...EGG.... The Egg on the mountain calls!
All Instruments of the Sirens are in my possession yet again and the Wind Fish is waiting for me to play them, where today is the day of truth. What will be that last Chamber Dungeon challenge? What will be the reward for getting all Secret Seashells? Will the Wind Fish's Egg be expanded? Well, I wasn't going to enter the latter without all Heart Containers and Secret Seashells, so the first two questions had to be answered first.
Mainly, this was about finding the last four Secret Seashells, hidden somewhere on the entirety of Koholint Island. But at first I had to revisit the Trendy Game and Chamber Dungeon one more time...
Normally, after finishing the Turtle Rock dungeon, if you had done all side quests up to this point, all that was left to do was going straight for the Wind Fish's Egg to finally finish the game. You would potentially be missing one final dialogue with Marin then, however, who doesn't re-appear in Mabe Village until after Level 8.
So, it's a good thing that the Trendy Game lures you back into Mabe Village after every single dungeon now, including this one. The Pokey figurine was next, so as expected the BowWow figurine is the last one you will get. However, it wasn't available just yet, but this would be explained later...
Back to the Chamber Dungeon, "Ticking Clock" was yet another "Drabland Challenge", which can be cheesed easily by only using the simplest rooms possible. And I have to say, when Dampé gave me that Heart Container (together with the "+Wallmaster Effect" and a unique Great Fairy chamber in the Turtle Rock visuals) I felt a wave of disappointment overcoming me. "That was it?! Really? This whole Chamber Dungeon thing is really ending on a low note..."
And then Dampé saw the massively underwhelmed expression in my cute, little Toy Link face and threw a set of twelve more challenges at me! All of them with interesting new layouts and challenges. It's like the twelve challenges before were just the basic tutorial and now I'm really hyped to get into the world of Chamber Dungeons for real. I'm guessing that this is even where I will be getting the rest of the plus effects as additional rewards.
This is also ideal for people, who don't really care for the whole feature. You do the basic challenges in the easiest way possible to get all the rewards, like the Fairy Bottle or the Heart Container, and then move on. But if you liked the Chamber Dungeon so far, there's a whole set of new dungeons for you to build.
Also, the tabs on the top would allow for one more space... Maybe challenges via DLC or free updates are really planned here? I mean, this is the perfect hook for new content. It shouldn't be hard to set up a challenge and the possibilities are near endless by adding both more challenges and chambers. (Update: the additional tab space is used for the amiibo dungeons, of course.)
Apropos chambers, the Turtle Rock dungeon added over 30 of them, easily topping the Color Dungeon. But it always has been quite "chambery" and offers lots of different mini-boss rooms. They even put in one chamber for the Dodongo Snakes under the balcony, where the room has a staircase added to it.
But this makes it even weirder that the Dodongo Snakes from the Key Cavern didn't get such a chamber. There is no basic variants of the Dodongo Snakes in my list of chambers, only the chambers from Level 6 and 8, which have a different room setup (holes and the balcony). Might this be a bug? An oversight? I will have to investigate, because except for this chamber absolutely all occurrences of mini-bosses in the dungeons are available. This seems rather weird.
And it seems like a majority of the Chamber Stones are coming from the shop... There was just now a 4th, a 5th and a 6th one, again 1280 Rupees each. The first one gave me a three way variant of the cracked floor chamber from Level 8. The second a variant of the Dodongo Snake balcony chamber above. And I'm still too poor for the 3rd, but I'm starting to think that each chamber stone is actually connected to a specific chamber, because why else would these not be for purchase earlier...?
Well, there is lots and lots to do here now for later, but with the last Heart Container in my hands I wanted to focus on the last four seashells first and then finish the game, before I do more dungeon building...
But for the moment I also thought the last seashell will be gotten from one of the new challenges, because in the memories on the map there was only one seashell icon at Dampé's Shasck and it was aligned with the left of the two Heart Pieces there. So, it looked like there could be another one. And so far every mini game had exactly two Pieces of Heart and Secret Seashells to offer, so why not the Chamber Dungeon?
But after clearing two of the new challenges I realized that you are "only" getting 300 Rupees from each. It would explain why the shovel icon on the tab is golden, even. This is perfect for buying the expansive Chamber Stones in the shop, but it won't help me with my seashell problem. I wanted to save the remaining Chamber Dungeon stuff for later and not do it all now in false hope of getting what I was looking for. So, I checked with a guy, who already had all 50 seashells, to confirm that the last seashell isn't with Dampé to finally move on...
Four Secret Seashells had completely evaded me during my playthrough and it's now time to honor them properly. After all I didn't spot any of them while re-exploring Koholint in its beautiful HD rendition.
If you're using the Seashell Sensor, finding all Secret Seashells might be trivial, save for the ones you get from mini-games. But I haven't been doing this. I turned that thing off the moment I got it and I was doing the seashell search the old school way.
And this really took me back to my childhood and the joy of discovering all these Secret Seashells, while exploring every nook in the island with the utmost curiosity. Back then the internet was still in the fledgling stage, so you didn't have instant access to guides or whatever. I knew that 20 Secret Seashells would give me the better sword and I knew that there were more than 20 Secret Seashells to find, but I didn't know how many there were in total, because once you get the better sword, all other seashells will vanish or be turned into 20 Rupees.
So, one time I decided to not get the sword and see, how many I can find, where I turned Koholint completely upside down. I cut every bush, I dug on every spot of earth, I rammed into every tree, I dived in every square of water, I did everything imaginable. Because I loved the game, because it was entertaining for a child and because I really was curious what I could find. This is probably even why I had this fixation on certain spots, like that one rock here or that one rock there, where finally they've added some seashells to them in the remake, over 20 years later.
Now I was back to doing basically the same, since looking for changes in the environment or inspecting old spots of curiosity only got me so far. Well, it got me far enough, but I had to up the ante. Other than digging around and ramming trees like a madman, I even had all kinds of silly ideas for new locations, like the following...
Spoilers, it wasn't any of that. And the first missing seashell was so simple, it even hurt a little...
The next two weren't as simple, so I did the good old "stare at the map and see where the gaps are"-method that worked well enough for the Koroks in Breath of the Wild. So, which areas didn't really have any Secret Seashells to offer? In my case those were a big chunk of the Toronbo Shores, the Goponga Swamp, the cemetery, a big chunk of the Tal Tal Heights, inside the walls of Kanalet Castle, south of Animal Village, the area around the hen house and the Signpost Maze.
I've checked the swamp and cemetery multiple times already, where both are host to dungeons, so it's not like they were in the dire need for something new. And Kanalet Castle already has the five Golden Leaves, so I didn't really feel like there would be anything else there either (I still went looking). Well, I was more lucky in a certain spot...
For me it was also clear that there needs to be a new Secret Seashell in a tree somewhere, because the Pegasus Boots didn't really get anything more to do in the remake. And during this "investigation" I've also noticed how certain trees now drop Rupees, if you ram into them (multiple times), including one of the bigger palm trees in the Yarna Desert. That one seemed rather random, because the other palms wouldn't move one bit. But this gave me an idea...
So, only one Secret Seashell remained. I found the previous three seashells pretty quickly, it only took me about one or two hours, all without the Seashell Sensor. The last one then has completely eluded me for an entire evening, where I've went through the entire overworld multiple times without finding anything. Most of the above list came from desperate attempts at finding something...
I even allowed myself to briefly use the Seashell Sensor in certain locations, just to be sure that there really isn't anything there... But there was seemingly nothing else to be found in the environment, so I've came up with the conclusion / theory that it's either hidden in some dungeon or gotten from a NPC as a reward for something.
Well, I had previously complained that they didn't hide any new Secret Seashells in dungeons, especially since you now can dig in a majority of them, but in hindsight this felt like a bad idea from my end. What if you're missing on seashell, but can't find it – like in my case? They can't expect you to run through all dungeons again with the Seashell Sensor, so they'd have to be inside treasure chests, which are marked on the dungeon map via the compass. I even went back to the Eagle's Tower to finally open that chest with the Secret Medicine just to be sure that they didn't change it to a seashell or Chamber Stone, but it's just another blocked chest.
(I actually would have replaced these three Secret Medicines with Chamber Stones by the way. This would have been much better than cramming them all into the shop. And it would feel more rewarding to get these three chests.)
But after the first of the final four seashells I kept having this feeling that the last seashell would be very similar. And something kept bringing me back to the same area as seashell #1. Call it intuition...
Happiness overcame me. Finally I got all Heart Containers and Secret Seashells. Finally I could move on to the final boss. And finally I would learn what you get for all 50 Secret Seashells in the remake. It had to be something special. It had to be an upgraded Spin Attack or another bonus for the L-2 Sword. I couldn't just be another Chamber Stone, right? Right? Of course not...
In any case, I was now ready to finally finish the game... to play all eight Instruments of the Sirens for the first (but certainly not last) time in this overall quite excellent remake.
And yes, I briefly had hoped that they might do something with the Wind Fish's Egg "dungeon". If there was a place, where they could be creative and add to it, without changing what was already there, then it would have been this place. You basically just keep jumping down holes, where between the infinite maze and the Nightmares there could have been another floor or two.
One quick look at the map destroyed this hope, however, because there wasn't one. And if there's no dungeon map, then there's no dungeon...
But the final boss fight got altered on some ends to make it harder, which is cool. The slime in the beginning is now much more aggressive, while Ganon does a better job at blocking with his Trident. The Lanmola doesn't die from one hit of the Magic Rod any longer and the same goes for Deth-I and the Boomerang. The Boomerang still works, but it takes quite a few hits to kill it. Oh, and it doesn't just play the mini-boss music in this part any longer, there is a new track here.
So, time to destroy Koholint once more, this time with an anime cutscene. Those were quite nice and faithful to the original. And I fully expected this to happen after the intro, where they translated the cutscenes from the GameBoy version into this anime style. But if they are going to remake the Oracle games, there will be more of these anime cutscenes for sure, because there those also happened in the middle of the game.
The secret ending at 0 deaths seems also to be in tact, so it's the same old, just prettier.
Interestingly, the game now lets you save after finishing it. Like with Breath of the Wild, this adds a star to your save file and it refills all your Magic Powder, Bombs and Arrows for some reason. You can also get the BowWow figurine then, which means you can't fully complete the game until after the final boss...
There also don't seem to be chambers for the Wind Fish's Egg. It would have been interesting to use the Nightmares as one, but you can replay those anyway at any time. The most interesting part about the boss chambers is that those let you replay bosses, which you couldn't do in the original.
In any case, there will be one final post, which will probably deal exclusively with the Chamber Dungeon. Now that I'm done with the main game, I will fully focus on that. And I'm probably missing a couple more Chamber Stones as well.
Mainly, this was about finding the last four Secret Seashells, hidden somewhere on the entirety of Koholint Island. But at first I had to revisit the Trendy Game and Chamber Dungeon one more time...
After Dungeon Routine
Normally, after finishing the Turtle Rock dungeon, if you had done all side quests up to this point, all that was left to do was going straight for the Wind Fish's Egg to finally finish the game. You would potentially be missing one final dialogue with Marin then, however, who doesn't re-appear in Mabe Village until after Level 8.
So, it's a good thing that the Trendy Game lures you back into Mabe Village after every single dungeon now, including this one. The Pokey figurine was next, so as expected the BowWow figurine is the last one you will get. However, it wasn't available just yet, but this would be explained later...
Back to the Chamber Dungeon, "Ticking Clock" was yet another "Drabland Challenge", which can be cheesed easily by only using the simplest rooms possible. And I have to say, when Dampé gave me that Heart Container (together with the "+Wallmaster Effect" and a unique Great Fairy chamber in the Turtle Rock visuals) I felt a wave of disappointment overcoming me. "That was it?! Really? This whole Chamber Dungeon thing is really ending on a low note..."
And then Dampé saw the massively underwhelmed expression in my cute, little Toy Link face and threw a set of twelve more challenges at me! All of them with interesting new layouts and challenges. It's like the twelve challenges before were just the basic tutorial and now I'm really hyped to get into the world of Chamber Dungeons for real. I'm guessing that this is even where I will be getting the rest of the plus effects as additional rewards.
This is also ideal for people, who don't really care for the whole feature. You do the basic challenges in the easiest way possible to get all the rewards, like the Fairy Bottle or the Heart Container, and then move on. But if you liked the Chamber Dungeon so far, there's a whole set of new dungeons for you to build.
Also, the tabs on the top would allow for one more space... Maybe challenges via DLC or free updates are really planned here? I mean, this is the perfect hook for new content. It shouldn't be hard to set up a challenge and the possibilities are near endless by adding both more challenges and chambers. (Update: the additional tab space is used for the amiibo dungeons, of course.)
Apropos chambers, the Turtle Rock dungeon added over 30 of them, easily topping the Color Dungeon. But it always has been quite "chambery" and offers lots of different mini-boss rooms. They even put in one chamber for the Dodongo Snakes under the balcony, where the room has a staircase added to it.
But this makes it even weirder that the Dodongo Snakes from the Key Cavern didn't get such a chamber. There is no basic variants of the Dodongo Snakes in my list of chambers, only the chambers from Level 6 and 8, which have a different room setup (holes and the balcony). Might this be a bug? An oversight? I will have to investigate, because except for this chamber absolutely all occurrences of mini-bosses in the dungeons are available. This seems rather weird.
And it seems like a majority of the Chamber Stones are coming from the shop... There was just now a 4th, a 5th and a 6th one, again 1280 Rupees each. The first one gave me a three way variant of the cracked floor chamber from Level 8. The second a variant of the Dodongo Snake balcony chamber above. And I'm still too poor for the 3rd, but I'm starting to think that each chamber stone is actually connected to a specific chamber, because why else would these not be for purchase earlier...?
Well, there is lots and lots to do here now for later, but with the last Heart Container in my hands I wanted to focus on the last four seashells first and then finish the game, before I do more dungeon building...
But for the moment I also thought the last seashell will be gotten from one of the new challenges, because in the memories on the map there was only one seashell icon at Dampé's Shasck and it was aligned with the left of the two Heart Pieces there. So, it looked like there could be another one. And so far every mini game had exactly two Pieces of Heart and Secret Seashells to offer, so why not the Chamber Dungeon?
But after clearing two of the new challenges I realized that you are "only" getting 300 Rupees from each. It would explain why the shovel icon on the tab is golden, even. This is perfect for buying the expansive Chamber Stones in the shop, but it won't help me with my seashell problem. I wanted to save the remaining Chamber Dungeon stuff for later and not do it all now in false hope of getting what I was looking for. So, I checked with a guy, who already had all 50 seashells, to confirm that the last seashell isn't with Dampé to finally move on...
The Final Four
Four Secret Seashells had completely evaded me during my playthrough and it's now time to honor them properly. After all I didn't spot any of them while re-exploring Koholint in its beautiful HD rendition.
If you're using the Seashell Sensor, finding all Secret Seashells might be trivial, save for the ones you get from mini-games. But I haven't been doing this. I turned that thing off the moment I got it and I was doing the seashell search the old school way.
And this really took me back to my childhood and the joy of discovering all these Secret Seashells, while exploring every nook in the island with the utmost curiosity. Back then the internet was still in the fledgling stage, so you didn't have instant access to guides or whatever. I knew that 20 Secret Seashells would give me the better sword and I knew that there were more than 20 Secret Seashells to find, but I didn't know how many there were in total, because once you get the better sword, all other seashells will vanish or be turned into 20 Rupees.
So, one time I decided to not get the sword and see, how many I can find, where I turned Koholint completely upside down. I cut every bush, I dug on every spot of earth, I rammed into every tree, I dived in every square of water, I did everything imaginable. Because I loved the game, because it was entertaining for a child and because I really was curious what I could find. This is probably even why I had this fixation on certain spots, like that one rock here or that one rock there, where finally they've added some seashells to them in the remake, over 20 years later.
Now I was back to doing basically the same, since looking for changes in the environment or inspecting old spots of curiosity only got me so far. Well, it got me far enough, but I had to up the ante. Other than digging around and ramming trees like a madman, I even had all kinds of silly ideas for new locations, like the following...
- in one of the many drawers
- in one of the many phone booths
- in the spider hole near Kanalet Castle
- from talking to the ghost again
- under a tombstone
- under one of the new wooden boxes for the Hookshot
- from one of the Zoras, because they are much trickier to kill now
- from playing the Ballad of the Windfish to one of the bunnies
Spoilers, it wasn't any of that. And the first missing seashell was so simple, it even hurt a little...
The next two weren't as simple, so I did the good old "stare at the map and see where the gaps are"-method that worked well enough for the Koroks in Breath of the Wild. So, which areas didn't really have any Secret Seashells to offer? In my case those were a big chunk of the Toronbo Shores, the Goponga Swamp, the cemetery, a big chunk of the Tal Tal Heights, inside the walls of Kanalet Castle, south of Animal Village, the area around the hen house and the Signpost Maze.
I've checked the swamp and cemetery multiple times already, where both are host to dungeons, so it's not like they were in the dire need for something new. And Kanalet Castle already has the five Golden Leaves, so I didn't really feel like there would be anything else there either (I still went looking). Well, I was more lucky in a certain spot...
For me it was also clear that there needs to be a new Secret Seashell in a tree somewhere, because the Pegasus Boots didn't really get anything more to do in the remake. And during this "investigation" I've also noticed how certain trees now drop Rupees, if you ram into them (multiple times), including one of the bigger palm trees in the Yarna Desert. That one seemed rather random, because the other palms wouldn't move one bit. But this gave me an idea...
So, only one Secret Seashell remained. I found the previous three seashells pretty quickly, it only took me about one or two hours, all without the Seashell Sensor. The last one then has completely eluded me for an entire evening, where I've went through the entire overworld multiple times without finding anything. Most of the above list came from desperate attempts at finding something...
I even allowed myself to briefly use the Seashell Sensor in certain locations, just to be sure that there really isn't anything there... But there was seemingly nothing else to be found in the environment, so I've came up with the conclusion / theory that it's either hidden in some dungeon or gotten from a NPC as a reward for something.
Well, I had previously complained that they didn't hide any new Secret Seashells in dungeons, especially since you now can dig in a majority of them, but in hindsight this felt like a bad idea from my end. What if you're missing on seashell, but can't find it – like in my case? They can't expect you to run through all dungeons again with the Seashell Sensor, so they'd have to be inside treasure chests, which are marked on the dungeon map via the compass. I even went back to the Eagle's Tower to finally open that chest with the Secret Medicine just to be sure that they didn't change it to a seashell or Chamber Stone, but it's just another blocked chest.
(I actually would have replaced these three Secret Medicines with Chamber Stones by the way. This would have been much better than cramming them all into the shop. And it would feel more rewarding to get these three chests.)
But after the first of the final four seashells I kept having this feeling that the last seashell would be very similar. And something kept bringing me back to the same area as seashell #1. Call it intuition...
Happiness overcame me. Finally I got all Heart Containers and Secret Seashells. Finally I could move on to the final boss. And finally I would learn what you get for all 50 Secret Seashells in the remake. It had to be something special. It had to be an upgraded Spin Attack or another bonus for the L-2 Sword. I couldn't just be another Chamber Stone, right? Right? Of course not...
Wind Fish's Egg
In any case, I was now ready to finally finish the game... to play all eight Instruments of the Sirens for the first (but certainly not last) time in this overall quite excellent remake.
And yes, I briefly had hoped that they might do something with the Wind Fish's Egg "dungeon". If there was a place, where they could be creative and add to it, without changing what was already there, then it would have been this place. You basically just keep jumping down holes, where between the infinite maze and the Nightmares there could have been another floor or two.
One quick look at the map destroyed this hope, however, because there wasn't one. And if there's no dungeon map, then there's no dungeon...
But the final boss fight got altered on some ends to make it harder, which is cool. The slime in the beginning is now much more aggressive, while Ganon does a better job at blocking with his Trident. The Lanmola doesn't die from one hit of the Magic Rod any longer and the same goes for Deth-I and the Boomerang. The Boomerang still works, but it takes quite a few hits to kill it. Oh, and it doesn't just play the mini-boss music in this part any longer, there is a new track here.
So, time to destroy Koholint once more, this time with an anime cutscene. Those were quite nice and faithful to the original. And I fully expected this to happen after the intro, where they translated the cutscenes from the GameBoy version into this anime style. But if they are going to remake the Oracle games, there will be more of these anime cutscenes for sure, because there those also happened in the middle of the game.
The secret ending at 0 deaths seems also to be in tact, so it's the same old, just prettier.
Interestingly, the game now lets you save after finishing it. Like with Breath of the Wild, this adds a star to your save file and it refills all your Magic Powder, Bombs and Arrows for some reason. You can also get the BowWow figurine then, which means you can't fully complete the game until after the final boss...
There also don't seem to be chambers for the Wind Fish's Egg. It would have been interesting to use the Nightmares as one, but you can replay those anyway at any time. The most interesting part about the boss chambers is that those let you replay bosses, which you couldn't do in the original.
In any case, there will be one final post, which will probably deal exclusively with the Chamber Dungeon. Now that I'm done with the main game, I will fully focus on that. And I'm probably missing a couple more Chamber Stones as well.
Current Status:
- Secret Seashells: 50 (24 old + 26 new)
- Pieces of Heart: 32 (12 old + 20 new)
- Chambers: 190
- Chamber Stones: 11
- Challenges Cleared: 14
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