent right, but the lynel still trashes me.  I’m fighting with a one-handed weapon, and this affords me the use of my other hand for a shield, and I find this makes a tremendous amount of difference, and is way better than trying to fight it with the slow, heavy damage two-handed weapons that I’d always gone in with in previous encounters.  I actually manage to pull off a couple of the parry and dodge moves, but the game’s camera still is a problem, screwing me up and disorienting me when the lynel gets right on me, and I can’t see what I’m doing or even where my enemy is, which is a disaster when he’s right next to me and can kill me in one shot.  I’m not sure how far I got his life meter down, but I did mange to hit him a bunch of times, so maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of his health before I died.  
 
This is encouraging, and maybe I can get better and take one of these things down soon.
 
My second attempt, I handle the Giant Horse better, and get past the first lynel before it can make an attack on me, and then I get past the second lynel without it even noticing me.  
 
The last major obstacle between me and the stable is the mounted bokoblins.  The Giant Horse’s slow top speed means that I can’t outrun them very well, and I end up taking a few arrows in the back as I run through them and away. I’m going to have to go back there at some point and teach them a lesson.
 
I do end up losing them eventually, outrunning their range of interest.  I come to a road, and follow it a ways, and then come to a fork where there’s a tree, and a couple of Hylian men sort of hanging out under there.  
 
I talk to them, and they ask me about Giant Horses, which kicks off a new side quest, to find a Giant Horse.  Since I am riding a Giant Horse, it’s the shortest side quest ever, and completes immediately.  But it’s pretty obvious that I did things out of order. I guess that’s always a possibility in an open world game like this, but I think it could have been handled better.  
 
The men give me a reward of 100 rupees for finding the Giant Horse, and then one of them invites me to do a mounted archery challenge, but I’m in a rush to get the Giant Horse registered at the stables before something happens and I lose him, so I decline, and continue to the stable.  I register him there, and a number of people make remarks about the massive animal. I name this horse Horsiest, replacing my previous Horsiest who I sold to the stranded man back in the canyon, and it’s an apt name.
 
I decide to take him to the Horse God’s spring, but the Horse God’s only purpose seems to be to resurrect lost horses, and it doesn’t seem to care at all that I have a special horse.  Oh well.  I ride the horse back to the stable and check him in.  
 
Having accomplished that much, I return to Gerudo town, transporting myself to the shrine there. I talk to the guy who’s looking for the merchant who sneaks in, and I stand with him for several game-hours, thinking he’ll come by and then I’ll see something, but much time passes, and nothing happens.  A few other travelers do come by, and I talk to them all, and none of them really tell me much that can help me move forward in my quest to sneak into Gerudo town.  
 
One guy is running around the city’s outer wall, and brags about his sand boots, which make it easier for him to travel. I want those boots, but he won’t let me have them, and he’s only interested in talking to women, because he wants to find a woman to woo.  
 
I also take a lap around the town’s perimeter, and observe that there are gates at the North, East, and West sides of town, but not to the South.  The West gate guard tells me about a secret treasure hidden in the desert, with the statues of ladies holding swords pointing the way.  This opens another side-quest that immediately resolves, because I had found that shrine all on my own.  Again, the out-of-order nature of this sequence feels like it could have been better handled. Like, the story writers should have written an alternative script in the event that you solve that shrine on your own before having this conversation. But I suppose the sheer number of combinations of things that would have forced them to have to account for in the game would have made that  an overwhelming project.
 
I’ve already pretty much figured out that I’m going to need to find some women’s clothing to disguise myself so I can sneak in, and it’s just a matter of finding them.  There was that woman back at the oasis, who talked about her tailoring skills, but she doesn’t seem to be interested in making me any clothing. But maybe if I go back there she’ll say something different now.
 
I run back to the oasis and talk to everyone again.  Maybe there’s some different people here, or maybe I missed a few the first time.  I meet a Goron, the first I’ve encountered, and he talks about watching the sandstorm, waiting for it to clear up.  There’s a Hylian man also watching the storm, and he’s interested in going out and finding a treasure when it clears.  This unlocks another side quest for me, and this one I haven’t solved already.  So that’s interesting, apparently there’s two separate treasures/shrines that I need to go into a major sandstorm in order to find.
 
I talk to several more people and everyone seems to know something about this merchant who sneaks in, or a female Hylian who has been here recently, staying at the inn.  I go and talk to the innkeeper, and they tip me off that they sometimes spend time on the roof of the inn, but not during the day. 
 
I go to sit by a fire until night, and ten climb to the roof of the inn, and find our merchant-in-drag who has been sneaking into Gerudo town.  He offers to sell me his clothes for 600 rupees, but I don’t have that much, as I’ve spent a fortune on the stealth clothes and arrows.  But I have over 130 amber gems, which is more than enough to bring the needed coin if I sell them, so I do that, and then go get my new outfit.
 
There’s some attempt at comedy at Link’s expense for dressing in women’s clothing, but it’s not a big deal. It’s not especially funny, and it doesn’t especially offend me, but it seems that Link is slightly embarrassed at first to be dressed as a woman.  But the game doesn’t seem to want to make too big a deal out of it, which is good.
 
The new clothes are also giving me a slight shift in the temperature range I can safely exist in, making desert travel during the day possible even without my frost wand equipped.
 
I run back to Gerudo town, and along the way I have to fight 5 or 6 lizals.  I probably should have just teleported to the shrine right by Gerudo, but I wanted to take the road again just to see what might happen, maybe I’d run into some more people, who could help advance the story or tell me useful things.  Taking weird detours and flying and teleporting, you lose a lot of opportunities to meet people on the roads, which come to think of it is probably why I feel like I’ve been missing some big clues about what I’m supposed to be doing, and why the game feels like a korok easter egg hunt rather than a quest to save Hyrule from Ganon.  And it’s probably why I haven’t seen Hestu since the first time I met him.  I have taken roads around a lot of places, but I often veer off them very quickly and end up spending much more time in fields, woods, and climbing cliffs and mountains, which means probably I’m not triggering a lot of storytelling events that happen on roads.
 
I make a note of this and think I’ll have to go back and travel along the roads more if I don’t figure out where to go next.
 
The Gerudo guards allow me to come right into the city.  I enter the West gate, and there’s the sand seal rental place. They tell me these seals are easier to manage than the wild ones, so maybe I’ll try them again soon.
 
I talk to an old lady sleeping in under a tent in the street who says I seem familiar to her, but I don’t think I’ve talked to her before. Maybe she’s someone Link knew 100 years ago?
 
I go into a building and there’s a Gerudo woman and her young daughter, and I talk to them both.  The woman is studying the nearby circle of seven massive statues, where I found a shrine already, and this open-completes yet another out of sequence side quest.  The daughter tells me that the people who spend their nights in the cantina are so loud, she can hear everything they say when she’s by the window of the cantina.  So I guess that means I’m supposed to do some eavesdropping myself.
 
I’ve made a ton of progress in this session, so I stop for the time being, and save the game.

Zelda: BOTW Diary (39)

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I venture out of the oasis in the evening, and first head out to get a closer look at the Divine Beast Naboris. On the way out, I find a korok seed, and get attacked by lizals. As I get closer to the Divine Beast, I get a better look, and it’s impressive. Wind whips up a sandstorm and visibility is terrible. And it generates lightning, which starts targeting me if I get too close. It doesn’t matter if I have metal equipped, or if I wear my rubber helmet and pants, it hits me and drops me to a half heart of life. I try to find shelter, and hide behind a large rock formation, and am safe there briefly, but eventually it finds me again, targets me, and kills me.
 
I respawn and head toward Gerudo town. Since it’s night, I don’t need the frost wand. And actually, it gets cold enough that I need to pull out the warm doublet to keep from taking cold damage.
 
On the road, a Gerudo vai is walking my way, and I talk to her. Just as we’re getting acquainted, three lizalfos burst out of the sand and attack us. I fend them off, handling them rather quickly with a bomb and my lizal boomerang. The vai is grateful and offers me a food item that confers cold resistance.
 
The rest of the hike out is uneventful. I spot an enclave of monsters off to the left as I approach Gerudo town, but I steer clear of them. As I get closer to Gerudo, I see a shrine sitting right there by the main gate.
 
I go there, and unlock it, then go in.
 
The puzzle involves a large ball being bounced between to catapults. I’m not sure what to do, but after observing it for a time, I decide to try to grab it out of the air using magnetism. This doesn’t work, so I next try the time stop power. This does work, as the time stop freezes the object and disrupts its momentum, causing it to fall straight to the ground after the statis wears off. Once it’s on the ground, I’m able to manipulate it with magnesis, but what to do with it?
 
The orb seems to be generating electricity, so maybe I use it to power something? I drag it around and find a small glass pedestal next to the orb master’s locked chamber. I try touching the pedestal with the big orb, and when I put it right on top, it activates the door to the shrine master’s enclosure.
 
But there’s a chest in a locked room next to the master’s chamber, and I can’t figure out how to open it. I eventually notice what appears at first to be a second chest inside the chamber, on higher platform, but upon closer inspection, it’s the switch pedestal to open the door.
 
So I open the door, and it gives me a weapon of some kind, but it’s not as good as the weapons I’m already carrying, so I leave it behind, and claim my orb.
 
I exit the shrine, and talk to the guards at Gerudo’s main gate. They explain that the town is forbidden to men, as has been explained to me at least 20 times already, and I’m not allowed in.
 
There’s a stocky man standing off to the side, and I talk to him. He says there’s a man who has been sneaking in, and he wants to see how he does it, because he wants to sell his merchandise in the city.
 
There’s another Gerudo vai to the left of the gate, and she’s training sand seals. These pudgy walruses have mohawk manes and are really cute. She explains to me how to sneak up and catch one, and if I have a shield equipped, the seal will drag me around the desert at a high speed that makes traversing the wastes easier.
 
I give it a try, and get the hang of it pretty much immediately. It’s not as easy as riding horses, and there’s no way to stop other than to release the seal, but it is fun and works, definitely better than trudging through the sand.
 
I explore some ruins to the north of Gerudo that I had skipped over on the way out, and there’s several lizals patrolling. The first one I encounter breathes fire on me, the first time I’ve run into something like that. It does a lot of damage to me, but I kill it. I pull out the ice arrows and find they’re very effective against it, taking them out with a single shot.
 
I clear out the area, and search around looking for anything interesting. I only managed to find a korok seed or two, though. I’m over 100 koroks at this point, so finding them is pretty routine by now. The lizals drop decent weapons, but I don’t really need any right now.
 
I continue exploring the desert, heading back north, and I see a building in the distance that looks like another Gerudo structure. I get there and discover this is their ice house. There doesn’t seem to be anything to do here, though. So I check it out and explore. I can climb up on the top and scope around with the Sheikah slate. I see a lot of ruined buildings all over the desert, some rocks, and a lot of sand.
 
Mostly what I see looks like places I’d find more monsters to fight, or else places I’d likely find a korok. It’s a lot of time to trudge around the desert to check out these things, and it’s not like a sand seal would help a lot, with all the frequent stops and climbs that I’d have to do. So I’m not sure how much I want to invest in exploring for what’s likely to be low reward items.
 
While I’m at the ice house, I decide to head west and check out the desert in that region. After walking a short way, I find a statue of a woman holding a sword. I grab the sword with magnesis, and it’s a rusty Traveler’s Claymore, not an especially good weapon, and I leave it. I find another statue a little further on, and it’s the same deal. But I notice that both of the statues are pointing their swords in a direction. This makes me think they are pointing to some point of interest.
 
I backtrack to the first statue, and mark its location on the map, and then look carefully at the direction it’s pointing its sword in, and head in a straight line, not deviating left or right at all to check out anything I see, and head in that direction to see if I’ll run into something along the line it pointed me in.
 
Eventually I come to another statue, and it’s pointing in a new direction. I do the same thing again, mark the location on the map, and then go off in the new direction, and come to a third statue. After the third statue, the wind kicks up and the resulting sand storm cuts visibility. I notice that my sheikah map cuts out due to some kind of interference, and now I’m in danger of getting lost. The only thing to do is put faith in the statue, and continue.
 
After a while, I lose count of statues, but they do ultimately lead me somewhere: another shrine. I enter this one, an it’s another electricity themed puzzle. There’s circuits in the floor, and gaps at points, and I have to manipulate metal boxes to bridge the gaps to activate switches. The reward here is a Thunderblade, which I already have one, so I leave this one here, and a spirit orb.
 
I now have four spirit orbs, but I don’t realize it for a while, and I’m more interested in exploring than anything else right now.
 
I proceed through the desert, going from place to place, fighting lizals and acquiring a lot of monster parts, and burning through ice arrows and meals, and don’t find much that’s worth the time and consumables. I’m really only interested in korok seeds and shrines so I can increase my heart meter or stamina meter, and so I can expand my inventory if I ever find Hestu again. It’s pointless to kill lizals only to get more of the same weapons I’m already carrying, especially when my inventory is already full. It seems that shrines are few and far between in these wastelands.
 
I note a region of the Gerudo map that looks like someone gerrymandered the district — there’s a “peninsula” on the map, extending into the territory to the north, like a jigsaw puzzle piece. Clearly, it must be an interesting spot for the map to be drawn this way. I decide to head up that way and check it out.
 
On the way, I note that the tower in the region immediately to the north where the “peninsula” projects into is nearby. I think about seeing if I can get there on the way. As I get closer, it becomes increasingly apparent to me that this tower is much, much, much taller than any other tower I’ve seen before. I can’t even see the bottom of it; the closer I get, the more I can see down into a very deep recess in the ground, while the tower actually extends high enough to be the tallest feature in the immediate area around it, and only a couple of nearby mountain peaks seem to rival it.
 
What’s more, there does not seem to be any platforms to rest on for the entire length of the tower, making it an impossible climb for anyone who doesn’t have an infinite stamina, or the means to fly. If I had my entire food inventory filled with stamina restoring elixirs, I’m sure I could do it, but I’m pretty borderline with the two or three stamina potions that I do have, and I doubt I could make it.
 
So it looks like an alternate approach, flying in from one of the highest and closest mountain peaks must be the way.
 
This means a detour, and I head into the Gerudo “peninsula”, which does seem to be the way up into the mountains. It’s geographically very interesting, a sort of semi-enclosed cavernous series of shelves, split down the center with a deep crack down the center of it, gradually sloping upward and spiraling to the right.
 
As I make my way up, I spot a lot of interesting things that I want to check out, but I remain focused on my goal of making it to the top, for now, and don’t take any detours along the way. I would have, but it didn’t look like it’d be easy to cross the giant crack in the middle and get back on course.
 
I go up, up, up. and eventually I have to start climbing the walls to make further progress. Not much farther than that, and I encounter a Yiga warrior, who attacks me with bow and scimitar, teleporting around like a ninja, disappearing in a cloud of colored smoke and sparkles. I’m able to defeat him, but he’s quick and nimble, not easy to hit. I get his bow, and the bow has the power to shoot two arrows at once. Neat.
 
I proceed a bit further up, and come to an immense, open cavern where there are many frog statues arranged. I’ve been seeing a lot of these statues along the way, but haven’t checked them out up close. These statues have masks covering their faces, which reminds me of the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
Suddenly, three more Yiga ninjas appear out of nowhere, and begin firing arrows at me and teleporting about the chamber. They make the mistake of getting up close to me, and I make quick work of them with one of my powerful lizal boomerangs.
 
At the back end of the chamber, there’s a large square rock door. At least, I assume it’s a door. There’s a crack around it, and it doesn’t look natural. I can’t figure out how to open the door, though.
 
I’m still not at the top of the area, but the cavernous ceiling has wrapped around to enclose the area, making further climbing impossible. So I backtrack to where the cavern ceiling opens up to the sky, and find a way to climb up and out.
 
On top, it’s snowy, and cold enough to hurt even with the warm doublet equipped. I have a flame spear, so I equip it, and like the ice wand, it confers a localized warming effect that keeps me safe from the elements.
 
I continue up the mountain, occasionally encountering moblin skeletons or lizals, which I try to avoid, to keep from having to use up my flame spear. I find a couple of baby Taluses, which I blow up with bombs, but a short distance away I awaken a full grown Talus, and this one is icy. I’m not carrying a sledge hammer, so it’s not a fight I can win. I run away, further up the mountain. Fortunately, the Talus doesn’t lob rocks at me, like all the other Stone Taluses I have fought, or I’d be an easy target in the deep snow, unable to run at full speed. It pursues me relentlessly, and not until I climb up and way do I get to safety.
 
Fortunately up here, I have a good view of the tower I’ve been trying to get to, and I’m actually above it. I take a flying leap, and glide in, landing on the top deck, without any climbing needed.
 
Kass the bird-man is here, and he sings me a song about a hidden shrine that’s nearby. I don’t make a lot of sense out of the clues, but I’m sure eventually I’ll make some sense of it and find it. I download the map data to unlock the tower, and save.

Zelda: BOTW Diary (38)

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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.

Zelda: BOTW Diary (37)

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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.

Zelda: BOTW Diary (36)

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I return to the region where the Dragon’s Mouth is, and explore the jungle a bit more, but don’t find much. A couple of korok seeds and a few hidden chests with some gems and weapons. Then a Blood Moon happens and all the enemies resurrect, which makes the area dangerous again. I go through the eastern portion of the jungle, running along a rock wall that serves as a border, and explore a couple of lakes, where I find fish and weapons. Eventually I come to a road, and follow it down to the jungle stables. I still haven’t found Farosh’s golden scale or whatever, and have no clue where to look for it. The Goddess Hylia hasn’t seen fit to lead me anywhere.
 
I decide it’s time to explore an uncharted region and try to unlock a tower somewhere. I teleport to the tower on the map called Lake Tower, in the region just south of the Great Plateau, and look around to the West, there’s a lot of area I haven’t been to yet, and then I spot a far off plume of black smoke, so I move in that direction. I cross over a ridge by the horse goddess spring, and the terrain becomes arid and dusty, and I am in Gerudo.
 
I find my self in the bottom of a wide canyon. I start to explore and before too long I start picking up a signal of a nearby shrine. I find it without too much difficulty, and enter it.
 
This one is clever. There’s a platform that moves horizontally, on a track, back and forth, with no apparent purpose. Below, I see a treasure chest, the access to which is blocked by what looks like a trip wire laser. On the far wall, there’s another chest up on a high ledge. And in the center of the floor at the bottom of the room is a glowing orange pillar.
 
I puzzle over what I’m supposed to do here. First I go to the lower chest, and jump over the laser beam easily, and obtain the treasure. I wonder why they had such an easy problem to solve, but don’t think much of it.
 
Then I inspect the pillar in the center of the room, and try hitting it with a weapon. It switches blue, and a number of platforms in the room shift, changing elevation. I can see that I could now glide to a point that would allow me to gain access to the second chest, but only if there’s a way for me to trip the switch again to move the platforms back.
 
I try using a bomb to activate the pillar switch, and it works. OK. So I hit the pillar, to set the platforms low, then glide from the entrance platform to the far wall to the lower platform, then trip a bomb to switch back, which raises me to the level of the second chest. Done. The final challenge is a series of platforms that I have to activate a total of 3 times in order to get to the top on the other side, where I will collect my spirit orb.
 
I can’t figure out what to do, I try setting the round and square bombs, but it only gets me as far as the second last lift, and then I’m stuck. I try using arrows on the pillar switch, and that works, but it doesn’t help because when I’m in the penultimate position I can’t hit it with an arrow.  This is the first time I learn that if you have two bombs active, and blow one up, it will detonate the other if it is in the blast radius.  So to make this work I have to space the bombs apart enough so that the switch is overlapped by both blast radii, but each bomb is far enough away from the other bomb that they won’t destroy the other.
 
I also discover that by holding the B button while running, Link can sprint, which uses his stamina meter.  All this time I thought of B as “the cancel/put away/say no” button, and never realized it had this feature.  I’m over a month into this game, and well over 100 hours logged, and am just now discovering this.
 
I try and try for about a half hour to figure out the solution to the shrine, get frustrated, and walk over to the laser tripwire, and put a bomb behind it, and then blow it up. I expect nothing to happen, but to my surprise, the block flies across the room. This gives me the idea to try picking it up, and I can! Now I aim it at the pedestal switch, and it activates. Suddenly, I understand the purpose of the horizontal moving platform. I place the laser on the moving platform and each time it sweeps by, it activates the pillar switch, which enables me to get past the final obstacle and clear the shrine.
 
Not bad.
 
Exiting the shrine, I resume looking for the pillar of smoke that I had seen from Lake Tower, and find it actually very close to the shrine. There’s a lot of what looks like burned decaying animal or monster remains surrounding the shrine, and then only a short distance away, there’s a woman tending a fire, trying to cook something. She tells me about different recipes that she recommends making, but they all sound awful, and they would result in “questionable meat”. She won’t let me sit at her fire to pass time, either. I’m puzzled as to what her purpose could be in the game.
 
In the general vicinity of the shrine and the cooking lady, I find a couple more korok seeds, one of which is a very difficult archery challenge with a single balloon target that is extremely close, fast moving, and erratic. I scout around a bit more, looking for anything interesting nearby, and see a stand of what look like baobab trees below, so I fly down to investigate them. When I land, I hear the roar of a lynel, and get scared. He’s nearby and I don’t see him.
 
Eventually I do spot him, up ahead of my position, and he’s patrolling a wide open plain at the entrance of the canyon that I had to cross in order to get to this side where the shrine is. I try taking him on, but no, he’s got me outclassed, just like the others. I give up, teleport back to the shrine at the top of the canyon, and, just to mess with him, I tried firing bomb arrows down into the valley to see if I can nail the lynel at extreme long range. 
 
He’s a tiny dot down below, and the distance has got to be over a thousand yards, but I find that I am able to make adjustments to my aim by seeing where the explosions land, like you do with artillery, and mange to actually nail the lynel a few times.  I note that the bombs cause him to fly back a lot, which is interesting because when I’ve hit a lynel with a bomb arrow more up close, they don’t seem to budge.  I also note that the explosions trigger lasting grass fires, which burn for a minute or two before going out, and that they attract the lynel’s interest, who slowly approaches them. 
 
I also note that if I actually hit the lynel with the arrow, rather than with splash damage from the explosion, he is immediately aware of the direction the attack came from, and sharp-eyed enough to actually see me high up on the canyon rim, and he starts attacking me with lightning arrows.  He can not only fire three lightning arrows at a time, in a spread, and he can not only lob them up hill back to my position, where they nearly reach me and land just short, hitting the lip of the canyon rim, but he also has some ability to bring down a lightning bolt from above, which can target me pretty much anywhere I happen to be, and will kill me unless I constantly move.  After I run away and get out of sight and wait several minutes, they stop, but he’s a lot more persistent than I would have thought. 
 
While I don’t defeat the lynel this way, I do gain some additional knowledge of its powers and behavior.
 
I decide to try exploring further to the north.
 
There’s a lot of coyotes, mineral deposits, and more baobab trees, and some new mushrooms and various insects for forage. I encounter a herd of horses, more than I’ve seen in one place before. I count seven or eight, and one looks a bit different from the rest. I notice he doesn’t seem to move much, just stands still, and he looks bigger. As I get closer I realize that he really is bigger. I try to get him, but he runs off. I sneak up again more carefully, and take a photo, and the Compendium identifies it as a Giant Horse, and says he is the last of his kind and very selective about who can ride him. I sneak more carefully, and down an elixir that grants a temporary extra stamina bar, but it doesn’t help enough to tame him, and he throws me.
 
Instead, I grab a different horse, one that looks like it’ll be a good one, and after I get one, I have to ride it all the way back to the stable near the horse goddess pond. To get there, I have to ride past TWO lynels, and then I encounter a mounted party of about 6 or 7 bokoblins, who give me a chase for a long way. I’m not in any shape to take on that many at once, with a semi-tamed horse, but I eventually outrun them, get to the stable, and when I go to register the horse I learn he’s nothing special at all actually. So I let him go.
 
I transport back to the shrine at the canyon, and explore the western lip of it, and eventually come back to the area where all the horses were. I explore that area a bit more. It’s pretty desolate, but there’s a lot of rocks that you can pick up and sometimes there’s something good under them, like a rupee. I get to the end of the canyon, which is one of the walls of the Great Plateau.
 
The walls of the canyon are a bit too tall, sheer, and difficult to climb so I make it a point to upgrade my stamina bar again next time I can. Which, since I just cleared a shrine, I can. I transport to Kakariko village and pray at the statue to receive the stamina upgrade, then buy out all the arrows at the arrow shop, and do a fairy fountain run, and catch 3 fairies.
 
I have yet to actually get into any uncharted territory, although I have not been through Gerudo before today. I want to try to find a tower so I can get the map info for the next territory over. So rather than return to explore southwest Gerudo, I transport to the shrine on the Great Plateau that was up on the top of the icy mountain, since that was the highest and western-most point of Hyrule that I’ve been to so far, and from there I look to the west. I can see a couple of nearby towers, and then a bit closer, I see a shrine sitting out in the open, and I decide it’s close enough that I can make it there, so I fly down to it,
 
I reach it without much difficulty. It’s on the top rim of another canyon. This one appears to have some scaffolding and bridges along its walls, and I’m not sure who built them but they do look rather rough. I expect to see some monsters, but no one seems to be around. The shrine is on the far wall of the canyon from where I landed, but it’s an easy secondary glide across, and then a little climb, and then I’m in.
 
I unlock it but can’t solve it. There’s a conveyor belt running left to right carrying an orange ball that needs to go into a hole behind and below the conveyor. If I had a korok leaf in my inventory, I bet I could use it to blow the ball off the conveyor and into the hole, but I have too many good weapons to spare a slot for a korok leaf, so I’m not carrying one. I try to improvise and use bombs to blow the ball off the conveyor and into the hole, but give up after a long time. I almost get it once or twice, but it’s very difficult to get the timing just right, and I will just have to come back later with the right equipment, and hope that the korok leaf does indeed work.
 
Leaving this shrine, I continue following along the bottom of the canyon, and hike a very long way, and eventually run into a guy sitting by a camp fire, who says he lost his horse, and would like to get another horse if I can help him. Side quest activated. If I find some more horses, I’ll go find one and bring it here. But the place where I got my last horse, I don’t know how to get here from there on a horse.
 
I continue onward, and eventually my shrine sensor starts pinging again. I head in the direction of the shrine I’ve picked up, and find it, and another stable. It’s good to find a stable here. Maybe I can give the guy who lost his horse one of my registered horses. Or if not there’s got to be some more horses nearby.
 
There’s a bunch of familiar faces at this location. Kass, the bird-man, is here and he sings me another song, about the heroes from 10,000 years ago. The lyrics for this song are written in an awkward meter that reminds me of when Rudy Ray Moore would recite one of his rhymes in the Dolemite movies. So I read the lyrics and hear Dolemite in my head, and it’s unintentionally funny. Nintendo should hire better poets.  Unlike Kass’s other songs, this one has an animation to go with it, which makes it seem more significant.
 
Another person at the stable tells me about a legendary sword that can be found in a woods, I think he said in Hyrule Forest, and I think he said it’s near Gerudo, which is to the Southwest. So that’s an important clue, I bet that will be the Master Sword. And the painter man who appears in other villages is here too, and he tells me about one of my 12 memory photos, and where I can find it. Maybe this was the spot to the southwest. I’ll have to go back and double check to refresh my memory.
 
Finally, I talk to a guy who says he got separated from four of his friends when they were attacked by monsters and he ran away. He would like me to find them for him if I can.
 
OK, so I still haven’t opened a tower. I look on the map and see a couple of stamps for towers that are near here, and I pick the nearest one of the two, and head there.
 
It’s a pretty straight shot, but I have to do a lot of climbing to get there. I head straight for it, and don’t take any time to look at things or pick up anything that isn’t immediately in front of me, and this allows me to get there pretty quick.
 
I get to the tower, and find that it’s standing in a lake of boiling mud that will kill me if I fall in it. I’m up high enough that I should be able to glide to the tower, no problem. But when I try, the wind picks up and blows so hard I can’t make any headway. I land on the ground by the lake of mud, and observe a quantity of metal boxes strewn about. So I use the magnet power to put the boxes in the mud to stack them up to create islands that I can hop onto.
 
There’s some stone pillars standing upright in the lake of mud, and it looks like I just need to make it to the first one, and then I should be able to climb it and jump to the next one, climb it, jump to the next one, and so forth until I get to the tower. But while I’m moving the boxes, I accidentally nudge the first block and it falls, domino-like, into the next, and triggers them all to fall into the tower, making for a much less difficult climb, with no risky jumps.
 
I ascend the tower, download my map data, and have a look around to see what I can see.
 
Off to the north, I can see what I think must be Hyrule Castle, and I can also see a volcano which I’m guessing is either Death Mountain, or where the Gorons live.  I’ve seen the volcano from a bunch of spots around the map, and it always seems far away.  To the north, I see a mountain that appears to be split in two, like the Dueling Peaks near the very first horse stable I encountered on the road to Kakariko, but I don’t think this mountain I’m looking at is that one.  I pin it with the Sheikah scope, and double check the map, and I’m right — it’s not the same mountain.  This gives me some hope, as one of the memory photos in the album looks like it is of the Dueling Peaks, and about a week ago I traveled to where I thought the spot that photo had been taken from was, and when I got there I did unlock a new memory, but it wasn’t the one for the picture showing the Dueling Peaks in the background.  So maybe that photo is of this mountain instead?  How weird that there should be two mountains so similar to each other in one world. 
 
There’s also a ton of interesting sites nearby. There’s a circle of massive statues, below me and to the south, an easy glide away, and a ruins a bit further out that looks fairly large, and then I see the Divine Beast that looks like a camel. It’s huge, like mountain sized, and enshrouded in a massive cloud of dust.
 
This seems like a good place to stop and rest.

Zelda: BOTW Diary (35)

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Alright, here’s a thing about the enemy AI.

I don’t really care for the way game developers use the term “AI” to mean “enemy behavior”.  Most enemy behavior is not remotely close to anything resembling what academics and researchers mean when they talk about Artificial Intelligence.  Much “AI” in games is super simple, deterministic, and basically linear.  More sophisticated “AI” combines several behavior states into a finite state machine system, where the enemy will shift from one to another depending on context.  These can be fairly sophisticated and make the enemies feel almost alive and maybe a little, tiny bit intelligent, but not really.  Most of them are super easy to fool, and once you figure out how they are triggered, what their vision radius is, they’re generally pretty easy to kill.

Bokoblins and Lizalfos for example, they seem to have a “home” point on the map, and they will not chase after you beyond a certain distance from this point.  It’s like in The Dukes of Hazzard, when the the Duke boys would be on the run, and to get away they would cross the county line, and Sheriff Roscoe couldn’t go after them across the county line… for some reason.  Once you’re out of their territory, it’s like they can’t see you anymore, and they don’t care, and they’ll turn around and walk back home.

To some extent that’s reasonable behavior.  I wouldn’t chase kids off my lawn for blocks and blocks.  Once they’re outside my property line, if they keep running away, I’ll let them.  But if they just stand there, and shoot arrows at me, I’m not going to start walking back to my house, take an arrow in the back, act surprised and look around, and then not see them because they’re across the street in plain sight but I can’t see them for some reason, and then give up and head back toward the house, only to get nailed again with another arrow.

But these bokoblin boys sure do!

That’s sad.  That an “AI” in such a beautiful game that in many ways is more an attempt to create a realistic model of a fantasy world than any game I’ve played before, still has such poorly developed AI.  This can’t be a limit of the hardware, and even the programming, I’m sure, could be done if someone had the notion to develop it.  

I think if the bokoblin should be able to still see you, he ought to react to you, as though you’re a threat. He should either attack, or seek cover, or run away, or call for help.  They do a lot of these things if you run into their camp area, but if you go outside, they lose interest in you a bit too quickly.

It makes the game easier, and there are times when I’m grateful for it, but I feel like when I run away, and succeed at getting away, I should have to have earned that, by really doing a good job of hiding and not by simply traveling beyond their give-a-damn radius for patrolling their home turf.

I also find it unenjoyable that it’s possible to use lame tactics like firing arrows from extreme range, where you can  hit the enemy and do damage to it, but they will never see you or react to you in any way.  They do react to the injury, sort of — they get knocked down, get angry, go over and pick the weapon they dropped back up, look around for a few seconds, and then if you don’t show yourself by charging in to finish up the attack, they… forget all about the arrow they just took to the head, and go back to standing around like an idiot waiting for you to finish murdering them.

Better AI would respond to these situations more realistically.  Getting hit with an arrow should be a major, life-altering event for an enemy AI, not something you forget about in five minutes, and you go back to standing where you were, only now bleeding.  

An enemy that takes a hit should not go back to standing where it was.  They should go off and seek healing.  They should run over to their friends and tell them what happen, and then the friends should bandage them up a bit, while one or two of the others grab some weapons and armor and head off into the general direction where they think the attack came from, and hunt you.  And if you get spotted, sometimes they will come over to attack you, but if you can hit them from way, way far away, well outside their visual range, they never will.  It’s like the world doesn’t exist for them outside of the bubble they live in.  And there’s plenty of ways to dish damage from a quarter mile off and never be seen.  They never seem to look up.  If you’re high enough, up a tree or on a tall hill, they’ll never know what’s been raining death on them patiently for minutes.

If you miss with the arrow, and it hits nearby, they’ll be alerted for a few seconds, but again, they’ll decide after a short time “it was nothing” and go back to their idle state, and completely forget about anything that just happened.  Well, every time you trigger an enemy from its idle state to an alert state, it should never go quite back to idle again.  It should go into a “heightened idle” where it remembers that something funny just happened, and if something funny ever happens again, at least in the next few hours, that should trigger them to go into a higher alert state than the first alert state they went to.  

Say something lands by your feet, startling you.  You look around to see where it came from. You’re maybe not sure what it even was, you just heard a whoosh and a thud by your feet, but you didn’t actually see it.  Maybe you can’t see the arrow, you don’t know exactly where it landed, and they’re hard to spot unless you know where to look, or happen to be looking right at the spot where it hit.  So after a second or two, you think to yourself “I don’t know what that was, but that was weird.  Huh, oh well.” and you go back to what you were doing.  But then it happens a second time.  Ok, now you know something is up.  Something is out there.  You don’t know what.  You don’t see it  yet.  But now your hair is standing on end.  You feel as though you’re being watched.  You feel vulnerable.  You move, and get out of sight, and start eyeing the treeline near the outskirts of your vision, straining to see any glint or motion, or something that wasn’t there before, something that isn’t right.  

If something happens again, well, you call your friend over and get them to help you, or you go find your friend.  Maybe they sneak out around the back way, out of sight, and start sweeping the general area, looking for you.  If you’re not up a tree, motionless and silent, or  using some significant stealth buffs, they’re likely to find you, unless you carefully use cover to stay out of sight.  

And that’s if you miss.  If you hit them, or if you lob a freakin’ bomb into their camp and it goes off with a huge, loud explosion, they ought to damn well behave as though that just happened.  A general alarm should go off and everyone should be on alert and they should hunt for whoever did that until they find them, and not give up for a day or two of wide-ranging perimeter patrols.  And after that, things should not go back to normal.  They should set up an ambush point on the approach to their village, or beef it up if there already was one.  They should set some traps or trip-wires or additional fortifications.  They should go to high alert much more readily after the first alert, and respond in an escalating fashion where they do more each time something sets them off, until they perceive that the threat has been dealt with, or the unknown has been identified and determined to be harmless.

That’s what it should be like, and that’s what’s missing with from the game, with the “stupid” AI behavior of these enemy creatures.

As well, there should be more variability into what the AIs decide to do next when they change behavior states.  The typical AI finite state machine is a series of interconnected behaviors where one behavior state connects to one or more others in the state machine.  But most of the time the state changes are too predictable, because they are connected by a rigid, deterministic logic.  

For example, if an enemy is on its “high alert” behavior, it will either transition back to “idle” if the enemy isn’t able to detect the player, or elevate to “attack” mode if it is.  This is too simple, and leads to the AI agent always behaving in the same way, repeatable and predictable, manipulatable and exploitable.  

Instead of that, it would be better if AI agents had behavioral drivers, which model the agent’s decision making.  Then the AI’s state machine transitions could be influenced by a complex, less deterministic seeming process.  Various factors could enter into an agent’s decision-making:  are there other friendly agents near it?  Is it injured?  How badly?  How long has it been since it last was in its sleeping behavior state (ie, is it sleepy?)  Is it exhausted?  Is it frustrated (has the player been screwing with it a lot?)  Has it seen the player?  Is it able to tell whether it’s stronger or weaker than the player?  Is there a nearby object that it wants, such as a weapon, or food, or some treasure that it guards jealously?  Various behavior drivers could influence the agent to make better, more realistic seeming choices to move through its behavior-states, and avoid looping through the same “dumb” behaviors repeatedly, as though the AI has no memory or ability to reason, or to choose between a few roughly equally reasonable behaviors.  

I think some day we’ll see this, and it will probably be fairly soon.  It might even be in other games that I haven’t played or heard of for all I know.  But I think when that level of sophistication becomes normal and expected in video games, they’ll have advanced the state of the art to a new level. 

We get a few glimpses of this in BOTW.  If an enemy has dropped its weapon when it gets knocked down, it will go and pick it up first before running back to fight the player.  So it has a certain priority order in which it decides to do things.  But this priority system is as yet too simple and agents always decide the same thing given the same collection of factors. An enemy never gets knocked down, drops its weapon and decide it’s too injured and should run away, or surrender.  It always gets back up and grabs its weapon and tries to fight.  And when it goes to fight, there are a couple of different tactics that it might use, but mostly it’s charge the player, or stand at a distance and use a ranged attack.  A few enemies do have multiple tactics that they can switch from, but for the most part it seems like they make the “decision” randomly, rather than with cunning.

Breath of the Wild does have some amazing stuff in it.  The atmosphere created by the Day-Night cycle and the weather system is impressive.  The climbing animation and kinematics is very well done.  The horse riding is pretty good.  The fact that pretty much anything in the game can interact with anything else through the physics system or through elemental effects is amazing.  But I’m not impressed with the enemy behavior — it still feels about the same or not much more advanced than what I was seeing in games like Half-Life 20 years ago.

And that’s kindof a shame.