It's been two weeks since my last update and I haven't really played much in this time, because I lacked motivation. My need to play this game is slowly returning, though, which is good, but overall it feels weird to have this happen – multiple times – with a new Zelda game.
Well, it also took me the entirety of 2017 to complete Breath of the Wild, which included some breaks, but there I was waiting for the DLC and I was finished with the main story and all shrines after two and a half months. The rest of the time was exclusively spent looking for Koroks, but I'm not even at the point yet where I'm actively searching for Koroks in Tears of the Kingdom, I only pick up the ones I find on the way...
Anyway, this Adventure Log has been a story of distractions and this post won't be an exception. So, I haven't been to the Wind Temple yet, but I've been to the last stable, completed a variety of armor sets, and also collected the last Tears of the Dragon... So, there were a couple more milestones achieved before going into the Rito storyline.
Well, at first I've been back to Zora's Domain for a bit, because I didn't have the Lightscale Trident yet and was looking for all the different Zora weapons to take pictures of them. And completing Hyrule Compendium will also be another massive task that is still waiting for me. I try to cover what I can during my adventures, but I haven't even started getting into all the materials yet. It's insane.
A Tale of Tails
After postponing this for weeks or maybe months, I've finally entered Rito Village to find that the daughters of Kass have grown quite a bit, which is nice to see. They even have taken over the shops in the village.
So, you can just buy the full Snowquill set here, like you could in Breath of the Wild. Since you get the Archaic Warm Greaves during the tutorial on the Great Sky Island, there was obviously no immediate need for me to get any cold-resistance armor, especially since you can also use Zant's Helmet to protect yourself from freezing effects. It's still useful, because you can enhance it, unlike those items, where I definitely should have done so a bit earlier.
But I had to "quickly" go and enhance it first, which is where the distractions began again... At this point in the game you want to have three stars on everything, because of the silver enemies, but in this case you need nine Fire-Breath Lizalfos Tails. Should be easy enough, right? Set your sensor, go around Death Mountain with an ice weapon, and you should be done quickly...
Wrong! I've spent an entire evening to collect these things. Problem is that obtaining the tails from Lizalfos is entirely luck-based, so you won't always get one from defeating them. At first it went pretty well, where I got one after another. But then I've defeated 20 Fire-Breath Lizalfos in a row without getting a single one. This made me even speculate that there is a limit for how many you can get, which won't refill until the next Blood Moon. But maybe I've just been super unlucky...?
Worst thing is that you need 30 more for the four-star enhancements... This was also the case in Breath of the Wild, but I don't remember things being so bad there, at least not for this. And I've fully enhanced every armor twice in that game.
In general, I'm completely against such luck-based drops, no matter what. Grinding the same enemies over and over again, just in the hopes of getting an item that they may or may not drop, shouldn't be a thing in any video game. It's despicable. The Wind Waker did it right, back when such materials were introduced, because you could always get the goods with your Grappling Hook. Then Skyward Sword came and messed it all up...
To be fair, there are certain materials that you will always obtain from defeating enemies in Tears of the Kingdom (and Breath of the Wild), like the horns or in case of the Lizalfos the talons. But there are still the rare drops. With the next game they really should simplify this whole system. Make it one material per enemy and make it always drop. Done.
Now, the above screenshot sums up the better part of that evening. Zeldra and Dinraal keep appearing above Death Mountain and since you also need a lot of dragon parts for all the armor enhancements, especially for the neat stuff, I've kept approaching them to feel at least somewhat productive with my time.
To Tabantha Tundra
I've ended up being so frustrated by the effort that it took to enhance the Snowquill set that I've built a hoverbike and just flew it right into the massive storm cloud above Hebra... In the least this offered an impressive sight of what's still to come with the flying Rito ships.
Well, you just crash when you try to go inside the cloud... I'm not sure what I was expecting here, but it was worth a try and I mainly did it for fun. Ultimately, I ended up in the northern end of the Tabantha snowfields, because the geoglyph and the tower there were acting like beacons in the dark snow storm.
With this particular tower you don't have to do anything to activate it, which was interesting... But I suppose that it acts as a bit of a challenge should you come from the ground, because it's on top of one of these giant mushroom-shaped ice rocks.
It might also be a tower that you're supposed to find early in the game, since the game is sending you to the Rito first, but there will be quite the difficulty spike nearby, where I fought my first Frost Gleeok in the game. Looks cool.
There are some ruins there for a relatively easy fight. And having enhanced the Snowquill set to three stars also helped a lot here, so the effort from the other evening wasn't for nothing. This was also to clear the path, where I've already spotted the golden horse to the north, but I thought it best to first defeat the dragon before I go and tame that special horse:
I already knew of its existence from my Zelda's house in Hateno, where you can find a picture of this horse, but it actually turned out to be Zelda's new horse, as a replacement for the white one. It's not even too great, the starts are worse than Epona's:
With a golden horse I expected everything to be on five stars by default... Of course you can now increase these stats via Malanya, but I haven't bothered with horses in quite some time. Bringing the Stable Trotters to the last Great Fairy, Mija, was one of the few exceptions, because you need to pull their wagon with something.
Otherwise the Zonai vehicles, first and foremost the hoverbike, have made horses fully obsolete. It also doesn't help that the Ancient Bridle and Saddle don't seem to have returned. Or at least I haven't found them yet...
But there were a couple of milestones achieved here, where I'm slowly but surely making progress towards the finish. Bringing the golden horse to the Snowfield Stable completed the line of side adventures with Penn, where you have to investigate rumors about Zelda around all the stables. So, this finally scored me the Froggy Hood and enhancing the entire set to two stars grants you the "Slip Proof" set bonus, where you can climb on wet surfaces without limitations.
Finally! It's been what now? Six and a half years? This is how long I've wanted this ability, though it would have been a lot more useful in Breath of the Wild, where this armor set should have been in that game already. There were also some moments in Tears of the Kingdom where I was craving this, but in the skies and the Depths you don't need it at all and if all fails you can use Zonai devices. I also won't have any use for where I'm going next, which is mainly the snowy areas...
The other milestone is finally having access to all four Great Fairies. I don't think I will pay Mija a second visit, however, because her position is super inconvenient, where you have to travel quite a bit from the nearest shrine and there are also Bokoblins on horses in your path. It's like she still doesn't want any visitors, where I found her location in Breath of the Wild much more convenient. But in both games Cotera is my go-to fairy.
In addition, I got the Monster-Control-Crew Fabric from participating in the battle at Hebra, which was the last one I had to attend. So, a lot is coming together in this final area, in my case.
Phantom from the Past
Another goal in this area is the North Lomei Labyrinth, where the sky labyrinth is called "North Lomei Castle Top Floor" for some reason. Seems like they forget to update the translation here. You have to melt your way through various ice masses in the surface labyrinth, which is new, but I like how ice now melts so much faster than it did in Breath of the Wild. Making a fire almost instantly makes it pop.
There is also a permanent Gloom Spawn near the center, where I guess the idea is to have it chase you through the labyrinth, but those days are over. It's even worth it to take the fight by now, because the Demon King's Bow does 60 damage for me and it has great range, so it's really good for fighting Gleeoks.
This encounter also gave me hope that the reward will really be worth it in the end, where my idea was that the completed Evil Spirit set will protect you from the Gloom Spawn somehow, but that doesn't seem to be the case...
It's pretty much the same thing as in Breath of the Wild, no enhancements and disguise only for stal enemies. Though, I suppose the increased bone damage might be much better in this game, since the bone weapons all have pretty good damage values.
Maybe, just maybe, this set also prevents the random Gloom Spawns from spawning, since you're basically disguising yourself as a fellow Phantom Ganon. I've only tested it with a permanent one and it's still chasing you. And to be fair, it wouldn't even make much sense, since the Phantom should know its kind. Even if you could prevent the spawns, the fact that you cannot enhance it would only mean that everything else will kill you. So, I don't think that this was worth the effort, not in the slightest.
Tears to the Past
Two more geoglyphs were waiting for me around the Tabantha Tundra, which were the last ones. I first got the "Ganon" at the Northern Snowfield and finally the "castle" at the Tabantha Hills. Impa kept telling me to get that one next, since this leads to the second memory, and I probably should have listened, because it was quite unspectacular for the finish. But I liked how it takes place on the infamous ledge in front of the Shrine of Resurrection, which gives you a nice view of a Hyrule where its nature remains mostly untouched and also takes you back to where everything began with Breath of the Wild. As for the other...
I might be able to find out more still, there is even one memory that I don't have yet, so some of these questions may get answered while I keep playing. For others I may have to wait until the next Hyrule Warriors...
Like in Breath of the Wild, you will receive one final memory after collecting the others, which shows what happened to Zelda at the end of her journey, much like how the last memory in Breath of the Wild shows Link's demise.
I'd love to see more of this in a new Hyrule Warriors game. What they have done with Age of Calamity would also work so well with this setting – even better, because time travel is already an established element here and not just something that comes out of nowhere with some Guardian in a box from Zelda's awakened powers. Though, at least Tears of the Kingdom explains that Zelda has inherited both the time and light powers from Sonia and Rauru, so this gives some more credibility to what happened in Age of Calamity.
The Eighth Heroine
Before I made this post, I decided to find two more shrines to bring my current total to 136, which is the number of shrines Breath of the Wild had at the end with The Champions' Ballad. There is still more to find here and the shrines were for the most part really great. It makes me long for a Shrine Maker as much as I want a new Hyrule Warriors now, all based on Tears of the Kingdom.
Well, spotting any missing shrines on the surface is easy enough when you have all 120 Lightroots activated. That completely gives it away and in this case I went to the west end of the Gerudo Highlands, where I haven't been to this area yet, mainly because I wanted the Snowquill set first, which I do have now.
The Mayamats Shrine is one of those good examples with its puzzle, "A Route for a Ball". While I didn't have any trouble to solve it, I still thought that the solutions were really clever, with a good mix of using Recall and the Ultrahand. And it beats just getting an undeserved blessing from Rauru, like at the Otutsum Shrine a bit to the north. I'm not sure what that was about, though technically the Shrines of Light are there to aid you, not to test you, so getting these random blessings aren't necessarily wrong from a lore standpoint. But I still feel like I got robbed of a proper shrine.
At the end of this road lied the statue of the Eighth Heroine, where you now can open its face with a Mirror Shield puzzle. It's a nice throwback to the Spirit Temple from Ocarina of Time and it gives you Tingle's Hood, where I have completed yet another armor set.
But... does the game want to tell you here that Tingle was the Eighth Heroine? I'm still a bit disappointed that it wasn't Zelda, after all, because this was such a nice theory, but Tingle would be a new low for that story... At least it explains why they definitely wouldn't let him into Gerudo Town. Gotta keep the children safe.
Progress:
- Sage's Vows: 4/5
- Sage's Wills: 15/20
- Main Quests: 17/23
- Side Adventures: 55/60
- Shrine Quests: 25/31
- Side Quests: 100/139
- Memories: 17/18
- Towers: 14/15
- Shrines: 136
Lightroots: 120/120- Caves: 124/147
- Korok Seeds: 440
- Schema Stones: 11
- Yiga Schematics: 32
- Old Maps: 15
- Map Completion: 73.67%
