August is over and I didn't get much play time in Tears of the Kingdom during this month, because of QuakeCon and two weeks of vacation. It's been about four weeks since I've beaten the final boss and since then I was mainly focused on some side objectives, where I've returned to the Faron region and explored the remainder of the Depths, collecting a ton of armor pieces on the way.
That One Cave
Beating the game throws you back to the prologue and afterwards I couldn't help but wonder what happened to all the amazing caves that were shown in the first teaser trailer at E3 2019, where Link and Zelda went spelunking together with a Dondon. Especially that huge underground bridge surrounded by Luminous Stones has ingrained itself into my memory and it would be a huge shame if all of that got cut during development...
But what if those caves are still part of the game somewhere? They may not be, but I don't know yet and the place where it made the most sense to look for them was Lake Floria. It's where you can find the Dondons, as well as a good amount of Zonai architecture and Luminous Stones. And I hadn't fully explored the area yet, so my next goal was set...
This led to the side quest with the three Hinox brothers, who now dwell inside caves, where the ones around Lake Floria are quite large, but they were not what I was looking for. They also weren't much fun, where I especially dislike that one long cave going through Mount Floria with all the thorns, for example, because it's not exactly convenient to explore.
And I ended up in this particular cave multiple times as I kept running in circles, because my Sensor+ kept pointing at a chest below the Kamah Plateau and none of the caves in the proximity seemed to lead to it. For a moment I was even worried that there are unobtainable chests once more. But I suppose that Tears of the Kingdom is too polished for that and I've ended up missing another cave down at the Floria River, the Sarjon Woods Cave, which leads right to the Rubber Helm.
It seems to me that the radius of chests for the sensor is dependent on their content. The more important the content of a chest, the larger its radius will be... With unimportant chests it usually doesn't start to beep until you're quite close, while in this case the radius was so large that it had me confused. Chests enclosed in rocks now are also not picked up in certain cases, which happens quite often in the Faron region, with those square holes in the ground.
By now I always have the Sensor+ turned on and set to chests, because there aren't that many compared to Breath of the Wild and I do enjoy having the highlight, which is giving you a small goal for the moment. I haven't used the Korok Mask yet, though, only in some rare instances where I wanted to check that I didn't miss anything in certain suspicious places.
With no luck at Lake Floria, I moved on to the Zonai Ruins in the jungle. It's such a good fit that they've placed the Thunderhead and Mineru's quest above this area, but otherwise there isn't much going on in relation to the Zonai here. I've noticed that some of the dragon statues now have a yellow horn on top, which looks to be conveniently fallen sky debris and seemingly acts as a reference to the Light Dragon (or Farosh). There are multiple ones and there might be more to this, but I have yet to find out...
But I was able to complete the quest around the Goddess Statues at the springs, because I can now safely approach all three dragons. You receive the Goddess Sword for your efforts, which is called "White Sword of the Sky" for some reason, and I couldn't possibly think of any more fitting reward here, even if it doesn't make sense canonically. This used to be the basis for the Master Sword, after all, where technically you could have multiple Master Swords now.
In Breath of the Wild it didn't really matter, because all the amiibo items were essentially "out of this world" and not even part of Hyrule Compendium. They were just some extras for the fan service. But now that these items are integrated into the main game, it raises some questions...
Back to spelunking, another cave that had me confused was the one at the Pagos Woods, where you can see a Bubbulfrog behind a grate in the wall. I was playing this in the middle of the day and it was so bright that I didn't see the big hole in the ground at the other end of the room, so I've ended up looking for another entrance or cave, some place where I potentially could use Ascend to reach the frog. But I was just making things more complicated than they were, which tends to happen... And overall Tears of the Kingdom is a game where I prefer to play it when it's dark, especially when I'm in the Depths. There are several things that I've missed there because I didn't see them, but we'll get to this.
These excavation sites in the area are cool, though, because they look different than your usual caves, come with a puzzle, and essentially feel like small shrines.
Next up was the Herin Lake South Thunder Gleeok, which has made its presence known for quite some time, much like the Flame Gleeok on the Bridge of Hylia. It's a huge "don't come any closer" sign and the flat terrain around it make more difficult to fight, because there is nothing that you can use for protection or as a platform for jump shots.
This is where Mineru comes into play, because you can always leap off her Construct to deliver those slow motion headshots at any time and almost everywhere. It's without a doubt the most useful and convenient of the sages, next to Yunobo, even if I never use the robot itself to fight. (Keep in mind that I don't have Tulin yet, so my ranking may change later.)
Anyway, after exploring the entire area for hours and even asking Satori for guidance, I gave up looking for the mystery caverns that may not even part of the game... Instead, I went down into the Depths (at Meda Mountain) and decided to sweep the place.
Dark Drablands
You could say that the Depths are essentially the Dark World to the Hyrule from Breath of the Wild, in the most literal sense. It's mirrored on the z-axis and very dark, at least before you've activated the Lightroots. This is very impressive for a game world of this size, if you think about it, but I stand by my opinion that it's a lot of filler and too much repetition.
It still can be fun, nevertheless, where it has proven for me to be the perfect gameplay for the evening hours, where I may just want to do, but not to think. "Mine, kill boss, mine, kill boss, open chest, go for the next Lightroot." It's busywork and a bit dull, but still entertaining somehow.
By now I've also made a tour through the northwest corner of the Depths, so that I have activated 119 Lightroots in total, which should be all but one. The last one is where Master Kohga is still hiding, in the Abandoned Mine below Rito Village. This feels like a fitting finale for when I'm to finally go there and I knew this in in advance, because the game tells you at some point that this particular place can't be accessed from within the Depths, only from a chasm above.
Now, while exploring the Depths I've usually been too focused on the map. It's easy enough to spot the Lightroots and once they've uncovered the surrounding areas, I search for details on the map. Groves, mines, enemy camps, and certain boss arenas are the points of interest, where I tend to navigate from one to the next.
This has the disadvantage that I'm avoiding "blank" areas, even though you may find other bosses and things there, potentially. Another example are the "Dark Skeletons", where so far they didn't really stand out on the map. Luckily, the Hebra Dark Skeleton is hard to miss and this led me to the Cap of the Wild, where all three skeletons have a part of this armor set and I made it my mission to collect them all right after.
I really didn't expect the Tunic of the Wild to come back, because this was the ultimate reward in Breath of the Wild for clearing all shrines. But since you can also collect the tunics of the other heroes, I guess it makes sense to have this as well, and I still expect that Tears of the Kingdom will have something of its own at the end.
And I love the descriptions about how these items fit you perfectly. It's still weird how they have ended up there, since they should have been in the possession of this Link at some point... Or this game takes place in some timeline where Link never bothered with completing all 120 Sheikah Shrines.
I was super impressed by the gigantic statue at the northeast cliff of what's essentially the "Tanagar Depths Plateau". It looks like a giant golem and gave me this uneasy feeling of first going into the Depths in the early game.
Ironically, I was wondering at this point about what happened to the four-eyed Bargainer Statues. I know that you can ask the statue at Lookout Landing for where to find its brethren, which only costs 100 Poe Souls, but I never did this and wanted to find them on my own. But I had been almost everywhere in the Depths and didn't encountered another one since the Central Mine, or at least I wasn't aware of it. I swear, I've climbed all over the big statue, but I didn't notice its face or any interactions... And I'm super blind when going through the Depths, which is why I stick to the map most of the time.
At least I noticed that I hadn't been to the Wellspring of Courage south of the Construct Factory yet, so I decided to check this place out to not only find some hidden altar, but also what I've been searching for...
It was much easier to see here and now I knew what I have to look for, where I've went back to the giant statue at the cliff to realize my mistake from earlier, as well as the other two springs. I've been to both the Wellspring of Power and Wisdom, but I didn't notice the statues there the first time, because they are a bit in the dark. (As I said, I'm super blind in the Depths, but my screen's brightness is well adjusted, I swear...)
And I suppose that it doesn't really matter how easy they are to see, because there is a pattern here: these statues are all below the big Goddess Statues on the surface, at the three Springs, the Temple of Time, and the Forgotten Temple. Knowing this makes it actually very easy to find them all...
Well, I didn't miss anything important, only the remaining parts of the Dark Link set and the Depths set. The latter was designed after these statues and makes you look like some horror monk:
The set bonus gives you "Gloom Attack Resist", where so far the armor only protected you from environmental gloom and I thought that its four extra hearts would now also be taken into account while fighting gloom enemies. But that's not the case... I suppose, it only reduces gloom attack damage a bit or so.
To my surprise, one more Bargainer Statue was missing for a total of seven, but since you can actually spot the statues on the map it didn't take me long to find the last one at the plains... It's below the new Goddess Statue at the Great Sky Island, where I hadn't connected the dots there. This scores you the Champion's Tunic, which is now called the "Tunic of Memories", another armor item that I didn't anticipate to return in Tears of the Kingdom, since there already are the Champion's Leathers.
It seems that almost all armor items from Breath of the Wild are returning... The exception are the items from the Great Plateau, where now you have the "archaic" set of tutorial items. (It's even noteworthy how you now get warm pants instead of a warm top for the early snow sections.) Both the Gerudo Vai set and the Ancient Armor set also seem to be gone now, since they don't serve their original purpose any longer, and I haven't found the Nintendo Switch Shirt yet, but everything else still seems to be there.
As for what's hidden in the Depths, I should only be missing the Cap of Time by now. Since the Tunic and Trousers of Time were found in some mines, I'm guessing that it's the same for the cap, but I have no clue where it could be. There should be an old map pointing at its location, however, so I will find it eventually... It may even be at the last large mine, where Kohga is waiting.
It's also the only amiibo armor item that I'm still missing, next to the Hero's Shield and the Sword of the Six Sages, or "Dusk Claymore", how it's now called. I'm putting all the amiibo and Champion weapons in my house, by the way, where I've purchased all three weapon stand containers for this. But it adds up perfectly. One container is for the Champion weapons, one for the two-handed amiibo weapons, and one for the one-handed amiibo weapons.
These amiibo weapons all feel a lot more special now, which is silly, because I could always just scan the amiibo to get more of them. But I like the fact that you had to earn them.
Progress:
- Sage's Vows: 4/5
- Sage's Wills: 13/20
- Main Quests: 16/23
- Side Adventures: 50/60
- Shrine Quests: 24/31
- Side Quests: 92/139
- Memories: 14/18
- Towers: 13/15
- Shrines: 124
- Lightroots: 119/120
- Caves: 113/147
- Korok Seeds: 384
- Schema Stones: 10
- Yiga Schematics: 32
- Old Maps: 15
- Map Completion: 68.82%
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