Saturday, November 11, 2017

Breath of the Wild EX Log, Entry 4

Back to it! It's been quite a while since the last post, four months to be exact, mostly because I was busy playing Metroid instead. So, I haven't played much Breath of the Wild in the last months, only a few hours, where looking for the remaining Koroks was still the main objective... A pretty boring task, to be honest. I don't want to start Master Mode, before I'm 100% done with Normal Mode, but collecting all Korok Seeds certainly takes its time, so somewhere along the way I lost motivation and focused on the Metroid series instead.

What brought me back all of sudden was the new free update with the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 promotion content, as well as the new Divine Helms for the Champion amiibo. I got all of that already, so it wasn't much to do, but it was still something. I hope that Nintendo will keeps such small updates going in the future, especially if they keep improving the ways of integrating the new content.

I like the way, how this time they provided the "randomly placed chests" for the DLC armor. How they handled this in the Master Trials DLC was mediocre at best, but here you get these new red falling stars with red chests, where looking for them was quite fun. It also didn't feel like they just retroactively added something to the game, which wasn't there before, it felt more like a new event. So, this was handled very nicely.


Luckily, I didn't have to look for other falling stars, because I already met the required materials to upgrade all four Divine Helms, which I just got from the amiibo via scam saving. I got most of them on my first or second try, so it didn't take too long. To upgrade them all to four stars you need four Star Fragments and eight Giant Ancient Cores, but luckily I got more than plenty of both already.

Originally, I hoped that they would be a nice replacement for the Ancient Helm, which looks too goofy, but they all aren't really that better. I probably like the Vah Ruta Divine Helm best, but it's still weird, especially because Link keeps this terrible mullet with all of them... Yikes.


If they just could give the Diamond Circlet the "Ancient Proficiency" set bonus and I would be happy... I also dislike, how they ended up after the first DLC armor in the sorted Armor Inventory. Why not put them next to the Ancient Armor, where they belong? They did so with Sheik's Mask and the Fierce Deity set, which are amiibo items as well. And those are the kind of small details that Nintendo keeps getting wrong with the armor.

The new Salvage gear isn't that great either and certainly not for everyone's taste. The clipping errors with shields are especially bad:


Anyway, to fill my Armor Inventory for now, I bought duplicates of both the Hylian Hood and the Hylian Tunic. One advantage is that for now I can't get any additional armor pieces from amiibo that I would just sell anyway. Saves me a little inconvenience, even though they sell for 125 Rupees. The other advantage is that it rearranges the Armor Inventory so that the Climbing set is located on one page with everything right next to each other. Since this is the set I use the most often, I want switching to it to be as quick as possible.

Well, I used crimson dye one the duplicate hood and I already had dyed the original tunic in a navy color. What's interesting here is that these combinations actually match. So, the crimson Hylian Hood looks good with the original color Hylian Tunic:


And the navy dyed Hylian Tunic fits the original color Hylian Hood better. That's just a small observation, overall I haven't put much effort into dyeing yet, otherwise I only dyed Gerudo set into red and the Tunic of the Wild set into crimson as an homage to the classic red tunic (where the crimson Hylian Hood also looks very nice in combination).


About the Koroks, I found about twenty more since my last post. There were a couple remarkable ones that surprised me and even got me puzzled for a while. One was at Cora Lake, where you have to complete some block patterns, but I couldn't find the required magnetic block. It's somewhere under the water cleverly hidden in a blind spot, so you have to look very carefully to find it. Some people even believe this Korok to be a bug...

Following the way north I also discovered two new types of Korok puzzles, which I haven't seen before.


Since I had to travel to Hebra Peak for the Xenoblade chronicles 2 side quest, I used the opportunity to place my Travel Gate on top of the peak as a scatter point from where I dive into the snowy mountains to look for Koroks. My instinct told me that I was missing many Koroks there and they didn't betray me... I quickly found four of them and I will continue my journey through this region.


Current Progress:
  • Koroks: 772/900
  • Map Rate: 89.41%

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