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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.

I went back to Hateno village to find Horsey, but I could not find him! I think maybe if you have two horses active in the world, and capture a third, maybe it de-spawns the first one. Or something like that. I wonder if he is gone-gone, or if he want back to the Stable somehow automatically. If he is gone-gone, I will miss himb.

When I warped back to Hateno village, I talked to Purah and she needs different parts from Guardians in order to augment my Sheikah slate further, and apparently these are only loot drops from killing active Guardians, so it doesn’t look like I’m getting my cell phone upgrade any time soon.

I decided to go check out Hateno Beach area and see if I could take out the monsters that were stealing the farm girl’s sheep.

I make my way down that way, and using my Sheikah scope, I spot them from probably a mile away or more. The area here is pretty open and expansive, and I decided to check out a few other things. What looked like a large skeleton on the shore turned out to be a sleeping monster, a humanoid lizard thing, and there are living ones and undead ones around. I ended up running into a lot of Chu Chu’s and bokoblin skeletons as well, and went through a few weapons to kill them, which annoyed me, because I figured I would need my better weapons against the 7 sheep rustlers. They did drop some OK weapons, at least. I found a kurok seed by jumping into a ring of rocks in the water, and then I spotted a tall pillar of rock out in the bay, and figured I could just about reach it if I glided there from some nearby cliffs.

I just about barely did, and when I landed I could hear accordion music. As I was coming in I could see a figure standing on top of the rock pillar, and I wondered how he could have gotten there, as there was no boat. My glider didn’t even make it all the way there, I had to land on a rock at the water level, then rest a bit, and swim the rest of the way to the pillar, rest again, and then climb it.

When I did, I found that the figure playing music was not a human, but a bird-man. So I guess it was easy for him to fly here. He sang me a song about a hidden cache located near the rock, here, but I didn’t understand the clue. So I left that for now.

I just barely was able to swim back to shore, and had to hike a long way to get to where the bokoblin camp was, and on the way I fought more enemies, and they surrounded me and beat me up a bit, and I ended up using two fairies. Now I was really not in any shape to try to take on the camp.

I didn’t want to run back to restock on stuff, though, so I thought I would just try and hope for the best.

As I got closer, I saw an advantageous high-ground position where I thought I might just be able to rain arrows down on them, and hopefully score a few head shots and take them out. If that didn’t work, then I could try waiting until night time and see if they went to sleep, and then I could take them out through stealth.

These guys were tough, and better armed than most bokoblins I’ve come across, and I ended up running through all of my bomb arrows, and several fire arrows taking them out, but I managed to do it at long range. Only the last one made it up to me and I had to deal with him hand-to-hand, but I managed to use my shield against him and he didn’t hurt me.

I looted the camp and took everything I could carry, then teleported back up to the Hateno Ancient Science Lab, since it’s right next to the farm, and went to talk to the farm girl. She rewarded me with ten Milks. Considering all the risk I took and the weapons I went through, it doesn’t seem worth it, but heroes aren’t really in it for the money.

After that, I decided to go back to Kakariko village, and see if I could get any more fairies at the fairy pond. I was in luck and managed to nab three of them, which is awesome. I also found all the other foragable items had replenished, and so collected more.

I went back to the village and discovered another Korok seed, which I got by making an offering at these statues where they have offering baskets. There’s an apple in one of them, and if you’re greedy you can take the apple. But I have 99 apples, so I put one in each of the 5 baskets, and then a Korok appeared. I’ve gotten pretty good at finding these guys, and now have over 20 seeds. I need to find Hestu again so he can give me more carrying capacity in my inventory.

While walking in Kakariko, I talked to an old man who I’d met there earlier, who had tipped me off about the fairy pond nearby. He was still looking for it himself, and asked me to help him go there. So I did, and he got tired climbing up the trail, so he asked me to go further and see if I could find it, and take a picture for him.

So I did that, and he rewarded me by telling me directions to the location where one of Zelda’s cellphone camera gallery pictures is located.

Since I really had no clue where to begin looking for those camera pic locations, this was very helpful. I looked on the map and headed off in the direction the old man said, and started seeing architectural structures that looked like gateways and aquaducts. I was walking along a river on a stone road at the bottom of a deep ravine. I had several combat encounters — a Yiga clan warrior, a few bokoblins, and some random bokoblin skeletons and chu chus and kees. I also ran into a new kind of aquatic humanoid lizard-like monster. I did well and defeated them all without getting killed myself.

About halfway to where I eventually found the location where Zelda took the photo on my Sheikah slate, I started getting pings from a nearby Shrine. I looked for it all over, and couldn’t find it. Eventually I moved on and found the place where the photo had been taken, and it awakened memories which told me more of the story, about how Zelda and four great warriors were on this road when Calamity Ganon awakened. They seemed pretty desperate to use their four Legendary Beasts to try to stop him.

It seemed like the next thing to do was go back to Kakariko village again and talk to Impa, but rather than just teleport back, I decided to hike it back, because I figured there would be things I had missed on the way out, and/or maybe some scripted story events, and I didn’t want to miss them. The only thing that I did end up doing was finding that shrine that I couldn’t find on the way out, but it took me probably about 2-3 hours of hunting to do it, and took even longer thanks to frequent rainstorms that inhibited my climbing.

This one was very well hidden, behind a waterfall, in a cave that was so well concealed that I had walked past it 3 or 4 times before I finally found it.

Solving the shrine was fairly easy; there was a humongous pressure switch in the floor, and I couldn’t actuate it by standing on it. But I found three heavy treasure chests, and using magnetic powers on them, I moved them to sit on top of the switch, and their combined weight activated it.

I got the contents of the chests, which was just money and a gem, and a spirit orb, and then I went back to hiking home. I spotted another likely Korok seed location in the river, and checked it out. I had to fight another one of those lizard guys, but I was right that it was indeed another Korok seed hiding spot.

After getting this seed, I saw some fish in the river, grabbed them, and then swam closer to what I thought were fish, but it was more of those lizard dudes.

I didn’t want to fight them, so I ended up aborting on hiking it the rest of the way back to Kakariko, and used the slate to warp me back.

Then I talked to Impa, who gave me a blue tunic and told me some more clues.

That was all I had time for tonight.

I’ll miss you, Horsey. You were my first horse, and you were gentle and good. We had some great times.

I took the raft down river, and got ambushed by an octarock, who was lurking in the water, which I killed.  Octarocks are super accurate with their fire, and are very dangerous unless you constantly change direction, as they can hit you on a dead run if you are moving in a straight line.  I like the challenge when they’re in an open area where I can run well, but when they’re a distance away and you can’t get to them due to some obstacles between you and them, and they can shoot you, they can really ruin your day in a hurry.

I continued on down the river a ways, and then checked the map to see where I was going to. The river was bringing me back toward the Stables, which wasn’t terribly interesting, but OK. There’s two wooded foot bridges that cross the river in this area, and I hadn’t really explored much up in this area, so I decided to scout and screw around.

I found a wooded area where there is an abundance of wildlife and herbs and mushrooms. I tried to take down a bear, but I couldn’t kill it, despite trying several times. Arrows seem to do damage, but not enough to bring it down, and my best attempt I hit it a good 3 maybe 4 times and it still ran me down and killed me in one hit. Which, I guess is pretty much what bears do.

I found a kurok seed in a hollowed tree stump near there, and a secret cache of rupees, and down by the river near there, I kept getting signals from my Sheikah slate that a shrine was nearby, but I couldn’t find it. I crossed the river and climbed up the sheer cliff on the other bank, climbing as high as I could, and found another Kurok seed archery test, but I was low on arrows and wasn’t able to claim the seed. And then, a bit absentmindedly, I didn’t remember to mark the hill on the map, so now I will have to re-discover it.

On top of the hill, I saw a huge bull, and managed to take him down, and got a prime raw meat drop for my trouble. I explored along the ridge, and found some wood, and a kurok seed, and ran into a camp of two or three bokoblins and a moblin. I tried rolling bombs downhill into them to take them out, but it was slow going. They seemed to take very little damage from the bombs, and OK, I guess the game designers aren’t going to give you an unlimited bomb that is a super weapon, are they. It took forever, but I did manage to take them out, but then a Blood Moon occurred and brought them back to life about two minutes later.

Eventually it seemed like there wasn’t a whole lot left for me to discover up there, unless I wanted to go onward into a new unmapped zone, which I wasn’t exactly feeling ready for yet, so I glided back down to the wooded area, and called Horsier, then rode out to see if that weird guy with the maraccas was out near Kakariko village, but he wasn’t.

So I decided to climb the hills in this area, and found 3-4 more kurok seeds on some of the hilltops, a buried chest with more rupees, and then glided down into this lake where there was a small rock island, which I landed on, and found the last of the kurok seeds that I would discover in this session.

I couldn’t see a safe way to get off of this island, as it looked too far to swim. So I used the Sheikah slate to teleport to the shrine outside Kakariko, then went up to the fairy pond and captured 3 fairies, and had the fairy in the pond augment my head scarf, so now I can climb even faster than before, which I’m looking forward to trying out.

I walked out of Kakariko on the north road by accident, and found some more horses, so I grabbed one, and I think this one might be a little bit more spirited than Horsier, so I took him back to the stables and registered him as Horsiest. Poor Horsey, my first horse, I left back at Hateno village, and I feel bad about that, so I will go back there next and get him and bring him back to the stable to board. I also boarded Horsier too, so now I’ll have 3 horses all at the stable.

The horses are pretty fun and I enjoy them but they do seem to be pretty inconvenient when it comes to exploring and finding neat stuff, since you have to get off of them any time you want to grab anything, and they can’t climb anywhere. At least they’ll call from a reasonably long distance if you leave them somewhere and need them to come to you.

Fighting from horseback is a lot harder than fighting on foot, at least for now, and I’m pretty terrible at it either way. I don’t use my shield, I don’t dodge or counter attack or use the stealth attack, and the charge attack seems like a sucker move that leaves you open to the enemy hitting you first too easily, so I’m just awful at combat. If I have an OK weapon I can get through the easier fights without too much problem.

The game offers a huge amount of rewarding activities that don’t involve combat, and I really like climbing and exploring, and now that the shrines have gotten a bit more interesting I enjoy solving those puzzles, too. But at some point I’m going to have to settle in and practice the combat moves a lot more until I know the controls. Lately I’ve been running into stronger bokoblins and moblins who can all pretty much one-shot me if I make even one mistake I’m dead.

Battery was low by this point so I had to stop again. I guess tomorrow I will run out to Hateno village and pick up Horsey, board him, and then see if I can complete the bokoblin beach mission for the farm girl with the sheep, and hopefully I’ll handle the combat OK, or at least get some good practice at it.

After that, I guess it’ll be trying to find more shrines, kurok seeds, and rupees and wood so I can buy that house in Hateno and see what that does for me.

Impa told me that in order to regain my memories, I should try visiting the 12 locations shown in the photos stored on Zelda’s smartphone. So it looks like I’m going to have to do a lot of traveling and exploration. Well, duh.  I’ve only been to, what, 3 zones on the world map, and there’s a huge amount of unexplored world out there. 

I don’t feel I’ve quite explored the regions I’ve already been to enough just yet, so I spent a few hours wandering around to do that.

I didn’t particularly have any agenda, just headed out in a direction and spotted something interesting, and headed towards it. No matter where you are in this world, there’s always something that looks pretty interesting. A tree, a hill, a rock formation, a ruin. Mostly, I try to climb to the top of things. There’s usually something good at the top of anything climbable, and whether there is or not, it’s good to take a look around from up there, and you can see a long way, especially with your Sheikah scope, and see other things to check out, and then you can usually glide there.

Near Hateno village, I captured a new horse in the highlands, and decided to keep him, so I needed to ride back to the stable between Hateno and Kakariko. This horse was more spirited and difficult to control, but I worked with him for a long time and he became calmer. Up in the highlands, there were a lot of bokoblins around, and a few of them even came on horseback. These guys were challenging to fight, because I was trying to ride my untamed horse, and fighting from it was not something I am used to. I wanted to do more exploring around there, but the enemies appearing and harassing me got annoying and persuaded me to take my new horse to the stables before I lost him.

It was a longer ride than I remembered, but we got there, and I got him registered, naming him Horsier, since his stats are higher than Horsey’s stats.

Next, I decided to try to climb the Dueling Peaks, and see what I might have overlooked there. It turns out there were (at least) three shrines up there that I hadn’t found on my first pass through, and probably due to the difficulty of the climbs I doubt that I could have reached them the first time. As well, I revisited one of the two shrines that I had cleared before, and figured out how to get to the treasure chest that I couldn’t figure out how to reach on my first visit. In it, I found a headscarf that, when I wear it, gives me a boost to my climbing speed, which means I can go higher before my stamina meter runs out. This is so useful, I’m very glad I returned to that shrine and figured out how to get it. I wonder if the fairy near Kakariko village is able to augment this one?

Two of the shrines were connected to each other, in that the solution to each of them was contained within the layout of the other. I was able to solve this easily by using the Sheikah camera to take a picture of the floor of each one, and then look at it in the other, to solve the puzzle. This was a fun and unique challenge.

I also found a few more Korok seeds, and discovered another Stone Talus, which I defeated pretty easily.

I don’t know if I found everything there is to find in this area, probably not, but I felt like I had done quite a lot here, and wanted to get back to the main quest. So I glided back down to the stable area and got on Horsier, and we rode back toward Hateno village. Near the ruined fortress wall, I remembered there were many broken down Guardians, and remembering that Purah can augment my Sheikah slate further if I bring her parts from them, I spent some time searching, and found some more screws, springs, and gears.

There were a lot of bokoblins around this area, too, and they were better armed than most, wielding big bats and claymore swords. I cleared out a camp of them and got some nice weapon drops and an opal.

Further to the south, along the wall, I discovered another raft, dragged ashore at the bank of a river. I decided that this would be the next thing I should check out, but the battery was running low again, so I called Horsier over, saved, and put it back on the dock to charge.

There’s a girl living at the farm in Hateno village where the cows, sheep, and doggos live, and the farmer hires me to go hunting in the woods. She tells me a band of bokoblins has been taking her sheep, and have a camp down by the beach nearby. There’s 7 of them, and she can’t fight them all by herself.

I want to help, but right now I’m focused on other things. I make my way up to the Hateno Ancient Science lab at the top of the hill, where I advance the main quest. I walk in and meet Purah, the head scientist. She is as old as Impa, but appears to be only 6 years old. She has an assistant working for her, and they tell me more about my Sheikah slate.

Basically, it’s a magic cell phone, and you can take photos with it, use Hyroogle Maps, teleport to shrines you’ve discovered, scan the area nearby for things you’ve taken pictures of, and control magnetism, ice, and make bombs.

The power levels of the Sheikah slate can be augmented. I was able to augment the sensor and now I can detect anything with it, not just shrines. This will make things a lot easier to find, if I start taking pictures of everything.

I’ve come to realize that not only will Link be hopelessly addicted to his cell phone, but he also has major ADD. I imagine the pitch meeting went something like this:

“So it’s a Zelda game…”

“Sold! When do you release?”

“No wait, we need to tell you about it before you decide.”

“Oh, fine. Tell me, does Link defeat Ganon in this one?”

“Look, do you want to be here forever, or do I get to do this pitch? I rehearsed it for weeks.”

“Very well then, fine. Proceed.”

“In this one, Link has been asleep for 100 years, and awakens with no memory. As he explores the world, he gradually learns who he is, his place in the world, and his destiny… to save Hyrule by defeating Calamity Ganon! Oh, wait, there’s an apple!”

“An… apple, you say?”

“YES! And mushrooms! Ohh there’s an acorn!”

“I don’t see how this is…”

“HOLY CATS, it’s a god damn FROG! YOU CATCH FROGS IN THIS GAME! Can you believe it!?”

“Frogs? What are they like some kind of humanoid frog monster that you.”

“No, just straight up frogs, and you catch them and then you can combine them with other stuff you find and make things out of it!”

“And then you defeat Ganon?”

“Eventually! But not until after you lift every rock, climb every tree and mountain, and perform everyone in the world’s errands. And fight enemies sometimes.”

“Fine. Whatever. I’m sure it will sell. Just make it good, dammit. I’m budgeting this for 20 BILLION YEN. And our entire reputation and fortunes will depend on it. Get to work.”

“HAI!”

Everyone you meet has something you can do for them, and the main quest people have a lot of things you need to do first to prove that you’re ready, or worthy, or to give them the power to help you in return. So, there’s a lot of that going on.

Purah wants me to go re-light the pilot fire on her science furnace so she can use it to fix and augment my cell phone. So I go do that, and it’s surprisingly easy. I caught a lucky break and it did not rain even once the entire time, which would have put out my torch. There’s a river to cross, but I figured out where to jump over it, and that was pretty easy too. It only took two tries.

Then Purah tells me to go back to see Impa, who will tell me more shit to do. And Purah’s assistant needs me to find him some mushrooms, and shows me how to use the Sheikah slate to scan for them. Nifty.

I head out looking for the mushrooms, and the scanner starts going off right away. On my HUD map, I see a blinking orange circle, which I mistake for being the location of the shroom, and I head off in that direction. In actuality, it’s Kakariko village, and I end up walking halfway there before I realize this. But along the way, I find two more korok seeds, the first one on the top of a strange little plateau that I land on, which has an archery game set up on it, and then nearby there, another raft, which I take across the water, where I explore a wooded area and fight a few bokoblins and get bombed from long distance by an octorock, then climb a nearby mountain for korok seed #2.

I walk about half way to Kakariko village along the road, fight another Yiga clan girl disguised, and spot the bokoblin camp on the other side of the river. This time, I decide to see if I can raid it, and I find a narrow part of the river that I can swim with my newly enlarged stamina meter. I could have used the ice power as well, but I find it a bit slow and tedious. I get over there, and these bokoblins are pushovers, I wipe them out easily, but break several weapons in the process, but it doesn’t matter much because they drop replacements for me, albeit shitty ones. I’m rewarded with an Opal, a number of arrows, which I badly needed, and a lot of bokoblin body parts, which I have an abundance of.

I decide while I’m over here that I should explore this bank of the river a bit, and I come to another Tower, which has thorns growing around it. I’m not sure if I see a clear path up the thorns, and I don’t attempt to do anything to destroy them, but I do find a path up to the top, and once I get there, I’m rewarded with a new map segment for the overworld, plus the tower is another teleportation destination. Towers are fantastic, because once you teleport them, you can glide a long way, and get to pretty much anywhere you want to go pretty quickly, or at least a good bit of the way there.

I scout around with my scope for a bit, and study the new map for a time.

Then I teleport to the shrine at Kakariko village, and see Impa, who tells me to do more shit for her, so now I pretty much have a list of shit to do that’s longer than my arm, and I’m having a hard time remembering all of it. The Sheikah slate has a todo app in it, though, so I can go look at it and it will help me remember. And the map provides a few cues as well.

I teleport back to Hateno village, and talk to Purah some more, and then decide that’s enough for one session, and call it a day.

I poked around Kakariko village one last time, and then headed back to where I thought that weird guy was who wanted Korok seeds for his maracas, but he wasn’t there. Maybe it’s because it was night time when I rode by there, or maybe I remember him telling me something about he would see me around other places, which at the time I thought he meant that there were other locations on the world map where I would run into him, but that I’d be able to find him at this place any time I went there.

I hope it’s just that it was night time.

I didn’t wait around, and took the road to Hateno village. It was a decent trek. I made it a ways east, and came to a ruined fortified wall, where I met a person who told me that it was a historic landmark. There were a lot of destroyed Guardians there, so I searched around and found lots of screws and springs, and a gear. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with those still, but they don’t seem to be worth very much.

I woke up one of the still-functioning Guardians and had to run away. I don’t like those things. I rode Horsey through the gate and explored a bit on the other side. There was a little cabin, and in the vicinity there were a lot of resources to forage, so I did that for a while, then headed further down the road. The road ran along a valley, with a river going through it, and I could see bokoblin camps on the other side of the river here and there, but I didn’t waste time with them and just continued on.

It grew dark and I ran into a few random encounters, but handled them quickly. I also got into a fight with a Yiga clan fighter, a girl who baited me by crying in the rain in the dark and looked like she needed help. She told me she needed a cooked salmon, and then attacked me. I wasn’t ready for it, and tried to throw my spear, which was badly damaged, but I haven’t practiced that a lot, so I fucked up pretty bad, and she took me down to 0 hearts, but then that triggered one of my fairies to recharge me, and I ended up switching weapons and won the fight. I’m annoyed that it cost me a fairy, because if I’d not been screwing around trying to experiment, I wouldn’t have used it.

A bit further down the road, I had some more bokoblin encounters, and these ones are tougher than the ones I’ve encountered so far, an take more damage before dropping. They also wield farm implements, hoes, pitchforks, and mops, in addition to the usual crude clubs and spears. I can usually take them out quickly without getting hit, but if they do hit me they do a lot of damage, so I have to be careful.

Sometimes, the bokoblins will be attacking people, and I come to their rescue. I saved two girls who were out looking for truffles. I looked around trying to find some, but didn’t turn up any. But I ran into more bokoblins, and ended up breaking too many weapons, so I decided not to stick around there.

I was almost to Hateno village anyway, and it seems like an even larger place than Kakariko village. It’s a bit overwhelming to keep track of everything. It’s a windy city, and there are windmills. They farm things, and they have a clothing store and a cloth dying store, so you can change your clothes to different colors. I’m not sure if there’s a game purpose for it or if it’s just a cosmetic thing that they built into the game rather than just gave you the usual generic interface for avatar designing. Hopefully it will turn out to have a purpose.

I went into a bunch of buildings and talked to people, but it kindof all blurs together, and now I feel like I should have been taking notes while I played. because I will never in a million years keep track of everything. Just about everything anyone tells you is more background information to the world, but its significance is not always clear. Some people you can tell are telling you something very important, while others are merely telling you something that might a clue about something fun in the game, but probably not essential to completing the main quest.

There was a shrine near the village, so I went and cleared it so my Sheikah slate would quit beeping. It was challenging, I had to use the gyroscopic motion sensors to control a tiltable plane in order to pass a ball through a maze, and dump it onto a ramp, so that the ball would go into a hole. This was very challenging, but mainly because the gyroscopic controls don’t seem to work so great, and the camera also made it very difficult at times to figure out if things were lined up right or not.

(Edit: it turns out that the 3-rd party Legend of Zelda joycon I had bought from Hori because of it having a D-pad does not have the motion sensing hardware in it, which caused the tilt sensing capabilities of the Switch not work properly. I discovered this quite some time later, after it got so bad that I had to investigate to see if my Switch was defective.  It’s fine, but the Hori D-pad L-joycon just doesn’t include the gyroscope features.) 

It took me a bunch of tries, but I eventually got it. This earned me another spirit orb, and when I found a little statue in the village that I could examine, it asked me if I wanted another heart container or more stamina, and this time I went for the stamina, and I think it will be well worth it to have the additional capability to explore.

I talked to some guys who were demolishing a house, and arranged to buy it instead. This will (hopefully?) give me a place to sleep that doesn’t cost money, so I can restore health for free, and maybe I can store extra inventory that I can’t carry on me. If not, then I don’t know what the point of it is. The house will be damn expensive — 3000 rupees, plus they want a bunch of wood bundles, which I haven’t seen much of lately.

I continued through the village and came to a farm on the outskirts, where there were two doggos, a few bulls, which I tried to rode like a horse, but it didn’t work. One of the people I talked to said something about you can ride other animals besides horses, but I guess not these bulls. There were a bunch of sheep, also. I talked to the farmer, who challenged me to hunt deer in the forest nearby, so I did that a few times, until I broke my bow and shot all my arrows. It was sortof fun, but later I found the place where he took me, and I could have just hunted animals there on my own. I gather that if you take enough in the 1-minute challenge the farmer gives you, it’ll reward you with something nice, but probably not anything amazing. I’ve gotten as many as 3 animals and all he gives me for it is 1 rupee, plus I get to keep whatever I kill. I bet if you get, like, 6 or something, he’ll give you the real reward.  For all the arrows I had to use, it better be something good. Just one arrow costs 5-6 rupees.

I went beyond the farm and there was another raft, which I took and explored an island in the middle of a lake, and on the island there was a big tree, which I climbed and got another Korok seed. I found another one nearby, but I don’t remember where I found that one. Sometimes you go someplace out of the way, and see some unusual arrangement of nature, or an especially big tree or rock, and you find them.

It’s a simple enough reward for exploring, and I’m glad when I find another one.

I returned the raft and went down hill for a bit, and came to a couple of what looked like wheat fields with scarecrows. I thought maybe I could harvest some, maybe with the bokoblin garden hoe or the pitchfork, but neither one seems to do anything if I stand in the field and swing it. I talked to someone in the village about recipes, and they mentioned rice and wheat, so I know they’re in the game somewhere.

I know the reason I came to the village was to further the main quest, and find someone who can fix my Sheikah slate to fully enable it, but I haven’t found that person yet.

The battery ran low, so I had to stop for now.

I spent a few more hours exploring and foraging around Kakariko village. There is stuff literally everywhere.

I walked behind Impa’s house, and there’s a river back there. I spotted some shrooms growing on the side of the rock wall leading down to the river. I went to collect it, and it started raining right then. I couldn’t move without slipping, and ran my stamina meter halfway down trying to get out, so I had to sit there all night long. It really was annoying! I tried to do the horse whistle to summon help, but you can’t do it when you’re climbing. I doubt anyone would have come anyway. But it wouldn’t have surprised me if it did work — whistling is for signaling your horse to come, but I’ve used it to startle wildlife and to attract the attention of nearby monsters, so it seems like just about everything else, the abilities you have and actions you take can be used in multiple different ways in many different situations.

There were fish swimming in the water, so after it stopped raining and I got to safety, I dove back in and grabbed a few. Then I noticed mushrooms were growing underneath Impa’s house (it’s built on an open lattice foundation that you can walk under). And I noticed a circle of plants growing in the water, so I dove into it and turned up a Korok seed.

I walked down one street and came to an odd rock formation with a tree growing near it. Climbed the tree and got some eggs. Couldn’t figure out what the rocks were for. Maybe it will become apparent later. I walked past them and hopped a fence, then explored the backside of the foothills surrounding the village. There were a few game animals there, and I collected more meat, and shot a bunch of arrows. I need to find a guy to buy more arrows from soon, I guess. I can pick them up and re-use them if I miss, at least.

I scoped out the surrounding landscape with the Sheikah slate in scope mode, and saw several shrines off in the distance, and some ruined buildings nearer by, with what looked like 3 dead(?) Guardians near them. It looked like there had been a big fire. I could also see 3 horses running in the meadow near there. Way off in the distance I could see the big evil looking castle surrounded by dark clouds and purple energy. Then I noticed what looked like a giant aircraft flying slowly around in the sky near the castle. No telling what that could be. It looked huge.

Speaking of huge, I also spotted an ENORMOUS tree, that looked like it must be the size of a mountain or city, some ways away to the north.

I tried to find a way to climb up the hill, and just barely made it up there. I found a sword up there, and it was a very nice one. Then I hang glided off the hilltop, and landed on another nearby hilltop, where I found some herbs growing, and then noticed a moss-covered lump that looked like a treasure chest. I used my magnet power on it, and pulled it out of the ground, and it *was* a treasure chest! It had a nice bow in it. I wonder how many other hills have secrets like this. It seems like about half of them do.

I discovered that there are limits to hang gliding. If you don’t land before your stamina meter runs out, you fall. I almost died, gliding down from one of the very tall hills. I will have to make sure I plan my descents in stages to avoid that in the future. I don’t know if there’s a way to drop or dive or whatever, but that would be very handy if there is.

I glided over the village to the other side where the fairy pond is, and landed on a hill, climbed up to the top of it, and found a rock that I could pick up. When I did, I found another Korok. I’ve found a bunch of those seeds now, and I’ll keep finding more. If I take them back to that weird guy I met on the road to Kakariko village, he’ll expand my inventory capacity, which will really help me out a lot, since I have so many weapons that I don’t want to lose. I wish that you could store them somewhere in these villages, and retrieve them later if you ever needed one.

I met a painter in the village, who told me something, about the fairy pond nearby, but since I’ve already discovered that on my own, it was a bit odd that there weren’t some dialog options for Link to mention it. And I met a little girl named Koko who likes to cook, and she needed ingredients, so I went to the store right next to her and bought them for her, and she she taught me a few new recipes. That was really fun, even if it was simple. Getting to do a kind deed for a village child was more heroic than murdering bokoblins and other monsters.

What’s really cool about the Koko sidequest is that it seems to have been triggered because I happened to be cooking some of my ingredients at the cooking pot next to the village store, and Koko ran up a little before the game clock hit noon, to make food for her family. I’m already aware that certain things will change depending on time of day, but this just creates a whole new dimension of searching for stuff, and makes me wonder how much stuff I’ll miss because I never happened to be in the right place at the right… time of day, phase of the moon, season of the year, etc.

I went down another road and met a warrior from the Yiga clan, who I learned from the villagers are Hyrulians who have turned bad and work for Ganon now. This one tried to recruit me, and I told him no way, and so he fought me, but I killed him with my spear. I couldn’t hit him with my two-handed weapon, because he was so fast. Plus, he had a teleport move, which made him one of the more difficult foes I’ve had to fight. But the spear worked good on him. He dropped a sickle, and it does pretty good damage.

I know the next thing I’m supposed to do is go to this village in the east to get my Sheikah slate augmented or repaired or fully activated or whatever, and that’s the next part of the main quest, but I’m really enjoying exploring and finding secrets. I think that part of the game is better than the combat. Combat is something I’m sure I will need to get better at, but I prefer to avoid it whenever possible, because I don’t want to waste my good weapons on random encounters, and I don’t have enough inventory slots to burn one or two on crappy weapons that I can find a lot of. But I have enough Korok seeds now, i think I can probably expand my inventory if I go back to that weird guy I met on the way here.

I still don’t feel like I’ve done half of what there is to do around Kakariko village yet. I know there’s a lot more things I can spend money on, but I don’t really want to spend all my rupees, and I’m not sure what I should sell off and what I should keep. I have found so many things, but I don’t know what even 1/4 of them do.

This game seems to go on endlessly. It amazes me how much stuff they are able to pack into it. And especially because you can see way far off into the distance, and it looks like stuff is moving around, like the whole world is alive and moving, which makes the experience feel less like a video game where the hardware can only handle so many things at once, so it only renders the immediate surroundings while anything outside of the current “scene” you’re in isn’t really in existence. It’s amazing how much the Switch is capable of doing.

I think the next thing for me to do is go back and trade in some more Korok seeds, then venture out to the East and try to find my way to Hateno Village.