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I decide since I’m not sure where to go next to just fast travel back to Lookout Landing and talk to Purah. I haven’t seen her since I left Impa and Caro back at the Forgotten Temple, and I’m sure she’ll be interested in the developments I’ve seen and all this new information.

It turns out this hunch is right. Purah wants me to go talk to her assistant, Robbie, and assist him with something. Purah chastises me for not having checked out the four points on the map that she wanted me to investigate, and tells me I need to learn how to use the Purah pad to keep track of things so I don’t forget. She tells me that Robbie can show me how it works.

I go talk to Robbie, who is busy talking with another of Purah’s assistants, Josha, about the Chasms and the Gloom. She wants to go investigate, but Robbie won’t let her, because it’s too dangerous. But a previous expedition recovered a slate with an interesting figure carved onto it, and she wants to learn more about it. Eventually Robbie agrees but says he’ll investigate it personally, and take me with him for protection.

So I guess I have a new mission, and it’s going back down into the underworld, this time with an actual purpose. Am I really ready yet? I’m desperately short on arrows, and I haven’t increased my life meter any, since the start of the game. I barely survived last time I went down there, but I spent an extended time wandering lost, not realizing that I could quick-travel back to the overworld any time I wanted to.

I decide to follow Robbie’s lead and run out to the small chasm south of Lookout Landing. I’m pretty sure this is the hole I went down the first time, too. This time, at the bottom of the chasm there’s a balloon vehicle and a Hylian man from Lookout Landing is there. He says that Robbie went on ahead but that they ran out of brightbloom seeds, and can’t do much with the gloom as bad as it is down here without them. The man says Robbie went west, and I try to follow the direction indicated, but it’s so dark down there that I get twisted around and lost, and eventually I decide to just try to open up as much of the map as I can, and head toward every Light Root I can get to. There are several within line of sight of me, and I get to at least two of them.

While I’m down there, I collect a bunch of Poes, and avoid combat as much as possible. There are times when it cannot be avoided, but I stay well clear of the Bokoblin camps down there, and concentrate on foraging, especially Poes and trying to activate Light Root stations so that I can travel and see more easily down there.

When I get in trouble, I fast travel back to Lookout Landing, take a free nap in the shelter, and go back to it. After activating a Lightroot tree, I notice a Hylian tent with a campfire and a Hylian sitting there. I expect he’s part of the expedition, and run over to talk to him. He reveals that he is actually a Yiga clan ninja in disguise, and attacks. I’m not ready for it, and he’s disappearing and teleporting act is much more dangerous in this gloomy dark world where it’s easy to get turned around. I can’t seem to focus on him, and my shield is activating its flame projector, which is completely unhelpful. I’m down half my health before I know it, and nope out of there with the Purah Pad teleporter.

The second trip, I follow the directions a bit better, and don’t get lost. This time it’s clearer; I follow the the direction that Robbie’s friend is looking in, and then continue following the light, until I reach Iyasus Light Root, where I find Robbie waiting for me. He tells me to use the camera on the Purah Pad to take a photo of a statue he’s found, which looks much like the figure depicted on the slate that Josha was excited about.

Robbie then realises my camera function isn’t working, and enables it for me, along with the Hyrule Compendium. I take a photo and show it to Robbie, who is excited and returns to Lookout Landing to tell Josha. I see no reason to stick around, so I fast travel back to Lookout Landing again, and show her. Josha is excited to see the photo, and proclaims that it does match the figure on the slate exactly, and proves that at one time people lived in the depths under Hyrule. This completes the quest.

I note that I’m about a dozen Poes short of being able to buy a new suit from the prayer statue in Lookout Landing.

I also note that I am not really furthering the Impa storyline by all that I’ve done with Josha and Robbie, but that’s OK. I also haven’t done what Purah has asked me to do to investigate the four zones of activity, or whatever she called them.

I take some time in the Forgotten Temple’s secret back room, and snap pictures of the Geoglyphs and the world map, for later reference. I also explore the general area around the room.

I had almost forgotten, but in the room before the Map Room, there was a mysterious room with a circular feature in the center which looked like it had some purpose, but I couldn’t tell what it was. It looked like a fountain or a machine of some kind. I wouldn’t want to forget that, in case it is important for some reason.

I decide rather than backtrack through the Temple, I will try to use the Ascend power to go straight up and out. I’m curious to see where this room is located, in relation to the surface, and I’m also curious whether there is any limit to how far I can tunnel through the ground with this ability. I must be very deep below the ground, and this is as good a test as I’m likely to find. I suppose I’m also testing the game design’s ability to bring me back on track if I take a random, weird wrong turn.

I trigger the Ascend power, and go up, up, up, emerging out into daylight on a rocky hilltop at the base of a mountain range. I decide to follow the ridge of the mountain up as high as I can go.

I climb and climb, mostly walking, up the ridge. Down below I can see what looks like an interesting rock formation, what appears to be a chunk of the sky level that fell and embedded into the mountain side. There’s a yellow plant growing on the top of it, and I want to check it out; it’s just fireseed fruit, nothing special. I continue back up the mountain ridge, until I get to just about the very top of it, when I spot a half buried treasure chest. I pull it out of the ground using Ultrahand, and it flies up higher into the air than expected, as though it were on a spring. I lose grip of it with the Ultrahand power, and it lands on the ground with a thud, then starts sliding down the hill. I try to run after it, hoping to catch it, but it tumbles and then falls off a cliff, and I instinctively try to glide after it. It’s falling faster than I am, but I can dive and catch up. Despite my best efforts, I lose track of it, or it despawns more likely, and I’m way down the mountain, annoyed at what just happened.

Now what? I decide to return back to the top of the ridge. I was close to a shrine, and I wanted to activate it and create a new fast-travel node.

This shrine is very dark. There’s a light in the very beginning, a bright Zonaite lantern, aiming at a locked gate. I pick up the lantern and walk around until I find a corridor branching off the back of the room, and decide to follow it. I turn a few corners, getting disoriented as I do so, and hear the sound of grinding stone. Around me I see some spiked walls, and it seems that some of them are moving. Eventually I find a treasure chest, which I get a piece of mineral out of; continuing my exploration, I find another dead end, but I notice the floor looks interesting, and I scan the area with Ultrahand and discover that the floor stone is movable. I lift it up and reveal another chest hidden underneath. This chest contains a small key, needed to unlock the gate at the starting area of the Shrine. I backtrack, and open the key. It’s a relatively easy shrine. I note that I could have used Ultrahand to pick up the lantern, which would be more useful in a number of ways, depending on the situation.

Exiting this shrine, I’m back at the top of this mountain ridge. Looking outward, I can see another map tower in the distance, one that I haven’t been to yet. It looks like it’s a long way away, but I think I should be able to glide a good bit of that distance, and make it there without too much trouble.

I do glide very far, and come to a landing in a dark, forested area overgrowing some stone ruins. The ruins look like rows and rows of columns, badly eroded and worn down by time. The mapping tower is still ahead of me. It is raining, and as I get closer to the tower, I slow down, carefully scouting the area and trying to avoid being seen by any monsters that might be nearby.

When I get close enough, I can see a light from a fire. This tower does have someone here. I spot a lean-to near the fire, and a Hylian man taking shelter there. I feel relieved, it looks like this one is already in our control. I talk to the man, but I forget what he tells me. I’m more excited to go activate the tower, and head right over there. There’s a Rito named Billson, who is trying to get the tower working, but something is wrong. He says the machinery is in working order and he doesn’t understand the problem, but it might be something to do with the tower itself?

I decide to go out and have a look at it. I notice some strange floating rocks in the vicinity of the tower, and one of them is low enough that perhaps I can use Ascend to get on top of it. Maybe from there I can get a better view and see what’s going on.

On top of the block, I awaken a soldier Zonai, who seems to be programmed to defend this little bit of ground it has. I have no choice but to do battle, but it’s quick and it goes down easily. I note that there two rocket-looking items on the ground here, and I find that I can pick them up using Ultrahand. I attach them to the sides of the platform, and hit them with my weapon. The rockets fire, and the entire block I’m standing on rushes upward for a short bit, but then the rockets are depleted and I’m left at a higher elevation looking down at the top of the tower. There are several more of these platforms below me. Perhaps I just need to get all of them to rocket up, out of the way, like this one…

I drop down and land on each one in succession, defeating a soldier Zonai and repeat the process of attaching the rockets to the platform and activating them. Soon I’ve done this to all four platforms… and then I finally notice that the tower has one of these sky platforms resting on its tip. It’s hard to notice, and it’s not like I’ve seen a lot of these towers to know the difference, but I now know what I need to do; I fly down to the tower, landing on the top of it, climb down to a level below the skyworld block that’s obstructing the tower’s operation. Using Ultrahand, I grab the block. There’s no rockets here, so nothing else I can do, and move the block up and horizontal until the tower is cleared.

That does it.

Now, why Billson the Rito couldn’t have flown up and seen the problem easily, so he could tell me what needed to be done, I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. I figured it out, and now the tower is active. I zip up into the sky, and download more map data.

From up here, I see some nearby skylands, and I glide toward them, easily. Off in the distance, but too far out of reach for my glider range, I spot a massive cube hovering over what looks like a labyrinth. I’m curious about this, but I don’t have any more pins to use right now on the map. From the position where I’m standing, I can see that there is one of the Geoglyphs from the Map Room in the Forgotten Temple — the one that looks like a sword. It’s nearby enough that I can get to it easily by gliding over.

I do so, and dive once I’m overhead, descending rapidly without using up my stamina, and then I manage to land on the hilt of the sword. I figure it’s a good place to start. I have to climb upward — I didn’t realize how vertical this geoglyph really was, from above, but it’s mostly vertical on a mountain slope. I climb up, up, up, and get to the tip of the sword, where I find another memory point.

I examine it, and trigger another cutscene. This time Princess Zelda is somewhere in the past, it seems. Her necklace looks like one of the geoglyphs, the one that looks like a comma. Or is it a claw? It’s hard to know. She is deeply concerned and lost in thought. Then the Master Sword appears in her hands, and it is deteriorated, looking like how I last saw it, when it was destroyed in my grasp when we awakened the Demon King.

Zelda says something about becoming a great Dragon Spirit, or something, and says that she knows what she must do now, and that she will be forever changed. Then she says that I must find her.

So I guess this is a particularly important bit of story-clue, and has to do with how I’ll recover the Master Sword.

I’m not sure exactly what it means, or how I’ll be able to return to the past to find Zelda. I guess I’ll know more eventually. Maybe it’s time to return to talk to Impa or Purah.

Below, a short distance away, a Shrine. I glide down to it, and enter. It’s a Recall puzzle, and an easy one. I use recall to get gears to turn backward; first there’s a spinning gear, which dumps a falling ball the wrong way. Reversing the gear, the ball falls to the correct side, landing in a bowl, which triggers a gate to open. In the next room, there’s another set of gears, this one not moving, but attached to a crank. I crank the crank using Ultra hand for a few rotations, then aim at the the big gear with Recall and it starts turning the opposite way that I was moving it with the crank. I ride up the cog teeth like it’s an elevator, and reach a platform where I collect my Light of Blessing.

Stepping out of this Shrine, I’m not sure where I should go next. I decide to look at the map, and head toward the nearest pinned location. This turns out to be another shrine, downhill and further to the West. I get there, and am in a lightly wooded areas with coniferous trees, and some wolves nearby. One of the wolves attacks me, and my weapons are too slow to hit it effectively. It almost kills me before I can land a hit on it, but fortunately the hit takes it out.

I enter the shrine, and it’s called Fire and Ice. There’s large blocks of ice dropping from chutes in the ceiling. Over to the side, there’s a blast furnace shooting flames. I see a switch, and try to position the ice block onto it, but it’s too big. So I move the ice near the flame, and it melts enough so that it will fit in the space where the switch is, and I activate the switch, opening a door.

There’s a treasure chest, containing a Zonai spear, which isn’t as good as any of my current weapons. Beyond that, there’s a spiked ramp leading up over a bottomless gap to another blast furnace, and a group of fans fixed the the floor, blowing upward at an angle. I can glide up the wind from the fans to the other side of the gap, and when I’m there, I see there’s ice blocks being fed into the furnace directly from the chute. These blocks melt in mere seconds.

I puzzle over what to do, and it takes me a while to figure out that there’s a grabbable platform next to the blast furnace. It looks just like a wall to me at first, but once I realize what it is, I pull it aside, and pull an ice block out from the furnace before it melts, which is tricky. But once I grab one, I glue it to the platform, and use the ice to lubricate it so it will slide down the spiked ramp. The ice is slippery enough, but the platform is not. Once the platform is down to the main level, where I came from, I glide back down there myself, to figure out what to do next.

This is also tricky, the first blast furnace is shooting flame down onto a big floor switch. It’s difficult to notice that this is even here, because the flames are so bright and hard to look at, that it conceals this switch. I try putting the platform down on the switch, but it isn’t heavy enough. So I determine the solution is to weigh the platform down more by gluing large ice blocks to it with Ultrahand. Once it weighs enough, it depresses the button, unlocking the Shrine, and I earn my Light of Blessing.

I decide to try to follow Impa’s advice and make my way toward Hebra. I must be able to find enough to keep me warm to at least take a quick scouting mission up there to see what I can see. Either I’ll find it along the way, or perhaps I’ll be turned back and have to come up with a better plan.

The terrain is uphill, but not much climbing. I traverse open fields and slopes, some grassy, but getting more rocky and barren as I continue. Along the way I encounter a few small groups of 2-3 Bokoblins, who are no problem for me to defeat, although at the same time it’s mostly pointless to do so, apart from farming some arrows and body parts from their corpses.

Further into the unknown territory on the map, I make a discovery (Discovery!) of a cave, and mark it on the map. This cave looks like it goes way down deep, and I am worried that it will lead me to the underworld where I won’t be able to get back up easily, and it will end up being a wrong turn. Or maybe I’m meant to go this way, who knows. But I opt to continue moving toward the spot marked on the map as the next stop in the Dragon’s Tears quest.

The mouth of this cave is concealed beneath a ridge, and it gives the appearance of an gigantic, empty eye socket peering out over the land. The area is called “Lindor’s Brow” on the map. Looking up at the ceiling of this natural bridge, I see what looks like a Korok tree stump, growing down out of the ceiling. I try shooting it with arrows, hoping to trigger a Korok, but nothing happens. So then I try positioning myself directly under it, and tunnel through it using Ascend. This works, and I collect another Korok seed.

I’m near the location of a map tower, and I really would like to get into it so I can set up a fast travel stop and get the map data for this region. As I get closer, I discover that this tower is built on a rocky island in the middle of a small lake, making it particularly difficult to reach. But perhaps I can construct something to help me get across.

There’s some construction material nearby, platforms and posts and wagon wheels. I just glue several platforms together, creating a long span that I use as a bridge. This works perfectly, and I gain access to the tower, activate it, and do a scan of the region to update my map. I’m in the Hyrule Ridge area, south of the Tabantha frontier. I recall that Tabantha was terribly cold, as cold as Hebra, in my previous journeys.

I try to take a quick 360 view of the landscape to see what looks interesting. As I start to descend from the sky, I notice a tiny skyland floating in the air a short distance away, and decide to try to glide to it. I make it easily, and from there I can take my time looking around. Off in the distance, to the north, I see what looks like a massive vortex of storm clouds swirling, like a gigantic tornado. It looks dangerous, with flashes of lightning, and there must be massive updrafts, based on the movement of the clouds. I think it’s too far for me to reach by glider, but it’s in the general direction of the Forgotten Temple, and that’s the direction I need to go, so I try to fly as close to it as possible. It is an incredibly long way off, but I am also incredibly high in the sky. My only limitation is my stamina, which gives out, and I drop like a stone. Fortunately I deploy the last-minute save move with my glider at exactly the last second, and avoid dying in the plummet. I’ve shaved a huge distance off of my travel to the Forgotten Temple by doing this, so it was well worth the risk.

During the last moments of my flight, the air temperature dropped and became cold enough to damage me, so I’m down a bit of health. The ground is snowy around here, and I pull out a few flame affiliated items to hold in my hand, hoping that they will keep me warm. I discover though that at ground level the temperature isn’t quite so bad, and I don’t need them. I can get by with my snow pants.

I trudge onward, I’m on the north rim of Tabantha canyon, and the Forgotten Temple is still a long way off. The area seems empty, devoid of life and little to hold my interest, so I just continue heading toward the point on the map where the Temple is located. After a bit of a run, I come to what looks like a large fortified Bokoblin camp. I notice a small cave in the wall of the hill that the fort is built on, and I go inside to seek shelter. There’s nothing here, but I’m able to use Ascend to get into the fort without being noticed. It’s night time and the bokoblins are asleep, except those on watch, but they’re looking outward, and can’t see me. There’s a few blue bokoblins and a bokoblin boss sleeping here among some treasure chests.

I’ve traveled a long way without making a save point, and I don’t want to risk getting killed, so I avoid waking the bokoblins up, so I stealth sneak to the chests and open them, stealing some better weapons and arrows, then climb up the wall and paraglide away, completely unnoticed.

This is cool; I like that I can do this.

Further on, I get nearer to the Forgotten Temple. I’m still up the side of the canyon, and I need to glide down, which I now do. I land outside the Temple, and it looks like the entrance has been completely filled with rock. I’m not at the bottom of the canyon, yet, so I descend a bit further, hoping to find another way in, and at the next level below, I see a Hylian man standing next to a balloon. I glide toward him, landing right next to him, and we talk. It’s a man I’ve talked to before, and he says he is with Impa, who became impatient and went into the Temple without him.

That’s a concern, so I head in after her, and quickly make my way to the back end of the ruined temple. Inside the temple is vast, but not very dangerous and quite empty, except for a couple of bokoblin camps, which I’m able to get past completely unnoticed.

I reach the back end of the Temple and find Impa standing next to a Shrine. I talk to Impa, who says something must be nearby, but she can’t find it, then enter the Shrine.

The Shrine is a building block puzzle, which I solve easily enough. There’s a combat in between two puzzles, with a soldier guardian who is armed with a flame thrower, but I manage to take him out with a bomb arrow. He drops some decent weapons, and I’ve been finding some better quality stuff in the Temple, so my weapons are now pretty buff. I still need to armor up and get some more hearts on my life meter, before I can be any good at fighting, though.

After emerging from the Shrine, Impa still says the same thing as before, that there must be something to do with the Geoglyphs nearby, so clearing the Shrine wasn’t it.

I continue forward, end find a hall leading to another vast chamber. Deeper into the Forgotten Temple, I’m starting to notice that sections of floor appear to have a raised surface, and some of the sections are different colored, in a way that looks deliberate, not natural. I think maybe these are clues of some kind, they almost look like a map of part of the world, but I can’t really see how these fragments would be useful to me as they are.

I proceed still deeper into the Temple until a final (?) room opens up, a large round chamber with murals on the wall, identical to the Geoglyphs we’ve seen, and on the floor in the center of the room is a map of what looks to be the surface level of the Kingdom of Hyrule, with the positions of the Geoglyphs marked at various locations on the map.

This is clearly a big clue. I climb down to the floor of the room to get a closer look. This triggers a cutscene, as Impa and the other guy from the balloon have caught up to me, and are in awe of the discovery. Impa tells me to visit each of the locations where these Geoglyphs are indicated on the map, and try to find more memory triggers that will give us more clues about the Princess’s whereabouts.

I like that I’ve been able to somehow keep the main storyline advancing as I’ve been going through these adventures and side quests. I think compared to BOTW, in TOTK it somehow is easier to get back on track after doing something non-essential. I think the quest log is more useful, but also the way the game seems to guide me without effort in the right direction is really impressing me right now.

I whistle for my horse, who is near enough to hear the call, and we meet each other a short distance from the shrine I just cleared.

I ride along the road, ignoring everything, until I come to a bridge, where there is a Hinox sleeping. There’s some construction materials nearby, and I decide that it would be fun to try to build something to help me deal with this Hinox.

I take a couple of thick poles, and attach them to a platform, so that the platform stands upright. I attach a second platform on top of the first, to give it height, creating a movable wall that I can hide behind, and control using Ultrahand.

I try to sneak the wall up to as close as I can, and apparently using Ultrahand or moving things nearby a sleeping Hinox will wake it up, I discover. Fortunately, though, the wall blocks its view of me, and it looks around, confused, for a bit, and then goes back to sleep. So far I don’t think this is really doing me any real help, but it is sort of working, and I’m happy enough with that for the moment.

I try sneaking from around the wall, to get into the Hinox’s hand, so he’ll put me on his chest, and then I can do a sneak attack on him.

I successfully make it to his hand, and wait patiently for what seems like a long time. He eventually moves me to his chest, but then I just sort of clip through the Hinox’s body, and end up standing upright automatically after I slide off, disrupting my stealth bonus from crouching, completely fucking up my entire plan.

This fucking happens about 2 out of every 3 times I try to slay a Hinox, and I don’t understand why I have such a hard time with them, or why their 3D mesh is so easy to slide off of. When they grab you, they should put you right on their chest right in the fucking middle, so you don’t fucking roll the fuck off so much of the time that it is just not fucking worth it to try this stunt with them. Bad, Nintendo.

I’m sure I’m the one who sucks at this, but after having played 300+ hours of BOTW and dealing with countless Hinoxes, I ought to be able to be better than this by now, and I don’t accept responsibility for my own sucking. The game should be more fair in this regard. It’s bullshit.

So the other thing that annoys me with Hinox battles is the camera’s glitchy unhelpful behavior when you’re standing right near the Hinox’s feet. The camera zooms way in for a closeup, and the Hinox blocks its view, so the game quits drawing the Hinox, resulting in you standing next to a fucking invisible Hinox, with a camera right up in Link’s face, completely making it impossible for you to accurately see the action, or know what’s in your immediate vicinity, or which way to fucking run to avoid getting stomped or sat on by the Hinox.

Despite all this poor response from the game engine, I do manage to defeat the Hinox. I use a spinning attack to deal a bunch of damage to it, then score a lucky eye hit, dropping it on its back, stunned, enabling me to run up and unleash another spin attack on it. It starts to get up again, and I have it down nearly to defeated, but it hits me, nearly killing me. I manage to get around the barrier, while the Hinox decides to uproot a nearby tree to use as an improvised club to continue its attack. This gives me a moment to eat a food to regain health, and then put some distance so I can try to nail it with an arrow in the eye again, to safely finish it off. I miss my critical hit with 4 or 5 arrows, before finally blundering into a tight spot where I get stuck behind a sign. The Hinox is right on me, about to kill me, when I make a lucky hit with the bow, and it’s stunned again, but I’m still stuck in the fucking geography, unable to get out from behind a signpost and some construction materials, and I lose the opportunity for the free shot to coup de grace him. Just as he’s getting back up, I manage to get free, and fortunately I’m able to run up and hit him one last time, and it’s enough, the Hinox is toast and I pick up a bunch of loot, most of which I can’t carry.

I’m plenty frustrated by the poor combat. I know I’m rusty from having not played BOTW recently before picking up TOTK, but I still had way harder of a time than I should have due to all the glitchy camera control and poor hitbox and 3D mesh nonsense. This ruined what should have been a fun, exciting, challenging fight, turning it into a rough experience where the engine let me down repeatedly, making things happen that I wasn’t trying to do, and making everything feel unfair.

Still, at least I survived. And my horse survived, as well.

I proceed past the bridge, and a short distance past it there’s a man standing next to a cave. He says he is looking for bubbulfrogs, asking me if I know about them. I’ve encountered them, they’re the cave creatures that look a bit like giant frogs, which don’t have eyes and crawl on the ceiling, but aren’t Horriblins, which also inhabit caves and can crawl on the ceiling, and we talk about them a little bit. I assume the cave he’s standing next to has bubbulfrogs in them. They’re not hard to kill, so I decide to go in and try to clear out the cave.

The cave actually has two of those big flower-looking barnacles. This time instead of running past them, I engage them, and it turns out that they are Like Likes. I know enough to keep my distance from these things, they look like they could swallow me whole. I try hitting one with an arrow tipped with muddlebud, which creates a confusion effect that turns it into an enemy of the other Like Like. They hit each other for a while, but do hardly any damage at all. I try several other types of arrows, trying to figure out what they’re vulnerable to, but nothing is doing much damage at all. In the end, I run in and try smashing them with my heavy hammer weapons. It seems they only take significant damage when their mouths are open, just before they attack with a swallow move. I get swallowed by one, and it does damage to me, but I don’t think it eats any of my shields. I wonder if there’s a more subtle effect to being swallowed that I’m not noticing.

After I clear out the cave, the man says something to me but it’s not particularly memorable, and we part ways. I continue heading to the northwest until just outside the boundary of the map that I have unlocked through the sky towers, I find another stable. There’s a shrine nearby, as there always seems to be with every stable. I stop to board Radish, and talk to everyone there. The girl who runs these stables is trying to assemble a horse cart, but needs some wheels attached. I make a note to do this for her later.

One of the people I talk to tells me that Impa is here, and that I need to speak with her right away.

I don’t, of course. I need to visit the Shrine, so I can activate it in order to be able to fast travel here in the event that I screw up somehow and can’t easily return from where I start out.

The shrine is a balloon tutorial. There’s these hot air balloons you can use to generate lift, if you have a heat source, such as an open flame. You can glue the balloon to a platform, and glue a flame source to the platform near the balloon, and if you get the balance right, you can stand on the platform and ride it up.

There’s a few exercises of this, where the solution is fairly obvious, but the execution takes a few tries. It’s tricky to get the flame near the balloon without setting fire to the wooden platform you’re trying to stand on, or to put the flame to the balloon and then jump on to the platform before it takes off and leaves you.

Fortunately, you can use Ultrahand to hold the entire thing down, if you grab it before it flies out of range.

It’s still kind of awkward, but I manage to do it.

The final challenge before me to graduate this shrine is to use the balloon to lift a heavy steel ball up to the top of a high room where I then need to place the ball into a basin. There’s actually two balls — a small one and a large one. The large one unlocks a chest room, the small one unlocks the shrine’s inner chamber. There’s these flame emitting pots that I can turn off by hitting them, which makes everything so much easier.

I assemble a platform, glue the flame emitters to the corners, turned off, glue the ball to the center of the platform, glue the balloon to the ball, hit the flame jets, and let it rise up until it gets stuck on the ceiling, then climb up a long ladder to get to the top level of the room, and use Ultrahand to grab the balls and put them where they need to go.

After I collect my rewards, I am out and ready to talk to Impa. It’s sometime late at night when I come out of the Shrine, and the very first thing I see as I exit is a shooting star, falling not far from here. I run at full speed in the direction of its beacon, and jump off a high rock formation, to glide down into a forested area below. While gliding, I pull out the telescope and mark the point where the Shooting Star landed, which is quite a feat to pull off while in the air. I land, and some bokoblin skeletons spring up from the ground to attack me, but I just ignore them, continuing to run to the spot where the star fragment is laying. I get there, and pick it up. Then immediately fast travel back to the Shrine I just completed so I can go talk to Impa, since that seems to be the most important thing to do at the moment.

Impa is trying to study the Geoglyphs that have appeared all over the landscape — the giant lines that look like writing or or drawings, that I’ve seen about the land. Unfortunately her own balloon vehicle got broken, and she needs help fixing it. Since I just did this, it’s pretty easy. I re-attach the balloon to her platform, and we get in. She asks me to light the fire, and there’s a fire and a torch on the ground conveniently nearby. I don’t want to lose a weapon because everything I’m holding now does good damage, so I just use Ultrahand to grab the torch, pass it through the flame, and quickly light the fire under the balloon, and then try to drop the torch before it sets fire to something important.

I manage to do this, and we get up to altitude, and have a perfect view of the Geoglyph. Impa still says it says something about Dragon’s Tears, but doesn’t know what it means. She suggests I skydive out and get a better look from my glider, which I do. I glide down to what appears to be the head of the creature depicted in the Geoglyph, which I don’t think looks all that much like a dragon, but looks more like Rauru. There are shapes like water droplets falling from the head, which are obviously meant to be Tears… (of the Kingdom?)

Near one of these spots, there’s a circular pool on the ground, and I recognize it as one of those Story cutscene spots that I’ve stumbled upon once or twice before.

This time my vision is of Princess Zelda; she wakens up on the ground and is approached by two gentle beings who turn out to be Rauru and another character named Sonia. They talk to the Princess and introduce themselves as the King and Queen of Hyrule, the founders of the kingdom. Somehow, Zelda must have traveled back to the past, so it would seem. Zelda seems alarmed and distraught at the realization.

Impa has landed her balloon craft by the time the vision is over, and Link relates this to her. This completes another mission of the main quest.

I guess somehow, despite taking completely random distractions and going in different directions, I’m more or less on the right path. Since I don’t really know how I could have known to do these things, to lead me to this place, by myself, I’ll chalk it up to genius design on Nintendo’s part, to lead me in a seemingly random meander that somehow came back to the important business of saving Hyrule without ever making me once feel like I was being forced back into that plot line, and without really making me feel lost.

Impa says I should go to a location called the Hidden Temple, which is located in Hebra, in a canyon. I think I may remember this location from BOTW, if it’s the place I am thinking of, it was full of Guardians and very dangerous. I wonder what it’s like now. All the old Guardians from BOTW seem to be gone from the landscape, as if they never existed.

I make it to the next shrine with little incident, stopping along the way here and there to pick up forage items if I see them long the way.

The shrine is called Forward Moving Object or something to that effect, and it deals with these wheels that you can attach to stuff, and then activate. The wheels turn in one direction, indicated by an arrow in their tread pattern, and in this shrine they come pre-attached to platforms to make cars and such.

The shrine is pretty easy, although I’m sure I didn’t solve it in the intended manner. First I ride across some lava using a platform car, and then I find a large heavy steel ball, which I attach to the car. The next part of the challenge involves getting the ball up a ramp, or staircase. I don’t really try to figure out what I’m supposed to do with the tools, I just balance the car, with the ball still attached, halfway up the staircase of platforms, ignore the rail next to it completely, and then climb up to the top of the steps and grab the whole car with Ultrahand and bring it to me.

Then I’m supposed to drive it down a ramp, but I just use Ultrahand again to carry it down, which is easier. Then there’s a river with some more platforms and it looks like I’m supposed to build a floating vehicle, which I try but it doesn’t do well against the current, and just stays in place. I could have maybe tired attaching some planks that are laying about nearby to the wheels, creating a paddle wheel, but I don’t think of that, and instead just end up connecting a bunch of platforms together to create a long log bridge across the water, far enough to hover the ball across with Ultrahand, and drop it on the other side.

There’s a ladder going to an upper level catwalk, which I use to make the crossing myself, and then I Ultrahand the ball back into the first room of the Shrine, which I’ve looped around to, stick it into a receptacle in the ground, and open a gate.

I also pick up a chest in the water in the river room, which contains a Zonai sword. I get another Light of Blessing.

I emerge near the Stable I had been heading toward. I am in the Wetlands of Lanayru, and it seems to be living up to its name, raining nearly constantly. The Stable welcomes me, and I talk to the two people who are here, a man who wants to investigate the Ring Ruins at Kakariko Village, and Beedle. No one else is around, except for the Stable keeper, who tells me I have enough Pony Points to trade in for a reward. I check the rewards, and find that they have a cart harness that I can use to hook up my horses to carts. So that’ll be useful at some point, I’m sure.

I actually decide I would like to take one of my horses out, since I am trying to get back to Lookout Landing, which is nearby but still a long walk, and I’m in the lowlands with little opportunity to use the glider. Sure, I could fast travel, but I’ve explored so little of the world there’s sure to be plenty of interesting things between here and there, even along the roadway.

I embark, checking the map to make sure I’m going the right way. I turn left and cross a bridge, noticing one of those glowing blue bunny creatures that you can shoot for bonus rupees. I take aim and get a good hit, getting a bunch of rupees for my well placed shot. Near where the rupees fell, I spot a cave. Upon entering, the game notifies me that I’ve made a Discovery!

In the cave, there are a few Horriblins, milling about up on the ceiling. I headshot one with an arrow, and it drops to the floor dead. The remaining ones rush me, and I try to fight them but I’m clumsy with the controls, and keep fucking up. I do some damage but they kill me, one hit from the tough looking blue Horriblin being enough to put me to a half heart from full health.

I respawn and try again, this time nailing them with more arrows, taking them down before they can close to within melee range, and clean out their little cave. There isn’t much here worth the effort, and I wouldn’t call this a great discovery. There’s a few forage items, some dropped weapons, Horribilin parts, and a few gemstones to mine. Maybe I’m missing something? Well whatever, I’m on my way to Lookout Landing.

Back on the road, I encounter a man with a horse cart coming the opposite way, who turns out to be a merchant selling wares. I buy some oil from him, since it’s something I don’t think I’m likely to find much of in the wilderness while foraging wild plants and mushrooms.

I also run into another Addison, and help him erect another sign for his President Hudson. He rewards me in the usual fashion with rupees and some food.

Next stop, another shrine, this one a little bit of a detour from the most direct path to Lookout Landing, but it’s one of the Shrines I had pinned on the map, so I make a point to go there. It turns out it is an item throwing challenge. It’s easy. There’s some fire seed bushes and a soldier Zonaite to use as target practice. I collect the fireseeds, nail the soldier twice, and collect a reward of bomb flowers, and a Light of Blessing.

I emerge from the Shrine, mount Radish, and make for Lookout Landing. I go around and talk to people to see what they have to say. Many of them are talking about a newspaper that is bringing in reports from abroad. Apparently it is headquartered in Hebra, where the Rito live. I’m told it is very cold there, so I should not go there unless I’m sufficiently prepared. I know what that means.

I found a well in Lookout Landing, like the one I found in Kakariko Village, with a ladder leading down to a cave I can explore and pick up some free stuff. I find a decayed Royal Claymore sword, and some brightblooms and other forage. I go to the shelter below ground and trade in my Light of Blessings for two Stamina upgrades, which should help me more than hearts will at the moment. Even though I’m low on life power and my armor is poor, I think exploring is better than fighting at this stage, and I’m going to avoid combat for the most part unless it’s necessary. I have three Light of Blessings left, so I’ll need to come back with one more soon anyway.

There’s another Prayer Statue, above ground, which tells me it wants Poes that I’ve collected from the underworld. Poes are lost souls and the statue helps return them to the afterworld, or so it tells me. I can trade it Poes for useful items, which seems a bit odd, and maybe unethical. These are people’s souls are they not? But most of the items are obtainable in other ways. The one I’m actually interested in, a new outfit, is out of my price range for now.

I go and talk to Purah, and she tells me that there are Four Regional Phenomena, points of interest on the map having to do with the Upheaval that I’m to visit in order to further the quest. There’s more talk about Zelda sightings, apparently she’s been spotted recently in Hebra, which is where one of these places is located. The others are in Gerudo, Lanayru, and Eldin, near Tarreytown.

I head out on Radish to travel, check the map for a bit, and decide to head toward the west. I’m not sure exactly what to do yet. I don’t feel ready for Hebra, although I do have some fire seeds that I can hold onto, some red chuchu jelly, and the winter pants that I found while I was still stuck on the big skyland during the opening part of the game. So maybe that will be enough to survive.

I stick to the roads, because the horses like to follow roads, and I look for things to do along the way.

I find another Addison, and help him erect another sign for the President of his company, and he gives me a few rupees and some food. A bit further out on the road, I spot what looks like a fortified hill, with a wooden palisade surrounded by spiked thorny barriers. It looks Bokoblinish to me. I’m not really interested in fights, but for some reason I decide to scout it out and see what I can find.

There’s a shallow cave under the hill, which I enter and park my horse for safety. I find a Hearty Truffle here, and I think that might be an ingredient that could help someone back in Kakariko Village, although at the moment I can’t remember if it’s the Gloom-sick grandmother or perhaps one of the family members of the village who’s mother died. I do remember someone somewhere said that truffles were good for them, though. So I hope I run into them again.

I check around the perimeter of the fort, and find a way in, and stupidly rush headlong into a trap. A Bokoblin is standing watch, and I try to headshot him with an arrow, but only succeed in letting him know I’m there, and then he sounds the alarm and wakes up everyone, who runs out to attack. These Bokoblins are well armed, one carries a shield and another is in full armor, and I can’t do damage with my melee weapon. I try tossing a bomb flower at him, but end up blowing myself up in the process, and am left dangerously close to death, which comes shortly thereafter. I glimpse an especially large enemy, who looks almost as big as a Hinox, but looks like a Bokoblin, as I go down.

I respawn, and this time I try Ascend to go through the roof of the little cave where I left my horse. This brings me up inside the fort, in the back area, out of the way of the guards, and right next to a prisoner in a cage. I am safe for the moment, but surrounded by enemies, and now I have to try to rescue this poor guy.

I don’t take a very creative approach, but just go with heavy artillery, bomb arrowing an effective tactic, which takes down the weaker bokoblins immediately, but also raises an alarm. The Big Bokoblin takes several headshots before going down, but thankfully doesn’t seem to be quite as tough as a Hinox at this point. He drops some loot, including a body part, which teaches me the name of this enemy is Boss Bokoblin. I think I like these guys.

I should be trying to flurry rush and dodge their attacks, but I’m just too clumsy with the controls to pull off stunts like that just yet. Fortunately I have enough arrows and bombs and it works. I Ultrahand the cage off of the prisoner, and he tells me he was investigating the Blood Moon, and discovered its connection with the resurrection of the monsters, which is how he got caught.

So, like, if you didn’t already know about the Blood Moon from having seen it about a million times, now you know.

He gives me three food items as a reward, and then heads for home. I continue looting the fortress, but there’s mostly just dropped weapons, and my inventory is full of those. So I find a few more items of ingredients and cooked food (probably cooked by the explosions I set off), and that’s about it.

I play around with Ultrahand and realize that if I had thought of it, I might have been able to use the Ultrahand to put the cage holding the prisoner onto the enemy, and perhaps trapped one or two. That would have been rather interesting to see if they could free themselves, or if the Boss Bokoblin would have been strong enough and smart enough to help them. I make a note to try that sometime.

I also play around a bit with the explosive kegs, and note that I can drop them from height with Ultrahand and they’ll detonate, as they will from a small amount of damage.

I get back on my horse and back on the trail.

I go a short distance, before I spot a shrine off in the distance. I’m going to need to climb a hill and glide to it, which is one of the reasons why horses aren’t really that useful in this game, because mostly you climb, glide, and fast travel to get to places faster than you can on a horse. So I ditch Radish and go climb a hill, then glide down to the shrine.

This shrine is a tutorial on the wind devices. I can use them in various ways: attach them to the ground to create an updraft that I can use to get altitude with my glider. I can attach them to a platform and if it isn’t stuck to the ground by friction, get it to move. I flip a platform upright using this power, and get access to a treasure chest, then attach two more fans to a cart on a rail track, and use it like an elevator to get to the Light of Blessing.

I’m happy with this one, because the solutions are not difficult and I learn a little bit about what I can do with this particular building block, without it becoming too frustrating.

I’m standing at the highest point of the Ring Ruins at Kakariko, and decide to take in the view for a full 360 degrees and figure out where I ought to go next.

Logically, I’d probably want to explore the other Ring Ruins and try to solve the mystery at Kakariko. But everywhere you look in the world, there’s unexplored areas with loads to do everywhere between here and there.

I had pinned a shrine on the map which is nearby and seems like it might be just within reach of my glider. I decide to see if I can reach it, and take off. Unfortunately, my stamina meter runs out well before I reach, but still tantalizingly close to landing there. I die in the ensuing fall, and respawn back atop Kakariko.

I wonder, can I use a Zonai wing, to get there without using up the stamina, and then glide the rest of the way down? I try this, but I can’t seem to get the Wing to take off. I mount a fan to it, but the fan won’t blow it off the precipice, and just runs down the battery until it shuts off.

The wing seems like a useful device, or should be, but I’m finding it frustrating. Apart from the time when I had a ready-made rail to launch off of, I couldn’t get it to work for me worth a damn.

In the end, I opt to simply glide out as close to the shrine as I can; it’s not that far from the ground, and in fact there’s a root extending from the tiny skyland the shrine sits on, to touch the ground below, just barely. I figure, I can climb this with little problem, and get up there.

So I glide out as far as I can, and when my stamina meter is up, I use the last little bit to slow my fall just before I would have hit the ground and died, the glider acting like a parachute, and I survive without injury.

I walk to the hill leading to the little skyland with the shrine on it, and try to climb up the root. But it turns out that climbing the root also would use more than a wheel of stamina. So perhaps I am meant to come back here when I have powered up at the prayer statues, or with a stamina potion.

Just to be sure, I try to Ascend through the skyland to its topside, but it’s a little too high above where I can stand to use the ability, and I can’t make it work.

I’m not giving up yet, though.

But suddenly the sky darkens, and something horrible comes up out of the ground nearby. It’s a mass of Gloom, erupting out of the ground, and it appears to be mobile. Looking more closely I see what appear to be several dark, horrid, arms reaching out of this mass. It seems to slide around along the ground, as though alive, and searching for something. It turns out, it’s trying to get to me.

I dare not go near it, fearful of the Gloom sickness and those grabbing hands. I knock arrows and tip them with brightbloom, thinking that might be especially effective against them. I manage to score several headshots, and after hitting it a few times, it seems to shrink and recoil, and then dissipates into nothing, leaving behind not a trace that it had been there, save for some unidentified monster parts on the ground, which I pick up. It’s called a “Dark Clump” and the description says it may be useful in creating Gloom-resistant meals or elixirs. Perhaps that’s the cure for the old woman back at Kakariko village?

This is one of the coolest encounters I’ve had in the game so far, and out of all the new enemies I’ve seen so far, this is far and away the most interesting. Could these hands pull me down into the underworld again? I did get grabbed one time, and “all” it did was take me down to a half heart of health, and give me Gloom sickness to temporarily make me incapable of healing. It moved quickly and seemed like it could always catch me if it wanted to, unless I was high up on a different elevation that it couldn’t ascend. I’d have to run or glide to get away from it otherwise.

I am down to just 17 arrows remaining, and I still can’t get up into the skyland platform where the shrine is. I spot a bokoblin camp downhill a short distance away, and decide to raid it to see if I can farm some arrows from their archers.

This goes remarkably well, I manage to dive bomb the bokoblins, killing one straight away, and dispatch the second one quickly, leaving one more still on his watch stand, to try to hit me with arrows, which he cannot do as long as I keep moving around. I pick up a bunch of arrows, before I am noticed by a nearby Aerocuda, which bombs me with casks of TNT. Fortunately I am moving erratically enough that it doesn’t score a hit, although it does wake me up. I take it down with an arrow — it seems they do not have a lot of health — and it falls to the ground. Then one of the nearby trees wakes up, and I hit it with a bomb arrow, destroying it in one hit.

The dead tree leaves behind some nuts and a log. I pick up the log using Ultrahand, and drag it back up the hill to the floating shrine, and try to get the log to stand upright, so that I can use it to boost myself partway up the climb without using my stamina. All I need is a short distance, and this should help.

I have to use one of my Zonai Uprighter devices, but this ends up working.

Annoyingly, just as I get this set up, it rains for hours and turns to night. I can’t climb in the rain, so I stand by and wait for hours while the lightning crashes around me.

I see wizzorobes have come out, and are dancing about nearby. Electric-charged, too. I wonder if the storm brought them out?

I also spot a glow a distance away, downhill from the place I’m standing, and using my Purah scope, I zoom in to see what appears to be a young Hylian woman. I imagine it’s dangerous for her to be out, at night, in the rain, alone, but I suspect she may be in disguise and dangerous herself. She doesn’t seem to be in immediate danger, so I watch and she eventually reaches a large tree and seems to take shelter beneath it, waiting out the storm.

I’m more interested in getting the most out of my Uprighter device so I am not about to leave the area and risk it disappearing just to check on her.

At midnight the rain lets up, and I try the climb. I get up to the level of the log, and stop to stand on it, resting until my stamina bar is full again, then resume climbing. I just barely get to the top with the very last of my stamina, leaping the last little bit, but the plan works perfectly.

I’m here, I’m ready, I run into the shrine.

This one is a challenge for bouncy blocks. These are spring-loaded platform boxes of Zonai origin, which I can trigger by hitting them. I learn all about how they work.

First, there’s an automated platform that just pumps up and down like a high speed piston, launching me into the air. I use it to get up to the next level, where there’s a movable (with Ultrahand) spring loaded box, which I use to get up to a still higher level.

At this point, it gets more challenging. There’s an inclined platform which I have to position a spring box on, to launch me across a gap, to an area where I find another spring box and a ball. I use the springbox to launch the ball back the way I came, where there was a bowl shaped depression for it, and then reset the spring box and use it again to launch myself back across.

Once the ball touches the center of the bowl, it triggers a gate to open, where I find a double spring block, glued together. I discover that hitting either of the blocks activates both of them, giving an extra boost effect.

I use this to jump up, but the room it’s in isn’t the way forward. I have to drag the contraption out of the locked room, back into the room where the ball-bowl is, and here I can jump up to the height of the next level, which is where I find the Light of Blessing.

I now have 9 of these saved up, and it seems that the challenges I’m dealing with would be easier if I had a little more stamina wheel, so I think it’s time to head back to Lookout Landing to cash them in.

As I emerge from the shrine, I take a quick look around to see if there’s anything else of interest here; I notice a climbable wall surrounding a small chimney-like structure, inside of which I can see a treasure chest. I climb up and get the treasure chest, it’s a Big Zonaite. There’s a spring box inside the chimney, so I use it to launch myself out.

Looking around I see that toward the way back to Lookout Landing, there appears to be another Stable and Shrine nearby that it doesn’t look like I’ve been to yet, so I decide I’ll glide as far in that direction as I can, and visit them.

So much is familiar about Kakariko Village, yet so much has changed. Pretty much everything is new, or transformed. It’s like starting all over again.

Paya is the new village chief, after Impa retired. I haven’t seen Impa yet, and I wonder if she is still alive, but no one has mentioned that she has passed, only that she has retired. So I hope she is still with us.

Dorian, one of the village guards, has two small children. Dorian’s wife died and is buried in the village cemetery, but with the Ring Ruins having fallen, and the one that is off limits per Zelda’s strict orders, they are unable to visit her grave.

I meet a man on the streets who is a visitor to Kakariko, who wants to see the Ring Ruins up close, but is afraid of heights, so cannot.

Tauro, the leader of the Zonai Investigation, who is working on learning the mysteries of the Ring Ruins, has an underling named Calip. Calip is ambitious and wants his name to be remembered, while Tauro seems to be all but consumed with the discoveries that he can make. Calip guards the forbidden ruin, and will not allow anyone near it, not even me. Even Tauro is unable to go against Zelda’s orders.

The clothing shop in Kakariko has fallen on hard times due to the illness of the family’s grandmother. They have raised prices on everything, but if she returns to health they say they will lower them. The Stealth and Radiant outfits are here, but everything is marked $5000 rupees. The shopkeeper also mentions that her sister wants to study fashion in Hateno Village, which has become renown for its fashion design.

The house up the hill is where I find the clothing store’s family. I talk to the younger daughter, she is trying to discover a recipe that will cure the gloom sickness that has affected her grandmother, who is stable but can only eat porridge and rest in bed for now. She has most of the ingredients needed to make porridge, but is missing some ingredient that will be a cure for Gloom. So it’s up to me to find that ingredient and bring it to her, only I don’t know what it might be.

Back in the rest of their property, I find the grandmother in a small house. She is resting and doesn’t have much to tell me that I find useful.

There’s a couple of gardens on the property, one growing carrots but I am not permitted to take them. There’s also a water well on the property, which I notice has a ladder leading down. I climb down it to explore, and find a surprizingly large cave complex, where there are brightshrooms growing along the walls, and some other plants as well. There’s even a chamber with a few brightseed bulbs glowing, and they evidently provide enough light to enable a small crop of pumpkins and carrots to grow. I even find a treasure chest, containing a weapon called the Eight Fold Blade, which seems to have some bonuses to stealth. I don’t need it right now, so I leave the weapon there for later, but I take everything else I can find. There’s a small fire and a cooking pot, and I discover a recipe notebook which suggests a few things to prepare:

• Pumpkin + meat
• Apple + goat butter
• Honey + apples

It seems that the notebook of recipes was written by the deceased wife of Dorian, so it seems to be a hint that if I produce these recipes and give them to her family, that will probably be rewarded somehow.

I like this.

I don’t have all these ingredients, so I need to come back with Goat Butter and Honey. But I intend to make them in this specific kitchen, to make it that much more like the home recipes that Dorian and his children will recognize.

I try to find the exit for the well, but it’s dark and the passages are twisted, and after a while I use Ascend to transport myself to the surface, and come up on the hillside next to Kakariko Village, and in the immediate vicinity I see one of those Zonai gumball machines, and a shrine a bit further off in the distance. Next to the gumball machine, there’s a girl from the Zonai investigation squad, named Cori, who talks to me about Sundelions. She tells me that they grow in the sky level, and seem to repel Gloom. She is studying them, trying to see if they can be cultivated on the ground level here.

Perhaps this is a clue to cure Gloom. I think I have Sundelion in my inventory.

I put some Zonaite items into the gumball machine, and it spits out a bunch of balls. Some of the items produced are new to me: Big Wheel, Stabilizer, Balloon. Cori is impressed. She’s also interested in studying the Zonai tech.

I run up the hill a bit, to collect some forage objects I see. I also want to gain some altitude so I can more easily glide across the valley to reach the shrine that I spotted.

I keep going up, up, and it looks like I’m near one of the Ring Ruins. I find two older looking men standing, arguing about which is better: offense or defense, and a younger looking man sitting under a lean-to. The young man is frustrated with the bickering, and only wants to get rid of some monsters that have occupied the ring ruin, before they damage the inscription on the stones there.

This sounds like a job for Link.

It seems like everything I look at or see is something else for Link to do. I’m just walking around the village and I’ve already picked up a half dozen or so things to do, and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface here.

I wonder how many hundreds of hours it will take me to do all these things.

I wonder how people will react to me differently based on the time of day, or what things I’ve seen and done, or what equipment I have, or what clothing I’m wearing. There’s an astronomical number of things I could conceivably try, and no way to try them all in a single lifetime.

I take out the bokoblins at the Ring Ruins. First, I hit them by surprise from a distance, using a bomb arrow to nail one of them in the head. The explosion does some extra damage, and as well they are set on fire, causing further damage. The two bokoblins who survive the initial strike get up and run at the two Hylian swordsmen discussing combat strategy, and engage them. This enables me to come up from behind and deal killing blows without taking any damage.

The swordsmen are thus impressed by my fighting ability, and each learns that focusing solely on offense or defense is not the best way, and that balance is the key.

The younger Hylian thanks me and is able to access the Ring Ruins again, and studies them. There is a stone carving with runes, which he wants to discover the meaning of.

I leave the area and head over to the shrine that I wanted to get into. This one is called An Upright Mechanism. This one gives me a lot of trouble.

First, I know that there are these Zonai devices that stand upright. They act like anchors, so if I attach something to them, they will stay upright, like feet planted firmly on the ground. This makes it possible to raise blocks and keep them upright that normally would fall over due to balance and gravity.

I am able to solve the first part of the challenge with ease. I use Ascend to get through an overhang to reach the first area, then take an L-shaped platform and raise it upright, climb it, and use it as a platform to glide across an open chasm to the other side.

There, I am in a larger room. There is a high wall of bars to my left, which I can see through, but cannot climb. To the right there is a locked room, barred, and a platform with a bowl attached to it, and a ball. There’s another L-shaped platform in the main area where I am, and I can use it to climb over the high wall, then use Ultrahand to glue the ball to the bowl platform, and use another uprighter to stand them up so I can climb them and get over the wall again. Throwing the ball into a small socket in the center of a depressed part of the floor in the main area opens up the barred room, and gives me access to another platform.

From here there is another, wider chasm to cross, only I can’t do it. I think that I could create a lever using the L-shaped piece and the two bowl platforms, gluing them together, using the bottom of the L as a fulcrum, and the weight of the ball in the cup on one side to launch me across the gap.

Only, I can’t get it to work. There’s no way to generate enough force with the ball.

I next try using the three platforms to create an ultra-high ladder, but it still isn’t enough to get me high enough to glide across the gap.

I try many times, and cannot solve the puzzle.

The original idea I had to launch myself using the ball and bowl platforms is so close to the solution, but I’ve missed a critical bit of information about the uprighter device. It can be activated by striking it with a weapon. This exerts the necessary force to launch me like a trebuchet over the gap. Only, I don’t know about hitting the uprighter. I just know that it seems to have inertia when it is set upright, and it can balance things that ordinarily would fall if not attached to them.

So in the end, I have to rely on my first cheat, I look up the solution for this shrine, and it shows me how to activate the uprighter device. There is a clue at the very first challenge, that was too subtle for me to catch: an activated uprighter next to the deactivated one attached to the L-shaped platform. I never activated it previously, just placed it upright by manipulating it with the Ultrahand ability and natural balance. I might have solved it in 20 minutes instead of two hours if I had observed this.

I emerge from the shrine at night, just before the Blood Moon.

After it passes, I look around to see what else there is to check out in my immediate vicinity. It appears there is something more nearby, up higher. I climb and find one of the Ring Ruins. This one is being actively investigated by the Hylian people of the Zonai Investigation Squad. I talk to them, there is a stone slab with Zonai writing on it. One of the investigators is sleeping, or ill, I’m not sure which, and is talking in his sleep about Hearty Truffles. So I bet if I bring him a Hearty Truffle something good will happen.

I continue climbing up above this encampment, and find a treasure chest, which has a Big Zonaite in it. And climb further still, until I reach the top, where there’s a rock that I lift to reveal the hiding place of a Korok. Well, I guess some things never change.

I’m way high up above Kakariko village, with all the climbing that I’ve done, and I can see in all directions, quite a long distance.

I have so much to explore and do. Not only is the game world vast, but it is also especially dense with points of interest and things to do. I can’t imagine fully exploring this game, it’d take years at the rate I’m able to put time into it. It must be incredibly easy to overlook things, or to miss a hint, or to forget something that someone told you about.

How could anyone keep track of all this without taking notes like I’m doing as they play?

Up in the clouds. Gliding to a floating rock wasn’t difficult. But there’s nothing on it of interest, other than the view. I’m a long, long way up, and yet there are skylands towering above me off in the distance, at even greater heights. How shall I reach them, I wonder?

I have a clear view of Hyrule below, in all directions, except where clouds are passing over, between the land and my position. Some clouds are at my level, or higher, but most are below. Some even seem to be dark and raining, with lightning illuminating them frequently. It’s a marvel to behold. I spend a few minutes just taking it in. Surveying the land, I try to note and pin a few more Map Towers, but there’s far too many interesting things to note, and not enough pins.

The world is mind boggling in its vastness, and I’ve done so little to explore it. I feel like if I just continue going from one thing to the next, like in the ADHD Heaven picture, I’ll miss so much and never see all of what the game has to offer. On the other hand, if I go methodically, slowly, and “mow the lawn” back and forth over every square inch of the world map, it will take forever and be very tedious, yet be faster and more efficient than sporadically skipping about all over the place.

Nearby, floating just a little below, are a few more “stepping stone” skylands, leading to a larger mass. It seems this is the natural path forward, and it’s a bit more to explore, so I go and check it out.

There’s nothing much about, at least in the way of living beings, although there are plentiful birds who have landed up here, and seem to be a bit surprised to see me.

After they take off, the skyland I’m on is clear, and it’s just me, the trees, and the breeze through the leaves. It’s very peaceful, and beautiful. For a moment, I wonder why I should try to solve the world’s problems, when up here they seem so small, and I could live happily, eating mushrooms and apples and hearty radishes that grow here.

But I want to explore, more than forage, I want to find something cool, something useful, something that will inform me about what this place is, and what it was.

Looking around, it seems there are clues, but I don’t know enough yet to make much out of them. Mostly it is just a peaceful, beautiful ruin. These rocky skylands have some verticality to them, which I can climb down the sides a bit and see if there’s perhaps a small ledge containing a secret, or a sub-level sheltered beneath the top level.

I see a structure on a nearby skyland, a short gap that I can cross with the glider, and it looks to be Zonai, so I go for it. Up close, it’s one of those giant gumball machines, so I put in some Zonai materials and it spits out a bunch of balls, including some new items that I haven’t seen before. I still haven’t played around with these much to make use of them. A cannon, a time bomb, a spring, I’m starting to get more interested in playing around with this stuff. But I suspect that it will be a lot of trial and error, save and restore, until I figure this stuff out and how to control it well. I have a strong suspicion that it will be even harder to control than the horses, which I’m still not very good on.

I can just imagine setting up a platform with some wheels and fans, and having no way to steer it once it’s turned on, being frustrated as the machine careens out of control in not quite the right direction, and I end up deciding that it’s not worth it and that I’m better off just doing things on foot. But I hope the game isn’t like that, really. I want for there to be controls that I can sit at and steer a vehicle that I’ve built, but I haven’t seen anything like that yet.

Next to the Zonai gumball machine, there’s a large stone platform, which I can aim by turning a crank wheel. The platform retracts, only to violently launch at an angle. It looks like it would pulverize me if I were to stand in front of it, but that’s exactly what I do, and it launches me across to a nearby skyland. I land there, and look around a bit, and there’s a hole in the center of this one, a well that goes all the way through, showing the Hyrule landscape far below.

I notice what appears to be some kind of Zonai device dangling from a long cord or vine. I’m puzzled about how I might retrieve it, forgetting for the moment about Ultrahand, and I climb down to try to get a better look, but after my stamina meter drops about half way I think better of this, and climb back to safety.

I continue looking around and see what looks like a Korok challenge tree stump, the kind where if you stand on it, something will happen for you to try to do. I try standing on it, and indeed a thing happens: a flare shoots out, and starts falling far below. I guess I’m meant to chase after it, then? So I dive off the platform. I fall faster than the flare, and end up shooting past it. Trying to slow my descent, I try deploying the glider, and then try to look back upward to see if I can still track the flare, but I’ve lost it. I maybe see it, but it’s hard to tell, as there are other streaks of light streaming down near it and it’s hard to tell which is the real thing.

I decide to just continue falling and see what happens at the bottom. I end up plummeting into Kakariko Village, splashing down in the moat surrounding Impa’s place.

I climb out of the water, and enter, but the place is empty. No Impa, but there’s some books strewn about and I read them. I find that Impa retired as chief of the village, and turned the responsibility over to Paya. After the sky fell, Paya became fascinated with these “Ring Ruins” that came down from the sky and surrounded Kakariko Village. There’s a Hylian man named Tauro, who leads the investigation squad, and who is an expert on the Zonai culture, and who can read their language a bit, who is here to learn what they can. Tauro wants to check out one of the Ring Ruins in particular, but was forbidden to do so by Princess Zelda, who declared them off limits. Apparently Zelda appeared in the village sometime after we disappeared during our exploration under Hyrule Castle, which triggered this geographic transformation.

It’s a bit of a mystery, then, how and where Zelda appears, and how she is traveling about, and why she doesn’t stay with her people. It’s almost like seeing a ghost.

I guess there’s a lot to catch up on and discover here, with a lot of potential side quests and storylines to advance, and I’m not sure where to go next or what to do, exactly.

I feel like instead of reading a book, cover to cover, in page order, I’m doing random seek and playing a 10 second sample of a Compact Disc, skipping around from one snippet to the next in a completely random fashion, and it’s so distorienting. It’s a very postmodern way of constructing narrative, and I find it a bit difficult to get into.

I feel like I should take a break and pick it up again when I have more time. But not having a sense of a direction I should go in next leaves me feeling a bit lost.

The next place I had marked as a point of interest on the map is a mapping tower. This one is in Necluda, on top of a rocky hill. To get to it, I have to cross the river. I make a go at it a few different ways, but it’s too wide to swim and I don’t have materials nearby to create a decent boat with. Plus even if I did get across the river I’d still have to climb up some sheer rocks, and I don’t know if I can make it with one Stamina meter.

I end up almost drowning in the river, but I use the Purah Pad to fast-travel back to the stables I found a few sessions ago. This is a cheap way of getting out of death, if you ask me, but the game allows it, and well there’s not much consequence for dying in this game anyway, so I’m not going to feel guilty about it.

I take another look at the map, and it looks like if I take a roundabout path I don’t have to try to swim across that river. It’ll be longer overland, but worth it, I think, so I try that route. Along the way I run from every monster I encounter, not wanting to waste my time with them. I also pick up whatever forage ingredients I happen to find along the way, but I’m not really trying to divert from my goal to pick stuff up right now.

I eventually get to the tower, and find that it is locked. There’s a Rito birdman with a puzzled look about him, and he explains he came to try to fix the tower, which he was part of the construction crew of, only to find that he was locked out. He says he’s hungry and wishes he had some of the mushrooms that grew in the caves below the tower.

I take the hint and go to look for the cave he’s talking about, and find one. When I set foot in it, the game tells me I’ve made a Discovery. The walls of this cave are breakable, and I happen to have a couple of stone hammers, so I go to work clearing a path through. A few broken walls later, and I realize that there are some monsters in this cave, and they’re alert to my presence. I haven’t seen these creatures before, and I’m not even sure whether they are humanoid, or more like some kind of giant frog-lizard thing. They’re called Horriblins, and they seem menacing, but are not actually too difficult. I hit one in the face with an arrow, and knock another one into a pool of water at the back of the cave. To my great surprise, it’s not capable of swimming, and ends up taking damage while it struggles in the water, and eventually drowns. The final Horriblin goes down to my melee weapon, a rusty claymore topped with a bokoblin skeleton arm, which deals the most damage of anything I’ve been able to fuse together in the game so far.

With the cave cleared out, I’m hoping to find some of those mushrooms, but I don’t find anything except mineral deposits that drop when I break the stone walls, and some glowing cave fish, and maybe some other stuff, one random mushroom but it doesn’t seem like a special type.

I walk back up to the Rito and talk to him again, hoping he’ll tell me I found what he wanted, and help me, but he just tells me the same thing. I wonder if I should try holding one of the mushrooms from my inventory and offer it to him, but only after the fact. There’s so many ways to do things in this game, you never know what will work or if you’ve tried everything — almost certainly, you haven’t.

I noticed a Stone Talus walking along the path below the tower, which had a battle platform manned by three bokoblins, and decide it would be fun to see if I can take it down. I’m high enough that I can glide down and divebomb them, and they’re just puny red bokoblins, not particularly well arme, and I figure why not.

I attempt it, but after taking the bokoblins down easily, as soon as I hit the Talus in its weak point, it bucks me, and I go flying clear off the platform, all the way down off the side of the cliff, to a fatal landing below. Dang it.

I go back to talk to the Rito, this time holding one of each mushroom variety, and drop them in front of him, hoping that this will be what he wants, but that doesn’t seem to interest him at all. OK, well I’ll go back to fighting the Battle Talus, then. At least that will be fun.

It takes several tries, but I eventually take down the Talus. It isn’t too difficult, a decent challenge, but I keep screwing up. When I get knocked off, it takes me a while to get back on my feet, during which time I’m vulnerable to the Talus’s attack, which does me in with one hit more often than not. And if it doesn’t, it takes me nearly down, and sends me reeling. Climbing onto the Talus’s back to finish it off is more difficult, almost impossible due to the platforms built onto its back, which I can’t get on top of when climbing from below. I find that the best way to get back on top is to ride a thermal with my glider, after a fire is started. Fortunately, the last surviving Bokoblin has fire seeds that he throws, which make this easy. When he goes down, though, I’m left to my own fire devices. I happen to have a Zonaite fire generator fused to one of my shields, which I can use to set the grass on fire in front of me, and then zip up on my glider, and as long as I can ride it up high enough, and don’t get stuck in the Talus (which screws up the camera controls, leaving me effectively blind and turned around) I can get back onto the platform and take another whack at the Talus’s weak point.

After I hit it a few more times, the Talus is down to its last few hitpoints, and my stone hammer breaks, leaving me with no good melee weapon to do damage to it with. Anything else I hit with will do minimal damage and shatter quickly, so I jump back off, and fire bomb arrows at the Talus, which ends up actually being the best method.

It dies, dropping a bunch of gemstones, and a heart-shaped rock, which I fuse to my rusty claymore. The Stone Talus Heart Claymore seems like it will be an effective rock smasher.

I go back into the cave to look again for the mushrooms. I smash some rocks with the new Stone Heart hammer, and it does indeed do a fantastic job of smashing rocks. I blow up some more rocks and discover an opening I didn’t see before. There’s another monster in there, I make quick work of it, and pick up some more forage, including some more gems. Looking around, I still see no mushrooms that this Rito might like to eat. I decide to try Ascend, and sure enough that works, and I find myself inside the tower, coming up through the floor behind the locked door.

There are two long wooden sticks propping the door closed, jamming it, and I remove them and then the door opens. The Rito enters, and puts some oil on the machinery in the Tower. I then activate the tower, shoot up into the sky, and map the area. On my way down, I see some nearby floating rocks, and glide toward them.

I think it’s time to explore the sky world for a bit.

I have no idea what I’m doing, really, but it doesn’t seem to matter. In this game, there is no urgency, and you’re free to do things in any order at all. Any distraction you choose to follow is the right direction. You can come back to any mission or challenge at any time, so it literally doesn’t matter what choices you make, to do this, or do that, nothing matters.

Only, I would like it to matter, at least a bit. So I can feel like I’m a better player if I make better decisions, or like I’m on the right track. Anything to give my actions in the game more meaning, importance, substance.