Day 3: The Lost Woods and a Found World
Now that I had obtained all three Pendants, I needed to make my way to the Lost Woods and get the Master Sword. The Lost Woods are the same as always, with the added gimmick that groups of poes show up and one of them will tell you the right way if you can keep track of it (they spin around and jumble up and that sort of thing. Once you find the Master Sword, though, you can break through the evil that has been encasing Hyrule Castle for most of the game. It *is* the Blade of Evil's Bane, after all.
This leads to the next dungeon, "Inside Hyrule Castle", which is pretty neat. Yuga absconds with Zelda and you have to chase him down through eight floors of castle. Yes, despite what it looks like, Hyrule Castle is basically a skyscraper and this is made abundantly clear in certain areas when you go outside the castle walls and can just barely make out the buildings on the ground below. There's also one part that looks like it's right above the Sanctuary and graveyard, so it's not just tall but expansive to boot. At the top I found myself in an office of some sort, but no one was there. There was a mysterious crack in the wall though, so I decided to go through it and found myself in a strange dimension.
I finally caught up to Yuga and Zelda, and Yuga revealed that he had already captured all Seven Sages! I couldn't make out who all of them were, but I definitely spotted Irene, Gulley, Rosso (the miner who gave me my power glove), and the Zora Queen, in addition to Osfala (Sahasrahla's son), who I already knew about. If you'll notice, these nearly perfectly map onto the sages from Ocarina. I say nearly because Zelda isn't one of the sages in this game and because I don't know who the rest of the sages are, so there could be some overlap.
Anyway, Yuga uses the Sage portraits to resurrect Ganon, and we learn that Yuga just wants to be pretty and will wipe out the beauty from the world if s/he can't be. It's sad, really. But before Ganon is completely reborn, he's stopped by Princess Hilda, who then scatters the portrait so Yuga can't find them. Hilda, she tells me, is the princess of the world we're now in, which is called Lorule. Lorule! Amazing. Lorule is a mirror universe of Hyrule, connected through cracks. Lorule is darker, the baddies are meaner, and so are the people. Hilda wants me to track down the portraits and restore them before Yuga can, and she helpfully marks on my map where she sent them. Thanks, Hilda!
Lorule has been split apart by all of Yuga's shenanigans, so the only portrait I can access at the moment is in Thieves' Town, the dark Kakariko. I don't know if you know this, but thieves love to sing, and paying attention to their songs helped me to finagle my way into the Thieves' Hideout, aka Lorule Dungeon #1. Before I get to that, though, I should point out that Talon's milk bar counterpart in Lorule is Ingo, which I think is funny, and there's this weird masked man called the "guru" who's attracting followers, which I think is weird. I thought it might have something to do with the Majora's Mask on my wall at home, but it doesn't seem to.
The conceit of the Thieves' Hideout is that there's a girl imprisoned there and I have to lead her out. It's your basic escort mission with the added bonus that she can step on switches for you, and I liked it. I also found something called Master Ore inside, which I later learned I can use to upgrade the Master Sword...if I find another one. Lame. Anyway, to exit the Hideout I had to go through the boss room, and I just knew the girl was going to turn into the boss, but she didn't. The boss fight was really interesting in that you're able to merge (ie, become a painting) on the boss's shield, which confuses him and allows you to get behind him, and then he eventually sizes up and tosses it away. What's also interesting is that a heart container didn't show up when I killed him; instead Thief Girl - which is really her name - led me to a house next door, where I found a heart container and a portrait of Osfala, who turned out to be a Sage and not just the descendant of one. But since I've been calling them sages this whole time, it doesn't really matter.
After that, I just did some exploring and prep. I found a fourth bottle, rented a Sand Rod from Ravio (Osfala had it but he doesn't need it anymore), and learned from Ravio that I can buy his items now so bought about half of them; it's all I had money for, because his prices are steep. But since I owned items now, I could get Mama Maiamai to upgrade them, so I upgraded my bow, hookshot, and boomerang. I can also upgrade my hammer, but I have to find eight more Maiamai first.
I also opened a few more cracks - they're technically already open but they don't show up on your map until you use them once - and made it possible to get to the second dungeon by helping some turtles get back to their mother. Finally, I paid for the privilege of using the Big Bomb Flower, which is exactly what it sounds like and is unlimited use for a one time fee, and found a fun Octoball minigame that would be funner if I knew how to aim better.
Since I already opened up cracks to these areas, tomorrow I'll be tackling the lake and swamp dungeons. After that? Who knows.
(And since I forgot to mention it and now can't fit it in anywhere, I'll just put it here: I learned that Irene isn't named Maple because the witch is! And that makes sense because they added Maple to the Link to the Past game boy advance remake, so I assume it's the same character.)
Day 4: A Duo of Dungeons
So...things didn't quite go according to plan. I did get through two dungeons today like I said I would, but they weren't the two dungeons I thought they were going to be. Here's what happened.
I started out by making my way through the Turtle Rock dungeon, which is a fire dungeon despite being in the middle of whatever the Lorule version of Lake Hylia is called. It has some pretty neat puzzles involving freezing lava with the ice rod, but it's also the first place the depthiness really tripped me up; there were ice and fire wizzrobes, and I knew I needed to use the fire and ice rods to defeat them, but I didn't realize they fired vertically instead of horizontally like you'd expect (meaning they made an ice cube drop out of the air or flames rise out of the ground). I figured it out eventually of course, which made it occur to me how to hit some out of the way crystal switches. So I get to the boss, which is a lava turtle, and everything's going fine until he kills me, which makes me lose all my rented stuff...which at this point was just my rods. Kind of a huge setback. And I was out of money from buying all my other tools.
So I decide that since I'm going to travel around rupee hunting anyway, I can also spend that time hunting for Maiamai and opening new cracks (I'll go ahead and tell you that I found enough Maiamai to upgrade my hammer and bombs). Along the way though, I found myself in the Skull Woods dungeon and really had no reason to not go in. So I did. And it's a good thing too, because I found the second master ore, which allowed me to upgrade my sword. (I'll also note here that I got a Hylian shield somewhere, but can't remember where.) And before I went into the dungeon, I came across the famous Running Man, who offered me an item for 888 rupees. I tried to buy it even though I needed the money for rupees, but I didn't have a free bottle. So whatever it is, it goes in a bottle.
The Skull Woods dungeon is your basic shadow dungeon, with wallmasters and gibdos and the like, but this one had the twist of having to use the wallmaster to solve certain puzzles (making it hit switches and the like), which is a neat idea. The boss was basically a giant wallmaster wearing a gauntlet and with an eye on its palm. And again, it was easy to figure out but still challenging. Beating this guy let me rescue Impa's portrait, and now I'm confused. If Impa is the Shadow Sage, then which one is Irene? I guess we'll find out.
After that I returned to Turtle Rock and the boss was a breeze this time, partially because of the upgraded sword and partially because there weren't wizzrobes hanging outside the boss's door, taking away my hearts. I rescued Seres's painting and I don't know who she's supposed to be descended from either. Maybe Zelda, but then that would leave Irene descended from Nabooru and that doesn't seem right. Maybe I'm way off on this whole thing.
At this point, I was going to go ahead and knock out a third dungeon tonight, the Desert Palace, but then I remembered I was still missing the Sand Rod, which is necessary to get in. So I went back to rupee hunting. Some things of note during this period: the Lorule version of Dampé is a ghost and I don't know what that's all about; I found a Hynox in a cave and he kept giving me money to go away, but then he got mad I took so much of his money and now tries to kill me whenever I enter the cave (I don't know if I can remedy this at all); and I accidentally entered a place called the Great Palace, which I'll go into detail about later but suffice it to say that it's CRAZY.
Next time: Desert Palace for real this time, and I'm just gonna wing it after that.
Questions: when am I gonna get my Pegasus boots? I know they're coming. Why do I not see the seeds of a trading quest? After the boots, what are the other three empty spots in my items for? And what about the three empty spots in my gear? Why don't the Gerudo get any love? And wouldn't it be nice if they explained where the Ocarina races have disappeared to?
Hopefully some of these will be answered in my next entry.
No comments:
Post a Comment