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Well… you’re not going to believe this.

Getting out of the underworld is EASY.

All you have to do is use the map to quick-travel. All levels of the map are accessible; you just have to use your eyes to notice the control hint on the screen, which tells you that the D-pad up/down will select the layer that you’re looking at on the map.

I figure this out after spending an hour or more in the underworld. I actually found it fun and rewarding to have the extra challenge, to actually need to use those foods and items that I had found, and to have some fear that I could actually run out of the stuff I needed most to keep me alive. I loved the unknown fear of not knowing how to get back to the safe and familiar area. But now I feel a little disappointed that it’s that easy to leave. I was expecting to have to earn the capability to get out, to have to fight my way up to the surface, to have to explore an extended time down there with little chance of survival and having to run away a lot and use my wits to their maximum, and find something that I would have to activate in order to be able to leave the underworld at will.

Instead it’s just a quick travel feature that I didn’t realize was given to me “for free”. This is how quick-travel can cheapen the game and remove opportunity for challenge. I would expect quick-travel options at some point, but let me appreciate quick-travel by not giving it to me so early and with so little done to earn it. Make me feel just how big that Hyrule map is.

Sigh. Well, whatever. I explored down there a bit more. I found an area where there was plentiful Zainite or however the fuck you spell it. I used up my stone hammers, but the combats with the bokoblins down there yield plenty of them, as they seem to be mining the stuff down there also. But I found that bomb arrows are even more effective for mining the stuff. They will destroy several blocks of the ore and drop all their yield at once, giving you many times more Zainite per action than pounding it out with a hammer weapon.

I also found these items called “poe” which are souls of some kind. They seemed important, but they also seemed like insects that you can gather as raw material. And there was a lot of them, so I grabbed all I could.

I couldn’t find anyone to talk to down there, or any clue about what I should be doing, so once I realized that I could just leave any time I wanted to, I decided to get back up to the surface. I’ll obviously need to go back down there again, at some point, once I learn more about what’s going on down there, and likely after I’m a lot more powerful. I will be much better off when I have a few more heart containers and some decent armor, and more supplies, especially light generation.

Without knowing more it seems like it’s going to be important to activate all the Roots of Light down there. Or Light Roots. Or whatever they’re called. Once they are turned on they brighten up the environment, fill out an area of the underworld map, and give you another quick-travel point. So probably once you light them all up, the evil power of the Gloom coming from below ground will be seriously weakened or destroyed. Beyond that, I expect as the story unfolds I’ll learn more.

I’m not sure what the right path is to do more story; I can look at the quest log and figure that out easily enough, but I’m just exploring right now.

Back at the surface of Hyrule, I return to the point near the chasm that I had jumped down. There were multiple points of interest within line of sight of this area, and I pick one at random and head toward it.

I pass by a little fortified zone full of at least a half dozen or more bokoblins and a moblin. It seems like this game must have been coded more efficiently to make it possible for you to have to fight more enemies at once. Which is a good thing. But I’m not powerful enough right now, and fighting is so pointless in a game where you use up your gear about as fast as you replenish it from these fights, nothing is permanent, and leveling up from combat only means that they throw tougher versions of the enemies at you.

It feels like a sisyphean treadmill, honestly. There’s no sense of progress other than the opening of the map and the completion of quests in this game. And yeah, that’s a criticism.

The thing I’m headed for is a shrine. I get there, and discover Addison, holding up another sign nearby. So before I go to complete the shrine, I help him get his sign erected, and he thanks me, gives me three rewards, all paltry, and then heads off to put up another sign somewhere else in Hyrule.

Another nearby rock formation has a treasure chest high up on a shelf, which I can’t seem to get to. I try using Ultrahand, but I can’t move the chest, and although I can put a platform right next to it, it doesn’t seem to want to open for me for some reason. I guess I just suck.

Oh well, it’s bound to be a crappy weapon that will last about 10 hits and then shatter, so who gives a fuck.

I go to the shrine. This one is another ultrahand challenge. It’s a bit of a tutorial. There’s these tent-spike objects that you can manipulate with ultrahand, and this helps you learn how those work. Not everything in the game world can be manipulated by ultrahand, and the things that can’t be manipulated, you can pin stuff to using these tent pegs objects. The pointy end will sink into the ground and anchor there. And you can attach other ultrahandable objects to them, so they end up being like anchor points. This is useful and I’m sure will prove important to solving many of the challenges ahead.

So, this puzzle takes a long time to figure out because I don’t know how the stuff is supposed to work.

First, I cross a bottomless trench, by jumping onto a platform that is rotating on an arm, which carries me to the other side of the trench. There, I find a floor switch, and a hittable switch. I stand on the floor switch, and a large section of wall in the chamber before me rotates around a 180 degree spin, and on the other side of the wall is a big orange bullseye.

There’s a chute coming out of the ceiling, and a ball drops from this chute, and rolls down the floor, and drains off into the bottomless pit, and then appears again at the chute, endlessly.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but evidently I need to get this ball to hit the bullseye.

On the ground there’s a couple of those tent spike anchors, and two sections of rod.

In the center of the floor is an object that I don’t understand, but I can’t control it with ultrahand, and the ultrahandable objects won’t stick to it. Eventually I figure out that when I hit the hittable switch in the room, this object rapidly spins. I deduce that the solution to the puzzle is to glue the ultrahandable parts together, and somehow attach them to this spinner, which I can then use as a baseball bat to hit the ball into the target.

It takes quite a bit of trial and error to realize that the anchor spike is the only way to get the log-shaped pieces to stick to the spinner. But once I figure that out, it’s pretty easy. I just have to get the angle and the timing right, and then I can hit that target.

I managed to do it on the 2nd or 3rd try, and open up the Spirit Light room, and collect my Light reward, completing the trial.

But there’s another room, locked, and the second target in the puzzle chamber must be the solution for it. This second target is more difficult, because there’s a section of wall hanging from chains, blocking it. The chains are unbreakable, but the hanging wall section is ultrahandable. Eventually I figure out that I can use more of those anchor pins to attach to the wall section, and pin it to the ceiling so that it is up and out of the way. This is really awkward and difficult because I’m so bad with the controls, but that’s the point of these shrines, to get you to figure out how to solve these puzzles in a trial that is challenging without trying to kill you.

So it take me a long, long, time to fucking pin that section of wall to the ceiling, but once I do, I figure the next part will be easy. Nope! The positioning is awkward; I have to change the angle of the “bat” that I created with the ultrahand objects, and the angle that the ball rolls in is really awkward. It’s like I’m batting lefty, and I am trying to swing at a pitch while standing in the batter’s box in a weird, oblique angle that makes it so that I almost have to hit a foul ball to hit this target. Most of the time when the bat connects with the ball, it doesn’t make good contact, and the ball rolls slowly, without enough energy to hit the target even if it happens to be hit in the right direction, which is only maybe 1 in 8 attempts, if that.

I fiddle with the positioning of the bat again and again, hoping to make the adjustment so that it will be easier and give me a better chance.

Eventually, I manage to do it, but it takes a good hour, hour and a half. And it’s frustrating. And for all that effort, the reward in the chest is an Elixir of Speed, which is a craftable item that I could make, and is a temporary item that I probably will never actually need to use, or will rarely want to use.

Totally not worth it. Fuck’s sake.

This is a cool game, and I know everyone loves it, you can’t say anything bad about Legend of Zelda without hordes of Zelda fanboys wanting to hunt you down for having a contrary opinion, but Nintendo could make the challenges better and make the rewards better. I don’t hate it, but I feel like it’s less fun, more of a chore, and has little to nothing to do with advancing the storyline, or completing the mission of the game.

I felt this way during much of BOTW, too, but I kept faith that all this stuff would be rewarded, like the shrines were going to be some kind of practice for a real world battle where I could use the abilities that I was training with. But really they’re just like little mini games built out of the engine’s physics systems, and they’re alright, but not when they’re ultra frustrating and give you so little in reward for the effort.

Could be it’s super easy in reality, and I just really suck at the game, but as I’m new to these things and learning the mechanics this way, I kind of feel like these kind of tutorial puzzles are supposed to be a reasonable challenge, with a reasonable reward for solving them, not a pain in the fucking ass with a jack shit reward that’s not worth it.

But because every Legend of Zelda game is supposed to be the Best Game Ever Made in the History of Video Games, I feel kind of guilty feeling like this. Only… I’m not wrong. I don’t think I am.

Well, it looks like I’m probably stuck down here for a while.

The underworld is dark and dangerous.

I have a bunch of those brightbloom berries that I can use to light up the immediate surroundings. These are pretty essential, and I hope I don’t run out of them before I can figure out how to get out of here.

Without them, it’s so dark I can’t see shit. It’s practically pitch black, and I could be walking straight into a wall and not really know it.

There’s patches of Gloom all over, and walking into it drains my life meter, and I can’t replenish health with food until I recover from the Gloom. I can do that if I’m in the vicinity of one of the underground travel towers. I tried fast traveling back to the one point I saw on the map that I could travel to, and it turns out that it was the underground light source that I had activated earlier, not a way back to the surface.

I’ve run into a couple of Bokoblin camps, and fought them. They are plentiful, they move pretty quickly, and they use bows. They can kill me if I’m not taking them seriously, and I’m pretty weak with only a 4-heart health meter, weakened by Gloom, and basically no armor.

Weapons are plentiful. There’s skeleton bokoblins and if you kill them their arms are a 20-damage weapon, which is far more powerful than anything else I’ve found so far, although they break very quickly. Living bokoblins and moblins seem to have a fire affinity, and will use fire. You have to watch out for that. I’ve also encountered some weird giant toad looking things that hop around and are a nuisance.

I found a couple of skeleton horses, and tamed one, and discovered that I can safely travel over pools of Gloom while riding them. So that is handy. But riding fast in the dark is bad. So I ride a bit, shoot off a glow berry arrow a distance ahead, explore and grab any forage I can find, and repeat.

I make my way around the perimeter of the area that illuminated when I activated the travel tower, and then pick a direction at random, and head to the west on the map, and after a bit of peril I find and activate another travel tower. Handy.

But how do I get back to the surface? That’s what I really want to do right now. I feel like I don’t really belong here just yet, but I’m surviving OK, and should be able to handle it down here as long as I don’t have to fight too much, and don’t go through all my supplies, which… I’m going to run out of food pretty soon and I’m going to be pretty screwed if I do, and I’ll also be pretty screwed if I run out of light source.

The forage here is different. There’s a plant that can confuse enemies, causing them to fight each other. Which seems like a good thing to put on an arrow, and then shoot into a camp and let things sort themselves out while I stand off at a distance and avoid getting into any fights.

There’s also bomb plants, which as you might expect, give you a form of bomb. It’s apparently pretty powerful, when I used one it really trashed the boko I hit with it, although that might have also been due to secondary explosions from an explosive crate.

And some kind of spore producing mushrooms, which I don’t know what those do yet.

I don’t know if I should continue to explore laterally, or maybe try to climb. There’s some elevated things that look like tree roots but are probably rock, since I can’t imagine tree roots being at this depth, given how far I fell to get here… it doesn’t seem like climbing would be a fast way out of here, and might take like hours.

When I exit the shrine, it is raining. But not a thunderstorm. The rain lets up after a short time. Near the shrine, there’s a rock formation, what looks like something that fell from the sky realm. I go over to investigate, climb it using Ascend, which works better in the rain than does conventional climbing, and find a fire seed plant at the top, and a rock, under which I find a Korok.

I take the vantage offered from atop this small rock to peer around in the dark using the Pura Pad’s telescope ability. I’m in the middle of a pretty much wide open field, with gently rolling hills and lush meadows surrounding me in all directions for a good distance. Off in the distance, there are numerous points of interest, and I try to pin as many as I can, but the Purah Pad doesn’t allow more than 6 or so pins. I spot several shrines off in the distance, and try to pin each of them. There are several towers, and some buildings, mostly ruined looking places, some interesting looking geological formations, fallen rocks from the sky above, and a Bokoblin camp or two.

Near the Gloom hole I passed by on my way to this shrine I just completed I notice that there is a hot air balloon, and I wonder whether that had been there before, and if so how I could have missed the thing. I walk over to take a look, and there’s another Hylian standing near the edge of the chasm. I talk to him, startling him, and he tells me he’s on the Chasm Investigation Squad, or something. He’s trying to discover what’s up with the chasms and the gloom, and is working with one of the guys who I talked to back at Lookout Landing, who is working with Hoz and Purah.

I decide since I’m here, I might as well jump down the dangerous looking hole and find out what I can. I leap off the edge and fall quite a long way. It is very dark and I can’t really see the ground below, which must certainly be rushing up to me at an unsafe rate. I unfurl my glider, and try to assess where I’m at, but it’s no good, too dark, and I really can’t see how much farther I might have to go.

I don’t want to run out of endurance so I drop again, risking everything, and then re-deploy the glider. I do this two or three more times. I pass through a sparkling mist about midway down, and then I get the idea that maybe I can take one of those glowing seeds and drop it, and it will help me see the bottom. I can’t quite figure out how to do this, though, but as I am continuing to fall I eventually see a light that I’m heading towards — must be the ground — so I pop the glider one more time and land safely.

So this is how I learn that TOTK has a THIRD map level, for the underground. I might have guessed, it wasn’t too much of a secret, really. But man is this game going to be extra super big.

It’s very dim, but the Gloom doesn’t seem to be too abundant right here, and I’m not feeling any ill effects. I wonder how I will return to the surface, or what I will end up finding down here. I look about and see some glowing fireflies, which I stealth sneak up to and capture. They’re a new species, native to the underworld. Then I spot something that looks like a large plant pot, almost reminding me of the fairy ponds from BOTW. It looks like I can walk up to it and do something with it, so I try to do that, and it lights up, illuminating a small part of the area surrounding it, and also fills in a bit of the map on the Purah Pad. So it’s a little like a Tower.

I wonder, can my Ascend power really take me through so much rock to the surface of Hyrule? Is that the way back? Or can I use the Tower transport system, even from way down in these depths? Or will I have to climb out? Or find a route to the surface through caves? How am I going to survive?

Well, alright.

It’s time for me to tackle the tower at Lookout Landing. I walk over, and I find Purah fiddling with the controls of the tower.

She activates the tower, and it lights up. All around the area, other towers also light up, all at once, as if on a network. A beacon of light streams out of the top of the tower, lighting up the sky.

The towers are activated. That wasn’t hard!

Purah tells me that I can update the map data on my Purah Pad if I visit the tower, and it will install the region that it has in its data banks. This will enable me to instantly travel to that tower, but also to have detailed map of the area around the tower.

So basically very much like the tower-map-fast travel system of BOTW, but updated a little bit.

Purah also gives me my glide wing back, and then tells me that they need me to go up the tower to scan the area with my Purah Pad to obtain an updated image of the terrain. So this is, I guess, why I can’t get the entire map of Hyrule all at once; I have to visit each tower, go to the top, and scan the land with the pad. There’s also map data for the sky level of the map, which is also updated. So Hyrule is effectively twice as big as in BOTW because there are two levels.

OK, so I go do that. I stand on a glowing section of floor in the middle of the tower, and it shoots me up, high into the air, all in a few seconds I’m maybe a thousand feet or more above the ground.

I’m on a tether, and the tether is like a data cable or something, the pad sends the data down the cable to the base of the tower, below.

After that, I’m free to fall, dive, or glide back to earth.

I’m very high up, and can see a long way. As I’m coming down, I try to look about and see what I can see.

I don’t try to move anywhere, because I want to test whether the winds will blow me about, or if I will just fall straight down; I fall straight down, right back into the hole at the top of the tower. At the very last instant, I use the glider to slow my descent, landing without taking any damage. Luckily.

I try going up the tower again, and it shoots me back up into the sky. This time, I test how fast I can move horizontally without deploying the glider. It’s not very fast, but I’m up so high that I can still manage to cover some ground. I don’t want to deploy the glider while I’m up too high, lest I run out of stamina meter and fall to my death. But maybe that works differently in TOTK than it did in BOTW for all I know. I’ll have to play around with it and test theories.

Looking around, nearby I spot a small (pond-sized) chasm in the ground not far from Lookout Landing. And not much past that, there’s a shrine. I decide to fall toward it and check it out.

I land in front of the chasm, and try to get close enough to look in. It’s pretty dark. Gloom is spewing forth from the hole in the ground, and I’m careful to avoid stepping in it. Nearby, there’s a small lean-to, with some building supplies near it. I spot a Hylian man, apparently resting in the lean-to. I go up to talk to him, and he tells me to be cautious about the Gloom, and its ruinous effects on your health. If you’re exposed it will drain your life slowly, and if you can get back to the surface, your health will slowly recover.

So, basically it’s kind of another environmental themed timer that prevents you from spending a lot of time in Gloomy areas, and forces you to hurry. So a lot like the cold and hot zones, but eeeeevil.

I continue to the shrine, and enter. The challenge is pretty simple. It involves manipulating large blocks of stone using the Ultrahand ability, and is a test of your ability to rotate and manipulate the shapes. There are two sub-challenges, and the idea is that you need to position the shape so that it will pass through a hole in the wall designed to accept the shape. This is like an IQ test for a 2 year old.

I feel like this is super simple but it’s still not entirely clear what I’m supposed to do with the shape once I get it to pass through the hole. At first I’m thinking I’m supposed to rotate the shape while it’s in the hole, using it as like a key in a lock. But that’s not it. I’m just supposed to take this long shape and pull it through an X-shaped hole, and use it as a bridge, laying it across a trench that I need to cross over to get to the next part of the shrine.

The second challenge is another block, this one is like two cubes that are welded together at the corners, creating an asymmetric shape a bit like a staircase. There’s a section of wall that I can use to position it to climb up, only it’s still not possible to climb up using conventional standard climbing techniques. It doesn’t take very long for me to realize that I can use the Ascend power, standing in the overhang of this block, and pass through the block to get to the top.

This gets me access to a chest with a potion of speed, and then I re-use the same block to get to the spirit orb and pass the challenge.

I have two spirit orbs now. Only they call them something else in this game, somethingsomething of Light or whatever. Same thing.

So that’s done. What next? Will the game tell me? Or should I just meander and screw around and figure things out?

I head up the way to Hyrule Castle like I’m supposed to. Along the way, I find more Hylians, standing around on watch. They’re part of Hoz’s search team, but they seem disorganized and inexperienced, and a bit aimless. They don’t really know what to do, but each of them tells me to continue a bit further onward, to the first gate tower, where I will find Hoz.

One of the guards is blocking a gate deeper into the Castle, and says I’m not allowed in without permission from Hoz. He doesn’t even trust me even though I’m Link.

I eventually do reach Hoz. There’s no combat or challenges to speak of. Hoz is relieved to see that I’m safe and asks me about the Princess. I explain quickly what has transpired, and then we both see Princess Zelda appear on a far tower, some distance away, yet unmistakably her.

She stands there for a brief moment, then turns into light and shoots off into the sky.

Hoz is amazed and we are all baffled. Hoz tells me that I must return to Purah at once to report what we have seen.

Huh? I just came from there. Can’t we just send a messenger? Or doesn’t Purah have another smartphone that we could just call her on??? Oh, OK…

So I head back, talking to the guards on the way, just to see if they have anything new to say.

Lol, and on the way back I realize I could have used the Ultrahand to open the great gate to the castle, instead of climbing over them like I did. Whoops. I forget these powers I have sometimes. But there’s always more than one way to do anything in this game…

On the way back, I talk to the guy who was holding up the sign of Hudson, and this time I figure out that he needs help holding the sign up. So using Ultrahand to grab a nearby piece of material, I use it to prop up the sign so it will not fall if he lets go, and then tell him to try letting go.

This works, he is happy that the sign is standing, and takes a moment to securely fasten it to the ground, and then rewards me with some rupees, and some food, and tells me he’s going to go everywhere and set up more signs. I have a feeling I’m going to end up seeing a lot of him… his name, Addison, seems to be a pun for “Add a Sign”. I think a lot of the names in the game are subtle puns. There was a guy in the search party back at the castle named “Sawtu” or “Saw, too” who also saw Princess Zelda when she appeared briefly.

After finishing with Addison, I return back to Purah’s and without wasting any time, run up and talk to her. She asks to see the Purah Pad, and says that we need to add map data to it, and to do that we need to activate a travel tower, which there happens to be one right here that they are working on completing…

Purah shows me around the town and explains the sleepover spot for resting, and a clothing shop that I can buy better clothes at if I want to, and then says when I’m ready to go up the tower, I can try it.

So I go around the area, which is called Lookout Landing, and I talk to a bunch of people. Everyone’s pretty helpful, in a tutorial kind of way, but also offering me useful information and items here and there that I might find handy later on in my quest.

I learn that the Upheaval is the term they use to describe the event that put the islands in the sky and revealed more of the Zonai technology and artifacts. This caused great rifts in the surface of the world, called chasms, and out of these chasms there is this stuff called Gloom, which is a red glowing smoke, from what I can tell. It reminds me of the Calamity from BOTW, but less oozy and gooey. But exposure to Gloom can make you ill, and there is some kind of yellow plant that can help treat the illness if you get it. There’s also a newspaper operating somewhere in Hyrule, I’m not sure where but it seems a lot of the people here are talking about Hebra, which has gotten even colder than it used to be, which was pretty darn cold as I recall from BOTW.

They are working on constructing a stable where I can board horses, but it’s not finished yet. Oh, and all the weapons in the world have decayed as a result of the Upheaval, I guess as an effect of the Gloom. So wherever I go, weapons are in poor condition, and in short supply.

There’s a royal shelter hidden below Lookout Landing, where there’s a cooking pot, a weapon supply store, and a bed I can rest in, along with a person named Nappin (ha) who can’t get out of bed because he’s so affected by the Gloom from when he went exploring in the Chasms.

I also learn from one of the people in the shelter that Lurelin Village has become dangerous due to pirates in the area.

I think that’s about it. I guess it’s time to return to Purah to do whatever it is we need to do with the Travel Tower so I can get the map activated on the Purah Pad.

As I proceed toward the outer gates of Hyrule Castle, there are two Hylian men looking at what appears to be a fallen chunk of skyland that has landed here beside the road.

I talk to them and they are curious about the upper world and concerned about Zelda’s safety and whereabouts.

I take a moment to climb up on the chunk of rock that fell from the sky; I find a Steward, who is stationed to work on producing Zonaite energy, er, stuff, I’m still not clear how all that Zonaite stuff works together. F me, it’s going to take me forever to remember how all that stuff goes together. Anyway, there’s a machine there that I can put stuff into to make other stuff, if and when I’m ready to. OK.

I climb down and head into the castle ruins. Just inside the outer gateway, there’s a guy holding up a sign post, advertising Hudson Construction. He tells me he’s very proud of the company that Hudson has created. Remember Hudson from the Tarry Town storyline in BOTW? He built that town, and now he’s charged with rebuilding all of Hyrule, and he has left stations of material staged throughout the land. Good for him.

Up in the sky, I notice the moon is a familiar shade of blood red… Oh good grief, has NOTHING I accomplished in BOTW been of lasting impact? We have the Blood Moon resetting the world again and again every so often? Oh FFS. Damn it. I did NOT want to see that. One of the things I really grew to dislike about BOTW was how meaningless everything you do in the game feels, because ultimately everything resets every Blood Moon. Every weapon and item you find is temporary, optional, and ultimately inconsequential. Every enemy you defeat doesn’t matter at all, except for the boss battles, because every Blood Moon everything goes back to how it was. Like Groundhog Day, with Link in place of Bill Murray. I guess it’s helpful to have some mechanic to reset the world so that you can replay parts of it that you enjoy, or unfuck something that you messed up so bad that you can’t proceed unless something resets the world for you. The worst thing of all is when a blood moon happens right as you were about to fucking finish something, clear out some area or whatever, only the shit you just killed two goddamn seconds ago gets resurrected because you picked the wrong fucking time of the month to do that part of the mission, and now you basically have to do it twice, back to back. But god damn it, I was hoping that they would have done something different in TOTK, to make it seem more than just BOTW 1.5.

Up ahead, I see a shrine, right there in the open, so I ride over to it. There’s a woman standing there, and I talk to her and then enter the shrine.

Why are there still shrines all over the place in Hyrule? Didn’t I discover and clear them all out in BOTW? Why are there more now? And why do they look different from the ones in BOTW? Who can say. It’s just a thing we do in this game. We go around, we find shrines, we go into them, we do the thing, we get the power.

All right. This one is a battle training exercise. I get to re-learn the basic mechanics to enable flurry rushes: the side hop dodge, the backflip dodge, the perfect shield parry move. I manage to do this pretty well, without too many mistakes, and defeat the little training bot on my first go.

Hold the Left Z-trigger (to focus on an enemy), then use the Left stick side to side (side hop) or back (backflip) when the enemy is attacking to enter bullet time and enable the flurry rush attack. Or press A to parry. The parry seems to be the hard one to pull off.

Well, OK. I manage to break a couple weapons, which is nice because it opens up some weapons slots.

Hey, I should probably use my powers to combine weapons into compound items, to free up more slots, shouldn’t I? I’ve been approaching the combat from a straightforward, BOTW purist mindset. I need to think about the new possibilities this game has given me with the new powers. How do I fuse items together, again? Oh hell.

I guess I need to re-learn how to do that, or look it up, or something. I need to not forget how to do the basics.

Well, they told me the quickest way was to take a brave dive off of the sky island, so that’s what I did.

Near the ledge where I had saved my game last time, there is a little one-square tile of a rivulet or spring, cascading over the edge. I reason that below must be a body of water, accumulated from this waterfall, so I jump here.

I fall a great distance, for what seems like more than a minute, and as I descend I can see the ground coming up to meet me. In the center, a small pond. If it’s not deep enough, this will have been a short adventure. I try to aim for the center, but not too far away from the edge, so I can make it to the shore without drowning.

I manage to splash down safely, and just barely with enough endurance meter to make it to land.

I step onto the shore, and am in Hyrule. Near the pond, there’s a large wood crate or something, covered by a tarpaulin. I walk over to look at it more closely, there are materials for construction, and a sign saying that they are for Hyrule Restoration, courtesy of Bolson Construction. I remember Bolson from BOTW. There are wooden sections of what would seem to be pre-fabricated walls for buildings, and some wagon wheels. I realize that I could probably assemble these parts with my Ultrahand ability to create a vehicle, but presently there’s no actual need to do that, and I feel more like exploring. As I’m looking at the construction materials, a Bokoblin comes up and attacks me; I whirl around and face him, smacking him with a thick wooden stick, which does not break after I hit him several times. He goes down quickly, and I’m pretty satisfied.

I cross a little bridge and follow the road away from the pond for a bit. Before too long, I come to a stand of trees, and spot a Bokoblin standing among them. I crouch down low to become stealthy, and sneak up, being careful to keep a tree trunk between the Bokoblin and I. I get close enough, and nail the bokoblin in the head with an arrow. I sit back and observe for a bit to see how the Bokoblin reacts. He seems angry and alert, but he can’t seem to find me. Eventually he settles back down, so I hit him again with another arrow, and follow up with several more shots until he drops.

I run up to collect some loot, when suddenly two of the trees uproot themselves and attack me!

I try to fight back, first with an arrow, but although I seemed to have had good aim, the arrow just passes through it. Could I have missed? Or perhaps are arrows not the best weapon? OK, I try running up to hit the tree up with my club. This proves poor strategy, the tree is much taller than I am and has a considerable reach advantage, bending over at near the ground to club me with its entire body. This hits pretty hard, and I lose more than half of my health.

I decide to run away at this point, but the trees give me a good chase and keep up with me for a bit. But eventually I’m far enough down the road that they give up and decide to leave me alone.

I’m further down the road from the direction I’d come from, and up ahead I can see a Bokoblin camp, and in the field a distance away from the main camp there’s a Bokoblin on horseback.

I decide I want the horse, and I try climbing up on a rock to get a good shot with my bow. The range of the bow is far less than I expect, though, and my arrow lands well short, about halfway to where I had been aiming.

I decide to just run up and shoot the Bokoblin off the horse, and this plan works just fine. The Bokoblin is dismounted and disarmed, and I rush up and finish him off with my club. Then I pick up his weapon and approach the horse, who seems to be already tame, and lets me mount him immediately.

I go back to the road and head back in the direction I came from. The map shows a point of interest marked, and apparently that’s where I’m supposed to go.

A few minutes at a moderate gallop, past some more Bokoblin camps that I just ignore, and I’m at the destination. It’s a little settlement just outside of the location of Hyrule Castle, or what would be Hyrule Castle if it wasn’t floating above in the air.

I walk in, and it looks like a shop, or an inn, there are some items for sale, and a little statue that I can pray to. I spot some arrows and go to collect them, when a little old man admonishes me not to touch them. I talk to him, and he recognizes me, and tells me to go at once to talk to Purah, who is waiting for me upstairs.

I do as he says, and the story advances a bit. Purah recalls the events thus far, and tells me that I should proceed to meet up with the search party that went to Hyrule Castle to search for Zelda and me when we disappeared, and to look for their leader, a man named Hoz.

So I guess that’s the next thing to do.

There seems to be quite a bit more around here for me to explore and do, but I’m feeling strangely impatient. In BOTW, I was exploring every little thing that looked interesting, that looked like it might be a thing; here I’m eager to press on and advance the main quest and storyline. I wonder why that is; do I expect the game to have so little new to offer me in the way of world and ambiance? Or am I simply familiar enough with the basics from playing BOTW that I am more ready to simply get on with it now?

In the Temple of Time, there’s a large clockwork mechanism, still turning, by what power still flows somehow.

I use my newest power, Recall, to reverse the spin of the gears, which gives me a platform that I can use to climb upwards to a higher level.

Here, there is a massive door, in front of which stands a simple-looking, worn statue. I pray at the statue, but nothing much happens, so then I try to open the door. Pushing on the door uses up my life meter, and when I’m run down to nearly empty, Rauru appears to tell me that I’m not yet strong enough to open the door.

Then he tells me of the existence of a fourth Shrine, and teaches me that the Purah Pad can be used to teleport about the map, just like the old Sheikah Slate from BOTW could. Rauru shows me a spot on the map to look for the shrine, and advises that I should teleport nearby. The nearest location is the Cave of Awakening, where the game began. So I teleport there.

Looking about the cave, I don’t see the shrine within line of sight; I consult the map, and I’m a bit of a distance away from it, and it looks like if I run forward in the cave, like I did at the start of the game, I will be heading in the right direction.

Unfortunately, this path leads downward, as there are several leaps into pools of water, which take me down, and as I exit the cave I realize that I must be somewhere below where the shrine is located. I don’t think to see if my Ascend power will help me here, because it doesn’t occur t me. Instead, I teleport back to the Cave of Awakening once again, and look around to see what I must have missed.

There’s another clockwork mechanism turning here, and it’s another platform puzzle that I can get through by using Recall.

It takes me to a previously unreachable and overlooked hole in the wall, through which there’s a cave tunnel, which leads me for a bit, until I find the fourth shrine that I’ve been looking for. Nearby, there’s another Zonai device, being tended to by a Steward. I talk to the Steward, who tells me that with the right type of materials, I can add capacity to my Zonai charger. But it takes a bunch of Zonaite, or something, and I don’t have nearly enough just yet.

So I enter the fourth shrine, and it’s a series of time Recall puzzles, where I can use the power on a raft to take me upriver, against the flow of a strong current that is flowing out of the shrine.

This is pretty easy, but because of the strong current and my clumsy control, I manage to die a few times by falling into the water and being unable to extricate myself.

After several attempts, I manage to get through it, and then I’m in a chamber with a gate at one end, and a treasure chest at the other. The treasure chest is easy to reach, using Recall to spin a gear backward, turning it into a walking platform. I open the chest and receive a bundle of 10 arrows for my trouble.

The gate proves more difficult. Above the gate, there are two moving arms that look like hands on a clock, moving in opposite directions. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with this, but after observing for several minutes I note that the gate temporarily lowers whenever the hands are aligned. But they are not aligned long enough for the gate to open entirely, so I can’t pass through.

I try using Recall to make one of the hands reverse direction, trying to get the hands to keep overlapping for a long enough time or the gate to open fully so I can pass through, but I’m clumsy and just can’t seem to hit it at the right time, and it doesn’t seem to help.

Eventually I try using my Ultrahand power to simply grab one of the clock hands, and hold it, and try to move it manually to line up with the other hand. This seems to work better, and I can get the gate to go all the way down, but it’s very difficult to move while I’m controlling the clock hands, and the camera seems to want to fixate on the clock hand that I’m controlling with the Ultrahand power, rather than allow me to free-look in the direction that I want to go — through the open gate.

Still, awkward as it is, I manage to open the gate long enough that I’m able to step through, solving the final obstacle of the fourth shrine, and I’m rewarded by yet another spirit orb, or whatever they are calling them in this game.

I teleport back to near the Temple of Time, run up to the Goddess Statue, pray, exchange my four spirit orbs for a Heart Container, which gives me enough life meter to open the massive door.

There’s another cutscene at this point, and Rauru tells me that I must find Zelda, who is somewhere below in the Kingdom of Hyrule, or something.

Did I mention? There’s a big white dragon flying about in the background. There has been for most of this. I catch a glimpse of it now and then. I’m not clear what it’s there for, but it must have some purpose, some connection in all this. Just thought I’d mention it. It seems worth mentioning.

I guess I’ve graduated from the tutorial opening, and am now free to explore the vast world. I’m invited to take a high dive off the floating skyland.

Well, wish me luck.

Immediately after the ruined stone shack with the cooking pot, I spot another nearby place of interest, and head there. It’s a little hollow cave in which there’s a pile of wood for a fire, and a treasure chest. In the treasure chest, I find cold weather pants that give me enough cold resistance that I won’t take damage when the food I ate wears off, in about 2 minutes. Super convenient.

I put the pants on and walk out, where I see Rauru again, and talk to him. He talks about the Zonai technology and how it was so useful, and that if I learn to master its use I will have an easier time in the world.

I see something that looks like a giant crystal ball above us on the top of the mountain we’re standing on, and using the Ascend ability, I travel up through an overhang and get to the top. There’s another steward bot, who I talk to, and it tells me that the crystal ball thing is a Zonai dispenser, which I can use to exchange zonai parts for finished zonai technology.

It’s like a giant gumball machine. You put in pieces of Zonai tech that you’ve found, and it spits out those handy little Zonai pods that you can keep in your pocket until you need them.

I’ve found a lot of the stuff all over the place, so I put in five and it spits out a bunch of bubbles at me and I stock up on wings, fans, cooking pots, and flame generators.

The steward mentioned using a Zonai wing to descend from the top of this mountain, so I think I’m supposed to use one of those pods right now to create one. Only I don’t know how to properly use it, and can’t get it to launch. I try dragging it to the edge of the cliff and it just drops like a stone, and I lose it.

Then I die a few times trying to figure out how to ride the thing as it’s falling, but that’s not what you do. While I’m doing that, I notice that there’s already a Zonai wing sitting on the ground, so I don’t need to use a pod. But I still can’t figure out how to make it work. I try gluing a fan to it, and it blows but not hard enough to take off. There’s too much friction on the ground and it doesn’t move.

I try everything I can think of, and then I see that down below, on the level where I was talking to Rauru, there’s three more of those wings, and they are on what appear to be more of those railroad tracks. I guess maybe these are launching ramps, and there’s less friction on those rails, so I could probably get that to work. I go down and attach a fan, get on, and activate it, and still nothing.

Then I notice that there’s an icicle that has grown, which is maybe blocking the wing from moving, so I hit it with my weapon and sure enough that does it, the fan blows the wing forward, it picks up speed and when I reach the end of the ramp, instead of a nosedive, I’m gliding.

I can somewhat control my direction and attack angle by positioning my weight on the wing, so I am kind of sky surfing. It’s amazing, and it should be awe inspiring and fun, but I’m still so annoyed at how hard it was to figure out how to launch that I’m not in the mood to enjoy it properly. But this feels like it should be one of the great moments of the game, the thrill of discovery, the thrill of flight, the thrill of seeing the whole world from above.

Far below, I see the Temple of Time. I’m still very high in the air, probably a few hundred feet up. And I’m not descending fast enough that I’m going to land this wing where I want to be, not if my goal is to get to the Temple and find Zelda.

Down below I’m over water, and I decide to dive off and hope that I survive. This works out just great. I splash down and swim over to the shore, right by the steps up to the Temple of Time.

I climb up and run to the Temple’s door, which opens.

I’m greeted by a cinematic cutscene, where I open the odor to find a big golden glowing… comma? It looks like a comma, the punctuation mark. We had seen something like this in the opening cutscene with the Demon King, there was a similar looking shape attached to the glowing arm that was apparently the power keeping the Demon King at bay, until we disturbed it.

Anyway, this comma kind of bursts, or hatches, and there’s Zelda. She touches my hand, my new bionic one, and it begins to glow that same golden color. I gain a new power, the power of Recall, which is the ability to move an object backward through time, through its motion path to where it came from. I guess the Zelda dev team liked Braid.

This is going to be useful, in so many ways, I’m sure.

Zelda disappears, and Rauru appears, and says even he doesn’t understand what just happened, but explains to me about the power of Recall.

There’s a mechanical clockwork mechanism moving in the background, my guess is that’s what I’m going to need to test my new power on.

I ponder, but it’s late and I need to sleep. Tomorrow, then.