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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.

I double check the dragon’s mouth, and re-read the clue the statue gives me. It says I need to get a golden scale from Farosh, which is the name of that dragon I’ve been seeing in the night sky near the Great Plateau and on into the jungle region.

Great, so how do I get a scale from him? The statue says he gives it to me? Huh. OK. The Goddess Hylia will show me the way. Right then.

I leave the dragon’s mouth temple and head back to where I left Horsier. On the way I get ambushed by a couple more lizalfos, and they’re in water deep enough that I have to swim to get close to them, which means I can’t fight, so I can only take them out with bombs and arrows. They’re not particularly strong, but I’m pretty low on normal arrows again, and I’m trying to conserve them. On the way back, I blunder into another bokoblin camp, and wipe them out. My faster weapons have all broken, and all I’m left with right now is high-damage two-handed weapons that are slow and awkward to use against weaker enemies, and it leads to me taking hits from them that I could ordinarily dodge or use my shield or pre-empt with a speedier attack.

I don’t much care for the two-handed heavy weapons. But maybe I just need to use them on the right type of enemy.

I get back, and find Kass the bird-man still sitting there, too, playing his accordion. I talk to him more, but he just tells me the same thing about the “shrine” at the dragon’s mouth, which makes me think I didn’t find something I was meant to, because Kass always tells me something congratulatory after I solve the puzzle in his songs. The place I found isn’t a “shrine” in the sense of the Sheikah Shrine puzzle dungeons that are all over Hyrule, so maybe there’s still one in that general area, waiting to be discovered? Only, my scanner never went off… So, I dunno.

I mount Horsier and we ride down the road, racing past any enemies we come across, until we get to the Highland Stable. I board Horsier there, and then transport to a shrine a little closer to the dragon’s mouth area. It’s still a hike to get there from the shrine, but I save about half the distance. I take a wandering path, checking out anything that looks like a korok seed, and I find several more, getting my total up to about 90.

I encounter a few more of those floaty teleporty guys with the wands, including ones that use fire.  I get a picture with my Sheikah camera, and they are indeed Wizzorobes.  The fire ones are a little different to fight, as the fire can set blazes nearby you when you dodge them, and you end up taking damage from the secondary burn anyway.  I find they are hard to hit with arrows when they dance around, but once in a while they kindof stand still and you can take a shot at them, then run up and hit them a few times, and this is the best way I’ve found to handle them so far.  If you don’t have arrows, they’re tough to fight.  Arrows knock them down to your level (they seem to float above and a bit out of your normal reach, otherwise) and stun them long enough that you can nail them pretty solidly if you’re quick about it. When you defeat them, they always drop a wand for you, which is a fairly weak weapon, and delicate, but it does elemental damage and has a range effect, which makes it worth having while they last.  The fire wands are almost as dangerous to myself as they are to my enemies, though.

I climb a small rocky hill and find a little lake at the top where I see three fairies and a bunch of fireflies. The fairies are high over the water, and it’s hard to get at these ones. I manage to screw up and make noise that scatters them and they disappear. Drat.

I continue northward and encounter a chain of shallow marshy wading ponds, with lots of forage, snails and frogs and plants. I find a couple of korok seeds there, and continuing a bit further, end up in an area I recall from my first trip off of the Great Plateau, down the main road to Kakariko village. I am near the big river with the bridge where I met Brigo the Bridge Guard. There’s the giant fallen hollow tree, where I found one of my first korok seeds, and a swampy low-lying area with a lot of ruins that I haven’t explored. I decide to search the area, and encounter a couple of weaker lizalfos, who I kill without too much difficulty. I get to the far end of the swamp, and there’s a large rock, which wakes up and it’s a big Stone Talus. I don’t have a iron sledge hammer to fight it with, so I mark the spot on the map, and transport back to the Highland Stable again, where there’s a free hammer that I can pick up, and then I transport back to a shrine that is very nearby the site where I found the Stone Talus.

This Talus fight is tougher, because his vulnerable ore-spot is not on top of him, but on his back, high enough that I can’t reach it with the hammer easily. He’s pretty hard to get behind, and when I do he has to be bent backward to make the vulnerable spot low enough that I can hit it, or else I need to be standing on a raised part of the ground. This is very difficult to arrange. I try jump attacking at the spot, but this isn’t really any easier.

I find if I climb up his back, and roll a my round and square Sheikah Slate bombs down his back, and detonate them, they do enough damage that it’s a worthwhile little bit extra. Then I can jump off his back and do a falling attack, which is tough to connect with, but works maybe half of the time or less. When I do manage to hit with the hammer, it does a big chunk of the Stone Talus’s life bar, about 1/5th or so. I also equip bomb arrows and when I can, I get a shot off at him, hitting twice, and the combination of all that manages to defeat him, but only after he hits me 3 different times, forcing me to eat two foods to keep my health up. The reward for victory is the usual massive gemstone drop, which to be honest isn’t such a great reward at this point, as I’ve found dozens of amber and other minerals, and don’t have much use for them still. Despite that, the Stone Talus fight is pretty enjoyable, about “just right” as far as the challenge level I can handle, and I like the battle music.

Having vanquished the Talus, I complete exploration of this swamp ruins area, and find a couple of hidden chests, and some animal and plant forage, and then I head back over the hills intending to make my way back toward the wooded river area that leads to the Dragon’s mouth and see if there’s more stuff I missed there, which I’m sure there is, but if it’s just forage and minor enemies, I don’t care about it. I only want to find a shrine or some clues that can tell me how to proceed on the main quest.

On my way back, I come to that fairy pond that I found earlier, and the fairies are back. I manage to capture two of them, but spook the third one away. Still, not bad, and it’s very good to have two fairies again.

I make my way own into the wooded area and find another small bokoblin camp. This makes the third or fourth one that I’ve cleared out in the area, and I wonder how many more there must be. You can’t see far at all from the ground here, which makes finding things much harder. I could walk right past something and have it be on the wrong side of a tree or a river bank, and never know it was there.

It turns out there’s a few areas I had yet to explore in the jungle region.

I get on my horse and take a ride out on the road, and let him take me where he wants to go, and I end up in a part of the map I hadn’t wandered to on my own. Somehow or other I had just missed this entire branch of the road, and it takes me through some low-lying jungle floor part of Faran.

I don’t get to explore much, for one because I’m on horseback, but more because it’s raining like hell again, and I am dodging thunderbolts. I forget that I’m equipped with a metal weapon until I start sparking, and just in the nick of time do I put it away, and thanks to Horsier’s speed, I just barely evade a humongous thunder blast that crashes behind me. Wow.

I continue on the road a ways, until I notice a bridge up ahead, and I almost stumble right into a bokoblin treehouse. This one is up an embankment to the right of the road I’m following, and there’s a ramp leading up to it, but it’s destroyed, and I have to climb up a tall tree right next to their platform, and jump over. Fortunately the bokoblins are pretty weak, and I take them down quickly. I find an opal, and a few arrows, which is good, because I’m all out of normal arrows.

I’m also hearing Kass’s accordion song again, and after crossing the bridge I find him at the road side, and here he’s singing a song about a dragon and a secret shrine that’s located in its jaws.

I puzzle over what this could mean, and continue down the road a ways, and run into an ambush of lizalfos, which I just ride through, speeding up a bit, but then not much past them I run into another ambush of bokoblins. These guys have arrows, and I want them, so I dismount and run them down, killing them all pretty quickly, without taking too much damage. I manage to get up to 19 arrows, pretty good replenishment up from 0 without having to spend a rupee.

A little further down the road, I run into a girl who I’ve encountered a few times, who is always talking about dragons. Something she says clues me in to check the map for a river that looks like a dragon, and sure enough, there’s a river that looks to me like a dragon. But it’s clear on the other end of the jungle area. I look again at the map, and there’s another river nearby that looks like a dragon too, and I decide this looks more like a dragon than the other one (I mean, who knows, really, and is it really a contest?) but this one has a much more pronounced delta that looks like jaws, so I go to check it out.

It seems the most direct way is to follow the river, which means leaving Horsier behind. I dismount near the bridge, and right by the bridge, there’s three rocks in the river. Two of the rocks have smaller rocks on top of them, and the third rock is bare. I scan the water with magnet-vision, and spot a third rock. This seems like a novel korok puzzle, but I can’t figure it out. The rock in the water was chained to one of the other rocks, and the slightest movement causes the first rock to fall off the rock. It’s extremely touchy, even with plenty of slack on the chain, so I feel like it’s an unfairly difficult puzzle due to poor physics simulation of the chain.

After several minutes of frustrating attempts, I finally try arranging ice blocks to hold the rock in place, but it doesn’t work. I give up and move on down the river.

Further in, I find a circle of water plants in the river, which I know from other ones is another korok spot. I jump in and find my guy.

I’m up to 78-79 korok seeds, and have yet to find Hestu again to give him more of them. Where the hell could he be? I first encountered him on the road, maybe I should try traveling down more roads, instead of veering off all the time to check out the local forage or hunt for more korok seeds. But the road has a lot more encounters, and if you want to get anywhere, you need to avoid them. But if I want to find a guy who’s known to hang out on the side of the road, I can’t avoid them!

Well, I continue down the river, and check the map to note my progress and correct course every so often.

Eventually, I get up to the area near the mouth of the river. I encounter two lizalfos ahead of the mouth, and then I enter into an open area. There are a couple of small, primitive foot bridges crossing some water into the center of the delta, and I can see stone ruins, pillars, and statues that have an ancient look to them.

Upon entering into the area, I’m immediately attacked. Horn blasts, and then lightning arrows. The lizalfos here are well equipped, and there’s a good 8 of them, I think. I’m quickly incapacitated by a shock arrow, and drop my weapon, and then am killed quickly thereafter.

I try again, with another frontal assault, feeling I’m ready this time, but I’m really not, and I quickly go down again. The lizalfos are so fast afoot, jumping and dashing, and they are hard to close to fight hand to hand. And at range, I can’t move much while I try to aim, and the arrows don’t do enough damage to take them down quickly. So I don’t have much good options to take them on this way, and my execution is even worse than my non-existent tactics.

Determined, I take a sneakier approach on my third attempt, and skirt around the outside of the kill zone. I stalk the lizalfos, one at a time, and kill them quietly, a single shock arrow to the head in most cases, and in some cases at extreme range, angling my shot to arc high into the air in order to get the range I need to connect. This works much better, and I clear the area methodically, probing ahead cautiously and backing off when I find the next target, assessing, and then taking it out with cruel, merciless stealth.

At the far end of the kill zone there’s an ancient stone construction built to look like a dragon’s head.

The mouth of the dragon is guarded by two more powerful lizalfos, but I spot them from far off, and take them down the same as I did the first 8, the only difference being that these two take several arrows to bring down.

The final enemy is a moblin, even more powerful than the two elite lizalfos. This one I could probably take on hand to hand, but I’m in bow mode, and I just lob bomb arrows in from probably the maximum possible range I can hit from using the bow, and drop him. In all, I’ve expended a small fortune on special arrows, but it was worth it, I had an easy time and got through it by using my abilities effectively and planning.

Inside, I’m expecting the usual shrine, but instead of that, I found a different sort of… I guess temple? Altar? Whatever you want to call it, it’s a statue, similar to those where I’ve prayed at to trade spirit orbs for heart containers or stamina meter upgrades. This one tells me about a quest, that I need to find a scale from this dragon, and then do something with it? I’m kinda vague on what I remember from this. I’ll go back and read it again.

Also, on top of the dragon head temple, there’s what looks like another korok puzzle, a rock block arrangement that I have to match to the one next to it. This one appears to be missing perhaps two blocks, so I go looking for blocks. Much later, it dawns on me that maybe the first one has the extra block that needs to complete the other one, so rather than one needing two blocks, one needs to give one to the other. Sure enough, that’s the solution, and I feel so smart that I figured it out on my own by just intuition and reading the obscure visual language of the puzzle correctly. This one was more difficult than most, but not as frustrating as the river stones that were chained together.

Hmm, I wonder if I hit the chain with a strong weapon if it might break, and then I could… Hmmmm.

I’m sure there must be a lot more in the area, but it’s night and not a good time to be foraging in a place that’s likely hostile and I’m not confident I’ve completely cleaned out the entire area, although for the immediate moment I appear to be alone and safe.

I wish there was a fire nearby that I could sit next to until morning, but you know how that goes.

I continued exploring the jungle region. Climbing again up the bluffs behind the Lakeside Stable, I find large statue with what might have once been an altar in front of it. I don’t know if there’s anything here to do or not, but I try various things and nothing does anything.

I take advantage of my altitude to look around a bit, but I don’t see much of anything that I haven’t seen, although I’m getting a bit different perspective. Down below, there’s another bokoblin camp, and I drop bombs on it for a while until the two blue bokoblins are taken out, then drop down and take care of the sentry on the tower. I loot whatever drops, and move on.

Continuing West, I run once again into the two sisters, Nat and Meghyn, who hunt truffles outside of Hateno village. They’re under attack again, and this time they get knocked senseless by their attackers, who I drive off a bit slowly. They’re just stunned, though, and are revived after I rescue them.

I have found several truffles, so I try to offer them one, but the game doesn’t allow it. I hold it and stand next to them, I try to talk to them, I tried even putting the truffle down on the ground in front of both of them, but they ignore it. They say they’re out here risking their safety to find a truffle, and here I am giving them what I have so they can return home and be safe, but there’s nothing.

This is a broken moment, I wish that the programmers had thought of this situation and accounted for it.

I move on, and come to the boundary that separates the jungle zone from the next area, and it looks like I’m coming into the area where the Horse God dwells. There’s a road that goes along the border, and I follow it a bit, and find a few more korok seeds.

I’m now up to nearly 80 korok seeds, and since first encountered Hestu, and gave him all the seeds I had at the time, that puts me over 80 and probably close to 90. I feel like I’ve been playing a game that should have been titled, Korok Quest: And Incidentally Link.

I’m not figuring anything out, I’m just on a mission to explore the world, lift every rock, climb every tree and mountain, and look at everything, but so far there’s been next to nothing about the main mission of the game, defeating Ganon. The Shrine tests don’t do anything other than give me a puzzle to solve. But they don’t tie into the story. They purport to prove my worth as a hero, and that’s fine, and the challenges themselves are mostly OK, though not amazing, but I really wish that they had designed them in such a fashion that they would reveal clues and story. Like, a clue to where the next shrine is. Or tell me who this Monk was, and let him tell me about Hyrule, Ganon, Zelda, or anything, really. My only real driver for finding shrines is that they put me 1/4 closer to a heart container or stamina meter upgrade, and a waypoint that I can teleport back to if I decide that I haven’t found enough korok seeds out in that part of the world yet.

But there’s jack shit out in the world telling me about how to find the Four Legendary Beasts, What to do when I find them, How to defeat Ganon, more about what Happened 100 years ago, or any of that stuff. I know that it must be out there. I haven’t found 10 of the 12 photographic memory spots yet. But there’s TWELVE of those, and there’s got to be a good 200+ korok seeds in the world, and I believe north of 100 shrines, although I have not found that many myself — not that I’ve been counting, but I think I’ve probably cleared maybe 16 to 20 altogether thus far. Most of the time, my sensor doesn’t detect anything when I’m exploring, so I must have cleaned out the parts of the world that I’ve been to. But I keep finding ridiculous amounts of korok seeds and forage and hidden weapons everywhere I go.

I continue following the road until it is clear that if I go further, I’ll be leaving the jungle area, so I turn off and head back into it. I find yet another korok, and then I encounter a sleeping red Hinox, who I defeat pretty easily. He manages to hit me one time, but with my armor equipped it doesn’t one-shot me, I take a mid-combat meal and recover, and take him down. He’s got some decent item drops, including some Knight’s-level arms.

Moving on, I find more hidden treasures in the water, and by this river, encounter that same odd hovering, teleporting, lightning shooting creature. It looks like maybe a Wizzorobe? But it’s wearing white.  I get excited and forget to photograph it to get an ID for sure, and I don’t notice it displaying a name on-screen when I target it. This time I manage to take it down with a couple of good arrow shots. I’m running low on arrows again, down to just 4. Hitting it with the bow stuns it, and gives me ample time to hit it again, which I do, and it only takes two arrows to take it down.  I happen to have a pretty nice bow equipped, which has an attack rating of 36, so other bows probably take a few more shot than that.  I don’t think I headshot it, but maybe that happened, and made it a relatively easy encounter.  The creature, whatever it is, drops its lightning rod, when I kill it, which fills my last weapon slot. This is a cool weapon, a bit inexact, and not great damage, but it gives me a range alternative for weak enemies, and can be used effectively to fight meta-users and aquatic creatures.

Crossing the river and going up another level, I find a large, flat, open area, and spot my second Lynel. This one is red. He’s also equipped with lightning weapons, and has very good vision. He sees me a long way off, and I try to run, but he comes up and even though I think I’ve gotten far enough away that he should have reset back to his idle AI behavior, he’s still tracking me, and hits me at long range with a thunderbolt, taking me out in one shot.

I experiment a few times, going up against him with different equipment, but nothing makes a bit of difference, he simply outclasses me, and by a large margin.Looking at my photo album of clues to the story, it looks like one of the photos was taken somewhere in this area, but I haven’t been able to find it. I see palm trees and ferns and square-shaped red rock formations, and what looks like some kind of building near a lake, but I have yet to encounter it. It feels like I’ve been all over this part of the map, pretty thoroughly by now, but of course it’s very possible that I’ve missed a huge swath of land somewhere. And of course, I have not really been anywhere near where that Lynel is patrolling. Although, I have come up adjacent two its area from two different directions, now.

I wonder how I’ll ever become powerful enough to stand toe to toe against one of those things.

Not all who quest are in a hurry.

I could try the Eventide Island mission again, but I don’t much feel like it. Instead I want to explore.

I end up taking about 5-6 hours and go all over Hyrule, to places I haven’t explored thoroughly.

It’s going to be hard to remember everything I did, and the order in which I did it. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I recall that in order to upgrade my Sheikah slate powers, I need to get ancient machine pieces, which can be obtained from dead Guardians. I’ve looted a bunch, and most of them have screws, springs, and gears. But the upgrades for the Bomb and Stasis powers require different parts, and they seem to be much more rare. I’ve only found one Shaft, and I need two more to upgrade the Bombs. And I forget offhand what it was that Purah said I need to upgrade the Statis power. But I know the one Shaft that I did find dropped when I killed the only Guardian I’ve managed to kill so far, so I decide to try to kill a few more.

First, I head back to the Great Plateau, and fight the two Guardians that are in the ruins area on the southeast corner by one of the four shrines. I’m well armed, and now these guardians are pretty easy to kill. I just hit them in the eye with an arrow, run up, and smash them. I get them nearly dead before they can shoot a second time, and if I need to I just back off and hit them with another arrow. I don’t get any of the parts I needed though. I transport back to Hateno village to pay Purah a visit to double check, and sure enough, I don’t have the parts she needs.

Leaving her lab, I forget all about Guardian killing and decide on a whim to wander north of Hateno village, in the cold region of Lanayru mountain. There are three pine trees on the top of three nearby peaks, and there’s got to be something up with those. I glide out and sure enough, I find a korok seed. I have several minutes on the cold resistance food I ate, so I explore a bit more, and re-visit the Spring of Wisdom. I still don’t know what to do there, and I don’t know where I’ll find the clues I need to figure it out.

I hope I can find some more serious cold weather gear that will allow me to spend indefinite time up here without having to eat special meals and watch the clock, and then I can screw around and experiment and explore more thoroughly.

I try touching the sick dragon, and it damages me, but not a lot. So, OK, I guess you don’t climb up on the dragon and pull a thorn out of its paw. Well what else could it be? I guess I’ll find out someday. I climb down and explore the east side of Lanayru, and find a couple of korok seeds, and a shrine. This shrine was another one that was well hidden, behind a bombable rock wall. It can be difficult to see on the mountain, it seems like it’s always dark when I go there, and the weather is bad, poor visibility, and so I’m lucky I found this one. Now I have a quick way to get there. I cleared the shrine, it’s tough to remember, but I think this one told me that I was worthy just for discovering it, so kindof a freebie. I think here is where I received some climbing boots, which give me another speed boost to my climbing. Sweet.

After this, I decide to explore up and down the coastline on the eastern shore of Hyrule, starting up north. I get to a low enough altitude that it doesn’t hurt to exist any longer. On my way down the trail, I fight a few lizalfos and some ice kees, who freeze me a couple of times because I don’t want to waste arrows on them.

I get down to the shore, and explore, and find several more korok seeds. Checking the map, there’s a string of islands on the north side of Lanayru, and I haven’t been up there before. The nearest is called Wintre Island, and I try to glide there from the mountain, but it’s much too far, and I don’t make it halfway there. So I give up on that, and head south down the shore. It’s desolate and rocky, and the forage isn’t great, but I do find several more korok seeds, some mineral deposits, and not a whole lot else. I get all the way to the southern point of the continent, to a region caled Mapla point, and continue back to the West, coming nearly south of Hateno village to an area called Deepback Bay on the map. Somewhere in this area, there’s a beach where I found a lot of gemstones and a couple or three more korok seeds. There’s lizalfos sleeping on the beach but they’re not too tough, and then I run into the gemstone beach, and there’s a bunch of baby stone taluses, maybe 5-6 of them, and they’re really only hurt by the iron sledge hammer, which I don’t have right now, so I bomb them and take them all out with one or two bombs.

There’s a dock with a raft around here, and I take it and swing around Mapla Point and head all the way back up to Wintre Island, where I find two more Korok seeds.

There’s what appear to be ancient Greek ruins on the land mass nearby Wintre island, and it looks interesting, so I try exploring it. Here, I find my first Lynel, and it’s a blue one. For the other enemies in the game, blue means extra strong, so I don’t know if this holds true for Lynels, or not, but this one was easily the strongest enemy I’ve encountered in the game so far. I tried fighting him, and he could one-shot me without even trying. He wielded a lightning weapon, I managed to hit him a couple of times, but he had 3000 hit points, and I don’t know what that translates to in terms of heart containers, but he definitely outclassed me.

After respawning, I decide to observe him from a safe distance, and see what i can figure out about it. He seems to be patrolling this area by the ruins, guarding it. I want to get past him, and I think I can do it. I manage to sneak by him, and it’s not hard. He patrols a fairly wide area, and when he’s on the far side of it, I duck down and sneak along the edge of the rocks, and mange to keep quiet and out of sight.

I get over to the ruins, and there’s a couple of chests sitting there. I pull them close to me using magnesis, and open them, and there’s a couple of Gold rupees, which are worth 300 rupees apiece.

I decide to leave this area for later, since if this Lynel is typical of what I’ll find up here, I’m definitely not ready for it yet.

I get back on the raft and start heading south, but it gets rainy and night time and I decide to just Sheikah slate teleport back to a more familiar part of the map, and set my destintation for the shrine near Kakariko village, where I raid the fairy pond, and find 3 fairies, which brings me up to 5 total again. I love having fairies, they’re a great life insurance policy. While I’m there, I have the fairy of the fairy pond enhance my new climbing boots.

I jump back to the Stables by Dueling Peaks, and it’s dark. I think about the Hinox skeleton that I fought it he wooded area nearby, and decide to try to find it again. I know right where it is now, and I marked it on the map. I have a lot of arrows and I am still very well armed, so I feel ready. I transport to the shrine by the river where the Hinox skeleton is, and get out there, and sure enough it’s there! I fight it, but I don’t get started until 2:30am, and at 5am the game changes to “morning” and the Hinox crumbles back into the earth and disappears. I had him down to near dead, and it escaped from me. Crap.

I transport back to the Dueling Peaks Stable, sit by the fire until night, which officially starts at 9pm, and then warp back to the Hinox skeleton, and fight it again. It’s a fun fight. I have a hard time with it, and have to do it 3-4 times before I manage to not get tripped up on running into trees while focusing on the Hinox, or having my view occluded by treetops. Apart from that, though, the combat goes really well. I hit it in the eye, and it seems easier somehow. I can run up and pound on him, and get in about 10-12 hits before he gets up and I have to run away again. I even manage to pop his eye out, and watch him search around and pop it back in to his skull. He also rips the ribs right off of his skeleton and throws them at me. He’s got some interesting attack options, I’ll give him that. I notice that when his eye pops out, it has its own health meter, and recalling how bokoblin skeletons take a hit, and then their head pops off and their skeletons crawl back and pick up the head and reassemble themselves, regenerating their healthbar, and aren’t truly destroyed until you smash the skull on the ground, I realie that this is what I need to do to defeat the Hinox skeleton, so the next time the eye comes out, I run up and smash it a couple of times, and the Hinox is defeated.

It drops a lot of loot, but the weapons it drops aren’t anything better than what I have. It does give me a Knight’s Halberd, though, which is a pretty cool spear weapon that does decent damage.

There was also a korok archery test on a nearby mountain that I found one time but didn’t have enough arrows for, and I have plenty of arrows right now, so I go back to the spot on the map where I marked it, and complete that challenge.

I continue to explore this mountain area, and end up getting back into the area of the map between Mount Taran and Ebon Mountain, an area I haven’t explored too well yet. I notice the next night that the moon is blood red, and since the monsters will all be resurrecting, I decide to warp to the shrine on Cape Cales, and do another raid on the bokoblins there so I can restock on Knight’s Broadswords.

I really don’t need to do this, though, as I’m well stocked with good weapons, and as it happens this time they do not drop any broadswords at all! I might have destroyed them all with explosions, or something, I hope. I realize that I’m near where that tall pillar of rock offshore was with that strange bird man who was playing a song about a hidden treasure. I decide to go back out that way again, and this time I find the treasure — a sunken chest nearby one of the rocks, which has a 300 gold rupee in it. I still don’t know what to make of the clue, 17 of 24 doesn’t make any sense to me; I just found the chest by searching with magnesis vision, which made it easy to spot. Maybe in the 17th hour (5pm?) of the 24 hour day, the shadow of the pillar of rock falls on this spot? I don’t know, I was there at 7pm, and didn’t want to wait around for 22 hours to see. I transport back up to the shrine on Cape Cales.

After clearing the bokoblin lair, I realize I haven’t explored much downhill from the cape, so I do so, and get into the area around Mount Dunsel. I encounter a couple of mounted bokoblins, and take them out, knocking them off their horses with the bow, and then finishing them with melee weapons. I take one of their horses, and ride it a bit, so I can go further, faster.

There’s a cluster of mountain peaks, and I kindof wander through, some of the places I’ve been to before, and I recognize it, but other parts I haven’t. This is another area of the map where I haven’t been to a whole lot, and taking a second pass through here, I find a few more kurok seeds, and pick up a few that I’d seen spots for but wasn’t able to figure out how to get them on my first pass.

Somewhere around here, I encountered another sleeping Hinox, this one was in a spectacular cavernous area in the vicinity north of Mount Dunsel. It was a red Hinox, and not too difficult to defeat. I glided in, landed on its chest, charged up a melee attack, did some good damage, and then managed to get an arrow to the eye or two to finish him off.

Not sure what to do next, I decide I want to explore more to the west of where I’m at. I lose the horse I took from the bokoblins, and transport to Lake Tower, scope around, and spot a shrine out in the open a distance away. It is too far to glide to on a straight shot, but I can get about halfway there, and then run the rest of the way in. As I get closer, I find another stable, the third so far that I’ve managed to discover. I talk to the people at the stable, save, and got clear the shrine. This shrine involves magnesis puzzles, and I have to rip a door off its hinges and turn it into a makeshift bridge to cross some gaps between platforms.

A person at the stables tells me he’s really into horses and challenges me to complete a course he has set up, and if I can do it in a good enough time, he’ll give me better horse gear. I try it, but don’t succeed. Another person tells me that there are some marauders on horses nearby, and asks me to take care of them. I get into a skirmish with 3-4 bokoblins on horseback, and take them all out easily. Then I spot another telltale orange glow of a shrine nearby, go and explore it and find it. I clear out this one too, I forget what the challenge was. Outside this shrine, there’s a woman sitting by a campfire, and she tells me about her best horse, who died, and she is hoping to reunite with it by going to a special place that is rumored to be near here where horses can be resurrected. It sounds pretty unbelievable, but who knows.

There are a lot of horses in this area, and I catch a few more, but none of them are any better than the horses I have already, so I don’t register them. A person at the stables can change your horse’s appearance, so I give Horsier a mohawk mane. I think he looks cool that way.

I take the horse on the steeple chase course, and after a few tries manage to get a sub-1:30 time, which earns me a fancy bridle, and then a few more tries and I get down to below 1:15, which earns me a fancy saddle. They don’t seem to do anything for my ability to ride, so I guess it’s just cosmetic.

I ride out and follow a pass I saw through a mountainous ridge that ran alongside the steeple chase course. I follow it, and eventually come to what looks like another fairy fountain flower. This one wants 1000 rupees, but I have plenty of rupees from all the exploration I’ve done. This is not a fairy, though, but a horse god, who tells me they have the power to resurrect a dead horse. I’ve seen Horsey jump off of a very high bridge, land in water, and swim to shore, so I don’t know what it takes to kill a horse — I did capture a horse once only to have it shot out from under me by a Guardian, just as I had succeeded in taming it, and that blast killed it. They also seem to take hits from weapons, so obviously they can die.

I continue exploring the area, just following a trail of korok seeds, mineral deposits, and hidden treasure chests, until I find myself on the south coast of Hyrle again, this time far further west than I was when I retook the fishing spot near Lurelin village. I reach a tall cliff, and far down below I see beach. I make my way down there, stopping on a few flat levels to harvest minerals, and when I get to the beach, I find a half-dead Guardian, and kill it, then I find another Guardian a little further down the beach. This one is alive and well, and wakes up, and it can walk. It kills me, I manage to hit it once with an arrow, miss it with the second arrow, and thereafter it just pummels me, it shot recharging just as my fairies bring me back to life, so I just get revived, killed, revived, killed, 5 times until I’m out of fairies and Game Over it.

I restore from my last save point, and head the opposite way, and end up exploring a long stretch of beach all the way back to that Lurelin fishing spot. Along the way I end up fighting a lot of lizalfos and a few bokoblins, including two mounted ones, and I take another horse, and ride it for a while, all the way back to the jungle zone, where I go to register it, only to find out that I’ve maxed out my horse registrations. It’s not a very good horse, so I let it go.

Since I’m back here again, I decide to go back to what I was doing 8 or 9 hours ago, in real time, and try to find that shrine that’s just east of the bridge. I still can’t find it. Any time I’m there, it pours and thunders and doesn’t stop. I try to climb up levels, because I can’t find any sign of a shrine on the lower levels, but the rain won’t let up, and it makes climbing impossible. At one point, I can hear accordion music, which I think is coming from the stable nearby, but the stable is far enough away that I shouldn’t be hearing any music. But I also heard this same music being played by the weird bird-man at the rock pillar in the middle of the bay near Hateno beach. I can’t tell where the music is coming from.

Frustrated, I give up on it, and walk back east, looking for a drip spot to climb, and get all the way back down to the beach again. Eventually, I do find a place I can climb back up, but it’s a very long trip to that spot, and after getting to the top of the cliff, the ground is very flat. These mountains have an unnatural, cubed-off look to them.

There’s a massive waterfall, and a few sunken treasure chests in the lake at the top of one of them. I get a bundle of ice arrows, and a sword that’s inferior to the weapons I already am carrying.

On another one of the flat mountain tops, there’s a circle of stones, with one stone in the center. I’ve seen other stone circles like it before, and they always have koroks on them. This one doesn’t, or at least it’s a puzzle that I don’t know the solution to, because nothing happens when I lift the center stone. I look around and try to figure something out, but can’t. I notice that right where the stone circle is, my shrine sensor is pinging like crazy, but I still can’t figure out where this shrine is.

I reach the end of the mountain range, so I backtrack and explore to the other end of it. I find a few more bokoblin camps, with some fairly tough bokoblins on them, and they’re decently armed. There’s a few lizalfos as well. I fight them, and win, although it wears through a few more weapons, and I end up biting it at least twice, running through the last of my fairies.

At the very top and farthest west end of the mountain, there’s a small lake, and in it there’s a magnetic iron door, which I lift out, expecting that there will be something I can do with it, or maybe it’s covering another treasure beneath it. But nothing. The lake is full of Hyrulian Bass, probably around 15 or 20 in a tiny little pond. I bomb them and harvest as many as I can.

Had my best Eventide Island run yet, and got killed by a freak glitch.

I started out by taking the raft on a circle around the island, and killing all the offshore octorocks using the bow, at ranges where they aren’t any real threat. Then, I cheat a bit, and drop my best sword, shield, and bow on the raft, so that after I set foot on the island and have all my possessions removed from my inventory, I can just pick these back up again and be very well equipped. This makes the regular bokoblin encounters very easy, and removes a lot of the need to scour the island scavenging and looking for hidden weapons that are more useful than the tree branches and bokoblin arms. All there is to do then is forage as much food as possible, and cook it so that you can heal yourself as necessary, find some arrows, and go clear out the enemies and put the orbs in the altars.

I start out and do it near-perfectly, and going great, I get 2 of the 3 orbs in the altars, and all that’s left for me to do is slay the Hinox and the small bokoblin camp on the southeast corner of the island, and I’ve done it.

I decide to take out the Hinox first. I sneak up and got in the Hinox’s hand, and he puts me on his chest. I have my best weapon equipped and begin charging up my attack, when I somehow clip through the Hinox’s body, fall to the ground, waking him up. My attack charge-up got interrupted, so it is no longer charging, and I can’t see anything since I’m standing inside the Hinox, so the game stops drawing properly, and because I’m inside its body, the game engine treats this as him hitting me, and I’m one-shot dead with absolutely no way to avoid it. Bullfuckingshit.

###

I decide to take a break from making Eventide Island runs, and go back to exploring the jungle waterfall area by the new stable I found.

Exploring this region is slow going. The jungle vegetation limits visibility a lot of the time. And it’s very rainy, as well as foggy. The rain brings lightning with it, and there are electricity-based monsters that you’ll encounter. I have my rubber helmet, which protects me somewhat against the lightning, but any time it’s raining, it’s tough to explore because you can’t climb, and it’s also a bad idea to try swimming, because you need to climb to get out of the water in most places. Plus, I haven’t had a lightning strike nearby with me in the water, but I assume it will damage me.

There’s a bunch of waterfalls just outside of the Stable area, and I get down there and start exploring. I find the usual — korok seeds, floating boxes with items, sunken treasure chests with more stuff, rupees, arrows, gems, and a couple of weapons, including a two-handed boomerang. Boomerangs are weird in BOTW — not like a traditional wooden boomerang, they’re swords with a bent blade, a bit like a kukri knife, and you can melee with them or throw them, but they are more interesting thrown. I have yet to throw a weapon effectively, because I’m so bad with the analog sticks.

But today is different. Today, I found that I had purchased a Pro controller, a long time ago, and forgot that I had it. All this time, I’ve been playing either with my joycons in handheld mode, or docked using a wired gamepad. With either of these, the fine control with the analog sticks is just not there. With the Wireless Pro controller, it’s a different world entirely. The precision with the analog sticks is there, and I finally have the ability to smoothly track the camera at a slow speed and stop exactly where I want to. Now, I can shoot arrows and throw weapons with accuracy. Finally.

I’m not looking to get into combat this session, and am trying to avoid it so I can keep my weapons.

I clear out the first pool area, just north of the Stables, and it starts to get dark. I climb a cliff, and a couple of bokoblin skeletons pop out of the ground, but I run past them and get away, as they’re too slow to follow me and it’s too dark and poor visibility for them to follow. I can see them, they can’t see me. I duck down in some tall grass and hang out for a bit, looking around to see what’s around on this level that I can either climb to or investigate.

All of a sudden, a fairy-like(?) being appears in mid-air, floating in front of me. I’m not sure what it is at first, friend or foe, but soon enough, it attacks me with lighting balls, and then teleports away. I take some damage, and respond a bit clumsily, caught off-guard. I manage to hit it a few times with arrows, and have it nearly defeated. I’m armed with a dragon bone spiked boko club, a good choice in this area, being that it is made from wood and therefore doesn’t conduct electricity, yet has high damage output. It’s main downside is low durability, and after a few hits I break it, and have to switch to a metal weapon, which is a bad mistake. The lightning attacks do more damage, and seem to home in on me while I’m holding metal. Very quickly, I’m taken down, rescued by my fairy. I end up dropping my knight’s broadsword, and can’t pick it up again because I’m already back down to half a heart, and looking to avoid dying more than recover my items. I was close to taking down this enemy, but suddenly disarmed, near dead, and looking like my options are few without a wooden weapon to fight with, I turn tail, and teleport back to the shrine near the stables. It’s cowardly, but I wasn’t prepared, and wasn’t looking to get into a fight. But suddenly, I’m down one fairy, one broken club and one barely used knight’s broadsword.

And, this is one of the shortcomings of the game, I think. The fact that you can teleport any time you want, by hitting pause, and just get out of any kind of dangerous situation. Pretty much any other time, you want to get out, you just have to hit the “-” button and bring up the map, and pick anywhere you’d rather be but where you are, and in the blink of an eye you’re whisked away.

For that matter, you can also pause at any time and eat to regain health or stamina, and bail yourself out of any situation. The entire meal takes place in the pause screen, taking up zero in-game time, and potentially you might have every slot of your prepared foods inventory devoted to life refills, so as long as you can keep an eye on your health meter, you can pack away virtually infinity hearts. And unless you take so much damage that you get one-shotted, if you can hit “+” fast enough when you’re down to your last few hearts, you’re very nearly immortal. The only thing that stops you from doing that is failing to have the presence of mind to bring up the pause screen because you’re too busy dealing with what’s in front of you.

This takes away so much of the danger to the game. The fun parts are exploring, figuring out puzzles, finding things. The combat, I’m still reserving judgment, until I’ve played more with the Pro controller’s actually-usable analog sticks enough, but I think the core of it is OK, but it’s flawed in several ways — the pause-heal/escape being too easy.

I mean, the original Legend of Zelda also gave you pause-heal, so this is not completely unprecedented, but it was only up to two doses of medicine, and medicine took some time to figure out how to get. In BOTW, how many prepared food slots do I have? I don’t know, it’s more than I can visually count at a glance, that’s for sure. Two dozen, maybe? And you could warp away with the Whistle, but that was of limited usefulness — you had to wait for the whirlwind to pick you up, and you had to not move out of the horizontal row you were in, or it would miss you, which limited your dodging while you waited for it, and then you had no real control over where it would take you. It was deterministic, but you didn’t have any choice in the matter — once you signed on for the ride, you were going to where the wind was blowing you. And it might be right into another dangerous spot, or far away from a fairy pond, or medicine shop.

And on top of all that, when you do die, the penalty for death is pretty light. You respawn at your last auto-save spot, and it’s usually pretty close to where you bought it. You only lose maybe the last few minutes of your progress. I actually like this, I don’t want a harsher penalty for dying, that makes it really suck, like losing your whole inventory, or half of it. That would just put me into a mode of saving every ten feet and respawning if anything bad happened, and that’s no fun. But this combination of design choices all factor into making the game feel rather… casual.

That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. I like that the game feels like a relaxing place where I can just hang out and explore for hours.

But, some hundred or so hours into the game, and having explored perhaps a third of the world, I have to say so far I haven’t enjoyed the combat too much, and mostly have sought to avoid it as much as possible. Most encounters are not that challenging, and also aren’t that rewarding.

Random encounters serve to deplete your hearts and wear out your weapons, and leave you with nothing worth the time.

The camp raids are fun exercises in tactics and strategy, at least at first, until you’ve run through a few dozen of them, and then they feel a bit routine — the AI’s limited and predictable responses doing little to keep them fresh. You take them on, more or less because they’re there, and to be able to say you did them. But most of them do not help you to advance the story or get you closer to defeating Ganon. And I think this feels like a mistake. I want these encounters to feel meaningful, and they just don’t. Especially once the Blood Moon happens and undoes all the death I’ve dealt them.

Then there’s the Guardians, who at first seem impossible, the challenge curve shooting up near vertically — that is, until you figure out what works on them, and then they’re manageable: Shoot them in the sensor with an arrow to reset their insta-death laser countdown, and hit them with a weapon good enough to do damage, and probably be ready for it to break at least one, because you’re going to need to hit the thing a bunch of times to knock its hit points down to nil.

Fighting a Hinox is a bit more interesting, and feels almost like a boss fight. They seem to have a bag of tricks that is fairly shallow, though, too. I would have liked to see them more fully fleshed out, with some more tactics, in addition to uprooting a tree to use as an improvised club, and butt-stomping you.

How about:

• a stampede charge where they trample you;
• hurling boulders,
• picking you up and bringing you close to their face for a big bite, where if you can work your arms free, you can take the opportunity to smash them in the head or put an arrow in their eye.
• Or taking on two Hinox at once, and dodging quickly out of the way while they clumsily run into each other, hit each other, etc.

I will grant that when I encounter mounted enemies, they seem like a lot more fun. I’ve had very few mounted encounters, but I am looking forward to having hopefully more.

I know there’s supposed to be Lynels somewhere in the game, and they’re tough, but I’ve yet to run into them. And I’d run like hell if I did, until I get a lot more heart containers, and some decent armor.

But I also wish that there would be more classic Zelda enemies, like Tektites, Leevers, Pols Voice, and Like-Likes, Lanmolas, Ghinis, Darknuts, Wizzorobes, and Iron Knuckles. And Moblins that look like Moblins, you now the bulldog faced guys. Not the weird tall troll dudes. (Edit: the electric fairy creature that attacked me was a wizzorobe. )

There’s basically only a few types of encounters, at least so far:

• Easy encounters where you are never in serious danger, and can just walk up and swing away: chuchus, kees, boko skeletons and the weaker bokoblins.
• Ambushes, where you can see your quarry from far away, and plan an approach that will maximize the amount of damage that you do before they even know you’re there. Plan, prepare, and execute, and you earn a meager and ultimately meaningless gem or a few arrows, or earn a completion of a sidequest. But usually nothing like a wondrous new item, or new capability.
• Somewhat challenging fights, with blue bokoblins, moblins, and lizalfos.
• Near-impossible odds, where you just need to run away as quickly as you can, because you don’t have a good enough weapon to do enough damage to survive the encounter, like the disabled Guardians in the early part of the game, or the enemy variations with elemental buffs, like cold Lizalfos, or the electric teleporting fairy who just kicked my ass.

On the plus side, I really do like the variety of weapons, their meaningfully diverse mechanical differences.

But the enemy AI is rather too easy, in most fights, and once you figure it out, it doesn’t offer a great deal of challenge, unless you’re facing down multiple well-armed enemies when you break a weapon or get knocked down. I wish the enemy AI was a bit more cunning, a bit more cutthroat. Maybe not for the random nuisance encounters, but definitely for the more serious ones. The first time you run into something new, it’ll probably get you. But after you figure them out, they’re pretty easy to deal with.

But I do think that because of the pause-screen mechanics of eating food to recover health and using the map to teleport to any convenient wayport at any time, they designed a game that sacrifices combat that feels truly deadly.

Anyway, enough criticism.

Back at the stables, I heal up, and rest until morning at the inn. The next day, I venture out over the bridge to the east of the stables, and check out the waterfalls nearby. Midway across the bridge, my Sheikah slate starts detecting another shrine nearby, but I’m unable to find it.

Looking around for the shrine, I spot a bokoblin outpost below the bridge, just south of it, and decide to raid it. I clear it out pretty easily, breaking another broadsword in the process, but picking up a halberd and a bunch of arrows. There’s another waterfall nearby, and I check out the pool there, and find a korok seed, and another couple of sunken treasure chests.

It gets dark, and the electric dragon appears and starts shooting lightning at me again, and I again decide to transport back to safety, wait until morning, and resume exploration.

On the third day out, I cross the bridge and continue looking for the hidden shrine. I’m close, but not finding it. I’m about to try climbing up the cliffs to the next level to explore there, when it starts raining. A woman from the stables comes walking by, and I talk to her. We take shelter under a nearby lean-to, as lightning starts to crash down, and wait for the rain to let up.