Day 10: A Brave New World
I got a TON done today. The first thing I did was go Inside The Thunderhead (which it turns out is the real name of the Ominous Dome Cloud). Inside were more islands, a Goddess Chest that I was able to get, and a fair amount of rupees. The main island, the one I was supposed to go to, is called the Isle of Songs, and that's because you learn at least one song there: Farore's Courage (you might learn Din's Power and Nayru's Wisdom there, too? I don't know. I don't even know if those are real songs, but I bet they are). But before you can do that, you have to spin this dial to get these three bridge parts lined up. It's tricky, but not difficult.
After I learned Farore's Courage, I went back to Faron Woods and found the area where I was supposed to play it. This brought me to a place called the Silent Realm, which - I swear - is just the Twilight Realm with a different name. It's got the same weird glow, and you even have a string of lights that you have to collect like 15 balls for. The trick is that there are guardians in the Silent Realm, and if you do something wrong (like touch the water or go too long between getting the balls), the guardians wake up and try to attack you. One hit means you're kicked out of the Silent Realm. So it's basically a fusion of the Twilight Realm and the Temple of the Ocean King. If you're successful, you prove you're worthy and get a Water Dragon's Scale, which let's you swim underwater. So it's basically a fusion a zora scale and the scales from Valoo that the Rito need to fly.
Now that I'm able to swim, I can get another Goddess Chest in Skyloft that got me a piece of heart, and I can also get into the giant ass tree in the middle of Faron Woods. It's a trek to the top and kind of a pain, but when you get up there, you talk to the Kikwi Hermit, which tells you about the Water Dragon and how to get to where she lives. And how you get to where she lives is by going to the giant gate with the Tune of Currents symbol on it (you know, the one I said I had no idea what it was for), charge your sword for a Skyward Strike, and then draw the part of the symbol that's missing. Very Phantom Hourglass- or Spirit Tracks-ish. This leads you to Lake Floria, where you meet a new race called the Perella, who look kind of like a cross between a seahorse and an octopus.
The Perella are led by the Water Dragon, but the Water Dragon is sick, so she enlists your help to go track down some Sacred Water. By the way...WE ARE NOW IN UNCHARTED TERRITORY; EVERYTHING PAST THIS POINT IS 100% BRAND NEW TO ME. Anyway, guess where it is? In the Skyview Temple. Except for the Temple of the Ocean King, which is a special case, I don't believe a Zelda game has ever made you go through the same dungeon twice before. It's interesting. Just about everything is as you left it, but there's more enemies, bigger and badder enemies, and you get to talk to a Mogma occasionally (he's looking for treasure). You also get to use your first Goddess Wall, and it too is very DS Zelda-ish, because if you draw a rupee on it, you get a ton of rupees, and if you draw a heart, you get a ton of hearts. Anyway, right before the boss room are two archer bokoblins, and I died three times trying to get past them. It wasn't completely, my fault, though, because the item drops led me to believe I was supposed to use my slingshot to stun them and then walk across the rope, but that was not actually the case (I was supposed to use my Beetle to grab a bomb and hit them with it). In the boss room, I had to fight three Stalfos and that was a pain; I died once or twice there too, but finally got through it. So I got the Sacred Water, brought it back to the Water Dragon, healed her, and she became this SUPED BIG mega dragon. And then, as thanks, she showed me where the first flame I need to get is: *another* dungeon by the name of Ancient Cistern. And that's what I'll do tomorrow.
Other stuff I did: bought a piece of heart and bug medal from Beedle, upgraded my slingshot to a Scattershot, upgraded my small seed satchel to a Medium Seed Satchel, upgraded my Sacred Shield to a Divine Shield and then a Goddess Shield, and...I feel like I upgraded something else too, but I don't remember what.
(I feel like this entry hes less reaction in it than the others, but I'm not sure if that's true. If it is, it's because I played a lot today, and since I was called into work, there was a big gap between the first stuff I did and the later stuff. It's also because it's really late and I'm tired so I'm just trying to finish. I'm sure Day 11 will be much better, especially since it's all new stuff.)
Day 11: The Ancient Cistern and The Lanayru Sand Sea
The Ancient Cistern is weird because ostensibly it's a factory of sorts (it purifies the putrid, evil water from the caverns below), but it looks more like a temple. There are pipes running all over the place, but for the most part it has a very zen Buddhist/Hindu design aesthetic that is really nice. An element of the dungeon that doesn't really fit this aesthetic but is still cool is what's basically a water elevator. You can open certain valves in the pipes with your whip (ps, you get a whip in here) which release columns of water that you can ride to a higher level. Majora's Mask had something similar in the Great Bay Temple (which was every bit a water plant and had nothing temple-like about it), but in that, the columns of water were just used as platforms for you to step on. Lame. How does that even work? Anyway, the whip is kind of neat because you can use it to pull levers, swing across gaps, and steal items from enemies. It's not my favorite weapon, but it's pretty useful. Not as useful as this game's MVP the Beetle, but still.
After you finish with the main of part of the Cistern, you have to go in its bowels, which is filled with cursed water and a type of Bokoblin that's really a ReDead in all but name. It's here where you get the boss key - I mean, the Idol Statue - which is wooden instead of gold like the others, and is probably the easiest puzzle to solve yet. And ugh, Ghirahim's here again, but thankfully I didn't have to fight him. Instead, he imbued the Cistern's guardian, Ancient Automaton Koloktor, with evil energy. Koloktor, by the way, is a beast. He's a six-armed golden statue, and in the first phase of the fight, he tries to smash you with four of his arms and hit you with spinning blades with the other two. After you get past that, he gains legs so he can walk around the room, and all six arms get giant swords. You have to break one of his arms so that it drops a sword, and then you have to use that sword to break the rest of him. Twice. It's rough. But doing this gets you Farore's Flame, which turns your Goddess Sword into a Goddess Longsword and makes it like twice as powerful.
After I finished with that, I went back to the Isle of Songs to learn Nayru's Wisdom (called it!), and then I headed to the desert to do Nayru's challenge. At first I didn't understand what Fi meant when she said it would test my wisdom, because it seemed exactly like Farore's challenge, but it's really not. Nayru's challenge has a couple of small puzzle elements to it (mainly figuring out how to get orbs that are out of reach) and unlike Farore's, where the orbs were basically in a line and you just had to find the path and run it without getting caught, a big part of this challenge is finding the best order to get the orbs in (such as passing up really easy-to-get-to orbs so that you can use them as a safety net if you get seen). My prize for proving worthy are the Clawshots, and now that I have those, you know where I can go? EVERY-FREAKING-WHERE. And I ended up getting like five or six more Goddess Cubes and a boatload of rupees because of it.
So now I'm supposed to head deeper into the desert, but before I did that, I took the opportunity to open some chests and get some more crackles. The chests, incidentally, got me a piece of heart, another heart medal, another life medal, a rupee medal (which makes rupees appear more often), some rupees, and I waaaant to say another piece of heart, but I'm not sure. Then I talked to Cawlin and he wanted me to deliver a love letter to Karane, but since I already know that Karane's not into Cawlin, I thought that was a waste of time, so I decided to give it to the weird crying person in the bathroom that needs some paper. This person turned out to be a ghost woman, and more importantly turned out to be the Hand in the Toilet(!), one of the best Zelda characters of all time. If you talk to Cawlin again, he'll be upset at you for giving the letter to the toilet when he specifically told you not to, but if you visit him again at night, Moaning Myrtle will be haunting him while he sleeps and she'll give you 5 grabitude crackles for introducing her to her new love. I also got 5 crackles from Potion Shop Owner Bertie for finding his baby's rattle, and I *finally* got into Zelda's room (by way of chimney) and got the crackle inside, bringing me up to 50, and so I got to talk to Uncle Bats and he gave me the Giant Wallet, which holds 5000(!!!) rupees, which, if you're keeping track at home, brings my maximum rupee total up to 5900. [Side Notes: I finally found out who's been keeping Karane from bathing, and I should've been able to guess because it was the only person I couldn't account for: Gaepora. And I don't know why Zelda has a tunnel leading from her room to a grate over the bathroom, but I guess she's a perv. What I *do* know, though, is that Zelda has a Tingle plushie, and I'm glad he got to make an appearance in this game.]
Anyway, I went back to the desert and used my hookshot to get to a door I hadn't been able to access before, and it led to and area called the Lanayru Caverns. The Caverns have a path that leads back to the Lanayru Mines and a path that leads to my next destination, the Lanayru Sand Sea, but it also has another path that's currently blocked off, although a new Goron I met named Golo (Gorons Only Live Once?) is trying to rectify that. And he asked me for 10 rupees to "fund his progress", or something along those lines. Seems kind of shady to me, but I paid him anyway, because I had 1900 rupees at the time so it's not like I really felt it or anything.
Now, let's talk about Lanayru Sand Sea for a bit. It's exactly what it sounds like: a giant sea of sand. It's basically the Sahara. But here's where it gets interesting. Near the entrance is a pier with a broken down boat and even brokener down Ancient Robot at the end. But the boat has a timeshift stone on it, and when you hit it, amazingness happens. See, the Sand Sea used to be a regular sea, so you can ride on the boat all you like, because it's in a ring of crystal clear, beautiful water...but surrounded by desert. I haven't been using pictures in these reviews, but this really needs one:
Except that a picture can't even do it justice, because the boat needs to be moving to see how great it is. Anyway, the Ancient Robot (who's wearing a sweet pirate hat that almost deserves a picture of its own), says your map's all wrong and that you need to swing by his retreat to get the Sea Chart. As it turns out, he retreat really is a retreat, and you have to use your clawshots to scale tons of cliffs to get to it. (There are also these weird things that look like Peahats, but they're not actually enemies, they're just for hooking onto, so I don't know what they are.) After that, the captain wants you to go to the Shipyard to help find his ship...that's invisible, because his ship is where the second Flame is stored, but the Shipyard looked an AWFUL lot like a dungeon, so that's where I quit for the night. The end...for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment