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Chief Riju wants me to rendezvous at the Gerudo southern watchpost, and formulate an attack plan to stop Vah Naboris.

I get a sand seal and head out there, and meet Riju, and she explains what we have to do.  She will wear her Thunderhelm, which will repel Naboris’s lightning, and when we get close enough to it, I am supposed to hit it in the feet with bomb arrows.  This will knock out their electrical generation and once its defenses are down, we’ll be able to get inside and calm the beast.

We take off without delay. It’s tricky to stay close enough to Riju to be protected, and then once we get close to Naboris, it’s tricky to connect with an arrow shot.  I hit the rear feet and get them disabled, but then I can’t hit the front feet.  I waste all my arrows and we have to retreat and try again.

On our second run, I switch to a different bow, with a weaker attack rating but with better range.  It zooms in when I aim with it, and this makes a great deal of difference, as I’m able to use a point-blank aim to hit the feet of Naboris rather than a ballistic arc, and it’s way easier to connect.

I take out all four feet, and Naboris stops moving long enough for me to climb up and get inside.

Once inside, the challenge is to figure out what to do, and then do it. The disembodied voice of Gerudo champion Urbosa greets me and gives me instructions and encouragement.  There are several switches that I need to reach and activate in order to restart Naboris’s main controls, which will enable us to regain control over it.

Complicating matters, the interior of the beast is mechanial, and I need to re-configure its internals in order to gain access to various parts of the inside.  It takes a lot of trial and error to figure it out, but eventually I am able to work out how to get to every part of the beast and activate its switches. It’s like a bigger, more difficult shrine puzzle with multiple stages and elements.  It’s enjoyable to figure out and solve, and what I wish all the shrine challenges could be like, at least after the initial few that are intended for training.

After I flip all the switches and return to the main control console, I encounter a boss called Thunderblight Ganon. It is a tough boss fight. Thunderblight Ganon teleports around, similar to a Wizzorobe or Yiga clan ninja, and shoots balls of lightning at me.  The lightning is not terribly difficult to dodge, and wearing my rubber helmet and pants protects me pretty well against it.  But it also runs in quick and hits me with a powerful sword attack that drops my health by about 2/3, and is all but impossible to dodge.  It also is very fast and nimble, and gets out of the way of my attacks very quickly.

I don’t even hit it one time on the first attempt.  On the second or third attempt, I do manage to hit it, and once you start doing damage to it, it’s a lot easier to hit.  It reels and gets knocked back, and I can get in multiple strikes.

After knocking its health down to about half, it changes its routine up, and takes to the air, hovering well out of reach of my melee weapons. I try arrows on it, but they don’t do damage, so again I’m supposed to do something specific to damage it.  Urbosa continues giving me advice and encouragement during the fight, and suggests that I should try to find a way to use its lightning attack against it.

In its new attack mode, it launches metal spikes to aid its targeting with lightning attacks.  I eventually realize that the metal is magnetic, and am able to grab the spikes with Magnesis, then fling them around, and if I get them close enough to Thunderblight Ganon, they discharge electricity, which knocks it out of the air, and leaves it prone and stunned for a few seconds.  

This is all I need to run up and deal a lot of damage.  On my final strike, the sword I’m using breaks, but Thunderblight Ganon is defeated.

I stop activate the main controls and we regain control over Vah Naboris.  It start shooting a laser beam at Hyurle Castle.  Urbosa grants me a new attack power, a lightning boost added to my charge attack.

Back at Gerudo town, a grateful Riju gifts me a powerful scimitar and shield that had once belonged to Champion Urbosa.

There’s a few more things left for me to do in the vicinity of Gerudo town:  

• Sand seal racing.
• The medicinal Molduga sidequest.
• Somewhere in the desert there’s a leviathan skull that I’m supposed to photograph for the scientists at Serenne Stables.
• At least one shrine which I detected near Naboris when we were heading twoards it on the sand seals.
• Probably at least a few more korok seeds.
• The sand shoes sidequest.
• The secret night club.

Back at Rito village, I decide to take a quick trip to Gerudo Tower, and see if I can figure out the solution to Kass’s puzzle. The last time I was there, I couldn’t figure it out. Something about waiting at the Tower until the sun was in the Northwest, casting a shadow to reveal the location of a hidden Shrine, and shooting an arrow into the light to reveal it.

I return and this time I solve it easily.  Kass himself is looking out in the direction where the tower is casting its shadow in the early part of the afternoon, and down below on a standstone rock ledge beneath us, I see a circular dais exactly like the one at Washa’s Bluff.  I glide down to it, and stand on it.  It’s about 2:30 in the afternoon, and the shadow of Gerudo Tower is swiftly extending toward this exact position.  I look back up to it, and the sun is directly behind the top of the tower.  I aim at it, and fire and arrow.  The ground rumbles, and the shrine pops up next to me.

I enter the shrine, and this one is another Modest Test of Strength combat trial.  I easily take care of this shrine Guardian, breaking a Dragonbone Moblin Club, and collect its weapons, although this time its spear is not worth the space it takes up my inventory. 

Recalling another rumored shrine location, I travel back to the oasis in Gerudo Desert, where I had last spoken with a man who was keeping an eye on a sandstorm off in the distance.  He said that when the sandstorm clears up, a way to a secret treasure would be revealed, but the storm hasn’t let up.

I stand by his watch post for a while, but this soon grows tedious and I decide to just chance going out into the desert with the sandstorm going.  I basically head straight out in the direction he’s watching, and before very long I lose my Sheikah slate map, and visibility is cut down to almost nothing.  But I can see just far enough ahead of me.  Up ahead, a natural rock column comes out of the ground.  Not far past it, there’s a small rise, and then I come upon a skull cave populated by lizals — and there are a lot of them.  

I back off, not wanting to get into a fight with them right now, and head back to the stone column, and use it to glide past.  I come to a tall rock formation, and climb it, and find what I am seeking — a shrine.  When I activate it, the desert sandstorm side quest is solved.  

I enter the shrine, and make my way through.  It’s an electrical puzzle, I just need to activate circuits to make platforms move that will take me to the end.  There are a couple of weak guardians who I am able to take out with a single arrow hit.  I accidentally shock myself with the battery object.  I get the sense that there must be more to this shrine than I realize, because it all seems a little too easy.  Perhaps there are more secrets that are optional that I skipped over.  But in any case, I reach the monk’s chamber and claim my spirit orb.

Next, I head back to Gerudo town, to re-interrogate the women of the guard to get my notes straight on the stolen Thunderhelm. The thieves are from the Yiga Clan, and I’ve actually been right where they were, when I went up to investigate a way to reach the top of Gerudo Tower.  Only, I couldn’t figure out how to enter.  They had a giant stone door, and I couldn’t get it to open.  I wonder if I return there now if I’ll be able to see something that wasn’t apparent on my first trip. With my weapons and expanded heart bar, I don’t think there’s much to fear from these Yiga now.  I already defeated several of them.

I try warping into the Gerudo Highlands to get as close to the top of the valley as I possibly can, but end up getting lost and wandering a bit.  After wasting some time fighting monsters for no good reason other than that they’re along the way, I decide to try the route I originally came when I went up through the valley, and transport to the shrine at the north end of the Gerudo desert, where the sword lady statues pointed the way, and hike up from the bottom.

As I come up, this time I encounter Yiga ninjas sooner than I did on my first trip.  I’m going along the valley floor this time, not trying to go as high as possible as quickly as possible.  Because of this, I encounter enemies I skipped the first time, but I also discover a new shrine.  This one I have to uncover by placing a Luminous Stone on a dais.  This triggers the shrine to come out of the ground.  I notice that these shrines are harder to find because they do not seem to trigger my Sheikah sensor at all, so I can’t just blunder about and hope that my alarm will start pinging and alert me to their presence.  This makes me wonder how many I might have missed along the way in other parts of the world, particularly in the regions where I didn’t find very many shrines.

I enter the shrine, and it’s a bomb-switch puzzle.  I’ve got plenty of experience with bombs, so I know exactly what I need to do. It’s not too difficult, a little bit of timing, but it’s actually quite simple.  I find 100 Rupees in a chest, and claim a spirit orb.

Onward I go.

Somehow, this trip takes much less time than it did the first time I made it.  I hardly walk a few hundred yards when already I’m at the chamber where I encounter the three Yiga archers and have to take them on all together.  I make quick work of them using the electric spear and ice spear.  It’s not hard to dodge their arrow fire if you’re moving, and so you don’t need a shield, and the reach and speed of the spears gives you the greatest advantage. These spears, although only middle-powered, do more than enough damage to these opponents to take them down in 2-3 hits, which can be landed quite quickly if you’re able to close to within striking distance before they teleport.

This time, after I’ve defeated them, that doorway that was blocked with stone is open.  I wonder if this is something that I triggered by advancing other points in the story line?  Or if it’s simply due to the time of day, or what it could be.

Cautiously, I advance down a tall corridor and ahead of me I see a large round chamber, with tapestries  hanging down, covering entrances that radiate from the room like spokes on a wheel hub. I have a foreboding sense of ambush, and being locked in the room with an enemy who will probably wish that they hadn’t messed with me while I have such good armaments. I only hope that I’m not underestimating them. 

I enter the chamber, and it’s too quiet. Surely the Yiga must know I am here if I just fought several of their warriors outside. I expect at any second, warriors will come streaming at me from all sides.  But nothing comes. I quietly approach the room, very cautious, and still, nothing.

There are numerous torches in the room, and it’s obvious I’m meant to light one and use it to set fire to the tapestries to reveal what’s behind them.  I go to each one in turn, one at a time.  Most of them are dead ends, with a couple of keese behind them, and I take care of them easily.  A few have items behind them, but they’re of no consequence.

The last one I torch reveals a stairway up. I enter, and quietly ascend, ready for anything.

I enter the Yiga clan’s stronghold. Immediately, I see in front of me a prison cell, with a Gerudo woman held captive. There’s been mention of one of their warriors missing, and this must be her.  I try to figure out how to release her, but when I talk to her she says it’s too dangerous and I shouldn’t try to fight them all by myself.  She suggests distracting them somehow, but doesn’t have any ideas.

I do.  Off to the left, I see a guard patrolling. He looks bigger than the other Yiga I’ve fought so far, and more imposing.  I get the sense that he’s stronger and will not go down easily. This life bar pops up over his head, and he’s got 600 hit points. Yep, that’s a tough guy.

He doesn’t see me, I guess the masks they wear don’t afford good vision. It’s dim, and he’s carrying a torch, but the light doesn’t reach up to the walkway I’m standing on.  

I sneak down and he turns a corner, his back to me, and marches slowly away.  I take the initiative, and hit him with the Stasis power from my Sheikah slate, to time-stop him, and while he’s frozen I hit him as much as I can with my strongest and fastest weapon.  He comes out of stasis and all the hits take effect on him at once, 7 or 8 blows from a strong sword.  It staggers him greatly, but he’s still up. I quick-switch to my ice spear, and hit him with it, and he’s frozen again.  I switch back to my hardest hitting two-handed weapon, and hit him one last time. This does him in, and he drops without so much as getting an attack in, or sounding an alarm.

He drops a weapon, a two-handed katana-like sword that has an attack rating of 40. If I get hit with that thing even once, it’s going to be tough to survive it.  I need to have excellent defense and timing if I’m going to take another guard like that out.

Past this guard, there’s another one, standing in front of a doorway. I try the same tactic on him, but this time he gets off a whistle, which summons two more Yiga bowmen, who appear out of nowhere and begin teleporting around the room, attacking me.  I switch to ice spear and take them down, but the warrior gets an attack in on me, and one-shots me, and I die.

I respawn, and attempt this same assault numerous times. Most of the time, I nearly kill the first guard only to have him sound the alarm.  When the first guard alerts, the second one by the door comes to his aid, in addition to the two bowmen, and it’s really tough to defeat them all. I manage to do it sometimes.  And sometimes I manage to take down both guards without them sounding the alarm.This is tough, but best.  I find that if I take the first guard out quickly enough, I can nail the second with an ice arrow head shot, and then run up, use Statis again, and finish him off with the sword.  If I sprint up quickly and pull off my attack flurry with perfect timing, I can manage to get in 8-10 hits before he can manage to do anything, and kill him.

Through the door, there’s a hallway leading to another room, to the right, and further ahead, a ladder going up.  

I switch my armor for my stealth suit, figuring this is exactly what it was meant for, and go up the ladder.  The ladder leads to a catwalk running along the top of the room, near the ceiling.  Ducking, I walk quietly along the room, and look down, and see three, maybe four Yiga guards patrolling around boxes and pallets of supplies of some sort. 

I don’t think I can fight them all. They’re too near each other and even if I can take one down quickly, the others are sure to notice and sound the alarm. I think I can probably take on one of those guards one-on-one, but 2- or 3-on one, it won’t be pretty, especially since they have the same teleport ability as the bowmen do, as I’ve found out through many trials attempting to get this far.

At the far end of the catwalk, there’s a small storage room, where there’s a huge amount of bananas, and a chest with a gem in it.  I consider that these might be a trap, but as an experiment I try taking them, and nothing happens.  From the storage room, I can see down into the main room through windows.  There are four guards, one patrolling each corner of the room.  At the far end of the room, there’s a guard standing in the middle of a doorway, blocking the exit to a hallway.

What I need to do is drop down from the catwalk, without getting noticed, and sneak past the guards.  I see another ladder leading to a second catwalk that goes along the wall adjacent to the one I’m on, and it leads directly overhead the guard blocking the doorway.

If I can get to him without being noticed, maybe I can time-stop him and just run past him.  If I try to kill him, it’ll make too much noise and take too much time, and I’m sure to be noticed.  But if I don’t do anything but time stop him, maybe he won’t realize anything has happened to him after the stasis effect wears off, and I can just sneak past him.

This is exactly what I do, and it only takes me about 4 hours of trying to pull it off.  I nearly succeed in my very first attempt, and slip past him, run down the hallway, and into a back room, another storage room.  Looking around, there’s a few chests and some that are partially buried in the floor and need to be pulled up with Magnesis.  Each time I do this, it makes noise and draws the guard’s attention, but I am able to duck down and hide and he checks the room, finds nothing and goes back.  But after the third time, I accidentally hit Down on the D-pad, which is the control Link uses to whistle for his horse.  This attracts the guard’s attention a bit more, and he comes further into the room than he has on other searches, and this time he finds me.  I almost take him, but he gets his alarm off just before I finish him off, and the rest of the guards come, bowmen come, and I actually did pretty good, managing to kill three or four of them, but eventually the big guys with the powerful swords hit me one time and I go down.

I try again, but much to my annoyance once I get past him, I get hung up on a wall and start climbing it, and when he wakes back up from stasis, I’m clinging to the fucking wall like Spider-Man, he whistles the alarm, and I’m quickly dogpiled. 

A bunch of other times, I don’t even make it that far, and screw up on other parts.  There’s no saving allowed, so I can’t do it step by step and save and restore from my last point of progress.  If I could I would be done with it in under an hour. As it is, it takes four hours.  I get pretty frustrated.  But it forces me to play very carefully and work on my skill.

Finally, I make it. I’m so frustrated that this time I don’t bother looting the whole room.  I don’t want to take any unnecessary chances or waste time; I’m here for one thing, and that’s the Thunderhelm.

In using Magnesis, I can see that one wall is magnetically sensitive, so I pull on it, and it’s a secret door that revolves open, and I go in without any further hesitation.

The game switches to a cutscene, and I enter a large, arena-like room, with a pit in the middle that looks bottomless. I’m alone at first, but then a voice shouts “Hey!” at me, and I am found. It’s the boss of the Yiga clan.  

He monologues a bit, and then we fight.  I have felt like Hinox fights and Lynel fights feel like boss fights, but this one feels more like a boss fight than those. This guy isn’t nearly as tough, though, and he’s not hard to take out. This fight is also somewhat comical, he has a clownish appearance and is something of a buffoon.  I use the same basic approach as I have with the rest of the Yiga, favoring quick striking weapons with decent range, switching to bow if he’s at a distance, and favoring elemental effects that disrupt or freeze him, such as electrical or freeze.

After I knock him about halfway down, he teleports to hover over the middle of the bottomless pit, where I can’t reach him anymore with melee weapons.  He creates a force shield, and then summons two large round bomb-looking things, which he lobs at me.  They’re not hard to dodge, and his windup is so slow that I can just nail him with an arrow before he fires them at me, and he drops them.

I hit him with arrows for like 10 minutes, before I notice that his life bar isn’t going down when I do this.  This annoys me to no end, because I end up wasting about 500 rupees worth of bomb arrows for nothing.  I hate it when boss fights have a specific thing that you have to do and that’s the only thing that will work, because that’s what the designers intend for the fight.  This is one such boss fight.  

What you are supposed to do is, wait for the bombs he generates to start circling around him, and when one is directly over his head, then hit him with an arrow, disrupting his concentration, and the bomb falls, hits him in the head, and does damage.  It’s not like an arrow, even a bomb arrow could do damage, it has to be one of his own bombs.  Because game designer logic.  This doesn’t fit well at all with so much of the rest of the challenges in the game, where anything goes and there’s almost always several approaches that can work, some more obvious, some more difficult, but all viable.  

By the time I figure out what I’m supposed to do, I’ve used up 100% of my bomb arrows, and most of my ice and electric arrows as well.  I really should reset and just do the whole fucking thing over again, but I’m so annoyed with all the attempts where I didn’t pull something off perfectly, and had it screw up my run, that I just want to get it the fuck over with.  

I do it.  I drop the bomb on his head, and he takes two of these and then he’s done.  He summons one more great big bomb, but it comically rolls the wrong way and hits him, knocking him into the pit, and he is defeated.  I think, maybe we haven’t seen the last of him, but I hope so.  Fucker.

A chest appears, and it has the Thunderhelm.  I grab it, and I’m so ready for this to be done right now, I don’t want to figure out a way out of here, I just teleport back to Gerudo town, and switch into my girl clothes, and run straight to the Chief of Gerudo to give her the helmet.

This triggers another of Link’s lost memories, and we see a story sequence, where the champion of the Gerudo, the mother of the current chief, is talking to Link about Zelda, and it serves to narrate some tension that exists between the two.  Zelda is frustrated at her lack of progress in developing her powers to bind the evil power, which is supposed to be her destiny, and she’s annoyed with Link because every time he has to come to her aid and protect her, it reminds her of her failure.  She’s sleeping, exhausted, while Urbana, the Gerudo champion, explains this all to Link.  Then she uses the Thunderhelm to summon a huge thunderbolt, which startles Zelda awake.

Back in the present day, Gerudo Chief Riju says she wants to go deal with the Divine Beast Vah Naboris right away, and asks Link for his help.  Of course that’s what I’m going to do.

Next session.

After clearing that least shrine, it’s Blood Moon Eve. I can tell, because the night before a Blood Moon, there’s a hint of the music that plays, just a note, but if you’re paying attention, you can usually hear it.

That’s my cue to head back toward Washa’s Bluff and strip.  I’m not 100% sure if it’ll be tonight or tomorrow, so I need to hurry to get there.  I transport to the nearest shrine, on Satori mountain, and check the time — it’s 11:20 pm.  I glide over as fast as I can get there, and midnight passes before I land, but there’s no resurrection tonight, so it must be tomorrow night. 

I climb up onto the big mushroom where Kass is playing his tune again, and talk to him one more time so he can run me through the song to make sure I have it right.  I listen, save my game in case I mess up and do something wrong, and then build a fire with firewood and flint, and sit by it until the next night, purely in order to make the time arrive as quickly as possible.

The time comes, and it is raining.  I glide down to where the song says I should stand, and un-equip all my clothing. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to sit here all night, or if it only happens exactly at midnight, or what I should expect, but I don’t end up having to wait long, because almost immediately something happens, my gamepad starts rumbling, and the shrine emerges from the ground nearby, right in front of me.

I walk up and activate it, and go inside. It’s a combat trial, a Modest Test of Strength, and I am able to defeat this shrine Guardian no problem. I collect some weapons and my spirit orb, and when I emerge from the shrine, Kass is nowhere to be found. His accordion music is not playing, and he’s disappeared. 

I climb the big mushroom to see if he’s there, but he’s really gone. He left his diary behind, so I read it just in case there’s a new final entry, but nope, there’s nothing.

I decide to transport to Rito Stables to see if I can find him there.  He’s there.  Last time I talked to him, he almost started telling me about his past, something about the songs his song master taught him, but he stopped himself. I’m hoping he’ll tell me now.  But, no, he just says the same thing as he did before.  OK.

Well, I decide I’ll try investigating up the mountain near Rito village, and see if anything new is going on up there. The first thing I do is transport to the shrine near the Flight Range, and I’m hoping that the Rito who I am supposed to meet will be there this time, but he’s still not there. I must need to do something in order to trigger his arrival at the range, but I have no idea what.  If I go back and talk to the people from the village, maybe they’ll tell me, but for now I just continue on exploring.  

I figure maybe I’ll figure out what I’m supposed to do at Warbler’s Nest, and head down there, but I end up getting sidetracked and never quite get there. Instead I end up exploring around the northwest side of the mountain.  I come across a bokoblin skull cave, inhabited by 7 or 8 of them, and take them out, and then a little further north it starts going downhill and I come to a lake, where there’s a dock and a raft, with a korok leaf sitting on it, inviting me to take it out for a trip on the water.  I kill an octorock by the dock, and then head out. I have to drop one weapon, and everything I have is real good stuff, so I just lay it on the raft, pick up the korok leaf, and when I get to where I’m going I drop the leaf and pick up the weapon I put down.

First, I get to a little island with a pile of bombable rocks on it, and thinking it’s a korok seed spot, I bomb it. Instead of a korok seed, a windy updraft appears where the rocks I bombed were, and I ride it up with my glider.  I land on the side of the mountain and start climbing a bit, then notice a flower that is the telltale signature of a korok seed puzzle.  I find the seed, then glide back down to the island and continue rafting across the lake.

At the far end of the lake, I see an orange light, which could be a fire, or could be a shrine.  It looks too small to be a shrine, but as I get closer my shrine sensor starts pinging, and as I reach the other shore and explore, sure enough I see that there is a shrine just on the other side of a narrow crack in the rock.  I try squeezing through, but can’t fit.  I can’t bomb it bigger, either. I try everything I can think of, but nothing works. I wish I could magically shrink myself, maybe that would do it.  But there’s no ability like that that I know of that does this.

I think maybe if I go around to the other side of this hill I’ll find another way in, so I wander about and explore. I don’t find the entrance, but I do find a hot spring that heals me if I stand in it, so I replenish my hearts, and continue looking.  There’s another skull house with monsters living in it on the top of the hill, but I try to avoid messing with them, I’m more interested in figuring out this shrine. It’s night, and they’re asleep.  But I run into a well-armed moblin skeleton, who hits me real good with a dragonbone club, taking me down to half my hearts before I know what’s going on.  I kill it easily, and get a new fresh club.  But now that I’m badly injured, I decide to go back to the spring and heal back up again.

While I’m down there, I get disoriented, and so I head back over to the crack so I can make sure I know where the shrine is supposed to be so I don’t waste time looking for the entrance in an obviously wrong place.

I notice another pile of bombable rocks, and blow it up, creating another updraft.  I glide up it, and when I land I am on a ledge.  I can see down from the ledge into a dark hole, where there’s an orange glow from a torch or fire, and I check it out, and end up finding the way to the entrance for this shrine.

This one is pretty cool.  There’s a lot of dangerous looking spiky traps, but most are easily avoided.  I have to blow up some boxes to clear a path through a blocked corridor, then there’s a slowly spinning log bridge that I have to stay balanced on top of while avoiding stepping on spiky parts, and also avoid falling into lava below.  There’s a clear path if you are patient and let it rotate for you, and I cross without difficulty.  I blow up another barrier wall, and on the other side there’s four minor shrine Guardians, of the weakest variety, who I am able to take out easily with arrows.  They hit me a few times with their blasts, but only do a heart of damage.  The next part is a simple ice puzzle, I have to create ice platforms in the shallow water of the room in order to have something I can climb up to get at a chest and a switch that opens the door to the next room.

Finally, there’s a rolling spiked ball that I have to dodge, after which I find magnetic chest on the other side of another lava river, that I grab with magnetism, and a final test in the form of a final rolling spiked ball.  This one regenerates after the first one rolls down, and I discover after running into it on its second pass. So I figure out time freezing it will allow me to get by it easily.  I clear the shrine and get another spirit orb.

I check, and this is my 7th orb, so if I can find and clear one more shrine, I should be able to pray at a village statue and get another 2 heart containers, which will be a big help.

I remember that my shrine sensor went off by the shield surfing pro’s cabin, so I transport to the one shrine that I did find there, and then hike over to the cabin, walk in, and sit by the fire until morning.  Then I head out and look for the shrine.  I find it this time, after a bit of searching, behind some ice formations that I have to melt in order to get access to the shrine.

This shrine is another combat trial, and it’s a Major Test of Strength.  I’m very well equipped though, and am able to defeat this test, although it takes me two tries, and I have to eat a meal after taking a hard hit from its axe.  Once I have it down to its final tenth or so of its life bar, it starts shooting high powered energy blasts at me non-stop, and I learn to dodge them.  It doesn’t let up, though, and I can’t get close to it, so I equip bomb arrows, and finish it off with those.  It takes 4 or 5 bomb arrows to do it, which is annoying, because bomb arrows are pretty darn expensive, and they don’t seem to do as much damage as I think they should.  Maybe I should try hitting it with an ice arrow or Time Stop and run up and hit it with a heavy weapon next time.

I broke a few weapons in this fight, but the Guardian has a sword, spear, and axe, which are all very powerful, and then the shrine rewards me with a chest containing a very powerful two handed sword, which has a damage rating of 56, which I think is the most powerful weapon in raw attack power that I’ve seen yet.  Maybe I saw a 60, it’s hard to remember.  I get my spirit orb and clear the shrine.

I return to the cabin, and try the shield surfing challenge.  I’m not very good at it, and at first I don’t even know how to do it, but I figure it out, and after 3 runs I get a mediocre time of just under  a minute, which the instructor says is marginal but good enough for me to try a new course if I want to.  I decline, for now, as I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing and can’t improve much unless I waste a lot more rupees, which I don’t want to do right now.

During one of my downhill runs, my shrine sensor started beeping, so there’s at least one more nearby shrine that I can find in this area.

But for now, this is enough, and it’s time to return back to the village to cash in my spirit orbs for those heart containers.

Outside the shrine in the Forgotten Temple, I mull over my options for extraction.  Simplest, easiest, and perhaps best would be to transport out using the Sheikah Slate. But I would like to explore this area more, and see if there’s anything else to find.

I carefully explore the room where the shrine is located, and the only way in or out that I can find is the way I came in. I don’t find anything else in the shrine room, no weapons, chests, or anything else.  So I cautiously emerge from the shrine room, and destroy the first Guardian at the doorway, breaking a Dragonbone Moblin Club in the process, and gather a bunch of ancient technology parts.  Nearby I find a chest with 5 fire arrows in it. 

I’m still a long way to the main exit of the Forgotten Temple, and there’s at least a half dozen Guardians between me and freedom. I figure I may be able to advance to a point where I can fight one at a time, from a point where I’m behind cover from the rest of the Guardians nearby, and take them out one at a time. This will be a slow process, and the biggest disadvantage of this approach is that I’ll wear out probably 1-2 weapons per Guardian, and since these Guardians don’t drop any melee weapons for me to pick up to replenish what I break, I’ll probably run out of weapons by the time I get to the end, or if not I’ll be nearly depleted of arms, and vulnerable. All the ancient technology drops I’ll pick up from destroying these Guardians won’t be worth the price in weapons.

The only thing to do, then, is to make another run for it back through the gauntlet, and dodge their fire. I visually assess the route through the room that I want to take, and go for it.  

The key to dodging Guardian blasts is to run from point of cover to point of cover, if you can, and then when under cover, wait for a while until the Guardian stands down and resets.  If you can’t do that, you can dodge their blasts by listening for the audio cue that tells you when their charging countdown is up, and then change speed or direction.  The surest method is to jump right as the blast goes off, and or to touch the sprint button for a quick burst of speed for maybe a half a second.  The Guardians also seem to have a hard time tracking you if you are gliding at full speed, so they’re unlikely to hit you if you’re gliding when they fire, unless they get lucky, or unless you’re too close or if you’re moving directly away from them, so that they don’t have to traverse to hit you.

By doing short bursts of sprinting, you can avoid depleting your stamina meter, which is it important because you need that stamina to glide, as well. There’s a few sections in the temple where you need to glide, and you’re stuck if you run out of stamina.

Long story short, I pull it off and manage to escape the Forgotten Temple.  Getting in and out were both pretty exciting, and make me realize that I’ve come a long way in terms of skill and knowledge of the game, as well as power-ups from where I was about a month ago. This would have seemed all but impossible back then, where now it’s a challenge, but do-able with a little planning and forethought.

Now that I’m outside the Temple, I don’t have a lot of options. I can either try to climb out of the canyon, or I can walk along it for its length and see how far it goes.

It goes, it turns out, an extremely long way.  I walk seemingly forever through the desolate, mostly empty canyon.  I encounter very few monsters down here.  Most frequently I run into packs of 3-4 wolves, who, being predatory animals, will try to attack if I get too close. The best thing about them is that they’re easy to kill with a Sheikah bomb, and they drop raw prime meat. Best of all, if you kill just one, the rest will run away, much like real world wolf packs.  It seems like I run to a new group of wolves about every few hundred yards, and so I stock up on a lot of meat along the way.  I occasionally see Lizals, but they’re lying dormant, easy to spot despite being camouflaged, and I mostly avoid them.  Occasionally giant chuchus will pop up, but they are also easy to bomb, or simply outrun.

I continue running down this canyon for two straight game-days.  At one point, my sheika sensor picks up a shrine nearby, but it seems like it must be above on the rim of the canyon, so I just ignore it and move on.

Here and there, I find a couple of korok seeds, but they’re pretty sparse around here. But I’m also not looking that exhaustively for them, either, so it’s possible I could have overlooked some. But anything that looks like a likely spot for a korok seed that I check out, I find a seed.  I get up to around 145 seeds.

Eventually I come upon a Goron, who invites me to play his golf game.  For 20 Rs, I can smash a ball with a hammer and get it into a hole.  No thanks.  I don’t expect the reward to be worth the time spent, so I move on.  Somehow, I end up getting turned around and come back.  Well, OK then, fine, let’s play golf.  I use the Time Stasis power to freeze the ball, hit it, and my aim is pretty good.  My first shot goes off the course, but after that I get it into the hole in 3 tries, which, with the penalty stroke, gives me a total score of 5, and earns me 50 Rs, for a net profit of +30.  Yeah, very much not worth the time.

Moving on, I continue still further down the canyon, and it seems I’m now south of Rito village (I could see the canyon from the village spire when i was scoping out the surroundings) and closer to Gerudo Desert than I am to Rito village.

My sensor picks up another shrine nearby, and this one I decide to try to find. After a little triangulation, I climb up out of the canyon, and search, and eventually find it, well hidden under a large flat rock that I have to knock out of the way with time stasis and the free iron sledgehammer that I obtained for playing Goron Golf. Maybe it’s good that I stopped there after all.

This shrine is a wind puzzle, solved with wind generated by korok leaf.  The shrine starts out with a chest containing a korok leaf, and I have to leave a weapon behind to equip it. So long, iron sledge hammer.  The shrine is one of the largest I’ve been to, and involves platforms floating on balloons, spikes that can pop balloons, wind-driven turbine switches, a lot of vertical updraft, and a couple of baby guardians to fight. It takes a long time to clear the shrine, but I’m successful on the first try without dying, so it’s not very difficult to figure out what to do, just time consuming.

There are several weapons chests in this shrine, including a Thunderspear, but I still have a Thunderspear that I found elsewhere some time ago, so I leave it, but I collect my spirit orb, and emerge, uncertain of where I should try to go next. 

Coming out of the flight archery range, there’s a road leading further to the north.  I find a small group of horses and grab one to make it a little quicker than going on foot. 

I explore the rest of the road that lead up to here, and it doesn’t go too far — it ends at a little cabin. There’s a man sitting at a campfire outside the cabin, and I talk to him. He turns out to be a Yiga ninja in disguise, and challenges me to a fight.  I suspected he might be Yiga, based on his appearance, and am ready for him.  I equip my frost spear, spears being the best weapons to take against Yiga due to their range and speed, and it freezes him.  I switch to my Dragonbone Moblin Club, and finish him off with one blow.  Dragonbone Moblin Clubs do massive damage and are a great weapon, and I’ve picked up several up here, as the monsters keep dropping them.  My horse runs off, and I can’t find it.

I proceed to explore the cabin, and it’s abandoned. There’s a diary, which I read, and the place had been inhabited by a professional shield surfer.  Shield surfing is basically snowboarding, and I gather that at some point in the game I will likely need to use this skill, although I can’t see why it would be better than gliding. Shield surfing wears out your shields, and I hate doing things that wears out my stuff. But I guess it’ll be fun and cool when I get to the point where I need to do it.

Exiting the cabin, I find the horse, luckily it had just been right outside the cabin after running away when I fought the Yiga clan ninja.  I get back on him and ride him all the way back down the mountain road to Rito Stables to register him, and I name him Radish.  Get it?

Along the way, I stop frequently, and keep finding stuff to forage and korok seeds.  There’s an area on the map called Warbler’s Den, where I run into a mystery I can’t solve: a central raised platform of rock surrounded by five stone rings, each ring having one, two, three, four, or five “fingers” coming from the top of it.  I figure I’m supposed to fire an arrow through the rings in the proper order, so I do, but nothing happens.  Then I try counting down from 5 to 1, and still nothing happens.  I’m just wasting time and arrows. 

No idea what to do here, I decide I’ll have to just come back to it later sometime, and I go further on down the road.  I hear a Hinox snoring, and spot him to my right, just past the Warbler’s Nest area.  I don’t want to engage it, and move on.  I get to the stables, register Radish, and then transport back to the shrine in Rito village.

There’s a few missions for me here.  The guards are telling me that one of their soldiers is supposed to be at the Flight Range, so I should go there again and see if he’s there now.  I also talk to the wife of a Hylian couple who are here on their honeymoon.  The wife wants baked apples, and the man wants flint, so he can bake some apples.  They pay me well for both, and the man takes nearly all of my flint.  I get a lot of rupees for them, but I don’t really need it.  But it completes two minor sidequests easily.

A young Rito girl tells me a story about the mountain peak with the tall pine tree on it.  Her grandfather went up there one day and saw a huge white bird with “something important” in its stomach.  This story doesn’t make sense to me; how can you see what’s in a bird’s stomach?  I decide I’ll go out that way and check it out.

I’ll glide out, but first I want to climb to the very top of Rito village.  I do it, and it’s not easy, but I manage.  I find a korok seed and something else at the very top, I forget but I think it’s a weapon.  I look around and check out the surroundings.  There’s a few more stone pillars like the one Rito village is built on, standing out of the water here and there.  One of them has a small depression in it, and I see another likely korok hiding place.  I glide down to it and yep, it’s a korok.

From here, the easiest glider approach to the road that will take me to Flight Range will land me right by the Hinox.  I decide to try to sneak in and see if I can steal whatever he’s guarding, and maybe it’ll be something useful.

I get in close and manage to climb into his hand and he puts me on his chest.  There’s a good sword and a good bow and a halberd that’s inferior to everything I’m carrying already.  I take what I can, but nothing is really essential, as I’m already well equipped and fully outfitted. The next thing is I need to figure out how to get off the Hinox without waking it. I try gliding off, but this makes too much noise and wakes the Hinox.

There’s a thick stone column standing nearby, and I try to run behind it, hoping that the Hinox won’t see me and will go back to sleep, but it apparently knows where I am, and is trying to find me.  We play a game of hide and seek for a few minutes, I keep going around the column, keeping it between the Hinox and me, and it keeps trying to move around to spot me.  Eventually, I slip up and he sees me, and it’s on.

Alright, Hinox, you want to fight, I’ll fight.  I quick-equip my Dragonbone Moblin Club, a good shield, my best armor, and my best bow.  The Hinox is bending way over to get a good close look at me, and so I blast him right in the eye with an arrow, stunning him.  I run up and unleash a flurry of charge attacks from the DMC, which does massive damage, taking the Hinox down about halfway.  It gets back up and tries to sit on me, but I get out of the way, and then I nail it right in the eye with another arrow, stunning it, and I finish it off with a second flurry of charge attack.

This is the easiest fight I’ve had with a Hinox, and I’m developing a bit of skill.  The better equipment and powering up that I’ve done helps too, no doubt.

I proceed up to the Flight Range, and there’s still no one there. Puzzled, I wonder here my contact is.  I don’t have all day to wait for him, but maybe he’s only here at a certain time of day.  Oh well, I guess he’ll have to wait.

I decide to head toward the big pine peak, and see if I can find that big white bird.  This is a long trip, but I’m already about halfway there. It’s a lot of hiking and climbing, though, and along the way I find a few korok seeds, a couple of monster camps, mostly moblins and lizals but some bokoblins as well, all well armed, and pretty numerous. I fight them when I need to, and don’t really have a hard time taking them out.

I also encounter another Frost Talus, and fight it.  This one is a bit easier to take down. I defrost it with a fire arrow, then run up onto its back and hit it in its soft spot with the DMC.  It only takes two or three cycles of this to bring down.  It freezes me a few times, but only hits me good one time, and I have to eat a meal to replenish my life bar after this fight.

I get to the peak with the big pine tree, and the tree has a red ribbon tied around it. This seems significant, but there’s nothing interactive about the ribbon, and it seems that it is merely decorative.  I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen up here, so I wait a bit and look around, but nothing happens.  I re-read the mission text and the girl’s story mentions her grandfather was looking to the northwest when he saw the huge bird, so I look to the northwest, and sure enough there’s a pretty large bird flying in circles a little below me.  

I figure this must be the bird, so I pull out my telescope to have a good look at it and hope it’ll clue me in as to what I’m supposed to do here.  The girl’s story said that the bird was white, but this bird is only white on its underside, and the top side is grey.  It does seem to have a fairly big stomach, but I can’t see anything in its stomach, not that  I expected to be able to.

I wonder if I’m supposed to shoot the bird with the bow, but I don’t want to do it.  Besides, at the distance it’s at, I’m not likely to hit it anyway. I decide what I’ll do is save the game here, then try gliding up to it, and see if I can get close, and maybe I’ll be able to grab it out of the sky, or something. If that doesn’t work, I’ll restore and try something else.

I jump and glide down and I do get close, but I can’t grab it, and I just sort of fly through it.  Now I’m below it, and it’s still up there.  So I restore from my save point, and when the game resumes, the bird is gone.  I wait and wait, hoping it’ll come back, but it doesn’t.  Crud.

Needing something else to do now, I scope about with my telescope, and spot a plume of smoke rising in the distance not too far from me, about two peaks over.  I glide toward it, and get about halfway, then hike and climb the rest of the way.  It’s another cabin, and this one is inhabited, by none other than the shield surfing pro.  She invites me to try shield surfing, but I’m not interested in that right now, and turn her down.  I sit by her fire until dawn, and then check out a shrine that I saw not far from her cabin, a little downhill.

I get to the shrine, and solve it.  It’s another wind test. This one involves a series of wind generators that spin turbines when they are pointed at them.  I have to point them all in the right direction to make all the turbines spin to unlock the shrine master’s chamber.  This just takes a little trial and error, and I’m in.

Walking back toward the cabin, I pick up another shrine signal, but I can’t pinpoint it.  I try going to the very top of the mountain peak, but I still don’t see it anywhere.  But while up there, I do spot a nearby tower that I haven’t yet activated, in the adjacent uncharted territory to the east.

I decide to try to glide down to it.  This is a lot further than it looked, and I have to go through two stamina potions in order to make it without falling to my death.  But once I do reach the tower, I arrive already about 2/3rd of the way up, and getting to the top is easy.  I activate it and unlock the map for this region, which is called Hebra.

From Hebra tower, I can see at least two shrines nearby.  The one that seems nearer also has what looks like a Stables nearby it, so I decide to go to that one first. Gliding to it actually takes me out of the Hebra map zone, and into the next zone, which is still uncharted.  I’m only able to make it about halfway by glider, but this area is easy terrain, open grassland and gentle slopes, and I land a short distance from the stable, and run the rest of the way there.  It’s called Serenne Stable, and it seems pretty serene.  I talk to everyone and sit by the fire until dawn, then hike to the shrine, which is a bit further away than it looked on the map, but still pretty nearby. 

This shrine is another wind generator and platform puzzle. This one involve using wind currents to blow a ball around a course and into a basin, which triggers an elevator platform to lift you up to where you can reach the shrine master’s chamber. It’s not particularly difficult, and I think I found an alternative solution that bypasses most of the challenge. There’s a magnetic box that you’re supposed to use in some manner; I just used it to block the basin there the ball is supposed to roll to activate the elevator.  Then, rather than having the ball roll around the whole course, I put it right into the basin, about 99% of the way to where it’s supposed to go.  Then I go stand on the elevator platform, and use magnesis to lift the box, allowing the ball to roll home.

Having cleared the shrine, I transport back to Hebra Tower, and glide down to the other shrine I could see from there.  As I get closer, I can see that this one too has a stable near it.  This one is called Snowfield Stables.  The shrine puzzle here is much like the other one I just solved.

After clearing this shrine, I follow the road north out of Snowfield Stable.  The road is mostly downhill, and runs to the northeast, and gradually curves to the right, making it more easterly.  The terrain gradually changes from snowy to barren and rocky, and I eventually come to a vast chasm, when my shrine sensor starts going off.

I spend a few minutes looking for the shrine topside before I conclude that it is most likely down below in the chasm.  At the bottom of the chasm I see what appears to be a vast stonework that might be another maze like the one I found in Gerudo desert.  But when I get down there, I find that the walls for this one aren’t even taller than me, and it’s just a rough terrain of what’s left of stonework foundations that must have existed for thousands of years to be in the state they’re in now.

I can’t find the shrine.  I walk back and forth over the area where the sensor indicates it is, for the better part of a day, and can’t find it.  Finally, I give up and head south to see what else is down in this gorge.  The stoneworks goes on a long way, and eventually I get to the end of it, and find that I’m at another drop-off.  I glide down and discover that I’ve been walking on the roof of a vast building, and the entrance of which is now before me.  It is an area called the Forgotten Temple.  

I climb up the face of the entrance looking for a way in, and find it after a brief search, near the dead hulk of a Guardian.  I begin to cautiously enter and look around, and in the dim light I see more Guardian hulks, and then the nearest one lights up, and I run back out toward safety, when I’m lit up by 3 or 4 more Guardian target lasers.

I try the approach again, more cautiously this time, hugging the wall and staying low, trying to keep obstacles between me and the line of sight of the Guardians I spotted, trying to get an idea of where they were.  One is to my left just as you come in, another is straight ahead on a bridge, and I think there’s another two in there, one further back and to the left, the other closer and to the right.  There’s no way I can fight all of them at once with them all targeting me.

The options seem to be: to sneak through; to make a mad dash for it; or to find an approach that allows me to divide and conquer, fighting one at a time, from a position where I have cover protecting me from the rest of them.

I try the sneak approach first, four or five times, but each time one of them picks me up and lights me up, and I have to run back out for safety.  I’m quick and fortunate and make it each time, but it’s close each time, I dive for cover at the last second and just make it. 

Each time I get a little bit better idea of how the place is laid out, and it helps me refine my approach for the next run.  I observe that just past the entrance corridor, there’s a drop, and a large expanse, where there’s an  updraft.  I can glide across that, and get to a bridge where the middle Guardian hulk is.  If I get that far, I’m not sure what I can do; maybe keep running, maybe find a good cover spot where I can lay low and plan the next stage.

I go for it, and four or five Guardians all start tracking me with their lasers.  With the speed of the glider, their blasts all miss just behind me, and I land on the bridge with the central Guardian right next to me.  I shoot it in the sensor with an arrow, disrupting it, and start pounding it with my weapon, doing significant damage.  It only has 500 hit points, and I bring it down after blinding it with an arrow a second time.  As it happened, my landing spot perfectly shielded me so that none of the other Guardians were capable of targeting me, and with the central one destroyed, I am safe for the moment.  After the bridge, there’s a second expanse with another updraft, and another two, maybe three half-dead Guardian hulks between me and another wide hallway leading into a deeper chamber further back.

Considering how well that worked, I elect to go for the mad dash approach a second time, and manage to penetrate their defenses, gliding past their laser blasts, and land out of their range, and in the rear chamber I find the shrine.  It’s actually in a spot almost directly below the point where I had marked on the map my best guess as to where I was detecting it.  So I guess I am starting to get the hang of triangulation with the sensor.

I go into the shrine, and this one has no puzzle for me.  I am given a powerful fire sword and a spirit orb.  I decide to leave the sword, for now, because I have so many powerful weapons as it is right now, and I feel like I’m cleaning out the best stuff from every zone in the land without actually facing the major obstacles of each zone in turn, and if I don’t leave some of the good stuff for later, I’ll use it up on weaker, inconsequential enemies first, and then really be screwed when it comes time to fight the Divine Beasts, or Ganon.  Now that the shrine is unlocked, I can come back to it any time, and it will hold my weapon for me until I need it.

I guess while I’m waiting for the Blood Moon so I can stand on Washa’s Bluff naked and bring forth a new shrine, I guess I should check out the Illumeni Plateau.

I glide over from the highest nearest point of Washa’s Bluff, and climb up the rest of the way to the top.  It is dry and barren compared to Washa’s Bluff, no plant life but a few tumbleweed and dried out shrubs and some trees that died before they grew taller than Link.  I walk over to a rock formation and it comes alive.  Another Stone Talus fight.

I’m not carrying an iron sledge hammer, and it’s night, and suddenly three moblin skeletons pop up, and some kees, and a few chuchus to boot, and it’s a lot more than I was looking for, so I decide to transport out.  I teleport to Hateno village and go to my house, where there is always a free sledge hammer for the taking.  I swap it into my inventory, and then go to bed to sleep until morning, wake up fully refreshed, and teleport back to the shrine by the cherry tree on Satori mountain, and glide back to Washa’s Bluff, hop over to Illumeni Plateau, and fight the Talus in the daytime.  I have a pretty good fight, and it drops a lot of gems, as usual, but I score at least two rubies from this one, so it’s a pretty nice haul.

Scouting the rest of the plateau, I find nothing of interest, so I bring up the map and use my telescope to see what else is in the general area that might be worth checking out while I wait for the next Blood Moon. 

Past the Tabantha Tower, the most recent tower I’ve activated, the one with the evil goo, there’s a road leading further north, and I haven’t gone down it, so I decide to do that.

I glide down in that direction, and as I get closer I spot a stand of pine trees and a treehouse hideout, and I come in for a landing to check it out.  I’m expecting bokoblins, but see no one around.  This one is looking abandoned.  But suddenly, before I know it, three lizals are on top of me.  They have a chameleon-like power that allows them to blend in, and these ones are green as the grass, and I never noticed them until they were right on top of me.

I quick-equip sword and shield, and manage to take them out without getting too badly injured myself.  There seems to be no way up this treehouse, so I climb a nearby tree to jump off of it and glide down, and there’s a rusty halberd, a rusty clayomore, and a chest with a Solider’s Bow, which is a decent bow if nothing special.  I could have skipped this encounter.

Back to the road, it passes through a narrow gap between two tall rocks.  I smell ambush, and I can already see a lizal standing guard on the road leading into the pass. I glide down to the rocks above, and follow them along the road, and spot a second lizal, down below.  I decide to take this one out, and drop bombs on him until he’s dead.  I glide down to pick up the loot drops, and then three more skeletal lizals pop up out of the ground and surprise attack me, but I quickly take them down, and now I have even more loot.  A couple bows, a spear, a couple boomeranges, body parts for brewing elixirs, and a couple of skeleton arms.  I can’t carry all the weapons, so I make my choices and continue on.  

The road curves around to the left, and then continues west, going downhill.  Up ahead, I see yet another stable, and decide to check in.

This one is called Rito Stable, and is close to Rito village, home of the bird-people. Most stables have a shrine right nearby, but this one doesn’t seem to, although I can see not too far away at Rito village there is a shrine, and there’s another shrine visible a short distance away to the north uphill.

Kass is here, and sings me the song of the battle against Ganon from 10,000 years ago.  There’s a few other people to talk to, but not much especially interesting. 

I continue down the road, and come to a small foot bridge, cross it, and I’m in Rito village.  It is the tall stone structure that I had spotted from Tabantha Tower that I thought looked like a skyscraper-sized magic wand.  A path spirals upward around the stone tower, and all along it there are little shops and homes, and I talk to many Rito there.  They tell me about the Divine Beast above us, Vah Medoh, and how it appeared recently and is threatening.  They sent their warriors to investigate it but some were injured and some didn’t come back.   They are safe on the ground, but Vah Medoh attacks them if they fly too high in the air, and it’s demoralizing to be a Rito and not be able to fly very high.  The Rito are mostly reluctant to talk to me about their troubles, since I’m Hylian and an outsider, but they seem to recognize that I’m a warrior, and of good heart, so they seem to warm up to me a bit as I talk to more of them.

I go to the shrine here, and it’s a wind puzzle. There are fans, which blow turbines if they are pointed at them.  The puzzle is to arrange the fans so that they turn every turbine.  There’s also a treasure chest, which I grab, and after a little trial and error, I solve the main puzzle and claim my spirit orb.

I talk to the Rito elder, who asks me to help them deal with Vah Medoh, and in order to do that I need to find one of their soldiers.  I’m not sure where he is.

I try climbing up further, but the walkway ends, and then there’s a lot more stone towering above me.  I try to climb it and get nearly to the top, but run out of stamina and fall.  I catch myself and land on a part of the village where there’s a launching point that will take me to close to the other nearby shrine that I had spotted, so I decide to check that one out.  

I glide over, and it’s very cold, but with my warm doublet, ruby headband, and snow shoes, I’m comfortable.  I fight a few monsters, skeleton moblins and bokoblins on horseback, all well-armed, and then get to the shrine.  This shrine is another wind puzzle.  It’s a very tall shaft with platforms hanging in space, and each platform has a fan blowing upward, creating an updraft that I can ride up with the glider to make it to the next platform.  I nearly get to the top, and then get stuck, as there’s no apparent path to get to the last platform where the shrine master waits.  I pause the game and it displays the name of the shrine again, which gives me a clue about how to find a hidden path up to the very top, and I solve the puzzle.  

A little further on the road out of the shrine, I come to a small building. There’s a sign outside of it that says “flight range” which looks like a practice course for flying creatures to do archery.  I can see a number of targets from where I stand, and shoot 3 or 4 of them.  I expect I’ll receive something for this, but nothing happens.  Upon looking a bit further, I can see still more targets.  Apparently, I’m supposed to glide out and fire arrows while in mid-air.  This is tricky, but when you shoot an arrow while gliding, you have to put away the glider, and you begin to fall.  But time slows down, and you get a chance to aim.  But this burns up a lot of stamina.  So I guess the idea is to glide, see a target, quickly take aim and destroy it, then switch back to glider and get back to someplace safe to land.  There’s a lot of updraft on the course, so it should be doable, with practice.  I am not very good at this  yet, and screw up, but it’s night, and so maybe if I come back later someone will be here, who can talk to me about the challenge and give me some tips…

A few steps from the entrance of the A Major Test of Strength shrine in the area past the bridge, marked Ancient Columns on the map, I find another memory photo location. 

This memory triggered is not a very pleasant one.  Zelda is trying to unlock the shrine, but is unable to because it is only unlockable by the one who wields the Sword of Destiny. She’s trying to figure out another way to open it, when Link rides up on a horse. Zelda is not happy to see him, tells him she doesn’t need protecting, and to begone.  I can’t help but think about the Legend of Zelda cartoon that aired when I was a kid, and imagine Link saying: “Well, I only happen to be holding the one and only sword that seals the darkness, so I thought maybe you’d want some help here!  Excuuuse me, princess!”

I proceed from the area further along the road, keeping to the high ground, until I’m close enough to see the Tower for this region.  It is covered in evil looking purple goo, which I know from my encounter with it in the Labyrinth in Gerudo that it is harmful if touched.  Looking up the road ahead of me, I spy at least three heavily armed moblins, and elect to not try taking them on, as it would only serve to wear out weapons that I don’t need to waste.  I glide from my location to a high spot on the far side of the rise where the tower stands, far away from the road leading to it, and manage to avoid the moblins notice.  From what I’ve noticed, moblins seem to have rather dim senses.  But also, I am wearing some of my stealth outfit, so I’m sure that helps.

So I need to figure a way up this tower that doesn’t involve touching the goo.  There’s goo all around the tower, but maybe there’s some way I can get around it.  But if I take a long route, it will sap all my stamina, and then I won’t make it.

There are a few free-standing columns about the tower, and I try climbing the nearest one, to see if perhaps from there I’ll be able to glide to a spot on the tower above the goo with a clear shot straight to the top.  There’s no such route visible from the first column, so I glide over to the second, climb it, and check again.  And so on, to the third column, where I spot a disturbing looking eyeball creature below, down at the base of the tower, in the goo. 

I don’t know what the thing is, but it doesn’t seem to see me, despite having multiple eyes, or if it does, it doesn’t seem to care that I’m there.  I look down at it a while, and zoom in using the Sheikah scope for a close-up.  It looks a bit like a Beholder from Dungeons and Dragons.

I don’t know what else to do with it, so I fire an arrow at it.  I use a flame arrow, and am fortunate enough to hit it on the first try.  The fire arrow is powerful enough to kill the thing in one shot, and as it dies, something happens, an earthquake or something shifts the goo, and a column nearby where the eyeball-creature was topples, leaning into the tower, creating a climbable bridge to get me over the goo!

I run over to this spot, walk up the leaning column, and climb the tower, activate it, and download the map data for the region I’m in.

I take a moment to survey the surrounding landscape, and spot a number of interesting geographical features:  a tower of rock that looks like a skyscraper-sized magic wand, or something; a likely fairy fountain spot, very nearby; a couple of shrines; and a few other odd geographic sites that unless I miss my guess are likely korok seed spots.

I have a mission to see that fairy and give her 500 rupees, so I glide that way and unlock her.  She is grateful, and offers to upgrade my clothes, and so I upgrade everything I can.  I have plenty of the materials she needs to do everything.  I upgrade my climbing gear and my stealth gear and my cold resistant jewelry that I bought in Gerudo, and my rubber pants and helmet from Faron. So far as I can tell, this doesn’t augment the special power of these items, only their armor value. But I don’t really know the underlying mechanics, so it’s possible that by augmenting the base protective value of these pieces of gear, they also improve the elemental property for resisting that type of damage.

I also manage to catch 3 of 4 fairies that are floating about the pond, restocking my fairy supply.  Good, I always need more fairies.

Having succeeded in the fairy quest, I decide to return back the way I came to see the man at the Stables who sent me out here with his money to offer to the fairy.  I head down the road back toward the Stable, and it’s night time.  I spot a moblin sitting by a fire, and it looks like I’ve found a camp.  I get a little closer, and I sure have.  The moblin is the only one awake, and is apparently on guard, watching over SIX sleeping bokoblins — and not weak-looking red ones.

I in no way need to mess with these monsters, but I feel like the game is challenging me to see if I can defeat this many enemies at once.  I think about trying to sneakstrike them, but with the awake moblin watching over them, that’s going to be just about impossible.   I don’t have any ranged weapon that can one-shot the moblin — maybe a bomb arrow would do it, if I could score a headshot, but even then, the upgraded moblins have a lot of hit points.

I try it, and it wakes up the whole camp, as one might expect. I don’t score the head shot, and I don’t take out the moblin. It does set all the bokoblins on fire, though, but this does only a little damage to each of them.  It seems that bomb arrows do great damage if they score a direct hit, but their splash damage and the damage from the secondary fire that is generated isn’t necessarily a lot.  It can take out a crowd of low-level enemies, but anything powerful can just shrug it off.  For an arrow that costs 50 Rs, it seems a bit underwhelming for use against more powerful opponents.  

I switch to regular arrows and try to headshot the remaining enemies from long range, which is pretty difficult and I loose a bunch of arrows but in the end I take out the whole camp at no actual risk to me, albeit at great expense.  I’m down to about 60-70 normal arrows, 8 bomb arrows, and a little under 40 of the other kinds of special arrows — fire, lightning, cold.

I go down and loot their camp, and they’re well equipped. I upgrade a couple of my weapons, discarding weaker stuff that had been filling my slots, and move on.

On my way back, the road goes down into a valley or canyon, and I stick to the high ground, and take a ridge running along the right side of the road.  This leads me to a section of the road where I spot the helicopter drones patrolling the valley below.  I’m above them, and they don’t seem to see me or pay me any notice.  

I want to assess how strong they are, and whether I can take them out, so I create a save point and engage.  Holy crap are these things tough. It’s clear that the designers intend for these things to be enemies that you sneak past and run from.  I hit the nearest one with a bomb arrow, and it does a sliver of damage, barely anything at all.  Immediately, it retaliates with a massive blast from its underturret, and the only thing that saves me is the fact that I’m far enough back from the edge of the cliff that the blast impacts the cliff wall, shielding me.

A wall of explosion and flames flares up in front of me, temporarily obscuring my vision, and when it clears I see the drone is hovering there, looking around for a bit, as though checking to see that it got me. I back away, and a few seconds later it resumes patrolling its programmed route.

I nail it again with another arrow, and the same thing happens.  No matter what I do, it never leaves its zone that it guards, and it only deviates from its patrol route if I hit it with an attack, and only then just for a momentary pause while it scans the area looking for targets.

I decide to see if I can take one of these things out, and just how much it would take.  I run through every special arrow I have. There’s a few misses among those, but I nail the thing with 8 bomb arrows and between 100 and 115 fire, ice, and electric arrows before it finally drops.  Every time I hit it, it fires a retributive blast at me with its eye-cannon, and I’m able to establish a pattern, a routine, of hitting it, backing off to use the cliff wall for a shield, and then running back up to nail it a few more times while it’s stationary and scanning for targets.  I hit it 1-3 times per cycle around its patrol route, and it takes maybe an hour to bring the thing down — and in game time, it probably takes a day and a half.  It’s a pretty epic fight, in a way, but in another way, it’s tedious — it’s a repetitive cycle where I attack, do damage, run away to disengage, it retaliates but never follows up, and never deviates from its programming, and this is the only reason I’m able to wear it down.  It’s very powerful, but not smart — if it were smart, it would call in reinforcements, at the very least alerting its partner, or summoning a ground party, or divert from its route long enough to ensure that it has effectively neutralized the threat that it keeps detecting.  All it would have needed to do to defeat me is fly to an altitude that gave it a firing angle that denied me the cover I had from the cliff face. 

It’s an accomplishment to bring it down, even so, but in no way worth the high cost of arrows, so I restore from my save point and continue on.

The two drones are patrolling around two tall pillars of stone in the middle of the canyon road, and I spot a couple of treasure chests on them.  I try to glide in to see what’s in them, and the drones pay me no heed. They appear to be looking down only, and are only interested in something on the road below if they see it, or in attacking me if I attack it.  If I leave them alone, they pretty much leave me alone.  So I leave them alone.  One of the treasure chests contains an opal, and another contains a flame rod, and it’s a powerful one that fires 3 fireballs at a time,and has a +7 attack bonus.  Worth it.

I wait until the coast is clear and then glide down off the treasure chest pillar to the road below and run. I manage to avoid detection, and the drones leave me alone. I get to the bridge, cross without incident, and make my way back to the stables.  I talk to the guy who sent me to the fairy fountain, and he thanks me.  Link holds his hand out as though he’s expecting payment, and the man tells him that his reward was getting to see the fairy.  Yeah, really, Link.  That dude said 500 Rs was all he had. What more do you want?  You collected 3 fairies and got your clothes upgraded and you got to see another fairy.  Don’t be greedy, dude.

Another guy at the stable tells me that there’s a strange platform on Washa’s Bluff.  I hadn’t been on the Bluff, only around it, so I decide that’s the next thing I’ll check out.  It’s a long walk, but not too bad.

On my way there, I’m attacked by a swarm of 20-30 Keese, and this time I’m ready for them, see them coming, and lob a bomb into the swarm just as it swoops in at me, and blow it up with perfect timing, taking out about half the swarm and the rest of them abort their attack and fly away.  Cool!  I collect a bunch of Keese parts.

The Bluff is large, and it takes a minute or two to travel from the road side of it to the far side, where a few of those giant mushroom-like structures are growing, like a small grove of tall trees, and I find the platform.  It’s a circular man-made looking platform made from stone or metal, it’s hard to say, and I can’t tell what it’s for or what to do with it.  

I can hear the accordion music of my bird-man friend Kass nearby, so I try to look for him.  He’s up on top of the tallest mushroom platform, and I have no idea how I can get up there.  It looks like trying to climb is out of the question, as the mushroom caps are quite wide, and I’d be inverted upside down, climbing on the ceiling to get to the edge.

I try it anyway, and find that I can do it.  There’s a series of steps, I first climb a small shroom, use it to jump/glide to a larger one nearby, and do the same to get to the tallest one, where Kass is, and I just barely make it.  I get up there, and he has a little house or something, more like a gazebo, in the middle of the mushroom cap.  He has a book of his songs and notes in the gazebo, so I take a minute and read through them all, and get some tantalizing clues about places I haven’t been to yet and songs I haven’t heard.

I then go up to Kass and talk to him, and he explains this place. That platform is where I need to stand during a Blood Moon, and I need to take off all my clothes and that will cause the shrine to appear.  Cool.

I don’t know when the next blood moon will be, but there was one just after I cleared out that shrine with the Major Test of Strength, so it’s going to be a while.  Probably longer than I’m going to care to wait. But I’m not sure what else I can do.

I glide down to the platform and stand on it, and about the same time I do that, I observe a strange teal glow from a distant mountain.  It’s not as far away as the other end of the world, but a neighboring mountain.  I wonder if the timing is coincidence or if standing on this platform triggered something over there.  I look at it on my scope, and it’s the spot where I was earlier in the day, the mountain with the shrine I transported in to, and more specifically it’s the place with the beautiful cherry tree in full blossom.

I decide that I have to check this out immediately, and transport back to that shrine, and quickly run over to the cherry tree.

Here, I see an amazing sight:  a gathering of maybe a dozen or twenty of those strange glowing blue rabbits that you sometimes see at night and if you shoot them they don’t die by drop coins and run away.  And they’re all surrounding a glowing blue, goat-like creature.  I stand at a distance, and it’s pretty clear that I need to keep quiet and avoid detection or they’ll just disappear on me.  I don’t know what to do, so I take pictures, and zoom in for a better look.  The goat thing has four eyes — two faces really — and is very strange — but beautiful.  It seems to exude power, but it doesn’t really do anything, other than just walk around in the vicinity near the cherry tree.

I’m baffled.  This feels like an X-files moment.  I’m witnessing something paranormal and out of this world.  In a world with magic and ancient technology and weird monsters and skeletons rising out of the grave every night like clockwork, and dead monsters resurrecting once a month, somehow this seems extraordinary and truly magical.

I observe this strange gathering for as long as I can, but eventually I get too close and cause some of the rabbit-like creatures to disappear.  Then I get a little closer, and as soon as I touch the water in the pool where the goat-creature is standing, it disappears from view.  I back out of the pool, and a few seconds it re-appears, only to disappear again for good a short time after that.  The rest of the rabbit-creatures are gone as well.

WTF was that?  What do I do?  Will it ever happen again?

In the Hyrule Compenium, the goat creature’s entry reveals that it is called the Lord of the Mountain.

But I have no idea what to make of it, other than I feel privileged to see a wondrous spiritual thing that probably no mortal was ever meant to.

There seems to be no quest associated with this; if it’s just a thing that serves no other purpose but to create a sense of wonder and awe about the world of Hyrule, my hat is off to the developers.  Bravo.  They really created a moment, and I almost hope that there’s no further explanation, and they let the mystery remain a mystery.

I wake up in Hateno village at my house early in the morning, and have a look at my map. Looking at the region I had been exploring yesterday, there are a lot of places I had passed by but did not truly explore. Unsure of what I might find, I transport back to the shrine on Satori Mountain, and being a slow, spiral descent around it to see if I can find anything interesting. There’s a lot of crows up here, for some reason, and I mean a lot.  Most bird wildlife comes in groups of three, but up here, it seems like there are dozens of crows about. I wonder if it could mean something.

Partway down on the north face of the mountain, I come to what appears to be an abandoned camp tucked away between a split rock topping the mountain like a miniature Dueling Peaks.  There’s a cooking pot under a dead fire, and some signs that someone has been here recently, but I see no one.  I take what I find that I can use, and feel like a thief for doing so. 

A little below the camp site, I come to a flat part of land with a small orchard of apple trees.  There are many dozens of apples here, on the ground and still on the tree.  I find a wood cutter’s axe, but I don’t feel like felling the trees and ruin the orchard just to get at the apples more efficiently. Then I find a farmer’s hoe, and discover to my delight that smacking the tree trunk with the hoe will knock loose apples down, saving me time spent climbing up to get them.  I pick a massive amount of apples, and last I had really paid attention, I was down to around 20 or so, as I’d sold a bunch off and had eaten a bunch more for little quick-heals, but when I look again, I’m back up to nearly 140.

I continue onward, and explore down to Rutile Lake, more of a pond, really, in a wooded area between Mount Satori and the larger mountains to the south.  I find plenty of korok seeds here, a few abandoned weapons, some buried chests, plentiful forage, and only a few monsters to fight.

It rains off and on, and I am a bit discouraged because of how the rain slows my progress when I need to climb up to explore somewhere. But here, I’m mainly going downward, and it doesn’t impede me too much, 

After I get done with this area, I proceed further down, into a low-lying gully at the foot of the larger mountain at the south, and here I find a stand of the baobab-like trees.  They’re so tall, and wide, and they just look like there should be something at the top of them to reward me for climbing all the way up, but after reaching the top of 4 or 5, I’ve found nothing, and there’s a lot more trees to explore, and I don’t feel like taking that much time to maybe find something largely inconsequential.

At the end of the gully, the elevation drops even further, and far below me, perhaps 100 feet, maybe 200, there’s a river.  The far bank is a lower elevation than where I’m standing, so I try gliding down there, and check around for more korok seeds.  I don’t find any immediately, but after going down to the river itself, I find two more.  There’s plenty more forage around, as well, and I take whatever I find, mostly mushrooms.

I poke around to the north a short distance, until I get between two high points that are labeled Washa’s Bluff and Illumeni Plateau on the map.  I then backtrack, to explore the rest of the valley to the west, and go through the Lake Illumeni area, and stumble upon two moblins in a wooded area, and take both out with ease.  They have such poor vision that they don’t see me until I’m right on them, and are so slow that even with a two handed club, which is one of my slowest weapons, I still manage to hit them first, and do so hard enough that it stuns them long enough for me to follow up with a second attack, which is all I need to kill them.

This area has some ruins in it, barely anything more than a stone foundation and a decaying wagon, but I search and find some minor things like an amber gem.

Having finished my sweep of this area, I proceed to the north, along the outside slope of Illumeni Plateau, along the edge of a deep canyon that borders the known map region.  Continuing the broadest orbit of my spiral sweep of the area, I circle around the base of Illumeni Plateau and Washa’s Bluff, and as I come around to the east end of this area, I spot a bridge spanning the canyon, and the road that I have traveled up previously on my first excursion to this area.  

I still didn’t check out the Plateau or the Bluff, but rather than return to explore those spots, I decide to head to the bridge and see what I can find on the other side.

It is raining as I approach, and as I get a bit closer, I can hear faint, familiar accordion music from my Rito friend, Kass the bird-man.  I find him on the far side of the bridge, sitting on some odd looking rock formations, and he sings me a song about firing an arrow through two rings to make a shrine appear.  Seems straightforward enough; the rock formations here have a multitude of rings, but I can’t seem to find any two that line up easily.  I explore a bit wider, and find a pair that look like I can just barely take a shot at this challenge.  It takes only three arrows, and then I succeed in my trial, and the shrine erupts out of the ground.  Kass is impressed that I found the secret so easily, and I go back to the shrine to see if I can pass the test.

This trial involves standing on floor switches to tilt platforms in order to make a ball roll down a ramp to land in a basin.  I have to time the order in which I stand on the switches to make the ball drop to the correct path, and land two balls in two basins.  It’s very easy, and I collect my spirit orb quickly.  After I emerge from the shrine, Kass is nowhere to be found.

I wander a bit east, into the meadow past where I met Kass, and find a small herd of horses.  Figuring it will be quicker travelling if I can snag one, I manage to grab one and tame it.  Then I hear the sound of a slumbering Hinox nearby. I’m not looking for a fight right now, but I look around and find the Hinox, and give it a wide berth lest I disturb its repose, and travel onward.  

I want to ride the horse back to Outskirts Stable and see what its ratings are and possibly register it.  On my way back, I am nearly there, when I spot a shooting star in the sky, just at the edge of my vision.  It seems to crash into the mountainside, and then I observe a shaft of light piercing the sky, marking the spot where it had landed. Obviously, I’m meant to investigate this.

I mark the point on the map, and then take my new horse off the road, and get as close to the landing spot as I possibly can, dismount, and climb the rest of the way.  It’s a good distance, but more walking uphill than climbing, and I get there in a few minutes time.  I find a meteorite, and pick it up. I’m not sure what I can do with it, but I’m sure its use will become apparent in time.

I make my way back down the mountain, search for a bit until I find the horse again, and ride him back to the Stable, where I go to register him and find that he’s not a particularly strong horse, so I don’t bother.

Instead, I transport back to the shrine on the top of Mount Satori, and return to the vicinity of the Illumeni Plateau and Washa’s Bluff, intending to explore them.  Instead, though, I get to a point where I see something more interesting:  a windmill. It looks like a metal tower with a weather vane on the top, and at first I see just one, but soon I spot a second, and then several more, going off down into the canyon into the unmapped part of the world.  A bit further past the first windmill that I spotted, I see a new shrine, and decide to head toward it.  

I don’t get too far, when I spot a bokoblin rider. He sees me about the same time, and gives a shout and starts riding in my direction.  Quickly, I see three or four more riders, and then more.  Altogether, it looks like there maybe as many as 6 or 7 of them — and I’m out in the open, without a horse of my own, I have little hope of outrunning them or outfighting them.  If I’m lucky, they’ll be relatively weak and I’ll be able to take one or two out quickly, but if they surround me and gang up, they may knock me around a lot and might be able to kill me by knocking me from one to the next and beating me every time I’m about to get back to my feet.

There’s a large boulder just to the right of me that I passed a short way back, so I retreat to it, climb up, and now they can ride around me and shoot arrows, but otherwise I’m fairly safe.  This turns out to be a tactical masterstroke.  The bokoblins aren’t terribly good shots under the best of circumstances, but on horseback, riding at full gallop, they’re positively terrible.  They fire dozens of arrows at me and I hear them clattering about my feet, but none really stand much of a chance of hitting me, although eventually one or two manage to — although for barely any damage.  Meanwhile, I’m able to stand off and return fire with my own bow, and it does the job rather more effectively.  I knock bokoblins off their horses, and then follow up with 2-3 more arrows to put them down permanently.  The moving ones are rather difficult targets to hit, but occasionally they’ll stop to scream, or to try to take an aimed shot, and once they do, I’m able to plug them, often scoring a headshot for extra damage.  It takes 2-3 arrows each, and I miss quite a few shots, and so go through maybe 20 arrows or so, before they’re defeated.  

I climb down and pick up as many dropped arrows as I’m able to find, but it’s only a handful.  Then a straggler rider comes up and hits me.  I didn’t notice him at first, and he snuck up, the bastard.  I get back on my feet and run over to a nearby horse, jump on it, and try to fight the bokoblin on more even terms, but for some reason I’m struggling to close to melee distance with him, while he nails me repeatedly with 3-4 arrows, and takes my health down to where it’s starting to become a concern.  I get knocked off the horse again, and get angry, and just sprint after him on foot, and finally connect with a spear weapon, unhorsing him, and deal him a mortal blow. I’m low on health now and need to consume a meal to replenish. 

I continue on now, and arrive at the shrine. As I approach it, I spot another Stable, and grow excited, because I’ve come to love Stables. They are smaller than villages, but pack a lot of adventure and story into a smaller space, and I always get several leads on things that I can do in the general area.

But first, the shrine. I get to it, and this one is a ball puzzle called Aim for the Moment. There’s a large ball, continuously being launched into the air by a piston-like platform that goes up and down. It’s on a platform slightly above the ground floor, and behind a fence.  I puzzle over this for a while, trying to work out what I need to do. Somehow I need to get the ball out of this loop, and knock it into a basin below the piston platform.

A short distance from the starting point, there’s a small slightly raised platform that I can stand on.  When I stand there, I can see the ball flying up and down pretty clearly.  I try using the time-stop power on it, and it’s in range, so I stop it in mid-air, but after the effect wears off it just goes back to being launched up in the air again by the piston.  I try again, this time waiting for the ball to be high in the air, above the fence that stands between me and it, and here I have a clear shot with my arrows.  I shoot three or four arrows into it to impart some kinetic energy, hoping that it’ll knock it out of the way enough that it won’t fall back on to the piston, and maybe will rebound off the far wall and come back to rest in the basin.  It doesn’t really move enough, and resumes bouncing after it unfreezes.  But I apparently knocked it offcenter just enough so that it eventually lands askew and rolls off the piston platform, and ends up rolling into the basin.

This in turn activates the platform I’m on, which shoots me up into the air.  I spot an alcove high up on the wall, where I see a switch pedestal.  I take aim with my bow and manage to hit the switch, which unlocks the door to the shrine master’s chamber.  I collect a treasure chest that I noticed in the room, behind where the bouncing ball was, using the piston platform to launch me high enough into the air that I can glide down to where the chest is.  Then I go to the shrine master, and claim my spirit orb.

I visit the stable, and talk to everyone there, and get a few new missions.  There’s apparently a fairy pond nearby here, and one of the travelers at the stable wishes he could go, but he can’t manage the trip, as it’s too difficult.  He asks me to take the fairy an offering of 500 rupees, and so I accept. Pikango the painter is here too, and he tells me another location for one of my memory photos is nearby.

I decide to go seek the fairy first, as it is near a tower, and unlocking the tower will reveal more of the world map to me.  I head down the road, and spot a drone copter flying above the road, patrolling, and I try to avoid its detection by diverting to the left and hiding behind a small hill, and manage to evade it.  A bit further up the road, very nearby, there’s another hill to the left of the road, and on the top of it is a shrine that I can see clearly.  I head toward it, climbing up the far side of the hill to stay well clear of the copter drone.  I get up there without any real difficulty, and unlock it and enter.

This shrine is another combat trial, and it’s called A Major Test of Strength.  I’d seen another Major Test of Strength shrine earlier, on a little island on the east end of the Hyrule map, and it kicked my ass repeatedly. I doubt I’ll fare much better here, but I decide to give it a try.  I have a few more heart containers in my health meter, and some very good weapons.

I equip a lizal forked boomerang, guardian shield and my strongest bow with lightning arrows, and step into the arena.  The shrine guardian comes out, and it’s similarly equipped as the other guardian I fought on the Major Test at the island shrine, but this one somehow seems less aggressive.  It’s attack timing seems slower, its defense seems a bit less tight, and I’m able to stun it with electric shocks from the arrows, run up and hit it several times, then back out of its way before it unleashses its attacks, which mostly miss feebly.  Then I nail it with another electric arrow, run in, and pound it some more. 

It has a very large health bar of 3000 hit points, and my attacks don’t do a lot to it, but gradually they wear it down. I break the forked boomerang, and switch to a stronger weapon, my greater Thunderblade, which I’d been saving for special combats.  I can’t use a shield with it, as it’s two-handed, but I discover that I can keep a shield equipped, and if I sheath the weapon, by pressing B, it allows me to bring up the shield, by holding the Z-left trigger, nearly instantly, and thus I can defend myself a bit better than I thought I could while armed with a 2-handed weapon.  It’s a little bit slower, and more button pressing, but more than manageable.

I bring the shrine Guardian down to about 1/2 of its health with the Thunderblade, when it, too breaks.  Next, I switch to my most powerful weapon, called the Blade of Duality, a monstrous 50 attack rating 2-handed greatsword that I’d found somewhere recently and had been saving for a combat such as this.  

I break this weapon on the Guardian as well, but by now it’s down to about 1/4 of its health, and I feel confident that I’ll be able to beat it.  I’ve taken damage from a few of its attacks, though, and had to eat two prepared foods in order to bring my hitpoints back up. But I note that my improved armor and my larger life bar now mean that one attack from this thing is not enough to one-shot me into fairy resurrection territory — and that’s a very good thing, because at the moment I have 0 fairies.

It does one of those spinning attacks that are unavoidable, but I manage to duck behind a pillar, which absorbs the attack for me, and then blast it again with a lightning arrow, stunning it, and run in and wail on it with the Blade of Duality.

After the Blade of Duality breaks, I switch to a Guardian Axe+ that I had won in a previous combat shrine challenge.  I beat on the guardian until it can’t walk anymore, but now it’s using its beam weapon to shoot super blasts at me, and it destroys two of my shields, and forces me to eat another meal.  I can’t get close enough to hit it with a melee weapon, and arrows don’t seem to stun it any longer.  It only has a little bit of life bar left, but I need to take it down quickly.  I switch to bomb arrows, and it takes three of them to do the job.  

It explodes, sending a shower of ancient parts and drops its weapons and shield, which I pick up, and then I go collect my spirit orb.

I’ve done it! I defeated a Major Test of Strength!  It took nearly everything I had, but it was do-able.  I have clearly made tangible progress in this game!

I have a small celebration involving alcohol.

I want to complete a few of the sidequests at the Stables I recently discovered. There’s a rumor about a pure white horse at a hill nearby, which I would like to check out. But I do not find the name of the hill on the map. It must be on one of the regions I have yet to activate the Sheikah Tower.  Maybe if I venture out I will find it anyway.

I try heading north up the road from Central Tower, to see how far north into central Hyrule I can get.  I see Hyrule castle off in the distance, and it is pulsating with an evil looking purple glow. I’ve seen it off in the distance many times before, but never this close, and I aim to get closer.  The road I am on seems like it was once well traveled, though now abandoned and disused.  I encounter little on the way.  The field are wide open with low, rolling hills, and a tree here and there, a busted wagon occasionally, and little else. 

I make my way easily until I spot a Guardian up dead ahead, patrolling.  Looking to see if I can simply detour around it, I spot a second Guardian to my right, on the other side of the road.  Neither seems to see me for the time being, so I have some time to try to formulate a plan.

I note the grass is fairly tall, and I wonder if, using my stealth outfit, I might be able to sneak slowly past and go between them.  I decide to try, and get about halfway between them before they both spot me, the eastern one first, and then as I duck down below a low ruined rock wall, and begin to equip my weapons, figuring I’ll see if I can take it out, the other one spots me.  The first Guardian is right up against the other side of the wall, and I’m in its blind spot, but I’m directly in line of sight of the other Guardian, and have nowhere to hide. 

I pull out the Sheikah slate and bring up a safe shrine on speed dial, going back to Central Tower.  I head out from there again, this time to the northwest, up to an area called the Giant’s Woods, where I discover a sleeping Hinox. I am not interested in fighting this one right now, and leave him alone, and fortunately he does not stir.  

There are a couple of horses about, and I think maybe if I ride a fast enough horse, I could get by the guardians. These horses look like the more wild type, and so I try to get one.  They’re very skittish, though, and won’t let me get close enough to grab one. I chase them around a while, eventually grabbing one, but not the one I really wanted. There’s also no sign of this supposed pure white horse, either, although that does not surprise me as I am still not in the right spot for that, and still don’t know the location where it is to be found.

I do manage to grab a horse as it runs past me, spooked, and get it under control. I ride it back to the Outskirts and register it, naming it Horstimus.  I want to name it Horstimus Prime, but horses can only have names that are nine letters long. He’s not quite as good as Horsier, in terms of stats, though.

I decide I don’t want to try to ride past the Guardians after all, after talking to the old man about the white horse again, it sounds like it’s more west of where I’ve tried to go so far, and I decide to strike out on foot, as it looks like there’ll be a lot of climbing in that direction.

I go out that way, following a road at first, and uncover a couple more koroks.  And it’s not too long before I am diverting offroad for this purpose, when I detect a shrine nearby.  I start climbing up a mountain, and it starts raining, making it difficult for me to continue up.  I’m very close to the shrine, but don’t see it yet, when I spot what looks like a bomb-able rock doorway, so I head over to it, and blow it up, and there’s nothing — a false door.

I head back the way I came from, and the pinging gets louder.  I continue to move up and to the south a short distance I find the shrine. This one has a bunch of objects that I have to move using magnesis, to swing from platform to platform, and to move massive spiked balls out of my way, and to create a staircase out of some platforms that slide along rails.  It requires a bit of thought, and planning, but is not overly difficult.

I continue further up the mountain, and near the top of it, I find a beautiful cherry tree blossoming, and I get to see it in the last minutes of sunset, and it’s really beautiful.  I just knew that there had to be a blossoming cherry tree somewhere in this world.  In the vicinity of the tree, I find a couple more korok seeds.  

I have an excellent view of terrain that I’ve only been able to see from a great distance from this spot, and so I spend considerable time just looking through my scope, marking shrines on the map, and gauging how likely I am able to reach them.  But I’m really more interested in Towers.

I spot a couple of shrines, and a couple of towers.  I decide to try to glide as far toward the nearest tower, and then run the rest of the way, and not get distracted by anything other than an obvious korok seed or a shrine, and if I don’t see it in plain sight I’m ignoring it.  I get maybe 2/3 or so of the way by gliding, and land right nearby a woman being attacked by a bokoblin. I come to her aid, but she seemed to be handling herself OK.  She gives me something, and tells me about a doctor who makes a monster extract of some kind, which can make better elixirs.  I make a mental note of it and move on, the tower is not much farther.

As I get to the tower, I can see that the surroundings here are a bit more alien than the rest of Hyrule.  There’s a forest off to my left of what appears to be enormous, tree-sized mushrooms. And a massive thunderstorm seems to be permanently above it.  I keep running on, and as I approach the Tower, I can see that it’s emerging from the middle of a flooded shallow lake.  

As I get even closer, I observe that it’s not actually shallow — the shallow parts are actually the flat tops of submerged mushrooms.  The actual depths go far below to what used to be the mushroom jungle floor.  The tower appears to be well guarded, with a number of yellow lizals and three yellow wizzorobes surrounding it on all sides, and with the water, the electrified powers of these monsters are going to make them really tricky to deal with.  I carefully take out the closest wizzorobe with enhanced arrows, finding that the fire ones maybe do the best damage.  If I make the first shot connect, it stuns him, making follow up shots easy to connect.  I end up needing to kill 2 or 3 lizals as well, in order to clear an approach to the tower.

I don’t need to clear the entire area around the tower, thankfully, and am able to get up the tower once I knock out the monsters on the side nearest to me.  The actual climb itself goes smoothly.

At the top, I activate the tower, download the map data, and talk to an odd man who is stuck up there. He studies the bird-men, and is interested in flight.  I tell him about my glider, and he asks me to do a test glide from the tower to see how far I can get. 

I get pretty far, and return automatically, and he gives me 100 rupees for my trouble, but this is after he takes a 20 rupee registration fee.  On the glide, my shrine sensor goes off and so I take a second swing out that way to look for it.  I find it rather easily, and land there and clear it out.  This on is a ball puzzle involving some waterways and a tilting chunk of the room.  It take a while to puzzle out how to solve it, but it’s not too bad once I figure it out.

I had also spotted a small lake a little past the shrine, with a tree growing on an island in the middle of it, and it looks like a likely korok spot, so I head over to it, but it’s actually an abandoned-looking enemy outpost.  It’s dark and raining when I get there, and lightning crashes around continually, and I switch into my rubber gear, and it saves me as a lightning blast clips me one time, but doesn’t do a whole lot of damage due to the protective gear.

I pick up what loot I can from the outpost, and move on.  Morning breaks, and the rain immediately ceases, and it’s suddenly a beautiful clear day.  I’m pretty close to Hyrule Castle at this point, although it’s still a pretty safe distance away. I think about scouting it out, if I can.  I start by scoping it from the top of this ridge that I’m standing on, when I spot what appears to be some kind of flying drone quadcopter patrolling the area from the sky.  Oh hell no.

I don’t like the look of that one bit, and decide that I’m going to stay way the hell away from those things.  I do spot a shrine inside a cave a little further up ahead, and I reason that if I am quick, I should be able to glide right to it, and get in before a drone copter spots me.

I glide in, but as I get closer what looked like a cave from a far distance is actually covered over in rock rubble, and then the whole side of the rock slope that the cave entrance is about halfway up is covered with thorns.  I crash the glider right into the thorns and take damage.  I think they look flamable, and taking out my flame spear, I find that indeed they are.  A little burst of flame, and the brambles burn away, and I’m able to blow up the rock wall and enter the cave, where I find the shrine.

The challenge here is a Minor Test of Strength, another combat trial, and this one I am able to prevail capably.  I do take a little damage in the fight, but I take the shrine Guardian down with relative ease.

By now I have more than enough spirit orbs for another heart container, so I return to Kakariko to pray at the statue for it, and do a fairy run, pulling down 3 more fairies to replenish the ones I’d used up during the fights on this excursion.

I also have over 55 rushrooms, so I transport to the Gerudo stables, to trade them to the old man for the diamond.

That’s enough for now, I think, and wonder what the next logical step should be.