The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

decided to hunt down a Dinraal Scale and that was pretty fun. i started by scouting out the location, the cliffs of the Eldin Mountains north of the lava lakes. the nearest warpable location was a shrine sitting inside a lava cave at the end of a mining track. i had it timed so that i could start there at 6am (just after resting til morning at any fire in the game) and have just enough time to catch the dragon on his morning flight.

but the shrine was surrounded by lava. to get out i had to climb the walls of the cave, out the entrance, then up the side to get to stand-able gound, all which was only do-able by equipping the climbing gear. then i headed for the mountains. running past all kinds of enemies to get to this one high point i had marked on the map, i could see the dragon flying towards me in the distance, far below. this is a great moment right here!

from this point i had more than enough height to glide down and use the arrows. not knowing you can't really kill him, i shot a ton of arrows, just wasted a whole bunch. still, the scales were sitting me on the ground, i had got what i had come for, and the dragon flying off into the distance was a wonderful sight.

i had some frustrating experiences with the dragons before finally realizing i wasn't supposed to land on their heads and talk to them

💙

Great story, Adam! It makes me want to fire this up again.

I rebooted this game last year to do the Master Trials, and found them incredibly difficult (but eventually was able to do them, walkthrough-assisted)

Me and my bf were walking and talking and basically realized that Zelda has a formula and the formula works, and it's best-on-display on Link To The Past, Link's Awakening and Ocarina Of Time

And that when they break from that formula, you sometimes get weaker games (Twilight Princess) and other times get games that shine as unique-within-the-series (Majora's Mask, Breath Of The Wild)

All this is to say that Majora and BotW are two of my favourite games of all time, but there are other Zelda games that I would describe as "the best of the series" as they follow the formula more closely

wonder if we're actually gonna get another one this gen since breath of the wild was technically the Wii u one

I think the next 3D Zelda will be playable on the current Switch.

TIL if you buy a house in Hateno it unlocks this series of sidequests, you end up creating and populating a town or something. it's a whole thing. sounds cool! gonna check it out.

that branch of quests unlocks a primo merchant

yeah played a bit of this it was cool. enjoy talking to all the townspeople and finding all this other role playing stuff that i had missed while spending 40+ hours fighting monsters and solving puzzles.

the homeowner guy and his crew are terrific. i liked having to gather wood, i ended up in a nearby forest throwing bombs and exploding them, the little bundles of wood rolling down the hill. at one point i exploded a tree trunk as it was rolling down and in mid-roll it turned into the smaller tumbleweed-size bundles and continued to roll as if nothing had happened. the physics of this game keep thing constantly fresh.

https://media.giphy.com/media/2A2EKfFWLnsxu7ag8o/giphy.gif

it sounds like the downside is you need a lot of money if you want to pay for all your house upgrades. the good side is there are recipes you can make w raw meat that can be sold for lots of money. so you can just always be farming this no matter where you are, keeping out an eye for birds or foxes.

heh, "downside"

...did the 400 times I spoke about Bolson and his fabulousness get deleted or something? :|

Maybe those are in the Switch thread or whatchu playing?

We can always post more about Bolson

Haha no theyre here, I was just being a bit pass-agg ;) And you're right!

I go back to tarry town a lot once I built it. Theres a nice hop from a nearby shrine, to a fairy fountain to touch up ones armour, then glide on over to the little islelet and once the rito dude has settled in there, you have a nice renewing source of all kinds of arrows.

uh i'm most of the way through hollow knight right now but this is really making me want to hop back into botw and buy a house and do all that

You gotta do that quest line it’s magical.

Over there in tarry town, they do things very strange

i want to like tarry town but have to admit that in real life i once had an absolutely awful day in tarrytown, NY, so much so that i have internally referred to it as my "terrible trip to tarrytown" ever since. but maybe this botw tarry town is the absolute dimensional opposite or something

Were you forced to chop up tarrytown, ny buildings and return all of the wood to the forest?

I love the breezy efficiency of the little houses there, almost like neat Ikea boxes with lovely wooden porches.

xpost in terrible tarrytown i was asked to find ONE THOUSAND RESTLESS CRICKETS. it took me over 4 years

You will now hate me forever for pointing out you never actually had to find the whole lot lol. I think I found out by mistake by telling the guy "I give up" and he goes "eh never mind this'll do" or something? I may be misremembering.

i only remember that after finding those damn crickets, i was rewarded ONE silver rupee!

lol karl tarrytown ain't that bad!

it's true. my terrible trip was more the result of the work assignment i had there and how late i was in getting to it, and how terrible it was as it happened, and then an especially shitty trip home. you tore me up, tarrytown

build me up tarry
just to tear me down
but worst of all
Bolson never calls when he says he will

so after passing 100 hours earlier today, i just now figured out how to do the puzzles with the circles of stones in the water

diving mechanism is pretty

You folks are crazy, the Beasts are great, the puzzles were super satisfying, and the emo bits rule

Except the camel - agree - fuck that guy

Tell me about the DLCs! I’ve never DLC’d before. Are you supposed to add them after killing Ganon or before?

All the extra content appears before you beat Ganon.

I’m just farting around side-questing now the beasts are done - maybe a good time then. It doesn’t do anything radical or weird to break the world-building, does it?

well…

tbh some of the DLC is worth having well before you finish the game imo! The ancient horse armour and the map where-youve-been thing in particular.

Okay this is one of the craziest things i've done in BotW. I used a slab to do a quadruple launch finished with a super launch all the way to the top of Hyrule Castle.

The fact that this is possible illustrates the power of modern BotW tech. pic.twitter.com/55RO9CGabR

— Zant (@Zants) August 15, 2018

Breath of the Wild’s basic physics must be an incredible piece of software. It’s likely that there’s very little special-casing of anything. Everything has a mass and material and materials have certain interactions with runes and electricity and fire and so on and the game somehow doesn’t crash.

xp crazyyyyyyy

Ive seen a few similar tricks! One guy stasis-slammed a TREE TRUNK up to the castle with him on it, and he just sailed right on into that sucker standing on a fucking flying log.

youzses were of course otm about getting stronger for bosses. after 115 hrs of play and 15+ hearts and levelled-up armour i flattened waterblight in 90 seconds. now i'm up to 145 hrs and have done all the divine beasts.

i did not enjoy any of the divine beast stuff btw, especially the camel lead-up which was just total garbage, especially with the sand seal/thunderhelm bit being straight-up broken (couldn't stay on a seal for more than one (1) second, whatsherface kept stopping me every 14 seconds just to ask if i wanted to retreat, i ended up getting through it out of sheer luck apparently). with 25 hearts thunderblight was just a load of master sword slashing and a couple of full-health meals. apparently calamity ganon is a doddle so i might as well get it over with.

but in general this has been a pretty fun game. i left a horrible job this month, and getting lost in this game was the perfect distraction.

Score

it's just so satisfying to go tramping off in the snowy mountains for what feels like days and suddenly stumble on a load of korok seeds, the game designers reminding me i'm supposed to be there.

calamity ganon was indeed a doddle but what the simmering fuck was dark beast ganon? fire arrows at targets all the way up a giant monster while riding a horse while constantly battling the shit camera while dodging all the trees some idiot game designer put there while zelda is barking instructions at you

serious question, did anybody play test this

also the ending is… weird

I just wanted to keep that light arrow :(