Link was in need of a lengthy break, after searching through Hyrule for one too many hours, and with "Link" I really mean myself. I had arrived at a point where the game wasn't engaging any longer and I needed something else, where for the past four weeks I've been playing some other things for fun, like Lonely Mountains: Downhill and my beloved Unreal Tournament series.
But during all this time I couldn't shake this feeling that I'm 15 Korok Seeds away from the 100%. I've completed all Zelda games so far and I don't want this to be the exception, but I also don't want to be doing it just for the sake of completion. Normally, whenever I go the extra mile in games, like beating the Path of Pain in Hollow Knight, I do so because I'm looking for an excuse to keep playing the game, because it's fun and I want to keep playing it. If I grow bored of a game, then I don't want to force myself to keep playing it. And unfortunately I grew bored of Tears of the Kingdom.
Partly, this is my own fault, because I was replaying Breath of the Wild right before Tears came out, where this ended up being too much of the same. And I'm also too stubborn about not using any guides for my first playthrough, which is only adding to the tedium. But I also blame the game itself for being too much filler and for re-using the same world, which is something I don't want Nintendo to ever do again.
Anyway, with this post I want to briefly talk about what I've been up to before I went into the break, at least from what I can remember. It's not much, but it just makes sense to have this cut, before I return to the game, hopefully refreshed and with less of an urge to play 20 year old arena shooters instead.
Ominous Omelets
Part of the frustration also came from making only very slow progress with the remaining things that I want to achieve, like filling the recipe book and powering up my horses. Even though you can reliably get new recipes from Lurelin, it takes way too long and I have yet to get something that I actually need for Malanya.
I'm still trying to figure out the "Vegetable Omelet" and I thought that maybe I can understand things better by making more of the "Cheesy Omelet", which is the only omelet variant I have so far. For that one I needed to use an egg, Hateno Cheese, but also rock salt, and a mushroom. You leave any of this away and you will only get a regular omelet for some reason. It doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever and replacing the cheese with vegetables didn't get me to the desired result.
It also doesn't help that it only records your last five creations for any given food, which makes it impossible to track in the game what you've already tried. The bright side is that you don't actually have to cook absolutely every variant to complete the thing. And to emphasize this again, it's really a me-playing-blind-problem, because you can just look it all up on the internet and quickly be done with it. But if you don't use any guides or tools, then this doesn't seem to be intuitive in any way, at least not to me.
At least I'm getting closer, because most of the stuff that's still missing in my recipe book are the different toasty and frozen things, which should be easy enough to fill out. I hope.
Bird Watch
The other big remaining goal is filling the compendium and here I have successfully completed the "Creatures" section, where it was just mostly all the different pigeons and sparrows that were missing. With most other animals you might spot them from a distance and then may seize the opportunity throughout the game, but these birds are hard to spot and easily scared, so that you really have to put in a conscious effort to look for them and then use your full stealth gear to be able to take a good picture. I also remember how finding all the sparrows was quite annoying in Breath of the Wild...
At least, for the most part I could just refer to my completed compendium from the previous game as to where to find them, but the Rainbow Sparrows still gave me a hard time. I remembered that you can encounter them on the bridge at Lake Floria, but I accidentally scared them all away and then for some reason they never respawned. I was also going in circles on the Guchini Plain again, bringing back flashbacks of my beetle hunt, because the Hyrule Compendium in Breath of the Wild states the "Faron Grasslands" as a possible location. Of course these "common locations" can be misleading and it may also be different for this game... So, after searching through the Faron area for an hour or so, I got nothing and turned the game off in frustration.
The game must have felt this, though, because the next time I loaded my save file, it spawned a Rainbow Sparrow right at my feet. Problem solved! (Luckily, I was wearing the full stealth gear.) And once you have them in your compendium, it's enough to find them again for a better picture:
Now, what remains are the materials, where I'm missing more than half of them, but that's mainly just all the horns. I have all of them in my inventory, so this will be nothing more than some mindless busy work, which also contributed to my loss in motivation. So, I will have to find a way of making this more interesting...
They Still Haven't Reached Their Friend...
My next goal will be finding the last Koroks, where this has slowed down tremendously, from discovering over a 100 between updates to now only a hand full. Well, it was only really three since last time, which includes a double, where my hope is that I have more of those Backpack Koroks left, because this would lower the number of how many I actually have to find.
They tend to be in the middle of nowhere, which also explains why I keep missing them, because I'm usually drawn towards points of interest... Now, as already mentioned, 15 Korok Seeds are left for me to find. I will probably document the final 10, just to highlight the ones that have escaped me for such a long time.
Progress:
- Korok Seeds: 985/1000 (+3)
- Recipes: 135/228 (+3)
- Map Completion: 99.39%
Compendium Completion:
Creatures: 92/92 (+13)- Materials: 58/126 (+6)
No comments:
Post a Comment