The Twilight Princess HD Diaries, Day 3

Another day, another province. Let's jump right into the missing bugs from Lanayru:

• the insect at the lake house
• one of the four insects in the river tunnel
• one of the two insects in the center of Zora's Domain
• the insect in the upper floors of Zora's Domain

It feels more similar to the insects in Faron, where they also reduced some groups and removed an insect behind a house. The one at Zora's Domain saves quite some time, though, because you don't have to climb all the way up again.

Next step was the carriage escort and that didn't go so well for me, because the new Epona controls are too stiff. I've never ran into so many walls in a video game before. The horse gets stuck where it can and actually naming it "Error" was the most appropriate thing I could have done. That doesn't look good, after they've claimed to have improved the controls and after Zelda U apparently has very good horse mechanics...

To make things worse, I fell off into Kakariko Gorge when I tried to shoot the bombing Kargarok. It came too close, the explosion threw me off the horse and into the abyss. Now let me tell you what happens: you have to restart from the beginning at the Hylia bridge... Imagine my outburst of frustration.

Still, besides all the issues with Error, I decided to do some sidequests before the Lakebed Temple, mainly getting all the Bomb Bags. Without warping you have to navigate Hyrule in its entirety and make some good use of the horse. In order to get back up to the Zora River for example, where the rafting minigame is located, you have to get shot up by the cannon, go to the northern field and there use the entrance to Zora's Domain. It's quite the detour compared to simply warping up there, so usually you would want to beat Lakebed Temple first and get the ability to switch between forms and to warp.

Getting the Master Sword is the point where the game gets the most fun for someone like me, who enjoys exploring and sidequests. The sidequests are not really well distributed throughout the game – as soon as you get the Master Sword you can do a majority of them. You don't have to, but I personally like to do sidequests as early as possible. So, that's why I usually spend many hours collecting bugs, hunting Poes, exploring grottos, fishing, opening Malo Mart and so on, before going to the Gerudo Desert.

And... now also collecting stamps! You may not like Miiverse Stamps, but I think that this was the best addition to the game. It's much more enjoyable than just collecting Rupees and it actually now gives you a good reason to search for many of the treasure chests, including the ones in hidden grottoes. There they even added new chests for the stamps, instead of replacing the content of existing ones.

But even with the replacements I'm quite happy, especially because they addressed some chests that required some serious amount of backtracking. One was the chest up the water spiral in the east part of the Lakebed Temple. You can't get it right away, because you don't have the Clawshot yet, and then you have walk up the entire water slide with your Iron Boots on to get to the chest, which takes some time. On GameCube and Wii I always got mad that I went through the trouble for just some Rupees and not a Piece of Heart. But here you get a stamp and added something to your collection.

It's the same in the Goron Mines. There is one chest, where you also need the Clawshot, so you have to return to the dungeon at a later date. And now this chest gives you another stamp, which is nice... So far I got 14 stamps already, forming the word ANHOFWYKCUS in that order. There's also some stamps that you can get outside of chests from people, so there's a little more variety to it than I originally expected.

And it's not like losing any Rupees hurts. You still get tons, for example from Agitha, who I had a beautiful moment with. There's this scene, where she slowly walks home from the field south of Hyrule Castle Town during dusk. You can walk slowly right beside her and Link and Agitha will keep looking into each others eyes while romantically walking next to each other, which looks funny, because they are not looking, where they are going. However, their passionate stare walk got interrupted by a nasty Poe, which could do as it pleased, because I couldn't turn into a wolf in front of Agitha...

Apropos Poes, to my surprise they actually did add a Poe Counter to each region of the map. So, they did improve the Poe hunting somewhat. I haven't found the Ghost Lantern yet and so far I didn't get spoiled about its location, which is exciting. I have some theories, where it could be. I'm thinking that you either get it from Jovanni after a certain number of Poes (it's not 10 though) or you might find it somewhere, like the cave at Lake Hylia or Arbiter's Grounds. If you already know where it is, please don't spoil it in the comments. Finding this new item will be one of my goals for tomorrow.


I'll finish this post with the Zelda U easter egg, where they put some E3 2014 images into the store at Hyrule Castle Town. However, as soon as Malo Mart takes over, those pictures are gone. Probably a way of saying that Zelda U is expensive stuff...