After I landed in Hyrule the last time, I quickly noticed that Tears of the Kingdom has read my save data from Breath of the Wild. But since I still had unfinished business in the previous game, at least on the Nintendo Switch, I decided to go back and clear everything before truly starting with the new one. It might not have been necessary, because the Picture of the Champions seems to be the only relevant thing, but I still needed to be done with this to put my mind at ease.
You can read all about my journey and motivations to complete Breath of the Wild one more time here, where I have been very busy with this the last days and where I basically lost almost a week of playing the new game. There is a lot of "could have, should have, would have" in this whole scenario, both from my side and Nintendo, but it is what it is and I'm glad that I've done this, so I can finally enjoy Tears of the Kingdom to its fullest, without having to worry that I might miss anything, even if this has caused a delay.
It feels a bit similar to Age of Calamity, where I wanted to play the entire game from start to finish in its "Very Hard" difficulty, which significantly slowed down my progress, so it took me months to finish the game. But I guess for you, my readers, this isn't a bad thing, because you don't have to worry that I will already be too far ahead. Right now I will be catching up to you, instead of the other way around...
This puts me in a vulnerable position for spoilers, of course, but I trust you that you will let me find out things on my own, even if I keep asking questions where the answers are already known to you, because you've experienced and seen the things that I have yet to experience and see for myself. Bear with me here, please!
While researching the whole topic of connectivity between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, I already ran into some spoilers, however, mostly about what special horses there are. And I've also learned that the fabrics are seemingly the only exclusive thing from amiibo now, where everything from Breath of the Wild can now be found normally in the game. But that's good to know. Using amiibo always felt like cheating, but you had to do it if you wanted a complete armor collection in Breath of the Wild. You can still get the things from the amiibo, but it's more like a shortcut. And that's another change I can appreciate, because getting everything from the amiibo was a hassle and using amiibo gave you too much good stuff.
I suppose it's even the same with transferring your horses from Breath of the Wild, where you can get some really good horses right from the beginning this way. But at least you've earned those in the previous game... except for Epona, she's still here by cheat.
Anyway, without further ado, let's dive right back into Tears of the Kingdom! You have to start a new game if you want the game to read your latest save data from Breath of the Wild, so I was back to the beginning. Luckily, I noticed the connectivity right after finishing the tutorial, so that's really the only big part I had to redo. And in this post I will be discussing the tutorial once more, where it wouldn't be me if I didn't try to do things differently the second time...
The Great Sky Reset
This time I wanted to experiment as much as possible to see how linear the whole tutorial really is. Well, it certainly was designed to be linear, I can tell you that much, but there are some possible "sequence breaks" to get the abilities out of order. The intended order is to first get the Ultrahand from the Ukouh Shrine, then use it to reach the In-isa Shrine and obtain Fuse, and then work your way towards the Gutanbac Shrine, where you finally will get Ascend. This way you're going counter-clockwise around the island that is all about time, where there is a bit of an irony to this, if you ask me.
At first, I tried what you can do without the Ultrahand, which isn't much. I suppose, you can theoretically swim to the In-isa Shrine with enough stamina, but from there you will still need the Ultrahand to make any progress at all, so you will have to return there anyway. (There is a nice shortcut for this, where you have a tunnel that leads below the big body of water, which I had missed the first time.)
There is nothing you can do to reach the Ascend Shrine without the Ultrahand, I think, because the ice walls surrounding it make it impossible to climb without any help. I've already tried this the last time and you're basically just running into a dead end...
So, I gave up on doing anything without Ultrahand, because this wasn't much fun, but I still wanted to obtain Ascend before Fuse to have done something differently. And this is entirely possible, where there are two ways of doing it, at least from what I have discovered.
One way is to simply run past by the In-isa Shrine and ignore Fuse. However, the whole section between Fuse and Ascend was heavily designed to make advantage of Fuse. There are the stronger Captain Constructs, where you want to fight with fused weapons. And there are the mining tunnels, where you don't have enough Bomb Flowers for everything, so you'd want Fuse to make yourself some mining tools. It's not really fun to play this part without Fuse, so I don't really recommend it.
Instead, I chose a different path to the Gutanbac Shrine, where you approach it from the northeast, the dead end mentioned above. The exact spot on the map is this one:
The whole river section there is surrounded by ice walls, so no climbing allowed at all. But with the Ultrahand I could just make myself a "ladder" by attaching a total of five felled trees to each other:
I could even re-use this right away to climb the top of the sky island, which is where you can find the Ascend Shrine:
And done! There are even some advantages to this... You will find the warm pants right after and there are various places with hidden treasure chests or Koroks, where you will need Ascend, which saves you some good amount of backtracking. Meanwhile, Fuse isn't really relevant for obtaining anything, so it's okay to get it last.
After acquiring Ascend, it's probably best to just use the gliders to go back to the start, but just for the sake of experimenting I went over the whole island clockwise. This led to the terrible experience between the Fuse and Ascend Shrines, where I probably wouldn't ever want to do this again. But in general this a good approach if you want Ascend early. It was also fun to do, where the possibilities with the Ultrahand are absolutely amazing.
I also have yet to talk about the Zonai devices, but I'm glad that those Gacha machines don't contain exclusive things, but orbs for carrying these devices everywhere, where I'm sure that this will come in handy, especially with the rockets.
Koroks in the Sky
Not only have I been experimenting, I have been exploring the sky islands in the tutorial much more thoroughly, where I have found more than twice as many Koroks than the first time. Last week I only found six, now it was 15, which is the exact same amount that you could get in Breath of the Wild without leaving the Great Plateau. I might still be missing some, but I was satisfied with that number.
And I noticed some new things during my search. Like, you can do your best Tony Hawk impression and shield surf on those rails, which works both on the minecart rails and the bigger single rails. Your shield also doesn't go kaputt during this, so it's very handy. Yes, we've already seen this in one of the trailers, but I have completely forgotten that this is a thing until now.
Also, you can attach the Koroks with a backpack to anything... And this is the ultimate recipe for shenanigans, where those poor little guys will probably have to suffer all over the world right now. During the one puzzle on the sky islands, someone in the room suggested to stick him to the front of the minecart, where the guy above ended up as a bumper... I still feel sorry, but it was hilarious.
I saw that "Korok" was trending on Twitter the other day, and now I know why... This is pure meme potential. Attach them to a rocket, crucify them, use them as parts for your tanks... I've been missing out here.
Sorry, little guys! I love you!
Now, off to find hundreds more... I'm excited to see what else you can do with this and in general it was fun to search for them on the sky islands, where I'm a lot more positive right now about Koroks returning than I was in the beginning.
During the last four and a half days I've been collecting more than half of the Koroks in Breath of the Wild,
that's around 100 Koroks per day! You would think that I'm completely
tired of this, but it's quite the opposite. I'm excited to search for
new ones and it's still as much fun as it was the first time. This
actually surprises even myself, because initially I wasn't too happy
about seeing shrines and Koroks return in the same fashion. But there is simply a certain charm to them. Yihaha!
Dive or Drop
Overall, I think the tutorial section of Tears of the Kingdom is well designed, though I still like the the open nature of the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild a lot more. This felt a bit more like your traditional linear Zelda game, where you need the item from one dungeon to get to the next. There are some merits to that, of course, and it does a good job of teaching the more intricate abilities.
And there are lot more secrets to discover, which is always something that I appreciate. And that's mostly thanks to the layered world, where in Breath of the Wild you never really found one area below another, except for maybe some small caves. Well, I wish the map actually let you look at certain layers in their entirety, instead of obscuring them, but it's still better than the map in Bayonetta Origins...
There was also one thing that I needed to do differently and that's the end part where you jump down. Last time, I suppose, I simply walked off and dropped down, where your survival was up to chance. But if you press the jump button, then Link will dive down head first and you are able to enter the sky diving mode, where this was without a doubt the intended way.
It was still confusing, because prior to this point you could only do this on specific spots by pressing A. And now you can just do it at any cliff with jumping... But the game doesn't teach you this properly. And I hate how there doesn't seem to be a way to go from dropping into diving. If you accidentally walk off somewhere, Link will simply fall and very likely die. I've tried all the buttons, but couldn't figure this out yet. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but if not then this will be a huge oversight, where you're basically stuck with waiting for Link's inevitable death. (Update: I was told that you can change modes with the R button, which works just fine... So, I obviously shouldn't play with the Pro HUD mode yet, but it's so much prettier.)
Progress:
- Shrines: 4
- Korok Seeds: 15
- Bubbuls: 4
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