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Knowing how to defeat the Hinox is going to be critical to succeeding the Eventide Island challenge, and it will be a waste of time running through the challenge only to lose to the Hinox time and again. I need practice and repetition, and a way to experiment with tactics. I don’t want to read any walkthrough, I want to figure it out for myself, for the satisfaction, even though that means the challenge and frustration levels will be higher for me.

I have seen two Hinox in the game at this point: the skeletal one that rose in the forest near the first Stable that I encountered just west of the Dueling Peaks, and the second one was on my recent excursion down the road south of Hateno village. I remember precisely where I saw the second one, but I don’t know that I can find it again easily on the map, and it’s more time consuming to get to.

I wish there was a tutorial battle arena mode in this game, where you could put yourself in a small map of one of the various terrain types, and place say 1-5 enemies in there, so long as they’re of a type you’ve encountered before, and practice fighting them with whatever gear you’ve acquired so far.

Absent that, the next best thing will be to use save states to save the game just before an encounter that I need to practice, and run through it, restore, and run through it some more, as many times as I need to until I feel I’ve mastered it.

OK then. That’s what I’ll do next time I play.

While I’m thinking about it, there’s something else that I’ve found annoying with the controls, having to do with the camera control. In a tight area, such as an enclosed space, or in the woods, or in a treetop, I very often have some useless object blocking my view, such as leaves or whatever. This stuff needs to not be drawn when they block Link’s view, or our view of Link. I’d like it better if the game rendered them transparently, so that you know that they’re there, but otherwise I want to see Link clearly, and I want to see what Link is looking at clearly. Climbing a tree to get a better view of the landscape basically isn’t viable because of this, and being in a dense area of a wooded space also has this problem.

There’s a road leading out of Lurelin village, running along a valley, and I decide to explore along it. I don’t go too far past the nearby shrine, when I spot something that looks interesting up the valley wall to the right. I decide to check it out, and under some odd looking vegetation, I find another korok seed. Back toward the village, I spot a large bokoblin platform, and decide to raid it. I sneak up, do a little sniping, and manage to take out most of them. One of them spots me and runs up to fight me, and I pull out my sword and inadvertently chop down the tree I was hiding behind, but manage to kill him easily. There’s still a few more up on their stand, so I run up and kill them all. They’d been firing arrows at me non-stop while I was behind my tree taking cover, and so I expected that I would be able to harvest maybe 15-20 arrows after the fight was over, but I guess when the tree fell it destroyed them, maybe. I’m a little annoyed, but oh well.

I continue down the road, kindof zig-zagging up and down the walls of the valley to check out whatever looks interesting. I end up climbing up a ridge and walk along it for a ways, then looking down I see a bokoblin menacing a person who looks like he’s from Lurelin village. I drop down on my glider, and take the bokoblin out, dropping on him from above and doing an extra damage strike.

I talk to the fellow I rescued, and he tells me he’s leaving the village to become an scavenger, and how he’s going to get rich hunting treasures around the ruins of Hyrule.

I’m not sure where to go next, but I don’t think I’ve been down south branch of the road, so I head that way, and before not too long I reach a swampy area, where I see some formations that look like massive rib cages from some long dead beast that must have been the size of a mountain. Checking it out, I find… a sleeping Hinox! Just what I was hoping to find. I create a save state, and then approach cautiously, to see if I can get a sneakstrike in on him while he’s sleeping. This doesn’t end up working, but as soon as he wakes up I’m on him, dropping a lot of damage. This one is wearing armor on one of his legs, which makes it a little harder to fight him, since I can only do damage on one side of him. He does manage to hurt me some, but the battle goes my way this time, thanks to my equipment being some of the best weapons I’ve found. I don’t manage to score any eye shots with my arrows, but I take a few attempts at that and manage to get a little closer to hitting the head.

This Hinox has an orb on a necklace, and so I know there must be an altar nearby where I can put it, but I’ve never been to this part of the map, before, and don’t know where it could be. So I loot the area, pick up the orb, and start wandering toward a nearby low hill, hoping that I’ll either find the altar, or be able to see it from up there. The mountain is not very steep, and is more of a hill than a true mountain, but as I’m looking for a walkable path that I can take without having to put the orb down, I come to another swampy area, with another sleeping Hinox!

This one is a darker color than the first one, and probably stronger. There’s also a few bokoblins around him, sleeping, which makes me think this is going to be a rough encounter. I sleepstrike one of the bokoblins, and the Hinox doesn’t wake up. I spot another bokoblin off in the swamp, and for some reason they’re all sleeping, even though it’s the middle of the day. I snipe him with the bow, taking him out with a headshot. I turn around and head back to the slumbering Hinox, and sneakshot the next bokoblin. I don’t see any more, so I think I’m ready to take on the Hinox. I duck down and crawl up near him, and notice him stir a bit, and he raises his arm to kindof scratch himself.

I’ve seen videos showing Link in a Hinox’s hand, being lifted onto his chest, so I try to position myself, climb into the hand, and wait a few seconds, and he obliges, and now I’m on the brute’s chest, with a nice clean shot at his head. I put on my most powerful weapon and charge it up, and take a mighty swing, and it manages to drop him for maybe 1/5th of his total hitpoints. Wow, this guy is tough. Of course he wakes up and is enraged, and I get a flurry of more blows in on his legs.

I sense he’s getting ready to attack so I try to get away, and end up taking only minor damage from the splash of his butt stomp. Then he uproots a tree, and starts coming after me again. I switch to bow, equip my strongest bow, and lock target on him and try to make an eye shot. I fire probably 10 arrows, and all of them connect, but only 1 or two manage to hit him in the eye. He starts trying to cover his eye when I’m readying my bow for another shot, which makes it extra difficult. But this is at least smart AI behavior, and I like it. When I nail him with an eye shot, he is stunned momentarily, allowing me to run up and hit him a bunch of times in the legs, doing a lot of damage in the process.

In the process of running from him, I stumble on another sleeping bokoblin that I missed when I was stalking the camp, and he joins the fight. I’m hoping I can take it out quickly and avoid getting damaged, but before I can do anything, the Hinox throws a tree trunk at us both, and it hits his friend, killing him instantly, and it blocks me from taking damage. Sweet! I manage to score a final eye shot on him, and run up and take a few quick shots to the legs, and he drops.

So now I have two of these orbs, and I still dont’t know where to take them. Looking at the map of the area, I see that there’s a third swamp, and kindof a hill in the center of them, and I guess that’s where I need to go. I carry an orb up there with me, and sure enough I find three altars. I put one orb in, then go back down and find the other, bring it up, and put it in.

Then I go down to the third swamp area, and find a third Hinox. This one is the weakest of the three. I glide down from the mountaintop and land one of the rib-like projections, where I have a very nice vantage point on my sleeping quarry. I save the game here, and try a few different tactics. First, I try headshotting him with the bow, but I don’t have a very good angle to do it, and I don’t think it did any extra damage, maybe I missed the eye or even the head entirely. He wakes up and as he’s walking around, I’m still above his head level, and he doesn’t seem to have any capability to attack above him, which seems like an oversight on the programmer’s part. He’s all about attacking down, but can’t deal with an enemy at treetop level above him. I’d love it if he tore down the rib, or battered it so hard with the tree trunk that it shakes me out and causes me to fall down, or something like that, but none of this happens. I guess the programmers didn’t anticipate anyone would do this.

Well they should have. It would have been great to see the Hinox trying to leap up to grab me, just out of reach, and maybe to grab onto the rib and hang from it, his weight causing it to bend, snap, and if I don’t jump off in time, catapult me through the air, flinging me miles away, if I can even survive the sudden acceleration, much less the landing.

He seems to know where I am, and is standing almost directly beneath me. Now, I could pretty easily just stand here and spam bombs onto him, for however long it takes to bring him down the safe way, but I don’t want to be at it for hours, so I just restore from my save point, and this time I try gliding in and land on his chest. This doesn’t wake him, and I manage to do a sneakstrike with a charged attack. He wakes up, I try to get a few more eye shots on him with the bow, but I don’t manage to get close this time. He gets a lucky hit on me and sends me sprawling, and one of my fairies resuscitates me. Enough playing around, I run up and chop his legs down, and he dies pretty quickly.

I grab his orb and take it up the mountain, and a shrine emerges from the ground. I enter it, and there’s no puzzle or challenge for this one, the shrine master tells me that I’m already worthy by defeating the three giant brothers. I am rewared with a Thunder Blade and a spirit orb. This one looks like it is the bigger version of the Thunder Blade sword that I found in the sunken treasure chest off of Lurelin harbor.

What I don’t get about the Thunder Blade is that it’s clearly a legendary weapon, and I don’t think item drops from Shrine Chests respawn (or do they?) So, if the Blood Moon restores all the dead monsters back to life, and all the really good weapons eventually wear out and break, but don’t replenish, isn’t this a problem? I’m hoping not, that I’m wrong and there’s ways to find these weapons again after they’re used up. Otherwise, this game could be too hard for me if I am taking my time and don’t save my best unique weapons for the encounters they are meant for..

So, great, I have a bit more confidence that I can take out this Hinox on Eventide Island, maybe, with a bit of luck. Looting the marshy area, I find a number of treasure chests, including one with 300 rupees in it, and a lot of old rusty weapons laying about, including claymores and broadswords. It’d be cool if you could take these into town and pay someone to fix them up to make them good as new and restore their durability. But there doesn’t seem to be anything like that in this game

I teleport back to Kakariko village, buy all the arrows in the shop, and grab two fairies at the fairy pond, and sell off a bunch of forage materials for rupees, transport to Hateno, and return to my house, sleep, and save.

Once more, I attempt to conquer the Eventide Island challenge.

I try to go about it smarter. I have four spirit orbs, so I can exchange them for a heart container, which will put me up to 5 and maybe that will be all the edge I need. So I do that.  I also pay to sleep at an inn, getting the extra comfy bed, which boosts my health by one additional temporary heart, putting me at 6.

I also decide to try alternate approaches to the island. Maybe landing on the south beach side isn’t the best? I seem to run into enemies there immediately, maybe there’s a better way on the north side of the island. One theme that seems to be recurring in BOTW is that taking the direct and straightforward approach is usually the hardest way to go, and if you go around there’s almost always an advantage that you can find that will make things a lot easier.

I try overshooting the island to the west and come around. There’s a few rocks offshore, and the raft gets around them OK. I decided to explore the rocks, and found a treasure chest in the water, and in it there are 10 arrows. Unfortunately, as soon as I set foot on the rocks, the challenge begins, my equipment is taken away from me, and I haven’t yet been able to take out a single aquatic octorock, and there are two on this side of the island, and they both wake up and start shelling me, and I’m completely defenseless.

I take 3-4 hits just swimming to the main island, scramble up the rock, climbing too slowly, but I don’t get hit again, and I run away. I’m already down about half my health, and basically screwed myself. The bokoblin tree stand camp where I found the first orb is here, and they spot me and start shooting arrows at me. I run for it, and make it around the edge of the island, just out of the range of their vision, and disappear into the jungle.

Fire chu chus are common on the island, and they keep appearing, burning down big swaths of jungle in their wake. I avoid coming close to them, and blow them with bombs when i can do it safely.

Nearly everything I try to do, I screw up though. I suck. I admit it, but goddamnit, I suck. I just do not have the knack for fine control with the analog sticks, and it doesn’t matter whether I’m in mobile mode using the joycons, or docked and using the wired controller. Fine control is nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing sudden extreme movement overcorrection and screwup. I climb trees when I’m trying to run away. I can’t climb a tree when I want to climb it. I duck and sneak slowly away while enemies are right on me beating my ass and I’m trying to run. I get to the edge of a platform and fall down just before I’m ready to do a big jump. In short, I’m clumsy, and I shouldn’t feel like this, but I think it’s not me, it’s the controller. The dead zone is too big, and then nearly the moment you’re out of the dead zone, you’re at full motion, and this takes away all the fine, slow movement that you need to be able to do. I whip around wildly like a drunk idiot.

Most of the time, it doesn’t matter in this game. When there’s no pressure, no combat going on, and all you need to do is walk around or climb, or glide, the controls aren’t a problem. There are tremendously long stretches in this game where you don’t have to fight anything. But the moment you do, the controls matter, and doing anything that requires precision and timing is just an exercise in frustration.

I’m going to have to see about trying a Pro controller and see what kind of difference it makes.

Despite my frustration with the controls, I do manage to scout quite a bit and manage to find a few things that will make this island challenge a bit more possible:

In the boiling mud pond where I found the wood cutter’s axe, there’s also a hidden treasure chest sunk in the ground, inside of which is a claymore sword. This is a weapon with actually decent damage output, and will make combat considerably easier.  But it’s a slower weapon, as well, and fighting with it will give the weaker enemies a bit more of an opportunity to get their short in.  I’m actually fine fighting them with the boko spears and skeleton arms that I find, despite them breaking after just a few hits, they are faster, do enough damage, and are replenishable.  So I’ll save the claymore for when I really need it.

If I’m lucky, I can get a boko skeleton to drop a bow, which gives me some improved odds of sniping enemies at a safe distance, without having to rely on bomb spamming. Arrows are still in short supply, though. But if you want arrows, you can taunt the bokoblin archer sentries for a while, and they’ll shoot all the arrows you could possibly want, and all you have to do is dodge and pick them up.  The tree platform camp also has a couple of 5x arrow drops, which are great to pick up if I don’t blow them up with bombs accidentally.

There’s a couple of other rusty swords and shields laying around on the island, on the beach and elsewhere. Combined with the boko skeleton arms, boko spears, and tree branches, you can fill out your inventory slots for weapons pretty quickly.

The thunderstorms are super annoying, since you can’t savestate and restorepoint your way through this challenge, and dodging lighting is very nearly impossible.

But I figured out how to find shelter from the storm.

First, disable your weapon, or arm yourself with a wood weapon. Lightning seems to be attracted to metal. Second, get under cover, and out of the open.

Standing on the beach or on a hill is deadly. Running into the jungle and getting into the trees helps a bit. Lighting will strike trees and start fires, and trees will fall down and can hurt you, so it’s still not completely safe, but it’s a lot less risky under the canopy cover.

I found a rock formation near the bubbling mud pond that has just a little bit of an overhang to it, and I can duck and shelter in there until the storm passes. As long as monsters don’t spawn nearby, forcing you to move and equip weapons, it’s the safest option. The storms can last upwards of ten minutes or so, or at least it seems like it, so this is time consuming.

I can use the bokoblin beach camp fire to manipulate the clock, by sitting down and waiting for morning. It seems that morning is an unlikely time for a rain storm, and most of the storms occur in the late afternoon just before evening. So resetting the clock is a smart way to avoid both the deadly thunder storms, and the night enemies. By only being active in the day time once you’re armed with bow and swords, you avoid a lot of unnecessary combat, and that’s very important since you need to conserve your weapons and health.

There’s a lot of forage in the island, jungle fruits, a few wild animals, and a lot of fish just offshore. If you bomb the waters off the shore, you can get a lot of fish. All the food can be cooked by tossing it onto the bokoblin beach camp fire, and while you can’t cook mixed dishes this way, anything you cook will give you better benefit than eating it raw. Once you’re fully stocked up on mushrooms, bananas, palm fruits, and whatever else you can find, you don’t have to worry as much about taking a little damage in a fight and being unable to heal. By an amazing stroke of luck I manage to catch a fairy in the jungle one night, which effectively gives me an extra life, and my best chance so far of completing this mission.

Taking out the bokoblin beach camp and the tree stand with the first orb are both pretty easy. Taking out the bokoblins up the hill on the southeast corner of the island is a bit tougher, and if it wasn’t for the controllers screwing me up left and right, I’d probably be able to clear these guys out without too much difficulty.

There are some buffed octorocks on the island that are really annoying. The offshore ones are bad enough, but in addition to them, the ones in the jungle are particularly well disguised. They have a harder time hitting you with all the tree cover around, but they can surprise you, plus they can hide and move again and a gain. There’s one who sits under a treasure chest in the vicinity of the southwest corner of the jungle part of the island, and he’ll pop out of the ground, slamming you with the chest, which can nearly one-shot you, plus it knocks you down, briefly stunning you. And there’s a white octorock up the hill on the southeast corner, just before the big camp where you fight several bokoblins and electric chu chus. The white octorock has a wind attack that can screw you up in many ways, blowing you around, sending your arrows or bombs off course, flanking you with artillery fire just as you’re starting your attack on the camp, etc. Taking these guys out is a high priority, but even you know they’re there, they’re still dangerous, and messing up taking them out can ruin a good run.

I managed to get pretty far, putting the first orb in place, and clearing out the three bokoblin camps. That’s when I notice, down the hill from the southeast corner of the map, there’s a sleeping Hinox, and he has one of the orbs around his neck on a necklace. Mother of God. So I have to take out this Hinox with nothing stronger than my claymore sword, and a couple of arrows. There are two huge boulders on the hill, and I think rolling them down might do a bunch of damage and start the fight off with some advantage. Wrong. The boulders barely roll at all, and kinda just nudge the Hinox awake, he sees me, gets pissed off, and runs up the hill to fight me.
I’m terrible with the bow, especially if I’m trying to run and dodge, but it seems obvious that hitting this thing in the eye will do a lot of good, but I can’t pull it off. I nail him about the chest with about 5-6 arrows, shoot a few more over his head, run out of ammo, and they hardly do any damage at all. And then I’m out. I switch to the claymore, and start chopping away at his legs, and he just takes me out with a butt stomp move.

I haven’t studied the strategy guides to learn how to effectively combat these guys, but for the most part they’re slow, cumbersome brutes that seem fairly easy to dodge, if you’re halfway competent at it, which I’m definitely not. I probably didn’t manage to knock him down more than a quarter of his hitpoints, when he connects with me, finishing me off.
Maybe I’m not meant to come here until after I have more power. Maybe 5 heart containers just isn’t enough. Maybe there’s some more tactics that I should practice before I try this again.

One thing’s for sure, though, if I could save, and restore from my last bit of progress, this challenge would be a lot less frustrating and difficult.

I really love the setup and the tactics and strategy that I’m forced to discover in this situation, but I really hate getting far into it and then screwing up one thing and dying, and have to start all over again from all the way back at the Lurelin village dock, and I definitely think that the controllers are screwing me more than anything. That’s a bad form of frustration and I guess it makes the challenge level high and that makes it more memorable. But I would prefer the game allow me to save progress at certain milestones: landing the raft; placing the first orb, etc.
I might have to come back to this challenge another time, when I have more heart containers, and better ability with the controls, or possibly a better controller, and some experience fighting Hinox.

I still don’t know where the 3rd orb is.

In order to avoid the frustration of repeated failing and starting over with the Eventide Island challenge, I decide to complete as many of the other side quests from Lurelin village as I can.

The most challenging of these seems to be to re-take the fishing spot at Aris beach. I hike south down the beach. At first I stay low, on the shoreline, but after running into some monsters early on, I decide that it will be quicker, safer, easier to climb up the hills nearby and run along the edge of the slope near the top, and once I’m close enough to glide in, fly the rest of the way.

Monsters mostly leave you along when you’re in a climbing area, so sticking with climbing and rough terrain and avoiding roads and flat open plains and woods is a great way to avoid monsters and fighting. If you’re social distancing in Hyrule, go climb.

It’s a pretty long hike, but I get there quickly, but I do take the time to climb Tuft Mountain and visit the heart-shaped lake there. I go at night, and encounter  a beautiful Geruda woman, and a nervous, confidence-lacking Sheikah man who’s too scared to talk to her, but thinks he’s in love with her. I act as sort of an intermediary, and give the man a blue nightshade flower from my inventory, to give to her, but then he chickens out and asks me to give it to her for him. So, sigh, I do, and it works magic, she loves the flower and talks to the man. He’s clearly unworthy of this woman, but because this is how the story goes, she accepts his flower and decides to go out with him. This is a pretty classic trope for how relationships are started, and I’ve seen it in probably hundreds of examples. The thing is, it’s a pretty poor model for real world relationships. Real relationships aren’t based on being mesmerized by beauty, and being afraid to talk to someone because you don’t know how and are afraid you’ll screw up is not a credential for how well suited you are to be with someone. The reality is that this couple are not well suited to one another, and they have absolutely no basis for a relationship with each other, apart from they both went to a heart-shaped pond on top of a mountain one night and saw each other there.

But, eh, I completed the side quest. But whoever wrote that crap needs to try much harder.

I continue on to the Aris beach area, and it’s a pretty far walk. When I get there, I scope things out from the cliffs near the shore. I spot a raft docked on the shore. There’s two bokoblin platforms just offshore, and it looks like I’ll need to use the raft to get over to them. I’m not sure if it’s possible for me to glide to the platforms from where I’m standing, but I decide against it and take the raft, mainly because I want to inspect the dock area down there.

I’m well armed, well equipped, and at full health, and I’m expecting that I can handle this encounter. And I do! I’m spotted immediately, and the bokoblin sentries sound the alarm, but there’s little they can do against me, as I just run up the spiraling platform, dishing out death left and right like it’s nobody’s business. It’s a very straightforward affair, just run up slice, slice, slice, taking each one out one at a time, and continue making my way up. I get to the top of one platform, and then, using the bow, take out the sentries in their towers, one shotting each of them since they’re very weak. The toughest enemy on the platform is a moblin, who I take down with a flurry of strikes which seems to disrupt his ability to attack, and he ends up doing basically nothing to me, just stands there and takes about 8-10 hits before he dies. None of the rest of the enemies puts up much of a fight, either.

I clear out both platforms, and loot as much as I can. The best items I find are a dragonbone shield and a three-bladed lizalfos boomerang, which has a damage rating of 36, and is second only to a dragonbone spear that I found a while back with a damage rating of 45, and have been saving back at the house in Hateno.

I collect some rupees and arrows, and get back to the raft, and sail all the way back to Lurelin village. On the beach I spot a blue snail, the type that the fisherman’s wife needed for her recipe. Checking my inventory, I needed goat’s milk butter to complete her reicpe, so I teleport to Hateno to shop for it, but I don’t find it in the shop there. So I teleport to Karakiko village, and buy it there, then teleport back to Lurelin.

I talk to the fisherman, who thanks me for retaking the fishing spot, and gives me a decent reward of 100 rupees, and then I talk to the wife, who thanks me for the ingredients, and she gives me some rupees as well, I think 20 or 50. I’m invited to have dinner with them, but I guess that’s just being polite, because there’s no actual depiction of me having dinner with them, and they don’t even give me a free sample meal of the dish she made. I think that the amount of rupees she gave me doesn’t even cover the value of the snail, so it seems that the benefit of completing this quest is the enjoyment of completing it. Which mainly consists of me walking along the shore and being like “Hey, what’s that blue thing?” and finding out that it was that rare snail that I didn’t buy from the merchant during the bad rainstorm that first night in Lurelin.

The village elder had told me after I found the sunken treasure chests in the middle of the triangle of rocks just outside Lurelin harbor that he thought there was still more stuff out there to be found. I did find a couple of floating chests off the shore of the crescent-shaped peninsula between Lurelin and Eventide Island, floating in the water. I recovered their contents, I don’t recall them being particularly memorable, probably a gem and some rupees. I was actually going to try another Island challenge, but the winds were especially bad this time, and blew me into shore so hard that the beach went completely out of the water onto the sand. So I take this as a sign that I should explore the beach here.

The crescent peninsula is quite long, but exploring it is pretty rewarding, and I find several chests in the water and in the sand, as well as lots of crabs. Near the end, there’s a small bokoblin camp, which I clear out easily, using the magesis power to manipulate a heavy box to bludgeon the bokoblins into pulp.

At the very end of the crescent, there’s a korok seed, as I expected, and some decent fishing grounds. After clearing all this out, I teleport back to Lurelin village to rest and save.

I go on a little excursion down the east coast of Hyrule, going south of Hateno village, sticking close to the shoreline.  I spot a shrine off in the distance and head toward it.  As I get closer, I notice a circle of plants floating in the water, which I know if I dive into will turn up another Korok seed.  I do the deed, collect my seed, and upon turning around I notice that at the base of the cliff I dove off of is a small inlet cave, and at the back wall of the cave I can see it is very rich in mineral deposits.  I collect gemstones and rocks, and then scope out my surroundings. 

Further to the south, I spot that shrine I’d seen from above on the cliffs, and decide to head there, so I can activate it and make a new travel waypoint. I’m down at sea level now, and the shrine is up a few levels so it’ll be a climb, but it’s not too far away and I’m sure I’ll get there quickly.

It doesn’t take long, but as I get closer I stumble upon a little coastal village called Lurelin. It seems like a Florida beach resort, or maybe Caribbean, very tropical and it rains frequently.  I check out the village first, making the rounds, talking to everyone. One of the huts has a gambling game like the original “money making game” in Legend of Zelda.  I play, spend 10, win back 1.  I don’t have a lot of money and don’t want to waste more of it right now. 

The townspeople tell me a few juicy bits of information about the area.  There’s a group of monsters who have run off the local fishermen, and they hang out on the beech a ways off and far to the south.  I offer to fight them off, of course.  The wife of the man who tells me about this is trying to cook a special meal tonight, and needs me to bring her some ingredients, one of which is a rare blue snail.  I had just talked to a merchant, and while the weather was a downpour, he was offering a special deal on this very snail, and I turned him down, not wanting to spend 2/3 of my rupees to obtain this item, unsure of what I might do with it.  The rain has subsided now, and the merchant took off, and now I’m out of luck and will have to find one somewhere. 

Someone else in the village tells me of a sunken treasure rumored to be out in the water somewhere not far offshore.

Lastly, a woman from the Desert lands of Gerudo tells me of an island off in the distance that is difficult to reach, but it sounds like a place I need to go see for myself.

I take all this in, and go to the shrine, activate it, and clear it.  There is a series of balances that I need to manipulate with weighted objects, using the balance platforms as elevators to get me through obstacles. The solution is pretty easy, but owing to terrible depth perception and poor camera mechanics, I struggle with it, but there’s no penalty for failure other than time, so I clear it eventually.  I get another Knight’s broadsword, and a gem and a spirit orb. It’s a pretty good haul, for a shrine.

I zip back to my house in Hateno to drop off the extra broadsword, but discover that you only can purchase a maximum of 3 display cases for weapons, bows, and shields, and I’m already full up now.  Ok then.  This game is really anti-hoarding, for sure.

I teleport back to Lurelin, and take the raft on the dock there out into open water.  There’s a few octarocks, and occasionally wandering lizalfos swimming in the water.  The winds are really variable, and it’s very slow going into a strong headwind, but sometimes I am able to zoom ahead with the wind at my back, and it feels like I’m doing over 60 knots.  The raft is very awkward to steer, but if you go in the same direction only, you can built up a huge top speed, and evade enemies easily, or if you’re lucky enough that they’re in your path, you can ram them and take them down.

I notice a very large school of fish in the water, something like 20-30 fish all together, like nothing I’ve seen in the game before, except for the big flocks of kees that I ran into near the gated bridge by the Great Plateau. Normally you don’t see more than 3-4 fish swimming together.  I’m flying by and cant’ stop to try to harvest them, though.  If you drop a bomb into the water, you can kill a whole bunch of fish all at once, and they float to the top and are easy to collect, since they don’t try to get away anymore.

I head up the cost to the North, toward that island the Gerudo woman told me about.  Between Lurelin and the island, there’s a kind of floating platform, like a stone-age oil derrick, where three lizalfos are standing. They look tough, and I’m not looking to tangle with them, but I just sail by and they pay me no mind.

I reach the island at top speed with the wind at my back and plow into the beach, grounding the raft. No sooner do I set foot off the raft when a voice speaks to me, saying it will take away my possessions and give me a challenge to complete.  Somewhere on the island are three orbs, and I must find them and place them on three altars.  Then I will get my belongings back and be rewarded somehow. It feels a bit like the challenges issued at shrines, but seems a bit more difficult.

The island is crawling with monsters.  Almost immediately, I’m being mortared by offshore octoarocks, so I run into the jungle to take cover, only to discover kees, chu chus, fire chu chus, bokoblin skeletons, and more octarocks hiding in the jungle.  I’m unarmed, no equipment, and so all I can do is just run. There are numerous large rocks on the ground, which I can lift, and throw and if I get lucky, maybe do a little damage, but they’re slow, awkward, and slow me down.  I do manage to take out a chu chu with one, but then the boko skeletons rise up and start chasing me and all I can do is try to run from them.  I do manage to get away, and happen to find a stick on the ground, which I pick up and use to kill a boko skeleton, and obtain his arm for a slightly better weapon.  I keep finding tree branches on the ground, and they’re all I can use, just barely better than nothing, breaking after 2-3 hits.  I fight and manage to defeat everyone nearby, but then it starts raining, it’s night, and it’s a thunderstorm.  Lightning crashes all around, and there’s no cover.

I’m somehow very fortunate and manage to avoid getting killed by lightning, and after a bit of exploring, have found various items:  some crabs, some fruits of various types, a few mushrooms.  More sticks, a boat oar, a traveler’s broadsword, a small, weak, but very useful shield.  My whole inventory is gone, even my clothes, but I find that I got to keep my Sheikah slate powers, as well as my paraglider.  This means I can use bombs and magnetism to even the odds up a bit. I try to Save my game, but the game won’t let me save here.  Uh oh. Shit just got real.

Sticking to the cover of the jungle canopy, I stealthily sneak along the beach line of the south coast of the island, and stumble upon a small beach camp of three bokoblins. Its slightly downhill from me to them, enough so that I can just get a lucky bomb toss close enough to take them out. The camp is small, but there’s a lot for the taking here.  Three boko spears, on which are spitted three roasted Hylian bass. Another sword, more crabs, and a few pieces of fruit. I’m suddenly well equipped, albeit with low-end weapons, and lacking a bow, although I manage to find about 5 arrows in a bundle.

I get to the southwest corner of the island, and find the first of the three altars, on a rock just offshore.  I puzzle over how I’ll get an orb into it, but figure my Sheikah ice powers can probably come in handy to build a bridge of sorts. But first I need to find an orb somewhere.

I head  into the jungle and find some bananas growing, and decide that in order to maximize my chances of surviving this island, I’m going to need to cook as much food as possible so I can use it to heal myself if I get into a fight and get hurt.  I take all my forage back to the bokoblin beach camp and use the fire there to cook everything.  It takes several minutes, but I now have a decent stockpile of healing, which makes me feel very good about my chances from here out.

I go back to the banana patch area, and continue scouting.  I observe a Woodsman’s axe embedded in a tree stump in the middle of a shallow pond, wade into it, and die in what’s apparently quicksand.  This is cheap, and annoys me, but OK, they got me.  Fortunately, drowning death doesn’t result in a Game Over, but respawns you on shore minus a few hearts.  I use magnesis power to pull the axe out of the stump and bring it to me, and now all I need to be in business is a bow.

A little further into the jungle, I emerge from the other side and find a small bokoblin tree stand with a total of three bokoblins.  Two red, one of them on a sentry tower, and one blue.  The sentry tower is near enough that I can bomb it, and when I do, the tower collapses.  The bokoblin is injured, but doesn’t seem to know what hit him, and doesn’t alert his fellows.  I manage to take him out easily with another bomb.  

The other two bokoblins are sill oblivious, which I’m grateful for, but in all honesty it breaks the suspension of disbelief and makes the encounter feel like a videogame with the same dumb AI that you can snipe and ambush, just like we’ve been doing since GoldenEye 007 on N64, and Metal Gear on NES before then.  These creatures lack cunning, and aren’t behaving realistically. They never learn, they never get wise, they never run off, they just reset to idle after being suspicious for a few seconds, and then go back to innocently waiting around for me to manage to murder them from outside their very limited visual range. As much as the rest of the game feels advanced over what I’ve played in previous generations, this part of the game feels underdeveloped, and a disappointing failure to advance the state of the art.  Give me some sophisticated AI that learns and adapts and attempts to outthink me, and makes me respect it as an opponent, please.

I manage to take out the second red bokoblin with a lucky bomb, and injure the blue one as well, badly enough that I don’t fear running up and finishing him with the sword.  This conquest feels satisfying, despite the sadly pathetic AI.  I manage to find a bow, several more arrows bringing my total up to somewhere around 7 or 8, and one of the three orbs. 

I carry the orb back to the first altar, and using the cryonis power, create a little pier of ice blocks, set the orb down in the shallow water next to it, and lift it up with my third and final cryonis block, walk over to near the altar, and toss the orb in.

1/3 success.

I look at the rest of the island and it looks like there’s probably something interesting up the hill on the southeast corner of the island, so I make my way carefully over there, avoiding encounters and any other dangers as much as possible.  There’s a trail that spirals up from the beach along the edge of the hill, and I get about halfway up it when I start hearing monster noises.  I decide it will be smarter, as usual, to not run into the trap by going in the front way, and climb up the back. Up here, there’s another camp fire, 3-4 bokoblins, and some kees, and a couple of yellow chu chus, the kind that have an electrified attack. At the back end of the camp I see what appear to be explosive crates, and I think if I am careful I will be able to bomb them, and take a lot of them out, then mop up the rest.

I screw up the first bomb and alert the whole group to my presence.  The bomb rolls down near my feet, and I can’t detonate it safely.  A yellow chu chu shocks me, knocking me off my feet and causing me to drop my weapon and shield.  Now I’m really screwed.  I get back up and switch weapons quickly, fight off some enemies, and manage to set off my bomb, which takes out the chu chus and flings bokoblins away from me, enabling me to regain the initiative.  I manage to win the combat, and observe what looks like the second altar, with some heavy boxes on top of it, that I should be able to move using magnesis.

Just then, it starts raining, and I start sparking with electricity.  I try to run off the hill top, but too slow and no where to run, I’m blasted by the lightning, fly off the mountain into the water below, and die, and it’s a real Game Over death.  So unfair! I was doing great!

I respawn all the way back in Lurelin, not even on the shore of the island, and my heart sinks.  This really annoys me. The boat trip is long and with the wind it can be especially annoying to fight against the headwinds.

I try three or four more attempts, and get nowhere near as far in any of them as I did with that first run.

Aggravated, I give up and see what else I can do with the boat.  I float in to the lizalfos platform, about midway to the island, and fight them, win, and loot their belongings, but there’s not much to write home about, the nicest thing being a 100 rupee chest, and a dragonbone boko shield.  I hope that if I save here, if I fail again on the island it will respawn me here, and then I won’t have so far to go.  It does, but without the raft, and I can’t get to the island, so I teleport back to Lurelin and try one more time. 

This time, instead of going to the island of trials, I decide to see what’s around the rocks I see offshore.  I get out a ways, and take out a couple of octorocks, and get out to the rock formations.  I observe that there’s three identical rocks jutting out of the water in a triangular pattern.  I surmise that there may be something in the center of the triangle, and I’m right — looking down, I can see four treasure chests at the bottom of she shallow water.  I’m drifting and it’s windy and the winds are shifting constantly, making it difficult to remain stationary.  The raft has no anchor, so I use the Cryonis power to create three pillars of ice, which I place around the raft so it will be locked into place.  Then, using magnesis power, I pull the four chests up from the depths, and open each one.  I get a few gems, and then a very nice sword, which is imbued with lightning power.  Cool!

I decide that this is enough adventure for one day, and decide to pause here.

I give up on finding the shrine, and proceed onward to the south, following the mountain range.  On my left is the the unexplored jungle zone, and on my right is a part of Hyrule that I have the map for, but haven’t been to.  I decide to see what’s over on the right.  The mountain ridge I’m running along gradually tapers down, until I reach a long, wide, curving gentle slope.  I’m high above on the hill, looking down, and see two mounted bokoblins  riding around on horses.  They look tough, and I still don’t have any good weapons, or fairies, so my only real option to deal with them is to lob bombs.  I’m very high up, and there’s no way I can get a bomb over to them on the fly, but the slope is convenient and the round bombs roll down, if I bowl them just right, they run down to where my targets are.  It takes a long time to take them out this way, but it’s safe, or so I think.  At one point, the bokoblins actually manage to spot me high atop the ridge, and begin opening fire at me with their bows, and woah, they’re firing fire arrows at me. I’ve never had that before, and it looks awesome.  Fortunately, I’m so high up that their arrows just aren’t able to reach me, but I’m surprised that they are capable of seeing me so far away.

My bombing is not very precise, and doesn’t do a lot of damage. I probably lob a good 40-50 bombs, and it takes a ridiculously long time, probably a good half hour.  Eventually, though, I manage to take them both out.  One of their horses is still around, and I hop on it and ride it for a while, to make speed and give me a better chance of escape if I run into a new enemy that I can’t handle. This horse is very gentle and easy to control, but I don’t have a saddle for him, as he’s unregistered.

I ride him a way, and the terrain starts to change, and it looks like it’s getting more arid.  I’m walking along, going downhill toward a canyon, when I stop dead in my tracks, as I see a huge monstrous looking giant, which I believe is the same type of creature as the skeletal one I fought in the woods behind the stable one night.  

I get close enough to take a good picture, and think about trying to take it out with a stealth strike, but it doesn’t seem possible.  I still don’t have a good weapon, and I bet this thing has a lot more hitpoints than the moblins that I still can’t usually one-shot.

I think about what else I can try to do, when it becomes daybreak, the giant wakes up, and I decide to retreat before he sees me. I run back to the rear wall of the canyon, and quickly scale up, abandoning the horse.  By the time I reach the top, I think I’ll try spending another hour dropping bombs on this giant.  But by the time I turn around and look down to where I last saw him, he’s gone. 

Checking my photo album, I see that this creature is called a Hinox.

Since I’m once again high up on an elevated platform, I take a look around with my scope, looking for nearby towers and shrines that I can visit to make return travel to this spot easier.  I do see one or two but after marking them on the map, they’re all quite far off.

I decide to go for an exploratory scouting trip into the jungle zone, which is still on my left, and I leap off the mountain ridge and sail down into the jungle. 

I’m fortunate enough not to run into many enemies, and mostly they’re weak types: chu chus, kees, skeletal bokoblins, and I’m able to take care of them easily, taking no damage, and replacing worn out weapons with equivalent.

The terrain is terraced, and there’s rivers and waterfalls everywhere. I make my way down slowly, gliding down one terrace at a time, watching carefully for enemies so I can avoid or deal with them with maximum advantage. A few terraces down, I find a tower at a level with the cliff I’m standing on.  I can glide right over to it and be nearly at the top, which will make this one easy to top. This is fantastic, as I’ll finally have a teleport spot to return to this area with easily.  After I make it to the top and activate the tower, I scan around with my scope, and see some interesting features:  a bridge, and what appears to be some kind of horse statue.

Walking back off the tower, I spot a couple of lizalfos, and using arrows, I kill them from a safe distance. They’re relatively weak, and I score a couple of headshots, and they go down quick. I’m in luck, both are armed with lizafos boomerangs, which are much better than any of the melee weapons I’m currently holding.

I continue to make my way northward and downhill, find a kurok seed, and come to a river with a waterfall.  After taking out a couple of octorocks, I discover that bombs can kill fish, which makes them a lot easier to catch.

I glide down from the waterfall, and am at the level of the bridge I saw from above. A thunderstorm comes and I am out in the open. I try to find shelter, but sparks start going off around me and I’m only seconds away from being blasted by lightning.  I dash and run across the bridge.  It’s night time, and the legendary beast dragon emerges suddenly from the water, electrical energy shooting off of him, and I can’t get away from him.  His discharge kills me, and I resurrect at the beginning of the bridge, it’s still night, but the weather is clear.  I run across the bridge, and find the horse statue I’d seen from far away is actually a stable.

I talk to the locals and find out that my three horses are all available at this stable, too, even though I left them back near the Dueling Mountain stable. My Sheikah slate is pinging like mad that there’s a shrine nearby, and it takes me a while, but I eventually find it behind a well hidden bomb-able wall.  I activate the shrine, and clear it.  It’s a see-saw challenge, that I solve with my time-stopping power.  The final challenge is two see-saws back-to-back, and I can only time stop the first one; after that I have to wait for the ability to re-charge.  I puzzle over what I need to do here.  Do I need to upgrade the stasis power before I can solve this?  No.  In the end, I discover that if I just jump, I can just make it up the slope before it tilts back the wrong way, and get up to the platform where I can claim my spirit orb.

Now that I have a quick way back to this part of the world, I transport back to Kakariko to replenish my fairies, and manage to grab 3.

Then I transport back to Hateno village to sell off excess forage and purchase arrows and another weapon display case for the house.  Then I transport to the shrine near the bokoblin camp where I found the Knight’s broadswords.  By transporting here, I have an easy way to sneak up on their camp from behind. I manage to scale their skull cave house, and from up there, I am able to lob bombs.  It’s time consuming, tedious, but safe and consumes nothing.  I manage to bomb the four archery posts, taking out the sentries. For a while, they’re freaking out, setting off alarms and shooting arrows at me like mad.  By the time it’s over, I end up collecting 15 reclaimed arrows.  Thanks guys!  Getting bombs into the skull cave is as simple as dropping them so that they roll down the eye sockets and roll into the cave.  It takes a good, long time before I manage to take them all out, but in the end it works beautifully, and I have three nice broadswords that I can use to take on greater challenges.

By this time the battery has run down and it’s time to stop again.

Boarded Horsey at the stables, transported to Kakariko and restocked on fairies. Then transported to Hateno, sold off a bunch of forage loot and had about 900 rupees. Bought 15 arrows, then went to the house to spend the rest on upgrades. Bought the Bed and trees and flowers for the exterior. I figure these are the biggest bang-for-buck purchases right now, as they’ll give me the ability to sleep without having to pay for a night’s rest in the inn, and will provide me with apples and flowers that I can sell for more rupees to buy other stuff, and I can harvest any time I come home. I still have a lot of left over rupees, so I shell out for lighting, and another weapon display, bow display, and shield display

I also buy a door, but I don’t see any new door on the house. WTF? Also, there’s a small shed on the side of the house, but the door seems to be non-functional. I thought that sort of thing went out of style in the early 2000s.

Bolson the house builder seems to be kinda gay/effeminate, and I’m not having a problem with it, but I’m curious how people feel about the character’s depiction. It doesn’t seem to be a negative portrayal, but maybe a bit stereotyped.

After I spend all my money, I got to cook more dishes with my huge stockpile of forage materials, and discover that my food inventory is full. Further, each cooked dish takes up a slot. You don’t get a slot with a number counter on it, so you can carry a bajillion of a prepared meal; you get one slot per meal. There are certain exceptions: seared steak and baked apples do get a counter, but they don’t heal a lot of health, either.

I can’t cook new experimental recipes if I don’t have empty slots, so finally it’s time to start using some of this stuff.

I decide to head north of Hetano village and explore the cold mountain. It’s a long trek, and I encounter enemies that are stronger than the ones I often run into. Wolves, who can be killed for meat, but fight pretty hard, and take a lot of damage, and frost lizard dudes, who are very dangerous: fast, high hit points, high damage output, they can spit, and they have a tongue attack that has a lot of range. I get through them but break all my good weapons on the way up the mountain.

It’s too cold for me even with my warm doublet equipped, but that’s OK, I have a lot of cold-resist boosting meals packed. I find the best way to make use of these is to wait until my health is nearly depleted from cold damage, then eat the meal. It restores my health bar, plus gives me several minutes of cold resistance, which together add up to a significant amount of time to explore and look around. It’s dangeorus to let the health meter go down, but if I don’t do it, the heart replenishment that the meals provide is wasted, and the cold damage drains your health so slowly that you can get an extra few minutes out of your life bar. It’s really only a bad thing if you run into monsters unexpectedly, but encounters up here are somewhat rare, thankfully.

Still, the fights I do get into end up wrecking all of my good weapons, leaving me with just my slow axe and sledge hammer, my torch, my korok leaf, and the rest is piddly weak weapons that break quickly and are barely any use at all. The stuff I pick up from the enemies I kill is inferior to what I brought in, doing less damage as well as being less durable. Plus, many of the monsters I run into here are not carrying weapons, but use natural fangs and claws, making the weapon drops that much less frequent.

I do manage to make it all the way to the peak of the mountain, where I encounter a sick-looking, lethargic dragon-like creature, I think one of the four legendary beasts. (Edit: wrong again!) At a place called the Spring of Wisdom on the map, I trigger a story event, but it doesn’t clue me in to what I need to do. I’m puzzled, I only have limited time, and I probably don’t have the capability to whatever I need to do here, and most likely need to quest for whatever and then come back.

I take the opportunity to scope around from the new vantage point at the mountain’s absolute pinnacle. Further north, I can see numerous shrines and towers, but they’re all very far off in the distance. With enough stamina, I’m pretty sure I could hang glide all the way to the nearest of them, based on the altitude I’m at. I give this a try, but I run out of stamina before I make it over a river, fall to my death, and drown. I retry this several times to make sure, but it seems impossible. Although, if I boosted my stamina meter 1-2 more times, or used elixirs, I’m pretty sure I could do it.

Instead, I go west, down the mountain ridge, staying at the top, and continue to survey the lands. I’m basically following a route that parallels the road I walked along to find the first memory point that I discovered a few days ago, but at maximum altitude, and a bit north. I’m so high up that it’s not possible to see much detail on the ground down below, but what I lack in detail I make up for in range, and it seems like I can see halfway to the ends of the map in any direction.

While I’m up here, I find a few korok seeds and a lot of mineral deposits, and collect as much as I can find. I’m going downhill, and by the time I get to a point where I’m about longitudinally in line with the big waterfall where the hidden shrine was in the river road valley, I believe I can glide down to the north and get pretty close to a tower that I haven’t yet climbed and activated. If so, that will open up a new map region for me, as well as give me a new teleportation spot.

I glide in, and don’t get quite as far as I hoped, running low on stamina long before I run out of altitude, so I have to land far shorter of where I hoped, but I do make it down to a level where I can see a column of smoke rising from a nearby cluster of trees near a clearing. I decide to check it out, and creep up, not sure whether to expect friend or foe. It turns out to be a man, and I talk to him. He’s a traveler, trying to get north but unable to cross the river, as it’s too wide to safely swim across. It’s not far from his camp, so I head up that way to check it out. I have enough elevation that I think I can make it the rest of the way, and from there if I’m lucky I can get to the base of the tower on foot.

I glide in, and just do make it to the edge of a shallow area of the river where I can stand and not drown. There’s a few monsters nearby but fortunately none in my immediate vicinity. I sneak around and avoid most of them, and make my way toward the base of the tower, which involves some climbing. Moblins, bokoblins, and lizalfos are thick in this area, but I’m able to thread my way through them, stealthily, and avoid nearly all of them. There’s one bokoblin who I have to fight my way past just before I reach the base of the tower. I knock him down, and he tumbles away down hill a bit, dropping his weapon. I could finish him off, but I’m very low on weapons at this point, and the longer I’m there, and the more I move about, the more likely I am to attract more unwanted attention, so I use that as an opportunity to make a run for it, and I get to a tall ladder that runs up to a platform, which has a narrow bridge to where the base of the tower is. I get up there safely, and make my way to the tower, and have an easy, uneventful climb, thankfully.

At the top of the tower, I find a Zora man, who has climbed the tower and is now stuck there, unable to climb down. He tells me the Prince of the Zora is waiting for him down at the bottom, and he’s up here waiting to meet a warrior of Hylian descent, which we both think is probably me. He asks me to go down to meet the Prince and talk to him and to save Hyrule from Ganon.

I go down there and there’s a shrine nearby, so I decide to try to clear it, first. I get in, and it’s another combat trial. This one is probably easy enough that I could have cleared it, if I were fully equipped with the best weapons I’ve found so far — maybe. But right now I’m weak and depleted, and there’s just no way.

I give up and decide that in order to be of any use in this area, I’m going to need to get re-armed, so I teleport back to Kakariko village to refill on fairies again, and then back to Hateno, intending to run out to where I found all those very nice swords in that large bokoblin camp to the south along the coast.

I end up getting very sidetracked, though, and rather than take the same route as I had on my first run out that way, which was to climb to the highest point of the mountain behind my house and glide as far as I could, I end up going on foot along the roads, so I can explore more. This is fairly rewarding, but also wastes a lot of time accomplishing very little. I do find another half dozen or more korok seeds, and bring my total up to something close to 40. If and when I ever see Hestu again, I’m going to be able to max out my carrying capacity, I hope.

I find the ruins of what was once a horse riding course, and although I don’t have a horse with me on this trip, I walk the trail and find numerous targets set up around, so I shoot them all with the bow, and am rewarded with one of the korok seeds. I also run into a few bokoblins and moblins, and mostly take them out without too much trouble, although it is tougher with the weak armaments I’m carrying, and I end up breaking my last decent weapon, and now am stuck with boko spears and clubs for the most part. I wonder how on earth I’m going to be able to defeat any bokoblins to be able to get one of those nice knight’s broadswords, and I really want to get 5 or 6 of them.

I never end up making quite out there, though. I continue in a south-westerly direction along the road, and find an area that is called the navel of something or other on the map. It’s a deeply recessed lake, where I find the usual korok seed, forage items, fish, and minerals. It’s a beautiful little spot, and I’d love to spend time in a place like that in real life. I clear it and move on.

Further along the road I run into more and more bokoblins and moblins. There’s a lot of them around, but they’re not terribly difficult to fight. I try to do so as indirectly as possible to conserve what little weapons I have. But it’s useless, as I keep also running into more Keese and Chu chus, who don’t drop weapons, but do wear out my shitty boko spears and clubs quickly. At night I also run into bokoblin skeletons, and have to kill them, and swap out my worn out weapons for their severed arms or occasionally a shitty spear.

I take a fork in the road and come to a natural stone archway, and can tell there’s an ambush waiting for me ahead. Rather than go through the tunnel, I climb over it, and sure enough there’s a couple of bokoblins on the other side. They don’t see me, and I rain bombs on them until they’re all dead, loot the area, go back through the tunnel and clear mineral deposits, fight a bunch more chu chus and boko skeletons, and move on.

I get close to the mountain ridge along the west coast and start climbing. I end up getting lost, wander around a bit, explore, and find more korok seeds, a few mountain lakes, and two more caves. The first cave is a dead end, but is loaded with mineral deposits. The second cave is a tunnel to a new part of the map that I haven’t been to, but have peered down into before; it looks tropical and swampy.

Passing through the tunnel I get assaulted by a gang of lightning Kees, who surround me, disarm me through shocking me, and I don’t last long against them. On my second attempt through, I take them out at distance with my bow, and don’t take any damage from the first 5, but don’t notice a 6th until I’m deep in the cave harvesting dead Kees parts, when one sneaks up on me and hits me 3 times before I can finally stop it.

My shrine sensor is pinging off the chart at a point about mid-way through the cave, but no matter where I look I can’t find the shrine. I spend about an hour trying to triangulate it, but it’s no good. I walk in a direction, the pings get faster and louder, then fade and stop. I turn around and walk back through the exact same area, and nothing. I turn around and walk back through again, same thing happens, it pings loud and fast and then fades and stops. I don’t see anything inside the cave, I climb on top of the mountain that the cave tunnels through, and it pings like mad up there, too, but I still don’t see anything. I spend at least two if not three day-night cycles up there looking for the damn shrine, but I never do find it. On one of the nights, the great dragon beast that I has seen near the Great Plateau makes an appearance, emerging out of a lake at the base of the mountain and flying about in the night sky.

Battery on the Switch has worn down to 25% at this point, so I decide it’s time to stop for now.

I continued my search for my lost memories.

First I went to the stables to get my horse. Here, I found that Horsey was alive and well, and had been re-boarded automatically. I signed out Horsey again for old time’s sake, even though Horsey isn’t the fastest now. We headed out down the road, back toward the Great Plateau.

Consulting my photo album and the map, I headed to where I thought the picture showing the Dueling Peaks had been taken. The photo shows the peaks off in the distance, the taller of the two is on the right, and in the foreground is a small lake or pond, with a fairly large boulder in the middle of the frame, on the near shore, and a couple of beech trees in the foreground off to the side.

I thought I could find it, and I headed off in the direction of the Great Plateau, crossing the bridge and checking back over my shoulder every so often to see if the perspective was getting closer.

Past the bridge, I encountered ruins that were infested with bokoblins and moblins, and I took my time going through there, killing them as I encountered them.

Near the bridge, there was a shrine that I had somehow missed on my way out to Kakariko village, so I went in and cleared it. There was a series of fans that I could use to boost my glide speed and cross horizontal gaps without dropping altitude. I easily obtained the spirit orb, but the second of two treasure chests was beyond my ability to figure out how to get to it. I bet there’s something good in there, too.

I gave up on it, and left the shrine. The weather was bad, and it started raining very hard, and then there was lightning strikes! I ran for cover and just barely got out of the way of a thunderstrike, which still knocked me off my feet, but didn’t do a lot of damage. I got up, and another lightning strike came out of nowhere and nearly killed me. I ran back to the shrine and got under cover, and this seemed to keep me safe. I even called Horsey to take shelter as much as I could get him to fit inside the shrine doorway. I didn’t want to find out if lighting would hurt him.

On horseback, it’s fun to gallop and charge enemies at full speed, swinging at them as you pass. Targeting seems semi-automated, which makes it fairly easy to connect with them, and it seems to do extra damage, and is hard for the enemies to hit you, so it seems like a very advantageous tactic. I am not quite so good at stopping, reversing direction, and passing through on another charge, though, so I need to work on this more.

I eventually made it all the way to the base of the Great Plateau, when another lightning storm suddenly came up, and I had to take shelter under a tiny overhang along the pleateau wall. There were moblins directly in sight, and I don’t know how they didn’t spot me. I guess it was dark and all. If they had seen me, I think it would have been very difficult to fight them in the rain with lightning crashing down about us.

I waited out the storm, clinging to the wall and crouched down, trying to keep out of sight. The storm cleared and it was sunny again, and morning. I consulted the map and determined that I needed to head further south. I observed that there was a road heading in the direction I needed to go, so I followed it, and made pretty good time with Horsey making it a bit faster than it would have otherwise, but I don’t think I was as thorough as I could have been in terms of searching and exploration. But, with as many enemies as there are in the vicinity, I really wanted speed and the capability to outrun them if I ran into a group I didn’t think I could handle.

I rode South until I came to a bridge with twin tower gates at either end. It was in ruins, but looked to have been a strong fortification at one time. I rode across the bridge at full gallop, and in the center of the bridge, it widened into a round sort of courtyard-like area, with a fountain in the center. There were three lizard guys standing guard, and I surprised one, smashing it with my sword as I ran by at full speed, Horsey adding a bit of trampling damage as well. A lizard guy off my right flank started firing arrows, and then a third one on the far side of the fountain began to close in, and I decided the best thing to do was keep going, so I did, breaking through them easily, and made it to the other side.

I was in an unmapped region of the world at this point, and so I spotted the tower and proceeded to head toward it. The terrain here was interesting, different from other parts of Hyrule that I’ve been to so far. Rocky, but the rock formations had a distinct shape about them, jutting up out of the ground at an angle, creating slopes. I really like the design work that the put in to the geography. Everywhere you go, it’s beautiful and intereseting to explore.

I was making my way up hill, toward the tower, when I spotted a bokoblin in the distance, and it looked like he was heading away from me. I followed him a bit, and observed that he was heading toward his home camp. I quickly spotted two other bokoblins, and then two more, for a total of five. It looked like they were guarding the pass. The road wasn’t really a road anymore, but it was a walkable path between two higher ridges of rock, creating a sort of natural corridor. I decided against risking a frontal assault uphill, figuring that would be the toughest way to take them on, and likely suicide. I did manage to take out the returning bokoblin with an arrow to the head before he got back to his companions, and then I climbed to the top of the ridge along the stone corridor, and looked for a bit to see who else is around.

Wouldn’t you know it, off to my left there was a similar group of those lizard guys. At least four, probably more, and they’re a lot nastier. Fast, better armed, much better fighters. They go down pretty quickly if you hit them with a good weapon, but I was suddenly feeling rather outnumbered, and needed to employ stealth and strategy if I was going to get through this.

I didn’t have that many arrows left, and there wasn’t any rocks or explosive barrels about, so I would have to rely on rolling Sheikah bombs down to them. Fortunately, this worked rather effectively, and I managed to take out both groups without coming to harm, and minimal use of weapons. I did have one or two spots where I had to finish someone off up close and personal, but I managed to soften them up with bombs and arrows, and only had to land a coup de grace with the sword on a nearly dead foe who managed to spot my position and climb up to get at me.

I was starting to run low on good weapons at this point. The better stuff that I had obtained in the vicinity of Hateno village was all used up, and I’d been picking up inferior drops form the bokoblins and moblins near the plateau. The lizard guys had some interesting gear, including a “boomerang” sword that had a weird bend to it. It was short-range, but very fast, and did repsectable enough damage.

At the base of the tower, there were three final lizard guys to get past. I thought I might be able to avoid them and just climb up the far side of the tower, but I messed up and the spotted me. I headshotted one with an arrow, and then quickly followed up with a bomb, blowing him up and doing some splash damage to the other two. Two of them were fairly weak, and I could probably take them out up close pretty easily if I had to, but the last one was very tough, and had a nasty looking weapon, and I knew he’d be trouble.

I jumped down to try to make this as quick as possible, and engaged them with my sword, which broke almost immediately. I switched over to my double bladed axe, which I’d been carrying for a long time, and had been saving for cutting wood, but hadn’t needed it since I’ve been felling trees with bombs instead. This axe was fantastic, and swung very nicely, much, much better than the woodsman’s axe you get in the start of the game. It seemed to do double hits and I could swing it around for a follow-through blow and do some secondary damage. It felt nimble and just a very nice weapon to have in this situation, where I had two enemies up close against me and needed to land strikes on both of them to keep them from being able to counter-attack me. I somehow managed this much better than I have any previous combats, and actually took down the tough guy without him hitting me even once, and took only minor damage from the weaker fellow.

I grabbed the tough guy’s weapon and it was a dragon bone lizafos spear, which has a damage rating of 45! If he’d hit me even once with that thing, it would have killed me for sure in one shot. This is nearly 2x the next best weapon I’ve found so far, the knight’s broadswords that I kept finding south of Hatenov village.

I cleared out the Lizalfos little camp area, and then proceeded to climb the tower. The climb was easy, and I activated it and updated my map. Then surveyed the lands surrounding the tower using the Sheikah scope, noted a few interesting landmarks, and pinning them on the map for later exploration.

Out in the distance, I spotted a shimmering pale dragon flying through the air. It was one of the Four Legendary Beasts! (Edit: I was wrong about that.) I snapped a photo of it, and wondered what I needed to do with it. It was huge, and clearly I could in no way be a match for this creature in a fight. It did not appear to notice me, though, and it was very far off in the distance, so I did not worry too much about it.

Remembering my original purpose, I went back to studying the new map to see if I could see any areas that looked like they had the right geographical features and were in the right location to be where that photo had been taken. Sure enough, I found a likely looking spot, back the way I came, over the fortified bridge, and then across another river.

I called Horsey and got back on him and we rode back. I was feeling bold and thought I’d try to take out the Lizalfos who were guarding the bridge, who I had rode through on the way out. I charged and dealt a double blow to the first one, but he wasn’t finished off yet, and he got up and gave chase. These things are super fast, and he was right on me. I tried riding in a circle around the courtyard-fountain part of the middle of the bridge, but got hung up on a corner of the bridge, and then horsey ran right off the edge, and we plummeted into the river below! It was probably about 60-100 feet down, and we survived the fall, but I had nowhere nearby to swim to safety. Horsey began swimming for the shore on his own, and I could not whistle for him to come, because I was swimming and you can’t call the horse when you’re swimmming or climbing. I tried to do a dash move to catch up to Horsey, hoping that I might be able to mount him and ride out to safety, but in the end I couldn’t keep up with him, and kept missing, used up my stamina meter, and drowned.

I respawned, back on the bridge, and on foot. No Horsey! And now I had to fight the three Lizalfos on foot, and wouldn’t be able to run from them if I coulnd’t handle it. I considered just using the Sheikah slate to travel to a shrine near where I wanted to look for the photo location, but I didn’t want to take the easy way out, and it felt too cheap to over-rely on that. I just ran up and quickly hit them with that wicked boomerang sword, and made quick work of the three guards. I checked the area for loot and picked up a few weapons to fill the empty slots that I’d created by breaking weapons in fights. My arsenal was starting to dwindle, and the replacements were not as good as what I came in with, but would do.

Then I looked down in the river to see if I could see Horsey, and there he was! He was still swimming to shore, and had a long way to go. I think it took him probably twenty minutes. I kept an eye on the map, which shows his location, and it was a LONG swim. I guess horses do not get tired. Horsey’s course had him making the far shore of the river, right by where I needed to go anyway.

I climbed up a bridge tower, and hang glided to the near-shore bank of the river, which was at high elevation, an area on the map called Scout Hill, and then from there I glided across the river, right to where I wanted to go. Horsey showed up eventually, about 5 minutes later. I called for him, and he came to me! I was surprised and thrilled to be reunited. I found the spot where I thought Zelda had taken the photo 100 years ago, and found one of the 12 spots that unlock my lost memories! But to my surprise, the memory I had found was for a different photo! This photo is the one showing two little statues near a large, gnarled tree. So now I am very puzzled. How did I guess the wrong location for one of the photos and have it end up being the right location for one of the other photos?

The memory triggered was of a conversation between Link and Zelda, where she asks Link if he would choose to be someone different if he knew he wasn’t meant to be a warrior, but had been told that he had to be one because of his family tradition. It seemed like Zelda was hinting that she felt that she wasn’t meant for the life she was told she must lead, and that she felt she had to disobey expectations and be who she knew she was meant to be.

I guess a lot of people have conflicts about their lives.

I explored the area near the lake where the memory trigger location is, hoping that I would find a second trigger location nearby, because it seemed very certain that I was in the right vicinity for the photo I was thinking of. But all that came of it was I found several more korok seeds, some rupees, and fought a few more lizalfos. I think I’m up to nearly 30 korok seeds by now. I enjoy finding them, and I enjoy the incentive and reward they offer for exploring every last corner of the world. They make it rewarding for going to places that you’d ordinarly probably find too difficult to bother going to otherwise, but are very worth it for the view. And there’s usually some kind of puzzle or challenge involved to reveal the korok. Some are just a matter of finding a special flower, or standing in a circle of plants or stones. Others are hidden under rocks, or up a tree, or on top of a hill. Some you find by placing apples in offering baskets next to the little deity statues that people pray at. These are neat little games within the main game, but have precious little to do with stopping Ganon, other than that you can trade the seeds in for inventory slots. But it seems like they make the quest to destroy Ganon a lot more circuitous. Not that I mind; I really enjoy finding them, and the game would be less enjoyable without them. But strictly from a storytelling standpoint, they seem to pad the game out a lot and it takes away from the urgency of the main quest.

Like, imagine you were watching a movie, where the hero is on a quest to destroy the big evil, and he has the mcguffin, and he knows where he needs to go with it, but rather than do that, he goes to literally every square inch of the world first, for reasons that are at best tenuously related to the central conflict and plot. And this made the movie run 200 hours long, instead of 2.

Well, that’s the difference between film and video games.

I decided that was enough for one night.

Oh. I almost forgot about a couple of other noteworthy things that I have enjoyed and need to mention.

In the new part of the world, there are FLOCKS of Keeses that will attack you all together in a swarm! You get stormed by like 20-30 Kees all at once. Normally they come at you 3 at a time, but it’s really something when you get a huge cloud of them come at you. You can take down a bunch of them, but you never get the whole swarm, and they inevitably do some damage to you. They are a lot of fun, and are quite a surprise the first time they come at you.

Second, I’ve observed several instances where bokoblins and moblins are engaged in doing something nominally evil, and you happen upon them, and have a choice to make, to intervene and be the hero, or not. Sometimes they are menacing travelers on the road, but often I have run into them trying to hunt an animal, usually a boar, or sometimes trying to catch a horse. They never seem to kill the boar, but chase it around in circles for as long as you care to watch at a safe distance, until such time as you decide to intercede and turn the hunters into the hunted. It’s a nice bit of world-building flavor to present the bokoblins doing things in the game world that aren’t simply standing in the way of the hero to become fodder for experience points and loot drops, but give you a new way to interact with them, or just observe them. So much of this game is that it’s simply enjoyable to sit in a spot and watch and observe time passing and things happening in a natural way, like the sun setting, or a storm coming in. Oh, that reminds me, you can see rainbows over Hateno village after the frequent rainstorms there. Rainbows, really!

I started out doing some exploration around Hateno village, first attempting to get into the mountains to the North, but it’s too cold to travel safely, even with my warm doublet, and I don’t want to expend cooked foods that give me boosted cold resistance just yet. So instead I try exploring to the South of Hateno. I traveled quite a ways, and got in over my head. The glider takes me a long way, and I explore an area where I encounter monsters I don’t think I’m ready to fight yet. And I’m not looking for a fight, really, I’m on a scouting run, mainly looking for shrines. As I’m coming in for a landing, I see a formation of three rocks in a triangle, which I think looks like a point of interest that I want to check out, and possibly find a Korok seed. Instead, as I come in for a landing, the three rocks come to life and pop out of the ground — they’re baby Stone Talus guys, and I have to fight them. I hit one with my sword but it does nothing, so I switch to sledge hammer, and they go down in one hit. They hit decently hard, but are pretty slow and clumsy and it is easy enough to stay out of their way.

I find two shrines out this way. One is at the end of a broad, flat sloping plane that just out into the sea. On my way there, I run into a bokoblin camp, and it’s a big one. There are four archers on stands, and inside a large skull cave there are another 5 or more bokoblins. It’s night, just before dawn, and they’ll be awake in moments. I think about how to attack.

There’s a large boulder that I can climb, and still stay out of sight. It’s a very long way to shoot an arrow, but by aiming way, way high, I can arc in and take out one of the tower guards, which will let me get in closer. I can see there are some explosive barrels inside the skull cave, and if I can hit one with a fire arrow, it’ll probably take out the whole lot of them inside. It’s like artillery, indirect fire, and very difficult to estimate the proper range and angle. Fortunately, it’s not windy, or this would be all but impossible.

I manage to nail the tower guard with a headshot on the 3rd or 4th try, and no one seems to notice him go down. Crouching, I sneak up closer and shoot a fire arrow in, but my aim is too high, it goes over the barrels, and hits the far wall of the skull cave. This wakes up all the bokoblins, who go to the back of the cave to check it out. One lights his weapon on fire, and they’re all alert now, and will probably notice me in a few more seconds. I quickly send out a second fire arrow, this one hits the barrel, and it explodes, in a chain reaction taking out the other barrels next to it. But because the bokoblins were in the back of the cave investigating the first arrow, they take minimal damage and none of them are killed by the blast. There’s nothing else for it, but to run in and take them out with the sword. I end up getting dog piled, and die a couple of times, but I’m carrying enough fairies that I’m able to get through it. I also break one or two weapons, but these bokoblins are very well armed, and I pick up 3-4 extra soldier’s broadswords, which do 26 damage and are probably the nicest weapon I’ve found so far.

I loot the bokoblin camp of everything I can find and carry, and I figure if nothing else I should be able to sell off the extra weapons and probably they’ll fetch enough to get me close to buying the house in Hateno.

I go to check out the shrine at the end of the peninsula, and it is a combat test, but it is far too difficult for me. The guardian has 1500 hit points, and I managed to take it down only 1/3 before it kills me. I can’t avoid any of its attacks, and any of them kills me. I go through 2-3 fairies before it takes me out, and have broken several more weapons and shields on it. A complete waste of time.

There’s another shrine nearby, on a small island in the bay, and I think I can glide there. I do, just barely making it, and it’s another combat test, this one with an even tougher guardian who has 3000 hit points, and I can’t do anything against it, either. I really need to practice the combat techniques they have shown me in tutorial, but I lack the timing and spacial distance. Whenever I get into a fight, the camera focus thing doesn’t seem to work well, I end up with a horrible camera angle, can’t see what I’m doing, where I’m going, or the enemy, and it fucking ruins the encounter, every time.

I wonder if my switch has bad gyroscopic sensors or something, because anything that involves them or might likely involve them seems very off.

I give up on the combat shrines and teleport to Kakariko village to replenish my fairies, and fortunately I manage to grab 5 of them, which is more than I’ve ever had.

I still haven’t figured out what to do next, so I decided to work on side quests. I decide to explore the stream behind the stable, and see if I can capture a bear, forage, and collect wood. I go there, and I find a bear, and try to sneak up on it, but before I get very close it notices me and attacks. This bear doesn’t just charge like a goat and then run away, it seems to be intent on killing me. I managed to kill it this time, thanks to the nice swords I have obtained from the bokoblins. It drops 2-3 chunks for “gourmet meat” which I guess is a leveled up version of raw meat that other animals drop.

I collect wood by bombing trees, an discover that when a tree is felled and turns into a log, if you bomb the log a second time, it will turn into wood bundles, 1-3 in number, and so finally I am able to rapidly acquire the needed 30 bundles for my house.

While I’m in the area, it becomes night, and I come across a huge skeletal giant with a cyclops eye! I’d seen a huge pile of bones during the day; I guess at night sometimes it animates and I am not sure what triggers this, because I’ve been there at night and it doesn’t always. I try to fight it, and it kills me 2-3 times, and eventually I’ve got it to a point where I can usually avoid its slow attacks and hit it a few times, get out of the way, and I’m feeling like I’m finally making progress, when day breaks, and it sinks back down into the ground and disappears.

This was probably the most fun fight I’ve had so far in the game. The giant destroys trees, and then picks up logs and uses them as a club, or even throws them. He also has some kind of fire attack. I had tried hitting it with fire arrows, but they did little damage. Usually fire is good against undead in a lot of games. I also tried to hit it in the eye, but it was hard to do, and I didn’t succeed. Each time I was close with my first shot, but it saw me just as I was about to let loose, and started moving and spoiled my shot.

Oh well. I ended up killing a second bear in the woods, and then I finally found that elusive shrine that I couldn’t find the last time I explored the area. It was down in the river, in a cave just on the far side bank, behind a bomb-able rock wall that I had failed to notice before. I lobbed a bomb and it didn’t go halfway across the river. So instead I swam across the river, and dropped a bomb in the water on the far side, and let it float downstream until it was close, then blew it.

This shrine was another gyroscope puzzle, and was pretty challenging, but only because motion sensors on my Switch are shit. If there’s a way to re-calibrate them, I really need to find this out, because it’s ridiculous. Motion in the real world correlates very loosely, wrongly, and unintuitively with motion in-game, and it pretty much ruins the experience. I can’t believe that Nintendo would make a game this buggy, so I have to believe that it’s my joycons instead. Nevertheless, after expending considerable time and effort and contorting myself in very strange angles, I manage to succeed at clearing the shrine.

Among all these different things, I also managed to find another 3-4 Kurok seeds, and it seems like there are a huge number of these, all over the place. I still have yet to encounter Hestu again to give them to him and expand my inventory slots. I really would like to, because I can’t carry enough weapons. I’m sure I will run into him eventually, but so far my exploration hasn’t turned him up yet.

By now, I have close to 2500 rupees and a ton of forage that I can sell off and get to 3000, so I travel back to Hateno and buy the house. After I buy it, one of the man’s workers tells me he’s going North for his next assignment, to a part of the map I haven’t been to before, and he invites me to look him up there if I ever go that way.

I check out my house. There’s a free sledge hammer that respawns out back of the house, so good, I know I can always get one of those if I need it. The house comes with a display case for ONE weapon, which annoys me. Apparently I have to grind out more rupees so I can upgrade the house to be able to store more stuff if I want that capability. It seems hardly worth the effort, as all that grinding will consume far more found weapons than I would ever be able to store in the house.

The house also has a bountiful apple tree which has more apples on it than any tree I’ve come across yet, and a few other random herbs and mushrooms nearby. The stream that runs by the house has a small island in it, where I found a rusty broadsword, which is an OK low-end weapon if I ever need one badly enough. Down a short ways past that I found a statue, which I tried praying at, and discovered a new mechanic. This statue seems to be some kind of sinister deal-with-the-devil type dealer of soul energy for money, but it turns out that it’s just a way that you can re-balance your character’s powers, trading heart containers for stamina containers, which you can do by selling one and buying it back at a markup. When you buy back, you can decide which type you want to get, so if you’re out of balance and need to change, this is how you can do it.

Well, OK. So that’s a lot of stuff. I feel like I’ve explored and made some progress, but little of it is meaningful in the way of advancing the main quest.

One last thing I do before closing tonight’s session, I spend more time studying the photos of Princess Zelda’s memories in my album, and try hard to see if I can recognize any landmarks. I do see a few features that look like areas I’ve seen far off in the distance. And in one of the photos, I see the Dueling Peaks, which I’ve passed through already, from a vantage point that looks like it’s back toward the way I came from when I descended from the Great Plateau. So I think that’s where I’ll try to go next time. If nothing else, I haven’t really explored that part of the world near the Plateau much yet, and I expect that by now the monsters I’ll encounter in that area should be easy to deal with.

I am trying to save up money and wood for the house in Hateno. I am about halfway there in rupees, but only 1/3 there in wood. I figured out that if I chop trees down, once in a while it drops a wood bundle. But more often, it drops a kurok leaf, a tree branch, or an acorn, so it’s not really worth farming it by wearing down my weapons. So instead, I can blow the trees down using Sheikah slate bombs.

I don’t like to spend a lot of time doing it at once, because it becomes tedious, but eventually I’ll get there. I do feel like blasting should attract attention from much farther away than it does. Maybe not for a single explosion, but when you’re blasting away like a mining company for an hour, it should eventually attract someone to investigate what the hell is going on, be it a monster or a travelling Hyrulian.

And even if you’re in a particularly inaccessible position on the side of a mountain, probably someone should walk by and look up and see the explosions and then start stalking you, keeping an eye on you as best they can until you come down and they can talk/fight you, or you disappear out of sight. And then that should generate rumor conversations, “Our village guard is concerned about reports of numerous explosions that have been heard in the mountain nearby. Have you seen or heard anything?” “A few days ago, we could hear a strange thunder. Even though the skies were clear. Some fear the worst about what may be coming. But I think we should go up there and face whatever it is. Are you with me?”

I’ve accumulated so many materials through foraging, that I am selling off the excess and getting my rupees mostly in that fashion. Unlike the original Zelda games that I’m used to (to date, I’ve only played LoZ, ZII, Link to the Past, and Ocarina) it doesn’t seem like you earn a lot of rupees by defeating enemies. Very occasionally they’ll drop coin, but mostly what you get from them is weapons, shields, and body parts. I’ve found a few treasure chests with rupees in them, but really very few, probably just a handful so far.

I discovered that in certain areas there are glowing rabbit-like creatures, which cannot be killed (so far as I can tell) but when shot by an arrow, they drop rupees. The amount that they drop is marginally cost effective, but sometimes they don’t drop enough to cover the cost of the arrow. Due to massive inflation, arrows in 2018 Zelda games cost a whopping 5 rupees, where in 1985 they cost just 1 rupee, which was far more reasonable. So I try not to use the arrows too much, unless I need meat, or if if I’m sniping bokoblins from long distances.

I discovered that Koko, the little girl in Kakariko village has more cooking sidequests for me, and they’re all pretty easy, she just names an ingredient that I 90% guaranteed have in my inventory already, I hand it over, and she makes me a dish. They’re fun, but Koko is so hard on herself, it makes me sad.

I discovered another Kakariko sidequest, to return a villager’s 10 chickens that have escaped. They’re all over the village, and pretty easy to grab, except the last one took a really long time to find. Chickens crow like roosters when day breaks! I also discovered that you can glide by holding a chicken and using it like a glider. I did not notice that it even requires stamina to do this, which unless I just missed it, gives chicken gliding a lot of potential, assuming that you can manage to carry a chicken all the way to some high location that you can then jump off of. But since you can’t climb and carry a chicken, it’s probably not very useful at all. After I finished rounding up all the chickens, the man gave me 50 rupees for my trouble, which, honestly, for the time it took, I could have done way better just harvesting forage in the fairy pond area, probably. Then the man told me about chicken gliding, which I had already figured out in the course of completing that quest. Oh well.

North of Kakarkio, where the road ends and blends into an open meadow area, I spotted a shrine down hill aways, so I tried to glide down to it. I spotted an abandoned looking shack, and went inside, and found a few old weapons lying about, but I didn’t really need any.

I made my way from there to the shrine, and encountered some lizard men, and not wanting to get into it with them, I just ran past them and got into the shrine.

This challenge was fairly easy, although it took me some time to work out what I needed to do.

There were three orange balls floating on the water, and a large, heavy bowl sitting at the bottom of the pool. Using magnetic power, I raised the bowl out of the water and put it on dry land. Then, using ice power, I lifted the orange balls out of the water, climbed the ice pillar, grabbed the orange ball, and put it into the bowl. After putting all three balls in, I expected something to happen, but nothing did. I looked around a bit and then noticed something I had overlooked initially: a ball-switch basin, on the other side of an un-climbable wall. I figured that I needed to use the magnet power on the bowl to lift a ball into the pen where the ball-switch is, and dump it in to trigger the switch.

The hunch proved right, and it opened a doorway to a second challenge. Another switch inside a pen with unclimbable walls, but this time no bowl in the pool. But I could bring the bowl from the first room with me, so that’s what I did. I grabbed a ball, scooped it out of the water with the bowl, and threw it into the pen. Then I noticed a big floor switch in the bottom of the pool, and so I dragged the bowl over, and it was heavy enough to not only sink again, but it pushed the switch down, which drained the water, and opened up the doorway to the waiting monk. I claimed my spirit orb, but didn’t get anything else.

After I emerged, I teleported back to Kakariko, traded in my four spirit orbs for a Heart Container, tried talking to Impa for more clues about where else I could go to recover my lost memories, but didn’t get any new advice, and then traveled to Hateno village, where I spent the better part of two hours screwing around with the blue fire, trying to light all the lamps in the village to see what they do. It’s possible I missed one, but I don’t think I did, and after lighting all of them that I could find, nothing else special happened. A bit of a letdown. I had to sit through two rainstorms to find that out, too.

Hateno has a lot more buildings and people in it that I haven’t properly explored yet, so I guess the next time I play, I’ll do that. If I still don’t have any leads, I guess I’ll go off in and explore a region I’ve yet to travel to.

I’ve already seen three interesting areas that look open to me: On the other side of the mountain range to the southeast of the Stable, there’s a tropical-looking land with what appear to be palm or coconut trees growing everywhere.

Outside of Hateno village, there’s the beach area, which I don’t know that I can explore too well without flight or a boat. And there’s the swampy looking area with the Lizard people to the North of Kakariko village. I could also go back East of Kakariko and explore the road to the Lanaryo mountain region. I’ve been through that area a bit already, mountain climbing, and it seemed fairly desolate and there wasn’t very much around, but that just feels wrong, given how there seems to be something of interest every 10 feet in the other parts of the world that I’ve been to.

The other option that’s open to me right now is to try to find the four Legendary Beasts. But that sounds like something I’m not ready for just yet. Although, if I try, I will get to explore four new areas on the map that I haven’t been to, and maybe it will trigger some of my lost memories in the process. And probably I’ll find shrines and new forage and creatures to take pictures of.

I also saw a picture in the guide book that came with my copy of the game that shows Link riding on a bear, and I know where I can find a bear, so now I kindof want to see if I have what it takes to tame a bear. I bet I need more stamina for that, though.