What's everyone's favourite weapons? I love the boomerangs, especially the giant boomerang. I often throw it at nothing just to hear the sound it makes as it flies.
Greatswords and Axes. That charged attack is the best attack in the game. Whirlwind of death, anything that doesn't fly away after being hit (like bosses or the big guardians) is just completely and utterly fucked. Smaller enemies need a dose of
What's everyone's favourite weapons? I love the boomerangs, especially the giant boomerang. I often throw it at nothing just to hear the sound it makes as it flies.
Boomerang is definitely my favorite, and why I'm pursuing the WW toon link amiibos. Just grabbed the giant one, but don't want to touch it yet and ruin that mint condition.
I've had the game for 4 days and I've already put in 25 hours. X_x Wii U version. Once I was let loose I basically went to the right and just kept on truckin' along. Thoroughly explored (lol yeah sure I did)
Karakiro
and its section and
Hateno
. Lovely stuff all round. Found 600 rupees on the veeeeery edge of the map, around the area where
Kass has a quest and you gotta ride some fine wind.
It was guarded by a
Centaur
dude tho...So I, uh...Went around and got the chests that way instead of fighting .
South from there are a couple of shrines, one as if in the middle of the sea and one on a cliff, both are combat shrines. Went to them super early when my best weapon was a two handed 32 damage sword. Got wrecked in the moderate one as all my weapons broke...and didn't even attempt the major one, just exited my ass outta there once I read the title. I should go back however, I'm swimming in 30+ dmg weapons plus some elemental stuff....Speaking of which; I need to find
What's everyone's favourite weapons? I love the boomerangs, especially the giant boomerang. I often throw it at nothing just to hear the sound it makes as it flies.
I arrive in Hateno and I see this awesome looking Knight armor. Turns out its weaker than my pretty standard Julian tunic and trousers. Come on now. Look at the material of the Knight armor yet its not am upgrade at all.
Going up to Zora's Domain and after finishing getting there, at the end of fighting all those Lizalfos I ended up with 84 regular arrows... Absolutely insane. I've never had this many arrows before. So, if you need arrows and you have decent/strong weapons, just go through the trail to Zora's Domain and fight the Lizalfos along the way. They seem to have a really high drop rate for stashes of 5x arrows compared to other regions they're in. It's really strange but I can't complain when now I have 84 arrows lmao
Going up to Zora's Domain and after finishing getting there, at the end of fighting all those Lizalfos I ended up with 84 regular arrows... Absolutely insane. I've never had this many arrows before. So, if you need arrows and you have decent/strong weapons, just go through the trail to Zora's Domain and fight the Lizalfos along the way. They seem to have a really high drop rate for stashes of 5x arrows compared to other regions they're in. It's really strange but I can't complain when now I have 84 arrows lmao
Would be a good idea, imo. There's only one area that's slightly difficult but the rest of the Lizalfos outside of that one small area are easy pickings for the drops.
My OT1 adventure journal, copiously spoiler-tagged, chronicling my first week with the game: parts one, two, three, four.
The damage thus far:
- 90+ hours logged (we'll have a more accurate count by tomorrow, I hope)
- 14 hearts and a full stamina bar
- 85 shrines completed
- 105 Koroks found
- 0 main dungeons entered
- 1
Master Sword
obtained
- 4 cinematic memories recovered
- 0
fully functional Guardians or Lynels
defeated
- 3 horses stabled
(the white royal steed, the Ganondorf mega-horse, and a blue one that isn't anything special, just blue)
- 2 articles of clothing
upgraded to 3 stars
- 85 stamps placed on the map, at the time of this writing
- 173 screenshots taken with the Capture button (and kept)
- 0 screenshots
taken with the Sheikah Slate (I haven't unlocked that function yet)
In the past day, I've been telling myself that now might finally be the time I do something about the main quest, as I've swept most of the map for anything obvious, marking a handful of locations I have yet to solve, and setting aside the various NPC minigames for later (as minigames always tend to be my roadblocks to 100%; they were the reason I set aside ALBW and Skyward Sword with 19 out of 20 hearts).
But every time I sit down with the game for another few hours, scanning the map for unvisited locations conspicuously free of symbols or stamps, it shows me something new, unexpected, or otherwise interesting. For a game with such a limited, simple set of high-level tasks, the variety is incredible, not just in the range of tactical experimentation open to the player but in the design of specific locations and scenarios as well. The 90+ hours I've put in have felt like 20 to 30 from the briskness of pacing and the minimal redundancy, even when you account for the lengthy travel times involved in crossing expansive stretches of the landscape on foot. The mental fatigue or exhaustion, the readiness to be done, that comes with seeing most of what a big game has to offer—that just hasn't hit, even though I've done so much that I jump into every new session expecting it to hit soon.
I don't expect I'll be able to keep up with the marathon sessions of this week in the days ahead, though, and I am definitely reaching the point where I think I'm comfortable with slowing down and getting back to the main quest (partly as so many players have done that by now that unmarked spoilers about items/bosses are spreading everywhere, but mostly because I'm simply curious). We'll see. Maybe I'll finish my first dungeon before the weekend is out.
*
Highlights since my last entry:
- A mountain in the southeast:
The Three Giant Brothers—at last, a chance to test out different methods of dislodging orbs from sleeping Hinoxes in an environment that isn't quite as do-or-die as a certain beloved challenge. But I wound up killing all of them anyway.
- The northern end of the northern zone:
Navigating Thyphlo Ruins in the dark is another challenge that leaves me curious about how other players managed it. I didn't find any torches, used up my Fire Rod a little too early, and didn't even know until after reaching the shrine that there were torches and unlit campfires in the area I could use as permanent sources of light. Instead, I placed Silent Shrooms as glow-in-the-dark markers, checked for walls or bogs by throwing bombs, climbed up the walls with a flaming greatsword on my back for illumination, sped my way to the shrine, and fought the giant in the dark. Afterwards I explored the whole area for treasure. Stay in the ruins long enough and you get used to fumbling in the darkness. Emerging from it captured the real-world feeling of coming back into daylight, like adjusting your eyes on your way out of a matinee at the cinema, in a way I had never seen in a video game.
- A low-elevation spot in the northwest:
The Forgotten Temple is an excellent demonstration of how to execute an Indiana Jones sequence without relying on cutscenes or QTEs. You read the situation, you test your options, you understand that picking off the stationary Guardians while dodging beams from four or five other ones at once is probably impractical (though you just know another player will do it this way), you see an updraft, you make a decision—hell, let's wing it. I ran for it with the glider, timing my sudden drops to avoid the beams, and got zapped once or twice on my way through the final room as the pillars only cover you from so many angles at once. But I made it.
In discussions about potential avenues for Hard Mode, one promising suggestion that many including myself have raised is some form of restriction on fast travel, if not its wholesale removal—so I wondered if areas like this, where the challenge is to reach the shrine at all, were designed in such a fashion that it's not a one-way trip; that is, if you can in fact get back out alive without warping.
I didn't test this all the way back to the entrance, but here, at least, it seems the answer is yes; the Goddess Statue at the end allows you to get up on ledges just beneath the ceiling, high enough to bypass most of the Guardians should you choose to exit the hard way.
- This game is ripe for a whole series of stunt videos, that's for sure. There is a tremendous sense of satisfaction in playing for style, not because there are any points for stylish combos like there are in a Kamiya game, but just for the satisfaction of seeing what you can do. Once you've played the game enough, you become alert to opportunities like this. I knocked an enemy far back enough that it was not far from an explosive barrel; "Close enough," I thought, and in a split-second decision I lobbed a bomb to blow him into the sky. A Bokoblin rider charged at me with a spear while I was running across a grassy field: I stood my ground, shot it off the horse with an arrow, mounted the horse as it passed me at full speed, steered it around, and finished off the dismounted rider. For all the fun of cautiously scouting out a position and setting up methods for splitting and picking off foes, there is nothing like an Errol Flynn moment improvised on the spot.
- Hyrule Castle:
Somewhere in the 80-to-90-hour zone I finally crossed the moat for the first time in the game, from the northern side—not to commit to fighting my way to Ganon, not at all, but to check for the entrances and side-rooms I had heard about from NPCs and get a feeling for how accessing the place might work. Good lord, the music! And I don't know what I expected from the layout, but as big as the castle looked from the outside, I didn't know I would be supplied with a Metroid Prime-like 3D map (alas, too small to be usable on the minimap if you are playing in tabletop mode). I haven't entered the castle just yet, but it already looks to be a lot more elaborate than I could have foreseen.
- Combat shrines:
I located several Major Tests of Strength early in my adventure, before I had completed more than 20 or 30 shrines, and stood no chance against them. Once I was through over 70 shrines, I thought it might be time to return. It turns out they are all trivially easy with the use of electrical attacks, be it with the Thunderstorm Rod (which comes with the benefit of locking on with ZL-targeting) or a handful of Shock Arrows: you can stun them all day and whittle them down. Defeating one gave me the top-level Ancient/Guardian weapons to easily defeat the next, and I blew through all of the Major Tests I had found in a single sitting. Then, after looting all of these high-end weapons, I thought I might be ready to take on a real Guardian. I was wrong.
- A word about the difficulty progression and AI:
I've been playing the game unguided and only have a vague sense of how the enemy progression works, but one thing I have noticed is that the AI definitely ramps up. I now see Moblins rushing to kick my bombs away before I get the chance to detonate them. And early in the game I got accustomed to using natural cover to block arrows, which meant it came as a nasty surprise when I encountered a Lynel that fired its shock arrows in the air and rained them down towards me in a perfect arc, when I thought I could safely get away by dropping onto the cliffside or gliding off. But that may just be a Lynel thing, as so many of the deadliest enemy mechanics are.
There's a new home area near the Hateno Village entrance. If you past there and across the bridge, you'll see some guys about to demolish a house. Talk to them and do their quests. It's like, behind the general Goods store (pot icon on the sign).
Little side quest in Hateno. A gift for my beloved. I have to "ask" prima. I talk to her and I don't get any other dialog options than staying at the Inn.
Little side quest in Hateno. A gift for my beloved. I have to "ask" prima. I talk to her and I don't get any other dialog options than staying at the Inn.
Little side quest in Hateno. A gift for my beloved. I have to "ask" prima. I talk to her and I don't get any other dialog options than staying at the Inn.
Is there a way to release horses? Also, are the any repercussions for having a horse die? I haven't had any die yet, but I'm curious about how the stable acts when they do. I read before that you can
. 
