Another week went by and I've been proceeding smoothly, more or less. After freeing all four Divine Beasts, I first went on to collect all the missing memories. And here the strangest things happened with Guardians...
When I moved between the Piper Ridge and the Rayne Highlands, the Guardian Skywatchers patrolling the round rock formations suddenly disappeared when I got close. Well, this was certainly helpful and they re-appeared once I got some distance, but it was still strange. I vaguely remember that something like this has happened before, where there seem to be a variety of glitches with unloading enemies, but I still wanted to take note here.
The game then made up for it at the Sacred Ground Ruins, where two Guardians homed in on me and then it spawned three Stalmoblins and a Yiga in my face... Not nice. I've never been a fan of the randomly spawning enemies, and here is why. Well, it can also get annoying quickly, but the main problem is that it sometimes screws you up in various ways. For example, I might just want to sneak up to an insect or a horse, when suddenly something spawns right in front of me, scaring my target away.
Eyes on the Prize
Now, after a bit of distraction, it was finally time to get what I wanted the most right from the beginning: the Master Cycle Zero. Sadly, even after meeting the prerequisite to start the Champions' Ballad quest, I still had long ways to go, where the first part is easily the worst – the One-Hit Obliterator Trial.
Whoever had the idea for this, I really hope that this person has moved over to the Super Mario team, because I'd hate for any Zelda game to have this again. Tears of the Kingdom will be the better game already if it doesn't have some cheap challenge like this. Now, I haven't died a single time during this playthrough up until this point, only to now get about ten Game Overs, sometimes from the silliest things. After I successfully made the Yowaka Ita Shrine appear at the Forests of Spirits, for example, something just randomly hit me. It looked like thorns that fell off the large tree or so... I'm not sure.
I could have recorded it, but instead I just closed the game to avoid that red X on my map. At least this works really well on the Nintendo Switch, though the Hero's Path mode still behaves weirdly. If you load any previous save game, it will show you the Hero's Path up until that point, as it should be. But if you save your game now and then load this file again, it will have merged any lost progress, where it looks like you were teleporting around. This might be a bug or fully intentional, but it's a mess and it doesn't help to show you pathways that didn't take place, especially if you're using the paths to see what you could be missing.
Then there was this random swarm of bees near the Rohtah Chigah Shrine, where this shrine is still the place that has caused me the most deaths. It's like a miniature version of the Path of Pain, where all it needs is some buzz saws, and maybe someone from the development team got inspired there. Though, even Hollow Knight doesn't give you a Game Over just from a single mistake.
Anyway, it's just not fun. In the very least it shouldn't disable fairies, but ideally such cheap deaths shouldn't be part of a Zelda game to begin with, where the Yiga Clan Hideout is another offender. Suddenly, the Yiga Blademasters can kill you with a single hit and your fairies are on vacation... It just forces you to play the game in a certain way, which seems like the entire opposite of what Breath of the Wild stands for.
My frustrations only grew with the following part and not because any of it was unfair or so (except for the aforementioned Yiga Clan Hideout, but at least this is very short the second time). It was purely because there was still so much to do. You have to revisit each Divine Beast's area and do three trials, complete a Sheikah Shrine after each trial, and rebattle the Blight of that Divine Beast. They meant well with the DLC and wanted to create a substantial quest line here, but it just doesn't sit right with me in the overall picture.
All I wanted was the motor bike and the game now made me literally jump through hoops to earn it. It's fine if you look at the DLC separately, as something that you do in addition to the main game, but in the context of the main game it's a bit much. If you want the Master Cycle Zero, you will have to complete all the main quests around the Divine Beasts, which is already a lot. But then you need to do the One-Hit Obliterator Trial on top, revisit all the Divine Beasts again, and finally clear one last Divine Beast.
It almost makes it feel like it's not worth it and I would enjoy it more as something that you can get earlier in the game. The base game handles things like this very nicely, where every major goal you might set is achievable pretty much after leaving the Great Plateau. There are some prerequisites here and there, naturally, but the main goals don't depend on each other. You can just focus on clearing enough shrines to obtain the Master Sword first, for example. You don't have to free all Divine Beasts to get it, but that's exactly how it is with the Master Cycle Zero and then some. Well, this is what inspired me to write my post about rearranging the Champions' Ballad, so maybe check this one out to see how I would have done things differently with this DLC quest line.
I went with the same order as I did the Divine Beasts before, so I started with Vah Medoh, then did Vah Naboris, Vah Rudania, and finally Vah Ruta. I think that the abilities provide the best utility in that order as well, though they are all very useful and nice to have. With replaying a big, open game like this there is always the danger that the order of things doesn't matter at all, or that you tend to do things in a specific order.
A Link Between Worlds is a great example here. If you're going to replay the game in Hero Mode, chances are that you will start heading for the Swamp Palace first in Lorule, simply because this scores you the Blue Mail and this helps a lot with the extra damage. And out of the three dungeons that give you a Master Ore, Thieves' Hideout is the best choice, because this dungeon also unlocks the Sand Rod. With the other two it doesn't really matter... You see where I'm going with this.
In Breath of the Wild there are a lot of options, but none of them are clearly preferable over the other. Well, of course you will want to start things with the Hateno Ancient Lab to get all the extras for the Sheikah Slate, but afterwards it's really about what gives you the advantage that you want to have first. It's just too bad that the Master Cycle Zero is not part of this equation and essentially requires you to obtain most other advantages first...
Well, out of the extra Divine Beast quests, Medoh probably took the longest, because it made me go deep into uncharted territories with the Hebra Mountains, where at first I was following the Hebra Mountain Climbing Path starting at the Trailhead Lodge. But it's easy to get distracted with lots of Koroks and treasure chests around.
Speaking of chests, I was not amused by how the "Big or Small" trial in the Keive Tala Shrine, after defeating the King Molduga at the east barrens of the Gerudo Desert, is just giving a you a Radiant Shield from its treasure chest after all the effort... This is a big issue of Breath of the Wild, where I really hope that Tears of the Kingdom will fix it somehow: getting weapons or shields on a full inventory.
I don't mind that the weapons can break, because it forces you to not rely on the single good weapon, but I do mind how frequently the game just throws weapons in chests at you when you don't need them. I just want to have the chests cleared, so now I have to open my inventory, drop something, just so I can open the chest again. But maybe I didn't even want a Radiant Shield, because I have enough better shields, so I will have to drop it as well, and then pick up what I had dropped previously. It's so inconvenient and it already would help if I somehow could just quickly drop things.
Maybe the Fuse feature in Tears of the Kingdom will make getting lots of stuff more interesting, but ideally you wouldn't drown in lots of weapons to begin with. I'm at a point where I love it when treasure chests just have Rupees in them, because I do always have use for them... It's upside-down Hyrule when compared to past Zelda games, where there was nothing more boring than finding Rupees in a chest. But it certainly beats getting yet another Royal Bow.
Anyway, moving on to Rudania... roaming the lava lakes around Death Mountain really made me excited to see it without them. There is going to be a lot of new ground here. Oh, wait... I'm just getting distracted again, where I sometimes really had to force myself to focus on the main goals. The more I explore at this point, the less usage I will have for the Master Cycle Zero. Though, you can't use the Master Cycle Zero in the intense heat areas anyway, so it didn't really matter that much. But for Ruta's quests I just went straight over Ploymus Mountain, where I battled the Lynel there for the first time, and ignored the Tingle islands to finally finish all these extra shrines. Almost there...!
Just one more dungeon to go, where the Final Trial might be the most clever of the Divine Beasts with its rotating engine, though Vah Naboris is probably still the most complex. In any case, this is the only part about getting the Master Cycle Zero that I didn't mind... It's a fun little dungeon with great music and a fantastic stage for obtaining the grand prize.
And here we go! Finally! I was around the 100 hour mark when I achieved this goal... And that's way too long for what's essentially just a practical alternative to horses. It might not even make horses obsolete for you, where I've sworn on them during my Master Mode run five years ago and only made little use of the Master Cycle Zero. But I can't say that I still agree with myself from back then...
Cruising over Hyrule
Words will fail to describe how good it feels to finally be able to do this. After over a month of thinking, "it would be nice to have the Master Cycle Zero for this", I can just now summon the thing and go.
And it's as much fun as I remember it to be, where you can just do the craziest things with it. That stunt scene in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, where Tom Cruise jumps off a cliff with a motor bike and then continues with a paraglider? I'm sure that one of the writers was playing Breath of the Wild when he or she came up with that idea... And even though I would never want to do something crazy like this in real life, replicating this stunt in Breath of the Wild just feels amazing.
It's also incredibly resilient while going downhill, where I'm using it in all sorts of terrains just for fun. And this time there will be plenty of opportunities to make use of it, where I haven't even found half of the Koroks yet. In both my Wii U playthroughs I only got it very late, but there's about half of the map left to explore at this point, where I can't wait to do most of it with the bike.
Right now, I'm even convinced that the Master Cycle Zero will be the main reason for me to go back to this game after having played Tears of the Kingdom. Sure, you also will be able to put together vehicles and have fun with those, but this probably won't be as convenient. The Master Cycle Zero can be summoned in most places out of thin air, where it works similarly to the amiibo rune. And you can just hop on it, drive it over the next cliff, and jump off, without a worry in the world...! It's the best!
Survival Trials
Now, there was one more major thing left to do in the game and that was the Trial of the Sword. And I definitely wanted to be done with that before Tears of the Kingdom comes out as well, because that thing can be a bit of a buzzkill. But before that I went to Eventide Island as a small warmup, since this has the same survival gameplay on an empty inventory.
It does let you use a couple of things that are unavailable in the Trial of the Sword, however, where Urbosa's Fury certainly does trivialize the challenge. So, I probably should have played this much earlier to get some thrill out of this, like I did during my first playthrough, but since I now know what's going to happen, I just feel like I need to come prepared somewhat.
However, these type of challenges are a lot more fun in Normal Mode, because they were balanced for that. In Master Mode I waited until the end of the game and with the Trial of the Sword this felt more than justified. In Normal Mode you could theoretically do it right after obtaining the Master Sword, I guess, though having more stamina is very helpful.
The difference between the modes is only really relevant for the Beginning and Middle Trials, however, because the Final Trials (not to be confused with the Final Trial) focus a lot on enemies that can and should be one-shotted. Still, I dread the day where I might replay the Nintendo Switch version one more time in Master Mode, because I still feel uneasy during the whole thing, even though it's technically easy enough in Normal Mode. Well... I had to start over the Middle Trials, because I took some bad hits in the first few rooms, where you are greeted by Ice and Bomb Arrows, so I guess it's not that easy, even in Normal Mode. But for the most part it's fairly doable if you know what you're doing.
During the Final Trials there was this one naughty fairy, who tried to lure me onto the teleporting platform inside one of the resting floors, the second one. If I had gone up there to try and grab it, I might have accidentally activated the portal and warped right to the next floor without getting any of the other supplies... So, I waited for it at the border of the pedestal, but it then just flew off when it got closer to me... Stupid ball! Luckily, you get enough fairies during the Final Trials and I didn't actually need any of them, but it still feels good to have them as a reassurance.
Ready for Real Hyrule Housing
After the Trial of the Sword I also finished the whole Tarrey Town quest. Well, I actually invited Kapson already when I first went for Vah Ruta, but I didn't bother with finishing the wedding up until now...
I'm thinking of just leaving Bolson and Karson right there, because my house is already finished as well. It would be nice to have it truly for myself this time, instead of having these two hoodlums loafing on my lawn.
Anyway, I'm curious how the house creation in Tears of the Kingdom will unfold. It was a nice idea in Breath of the Wild, but all you really do is gather wood, collect enough Rupees, and then talk to people. Mainly the latter. So, I would love to have something more substantial and something where you can bring in your own creativity. Don't get me wrong, I don't need this to turn into Animal Crossing, but somewhere in the middle could be nice.
And with that I think I have finished all the important things. All that's left to do is looking for Koroks and Shrines, hunting all overworld bosses, clearing some more side quests, completing my armor collection, and spending lots of money on Hyrule Compendium pictures. Well, and there are two whole areas that I haven't even touched yet: Faron and the Gerudo Highlands.
Progress:
Divine Beasts: 4/4Main Quests: 20/20- Shrine Quests: 23/42
- Side Quests: 55/90
Memories: 23/23- Towers: 13/15
- Shrines: 92/136
- Koroks: 388/900
- Taluses: 15/40
- Hinoxes: 9/40
- Moldugas: 3/4
- Map Completion: 50.36%
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