The Twilight Princess HD Diaries, Day 5

Today was dungeon crawling day. I've played through Snowpeak Ruins, Temple of Time, City in the Sky and Palace of Twilight. After you've gotten out of the big sidequest phase, there isn't much to do after the individual dungeons. Their items only give access to little possibilities throughout the overworld.

I still enjoy this part quite a lot, because the dungeons in Twilight Princess were all very well designed. It feels "cool" to play through them, except maybe City in the Sky, where I feel like the dungeons drags on too much. And I mindlessly hate the part with the hands chasing the Sols. Ugh. I've played this probably a dozen times already, but I still get nervous during this part. At least the second half of the dungeon then feels very rewarding with the glowing Master Sword, which sadly only gets used in this dungeon.

Overall I remember pretty well, how this part of the game let me down, when I played the game for the first time in 2006. Even though Twilight Princess easily became the longest and largest Zelda game, it still didn't feel satisfying to me. Like I'm running too quickly from one dungeon to the next without any real substance. Like something is missing. It felt like the game was already over, before it really started, which is also probably due to its heavy linearity.

Anyway, Snowpeak Ruins certainly was my favorite of the lot, because the idea of a ruined mansion being a dungeon felt pretty original, at least for Zelda. And I like the puzzles with the cannon, as well as the sliding block puzzles. Those are always pretty smart.

However, the snowboard minigame afterwards gave me some trouble. It feels somewhat rigged, because even if you're in 1st place, you have to score a certain time in order to win or else your opponent will run you over at the last second, which looks so super unfair. I forgot that holding down A actually slows you down, so I was too slow and got beaten by Yeto several times, before I realized my mistake. It's also another one of these wall hitting minigames that Twilight Princess has. It's like the steering in the entire game is broken.

But with a little practice all the minigames are possible. I even got a perfect score of
61454 points in the fruit balloon popping challenge. I thought that this might give you another stamp, which would have been evil, but it's just the same 200 Rupees that you got in the original for this.

I'm really looking for stamps right now, because currently I have only 41 out of 50. Unless Hyrule Castle and the Cave of Ordeals somehow give you the entire rest, I'm missing something somewhere. Which would be exciting, because this means that there are some treasure chests, which I haven't found yet. I do have completed the alphabet though, I'm mostly missing some of the faces and other stamps. And there even quite some places, where I thought that I would find stamps there, but didn't, like any of the hidden chests inside Lanayru Spring. Or I thought that I would get many stamps during the owl statue search, but this wasn't the case - there are still just Rupees in most of these locations.

But there at least has been a significant improvement in that part: the checkmarks on your map for the owl statues will be removed one by one during your search. In the original versions they would stay forever and clutter your map with red dots... and I always wished that they would go away.

Now, the Rupee situation has improved significantly over the original game, but there are still quite a lot and I wasted hundreds of them. Especially giving Agitha the remaining Golden Bugs hurts a lot. You have to give them all to get the larger wallet, so you can finally carry more Rupees. So, she basically gave me around 1000 Rupees, which didn't fit into my wallet, and then she finally expanded my wallet, so it could carry 1000 more Rupees... What an evil girl...! It's not alone her fault though, the main issue lies within the fact that there's nothing to spend Rupees on, except for wearing the Magic Armor, which only really might be useful in the Cave of Ordeals.

And the new Bottomless Wallet won't be available until you got the light infused Master Sword in the Palace of Twilight. That's when the final section of the Cave of Shadows gets unlocked. Both the Cave of Shadows and the Cave of Ordeals will be my goals for tomorrow, as well as completing the final dungeon.

Right now I got:

• 57 Poes (Cave of Ordeals has the last three)
• 41 Stamps
• All Golden Bugs
• All Heart Containers

Fun fact about my Heart Piece hunting: there's this one piece that I seem likely to forget at Hyrule Field in Faron Province. It's right up there in one of the trees and it's one of the first Heart Pieces that you can get, but I've missed both the last time that I've played through this game and now. I had 42 Heart Pieces before going into the Palace of Twilight and I wondered, where I was missing one piece, thinking really hard all over the map, where I could have missed something. I don't want to use the Fortune Teller, because it feels like cheating and I should have memorized all the locations anyway. My inner compass then was drawing me to Faron Field, I just felt like I was missing something there and at night you could even see the Piece of Heart from a long distance... I guess, it's just untypical for Heart Pieces to sit in trees, which is why I keep missing it.