Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Tingle Bottles can give you Missable Figurines

I always try to complete my Zelda games for 100% and missable items can be a problem with that. In The Wind Waker there is a series of figurines, which you can miss by not taking their pictographs at the right time or before they are gone from the game. This is them:

  • Big Octo
  • Cyclos
  • Phantom Ganon
  • Helmaroc King
  • Tetra
  • (Kogoli)
  • Wizzrobe King
  • Puppet Ganon

Kogoli was probably the worst, because he's just some random insignificant Rito, who disappears from the game for no apparant reason after Medli awakens as a sage. Easy to miss. But it might be that they patched this... I'm not sure.

Now, The Wind Waker HD made collecting the missables already easier with the "Carlov Sigil", which tells you whenever a pictograph is good enough to be accepted by Carlov. The best examples, where this is useful, are probably Cyclos, Puppet Ganon, Helmaroc King or Tetra. To makes sure you really get these figurines you had to go through quite some extra trouble. For example in the case of Cyclos you have to take a pictograph of him, manually travel to Forest Haven, get the figurine and then you can finally fight him to get the Ballad of Gales. With the new sigil function you can just get the Ballad of Gales right away. Or with the Helmaroc King and Tetra you had a long series of cutscenes and events and you weren't allowed to save until Carlov accepted both figurines. If you screwed up one of the shots, you had to start over at the Helmaroc King boss battle and go through everything again. But now you have assurance that your pictographs work. So, you can save normally, play the game normally without worrying about the figurines.

Of course not everyone knows what figurines are missable and most people probably won't bother with collecting them until the end of the game. But not missing anything requires knowledge of what can be missed and not forgetting about the figurines, etc. So, if this is your first time playing the game, you will most likely miss something, unless you're really thorough.

But The Wind Waker HD even has a solution for this! You can actually use pictographs from Tingle Bottles - you can give them to Carlov and he will accept them as they were yours. Which makes sense. And if you're lucky you find a bottle with a pictograph of Tetra or any of the other missable figurines.

I on the other hand would even go as far and be the nice guy, who sends out Tingle Bottles with pictographs of all eight missable figurines. Missed Cyclos? Here you go! I'm really starting to like the whole Tingle Bottle Miiverse thing. Of course it's basically Zelda Instagramm and you will get lots of crab, but it obviously can be useful as well. And collecting the bottles seems to be fun.

And wonder, if Knuckle is actually still missable. He was missable in the GameCube version, if you tried to get his figurine last. Carlov ended his work, whether you got Knuckle's figurine or not, because if you don't have a GameBoy Advance or the cable, you would never have been able to complete your figurine collection. I'm pretty sure that they will fix this, since you don't need any extra hardware for Knuckle anymore, but I will test this. Because if he's still missable that way, even Tingle Bottles can't help you.

9 comments:

K2L said...

I despise when a game has permanently missable stuff, more so when it's difficult to figure out why.

angelday said...

I think if you completed the temples without taking photos of Medli and Makar, you won't be able to find them any more.

angelday said...

Quick correction: Makar is in the boss room later, playing the cello.

TourianTourist said...

Same with Medli. The list in my post should be fully accurate. ^^

angelday said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
angelday said...

Where is she idling? I went back to the boss room and it seemed empty.

TourianTourist said...

Huh? As far as I remember, she should be there... She is certainly not missable or else we would know about this already.

angelday said...

@K2L: "I despise when a game has permanently missable stuff, more so when it's difficult to figure out why."

During a normal gameplay you'd be certainly missing a couple of photos. I think the designers of the game intended this as an additional incentive for the second quest.

angelday said...

She is there, I was looking for her at the wrong dungeon (Dragon Roost).