Saturday, November 19, 2011

Skyward Sword Blade Journal, Day 3

Day 3 is over and I didn't come far actually... oh, wait, at first I have to raise the spoiler flag:

SPOILER WARNING! DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T BEATEN DUNGEON 3 YET!





Well, I've crossed the Lanayru Desert and beaten the Lanayru Mining Facility dungeon. Overall it felt all very similar to the first two dungeons. First you need to find a number of things that can be found using the dowsing feature before you can enter the dungeon. The dungeon itself felt very similar to the dungeon design of Twilight Princess, very linear progressing and there's some kind of main feature, something only this dungeon has. I swear that the first three dungeons all have the same layout! It's just one floor and there are two crossroad rooms in the center and you travel on a linear path through these rooms. It's the exact same dungeon layout in all three dungeons and it feels bland. It's like the dungeon creator never heard of z-axis or non-linear design. The boss fight one the other hand again was a lot of fun and quite creative. The only remarkable difference this time was that the dungeon item wasn't protected by a miniboss. The dungeon just didn't have one. That's the only variety that we got in the formula. However, this was the last dungeon before the midway story point, so I expect that the game's formula now heavily changes for the next dungeon. I guess at first you will have to deal with the Silent Realm in an overworld, then you will enter new territories in the same overworld, get to a new dungeon, etc. But the two dungeons after that will probably just copy the new formula again.

However, my next destination is the Sealed Grounds. I bet that this is where you fight the giant black thing for your first time... can't wait. No, actually I thought that this was the perfect point to take a pause and end this day, because I'm not really looking forward to the seal fight or the Silent Realm. Ugh.

But the Lanayru Desert was a lot of fun, I love the time warp idea and the music rocked. First I struggled with those electric sword Bokoblins (which look really cool), but this is what you get for only using your sword all the time. Drop a bomb on them with your Beetle or stun them with your Slingshot and these fights get easy. But before you could enter the dungeon, Fi totally spoiled a puzzle for me. I think it would have been much smarter, if you had to figure out the door mechanism by yourself. Looking at the map to see the pattern is genious! That would have been such an awesome "damn, I'm so smart!!"-moment. But instead Fi just pops up and tells you the solution right away. WHAT THE FUCK?! You can always ask her for advice, if you're stuck, so there's no reason that she tells you puzzle solutions like that! Come on! What's next, does she kill the bosses for me?!

The Lanayru Mining Facility itself wasn't too much fun. But I like the new Gust Bellow item, though I wonder what upgrades it might hold. I struggled with the Beamos, because I had problems performing a stab attack. Sometimes I accidently move the Nunchuk at the same time, which results in a vertical spin. Or sometimes it just doesn't recognize the move. It's aweful if you get your ass kicked by a Beamos, just because the controls failed on you. But the boss fight was great, again. It was the scorpion from the Forest Area demo, but unlike in the demo he would also hide himself below sand, so that you had to look for him with the Gust Bellow. But the overall fight was a nice battle of claws vs. sword.

Well, I've only beaten one dungeon today, because I again spent a lot of time with side questing. I farmed different items like Bird Feathers in the woods for two hours! But it was worth it. Additionally to the Quick Beetle I now got the Tough Beetle, which seems to be the final Beetle upgrade. It seems like you can get two upgrades per item in the Scrap Shop. I also fully upgraded a Bomb Bag and a Seed Satchel. And I bought the 7th pocket from Beedle. However, he also sells the last pocket for 1200 Rupees. I think it's somehow boring that he sells three of the four Adventure Pouch upgrades, but on the other hand this lets you get all pockets early in the game, if you're willing to farm Rupees.


And I thought about a nice strategy to get some easy money, but it failed. At the entrance of the Deep Woods, there's this hornet nest. You can easily collect all of them with your Bug Net, go back to Faron Woods, reenter Deep Woods and do the same again. The Deku Hornets are probably the easiest to catch insects and you can get 99 of them in no time. So, I thought about selling them. But you can't just sell treasures and insects like in the Nintendo DS Zeldas. The guy who buys them only looks for three different types per night. So you have to go to bed and sleep through many nights until he's finally looking for the item you want to sell. I don't know, I slept through 8 nights or so until he finally asked for hornets. And then he bought them for only one Rupee per hornet, which is not sufficient. So, my genious money making plan turned out to be a total failure. I really don't like the way how you sell your stuff. It should be more convenient, like in the Nintendo DS Zeldas. Why does Nintendo make a step back like this? They done it right before, why change it into something ineffecient?

You don't take any damage from falls... it makes sense in Skyloft, where you get catched by knights, but in dungeons you should at least lose one heart... there should be some punishment for potentially killing Link.

I still can't buy the blue potion, I guess it's for air when you dive. And I can't get the Slingshot upgrade because I'm missing Dusk Relics. I have no idea where to get them.

No comments: