Breath of the Wild first playthrough log part 17

First playthrough commentary: Part 17

This is the high session where I completed the last divine beast, cleared up a few other things, and then beat the game a 2nd time to see the good ending.

I'm sick of having to gimp myself in thunderstorms... I need to get that Thunder Helm.

I like this Gerudo Town sidequest where you need to track down the source of the litter coming from the waterway ontop of the buildings... A gerudo is sitting up there munching on fruits and throwing her disgusting slobber-filled waste into the town's drinking water.

Damn I have no idea where Barta went... somewhere near the Fairy Fountain, near a Molduga, I think? Oh wait, she's right there near a shrine that I passed by before... I must have just missed her.

Thunder Helm get.

Now it's time to finally knock out this last divine beast quest... I talked to everyone in Goron City... went to the North Mine to search for Yunobo... Had to do some platforming across a lava section, with a bunch of annoying archer Lizalfos shooting at me. I'm seeing all these red rocks that I can't break with bombs or anything... and Yunobo is stuck behind one of them... hmm...

Oh, I bet I have to go back and get the boss's permission to use the cannons... er, no, it's just that it wasn't obvious how to use them.

I swear these Lizalfos found a way to respawn without the blood moon... Or maybe it's because I'm not killing them when I make them fall in the lava? Yeah that's gotta be it.

Yunobo's voice sounds really stupid. This little wimp is the descendant of Daruk, and uses the shield ability whenever he gets scared. The elder uses the cannons to shoot Yunobo at Vah Rudania with his shield ability to keep him away from Goron City.

I did this weird sidequest where I had to go down a hill to get a rock roast for a hungry goron, and then there are moblins and falling rocks getting in my way as I climbed back up the hill while carrying the rock roast.

Found my 100th shrine, near the Bridge of Eldin (lol why is this dinky little drawbridge named after that huge epic bridge from TP?)

The Bridge of Eldin, the only way to get up to the Death Mountain Summit, was raised in order to keep Vah Rudania out of Goron City. Yunobo helps Link get across. This is the hottest part of Death Mountain, where you need all 3 pieces of the flameproof armor to survive... the visual effect of the heat here is intense...

Breath of the Wild first playthrough log part 16

Explored the bell tower above the sanctum, found all the koroks I could, and then went into the Sanctum to fight Ganon.

Went and killed Fireblight Ganon, and then fought the true Calamity Ganon. Fireblight was kinda tricky, until I realized you could use bombs to knock him out when he charges a giant fireball... He can also be defeated really quickly if you don't care about using up bomb arrows.

Calamity Ganon was a pretty decent boss fight. He shoots guardian lasers at you, and only becomes vulnerable when you deflect them back at him.

Then when that boss fight is over, you're back outside the castle, in Hyrule Field... and Calamity Ganon manages to return to his beast form, and then Link gets on his horse, and picks up the Bow of Light sent down from the sky by Zelda... She seems to have full control over her Hylia powers now... She talks to Link throughout the fight and points out Ganon's weak points that you have to shoot. The Bow of Light shoots farther than any other bow, and has unlimited arrows.

Ganon barely does anything except stand there and shoot a giant explosive beam out of his mouth every once in a while. He turns toward you at a snail's pace... I did have a bit of trouble hitting his last weak point, until Zelda pointed out that I should use the updraft from Ganon's attack to get a clearer shot... That part was really cool, but the rest of it was way too easy. It's a real shame, this beast form seems so intimidating and powerful, but defeating him is stupidly easy. I wonder if trying to beat this without using the horse would be much harder.

There we go, I got the "You don't remember me, do you?" ending.

The peak of the Bell Tower above the sanctum is probably the most epic vista in the whole game. I just had to go back up there again and jump off, gliding towards the south... I landed back near south Hyrule Field... Hyrule Field is so peaceful now after I cleared out nearly all the enemies.

Breath of the Wild first playthrough log part 15

I'm now at 90 shrines and 180 korok seeds.

I guess I'll go and beat Ganon next... I wanna see if there's a different ending from beating him before doing all the divine beasts, and getting all the memories.
Impa has updated dialog depending on how many of the divine beasts you've completed, and after certain other main quest stuff.

Woah... I defeated a Stalnox and got the Gale Boomerang, an item from TP...

Explored around the ruined Hyrule Castle Town after taking out all the guardians roaming around there... got the memory where Zelda is appointing Link as her knight... and I found a few more shrines and a bunch more korok seeds around here... and at the prison area to the west of the castle.

Then I took a ract and found an opening that leads into the bottom floor of the castle dungeon... defeated a Stalnox in a dead end room, and got the Hylian Shield... Went back outside and found another bottom entrance from the moat, which leads into the docks... Found a shrine inside the castle by lighting some torches... classic Zelda vibes right there...

Then I found the library.
Royal Recipe #1: Fruitcake, 2 fruits, Tabantha wheat, and sugar
Royal Recipe #2: Monster Cake. Tabantha wheat, sugar, butter, and monster parts.
Cool, these are the recipes I needed for a couple of sidequests.

The atmosphere in this castle is amazing... it feels more like a real, actual lived-in castle than any other version of Hyrule Castle in the Zelda series.

Found the dining hall and some more royal weapons...
Then I found the observation deck, which overlooks Castle Town and Hyrule Field... of course everything looks bleak and depressing in its current state.

Went around more of the outside of the castle, to another lower door, that looks like it's been dug out of the wall... Basically I'm just entering every single door I can find, going in order from the bottom up.
Oh shit, it's the East Passage that I heard about... there's a Talus, a mine cart you can ride with stasis, and another way into the library...

Kept exploring some more, destroying every enemy so I could explore in peace... Found the guards' chamber on the mid level... Got lost on the outside again... entered a random tower and it locked me in with a white Lynel battle, in a very small space... AND there's a Ganon sludge enemy generator spawning a bunch of those little floating stal head enemies... I also encountered another tower just like this, with a blue Lynel inside... both rewarded you with a chest for clearing them out.

Breath of the Wild first playthrough log part 14

Currently at 102 hours played.

Now I'm finding a bunch more koroks in the Faron Woods/Lake Floria area that I haven't found yet... this place is so dense and confusing compared to the other areas. Also I'm going crazy trying to find this one shrine... then I see an orange glow on the reflection of the water... AHA! It's behind the waterfall!

Now exploring more of East Necluda... got 3 balls from 3 sleeping Hinox enemies and put them in the 3 glowing pedestals to make a shrine appear.
.. Found a broken heart-shaped pond...

Found Kass with another riddle at Hateno Beach...

At 17 of 24, this rock will point toward its retrieval.

At first I was like, "wtf this makes no sense", but then I thought about it some more... lol it's another shadow pointing somewhere at a certain time of day puzzle.

Decided to go back to Gerudo and get the snow boots back before exploring Lanayru Mountain... but now the guy with the snow shoes wants me to get him a picture of the Eighth Heroine's sword in exchange for both pairs of shoes... I came across that before, but forgot where it was... It's up in the really low visibility part of the Gerudo Highlands somewhere... didn't take me too long to find it again.

Then I explored West Gerudo Ruins in a sandstorm... the sandstorm removes all your minimap/map access and makes you feel completely lost... found the shrine that the 7 heroine statues scattered around the desert are all pointing towards... and found a few more shrines and the 4th Great Fairy... as well as the Leviathan bones in the desert.

Just realized... I like how certain NPCs talk about interesting locations in a way that subtly guides you to where shrines are. It kinda reminds me of the old man hints in LoZ.

Woah... east of the Great Fairy is a location named "Arbiter's Grounds"... or at least what's left of it... I think the desert sand must've risen above nearly the whole thing at this point, cuz you can only see the top tips of the structure coming out of the sand.

Okay now I'll go to Mount Lanayru... I haven't really explored this area at all, except for that one time I ran through it on my way to Hateno.
Got to the top... found the ice dragon Naydra, trapped on the mountain by Ganon sludge.

I guess Naydra is supposed to be your introduction to the dragon spirits... This is a whole event sequence where you have to shoot the Ganon sludge off of Naydra while it's flying around, and then it teaches you how to get scales from it.

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This high session was really amazing...
Short summary:
Started off by exploring the Forgotten Temple in that canyon in west Hyrule. Then I beat the Gerudo dungeon, then explored the desert and did a few of the post-dungeon sidequests, and the Gerudo Heroine statues puzzle... then I did the Rito dungeon, this was way easier and shorter than Gerudo.

Long summary:

Wow... wtf at this shrine sensor on the north-most part of the Tabantha gorge... the shrine is like invisible or something...
ohhh... I went back south and fell further down into the pit, and then turned around and found the entrance to the Forgotten Temple... It's this huge indoor area with a unique aesthetic... There's a ton of stationary guardians here. If you go through it slowly you can safely deflect their lasers one at a time and get through it safely... but you can also just run through and try to dodge all the constant barrage of guardian lasers.

At first I thought this might be the secret underground entrance to Hyrule Castle that I heard about... that would be really cool. But then I got to the end, and it's a dead end with a huge goddess statue, very similar to the one from the Temple of Hylia in Skyward Sword... I wonder if this is the same place as that.

Back to Gerudo Town... I brought the Thunder Helm back to Riju, and she says to go meet her out by the lookout area near the sandstorm, and bring a sand seal. She's bringing her own sand seal, Patricia.
Riju is getting all mystical here, like she's summoning the strength of all her Gerudo heroine ancestors...
This section is very similar to the Vah Ruta battle scene, but you're riding a sandseal and following behind Riju, and trying to stay in her thunder-proof forcefield to protect against Vah Rudania's attacks as you shoot each of its feet.

Wow this dungeon has a really neat aesthetic... And the big central room can be rotated around vertically in multiple separate parts... this is like the Stone Tower Temple gimmick except more complex, and you can actually move around and stuff while the room is rotating around. Also there's some stuff involving electrical circuits that you have to connect together, like in some of the shrines found around here...

It's a bit confusing to find all the terminals... I really like this kind of difficulty. It's way better than the elephant dungeon.

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I got reminded about the Spring of Power from North Akalla Stable... found it easily, but it's patrolled by some guardian drones... Offerring Dinraal's scale to the spring makes a shrine appear, with a flame weapon inside. And also found the memory there, where Zelda is frustrated because her spiritual training isn't going anywhere.

Hudson was one of the construction workers in Hateno Village... after buying that house, Hudson came to Akalla to try and build a new town. He's on this high, mini plateau in the middle of Lake Akalla. He's decided to call this place Tarrey Town, and he says he needs help finding some people to help build and populate the town... and due to the regulations of the company he works for, he can only employ people whose name ends in "son"... This seems like a really long quest where you need to find a certain character from each town and bring them here.

Spent a bit more time in/around Hateno, getting to know the characters better... I also found this weird horse target range area that I don't know what to do with yet.

Next I explored the 4 islands named after the Tingle characters from Wind Waker... This is a really confusing set of bridge paths connecting all the islands... some bridges go to lower sections and some go to higher sections of the same island... There's a bunch of enemies here that would be hard if I wasn't so stacked up with crazy good gear at this point... and not much else but tons of ore and koroks to find... and a few flying guardians that aren't even worth destroying because all their loot just falls down way below into the ocean.

Next, I went back to Foothill Stable and finally decided to start scaling Death Mountain for real.

Breath of the Wild first playthrough log part 11

Wow, I'm totally lost trying to find the Hebra tower... Also a lot of shrines seem to be hidden underground, like there's some cave entrance I need to find that the shrine sensor doesn't help me with... This is a pretty tough region to explore. There's a lot of good shield surfing spots here though.

Found some shrines and a snowball bowling minigame where you can win rupees... Finally found the tower a bit later.

North Lomei Labyrinth... wow the shrine in this place was really cleverly hidden... found a ton of good loot too.

Next I explored the outside of Death Mountain... Found Dinraal, the fire dragon, and got his scale. Found one of the Leviathan skeletons, and found a Goron climbing challenge where a goron blocks a shrine until you complete the easy version of the challenge at least once... it's just a climbing challenge where you have to collect as many rupees as you can.

Next I went to the other Labyrinth I saw off the north coast of Akalla... it's like a big isolated maze island out in the ocean, similar to in Zelda 2. This labyrinth is patrolled by flying guardian drones, making it much harder to explore the top of it. And there's even a walking guardian inside the bottom of the maze, in an open space that branches out into a bunch of other maze paths. By now I've gotten a good feel for how to deflect the guardian's lasers... but I find the drone guardians are still really hard to deflect.

After finding the shrine in this labyrinth, there was an open hole with wind coming out of it... I fell down through the hole and came into this huge open underground area filled with dead guardians... after opening a chest, some of the dead guardians came back to life... They're easy to deflect when there's just one of them, but fighting like 3 at once is an ordeal... some of them even started doing combo chain attacks... and then others came back to life as I came close to them and try to collect the materials...

Akalla definitely seems to be one of the more guardian-infested areas.

I got an anti-guardian accessory from the chest here... and also all 3 of these labyrinth shrines had attack-up clothing, and I now have the whole set... wow, I feel way stronger at this point. I could probably knock out all 3 of the remaining divine beasts and beat the game at this point. I guess what I'll do next is go to Death Mountain and see what's up with that divine beast quest, and then after I pull out the Master Sword, I'll do each of those beast quests all in a row.

Breath of the Wild first playthrough log part 10

72 hours in so far... 56 shrines and 90-something korok seeds...

There's a lot of birds flying around that sakura tree mountaintop... I think that mysterious light that came from here only shows up at night.

I went to this little plateau with a perpetual thunderstorm cloud overtop of it... solved the orb puzzle to reveal the shrine, and then the shrine itself contains a very hard puzzle with a bunch of bombable blocks and a big metal block... to get the chest (which just has an opal), I tried a bunch of really crazy strats trying to get to it, until finally I managed to get to it by carefully pushing some of the blocks around so that I could barely jump across... doesn't even seem like that was the intended method.

Ridgeland Tower, at Hyrule Ridge, is surrounded by water and electric enemies. Had to use shock resistance food to even stand a chance to get through... Only 1 tower left to fill out the whole map.

Found Serenne Stable... North of here is some huge snowy plains on, on the west side of the Hebra region.
Northeast of here, past Mount Drena... there's some perpetually dark ruins.
These 3 NPCs have a sidequest where I need to find and take pictures of the 3 Leviathan skeletons found in Eldin, Hebra, and Gerudo Desert.

After doing a few sidequests, I went back to the desert and attempted the Yiga HQ again, and finally figured out just needed to burn the curtains with fire to find the secret entrance... A gerudo is imprisoned here. The Yiga guards patrolling this hideout are very strong... I snuck past them by distracting them with bananas.

Master Kohga, leader of the Yiga clan... lmao it's a joke boss... it actually kinda reminds me of the bosses from some of the other 3D Zelda games, but just exaggeratingly more easy. The guards are way more formidable than the leader himself.

Breath of the Wild first playthrough log part 9

Went back to Faron and chased down Farosh, and finally managed to get Farosh's Scale. I noticed after shooting it with an arrow that a glowing object fell out of its body and landed on the ground.

Then went back to the desert... defeated a Molduga for the first time... it was really hard at first, but then I discovered the strategy where you just stand on a safe platform and throw bombs to lure it out and knock it over, and get a bunch of free hits in...

I found the guy with the Gerudo clothes at the Kara Kara Bazaar inn, and bought a set of Gerudo clothes from him... lol that scene is good.
That guy running around outside Gerudo Town wants to go out with Link... Link is like "give me your sand shoes"... He says he'll give me them if I get a photo of the eighth heroine statue that is said to be in the Gerudo Highlands somewhere... and he gave me snow boots in order to help with exploring the highlands.

I guess sand shoes aren't really that useful anyway, since you can just rent a sand seal to travel across the desert much faster... or even just shield surf.

These Gerudo people refer to men as "voe" and women as "vai", and they have weird greetings like "Sa'vaaq" and "Sav'saaba"

Found a shop with a lot of expensive elemental accessories.

There's a lot of shops with overpriced fruit and stuff in this town.
The rumor mill girl Traysi, is here gathering info... I've seen several of Traysi's notes inside some of the stables.
This town is so comfy and cool looking...

The

Breath of the Wild first playthrough log part 8

I just made Link look like the Link from the 80's Zelda cartoon, by putting on the warm doublet and the green cap I got from an amiibo.

Next I jumped off the west side of the Plateau, and went towards Gerudo Canyon Pass... There's a very long canyon path here that's reminiscent of Gerudo Canyon from OoT, but a lot bigger... there's also some side paths going up some scaffolds on the cliffs... I think I remember this area from that cutscene at the beginning that showed the Hylians excavating shiekah tech...

Found a side path leading to the Wasteland Tower... it's surrounded by a sludge pit, and this troll wind keeps preventing me from just gliding across it... so now I'm using magnesis and piling up boxes on the sludge to make a platforming path... but you have to be really quick cuz the boxes sink... actually, if you pile up enough boxes, they can't sink any lower and you can stand on them.

So many past Zelda game references around here... Spectacle Rock, Yarna Valley, Gerudo Desert...

Seems like this whole canyon area benefits a lot from having a horse... and I just found a horse stable on the west side of Gerudo Canyon...
Some NPC here says his friends got attacked and he left them behind in the canyon, and wants someone to go find them... then he goes on about the mystical sword found in the Great Hyrule Forest.

This desert atmosphere is perfect... I even feel like I'm seeing mirages I think... Suddenly I see a cutscene showing the next divine beast, a giant robo camel creating lighting out of his footsteps... and creating a huge sandstorm all around him...

Got to an oasis... Gerudo Town is further southwest of here... people are saying Vah Naboris has been creating sandstorms everywhere and is a constant threat to the town...