#rpbotw

Well, I'm pretty much out of excuses. I think I'm going to finally beat Breath of the Wild tonight. I spent the last few nights grinding for star fragments. I'd put it off for a long time because I thought it would be mind numbing and awful. It turned out to be incredibly relaxing, serene, and fulfilling. One of the best things I've done in the entire game. I'm not being sarcastic at all. Here's the thing. I've gotten all 120 shrines. I freed all four divine beasts. I got all 900 Korok Seeds. I upgraded every armor set I could buy or find. I just hadn't upgraded all of the amiibo armor sets or all of the Gerudo jewelery. Upgrading those costs star fragments. There's no fast or easy way to get star fragments. They come in a few chests, and are prizes in a few quests. A couple of dogs will even give you one, if you feed them enough meat first. Fun fact. Dogs also eat voltfruit. I don't know why. Another fun fact. Horses will like you more if you feed them apples, swift carrots, or endura carrots. Of the three, apples are the easiest to find. Swift carrots can be easily bought in Kakariko Village, and endura carrots can be found around Great Fairy Fountains and the top of Mount Satori. Related fun fact. You can feed a horse by walking up to it with an apple held in Link's hands and the horse will eat from Link's hands. You don't have to drop the item. I found that last one out myself, last night. I found the Lord of the Mountain on Mount Satori a few nights ago at long last. I rode him to the stable. I didn't like the look of him, but I enjoyed having a horse with super fast stamina regeneration for a while. I already have a horse with five stars in speed. I named him, if you remember, Freddie, after Freddie Mercury. I do not know if Freddie Mercury would have liked that or not. My honest guess is that he would not have cared at all. The Lord of the Mountain disappeared after I got off of his back and tried to take his picture. I was disappointed, but I understand. It's just a silly cheat thing, being able to ride a horse with five stars in all stats and super fast stamina regeneration. Epona has four stars and normal regeneration. My horse Soybean has four in strength and speed, and five in stamina. Freddie has two strength and three stamina, and five speed. There is no perfect five star horse that you can actually register. I'm alright with that. I usually ride Freddie, because when I want a horse, I want the fastest fucking horse. There are times when Freddie is too fast or I fear for his safety. Then I can use Soybean, or go even slower with a three-star speed horse, the Royal Horse that I caught fairly early on in the game. I used the Royal Horse for the obstacle course to earn the extravagant bridle and saddle. I'm pretty sure I used Freddie for the archery course to earn the Knight's bridle and saddle. I have Freddie and Soybean wear the Knight's bridle and saddle. And so on. Grinding for star fragments means doing one of two things. One is fighting and killing lots and lots of Silver Lynels. They have a small chance of dropping star fragments. I think I've killed about thirty or forty or so of them, maybe. I've gotten three star fragments from it. It is not reliable. They are the only monster that drops them. I know because I found a list of all enemy drops that a man named MrCheeze compiled by mining game data. It's thanks to him and his object map that I know that Freddie and Soybean are the best horses, too. And that I can mix four fleetpod whatever the fuck they're called with a dragon horn to get an elixir that maxes out Link's speed for thirty fucking minutes. The other way to get a star fragment is to see one fall from the sky. They fall at night, as red streaks that slowly drop to the ground from far away, and they throw up a dust cloud and then leave behind a very tall pillar of light. If you make it to the light before 4 AM, it turns into a star fragment and becomes beholden to the game's physics. It may fall off of a cliff if it is near one. That is bad. That makes it harder to grab. The way I found online to do this is to save the game and then close out of it completely. Then wit until night and go to shrine on top of the Dueling Peaks mountains. Stare East until a star drops. By closing the game and starting it again, it guarantees a fragment will fall. They don't fall every night otherwise. I did that for a while. But the East of Dueling Peaks is not an easy landscape to navigate. I lost a lot of star fragments to the cliffs and lakes over there. So I tried other waiting places. My favorite is the Great Plateau tower. Stare north from the tower, with the central Hyrule tower on the left and the stable on the right. Fragments fall very close to one of those two places. So close that I could always, without fail, either glide to the fragment from the central tower or hop on Freddie at the stable and get the fragment in under a minute. There's no water for the fragments to fall into or cliffs for them to fall down. Just open fields and a few forests. There are guardians. They often tried to shoot me. I either ignored them, if I could, or I killed them, if I couldn't. Guardians aren't a threat anymore. I needed to get about ninety star fragments or so to max out everything. I think. Let's do the math. I believe there are four pieces of jewelry that require two fragments each. There are five sets of amiibo armor that require twelve each (four for each piece, three pieces). The Sheikah Mask takes a whopping ten. That's seventy-eight. Okay. I guess I needed seventy-eight. I still forget how many I started with. I could average a few in an hour at Dueling Peaks. I averaged nearly ten an hour at the Great Plateau. Last night I got fourteen in a little over an hour and a half. Staring at the landscape for several minutes at a time, waiting for a fragment to fall, is very relaxing. Sometimes it rains. Sometimes it doesn't. The sky gets brighter or darker depending on the size of the moon and the clarity of the sky. I could stare at those landscapes for hours. And I guess I did, though not all at once. The brief interruptions of teleporting somewhere else, chasing down the star fragment, waiting until noon somewhere, saving, closing the game, starting it up, waiting until night, and teleporting back to the tower gave it enough meaning that I wasn't just falling asleep looking at a big field with a castle in the middle that had black clouds and four lasers going into it. And I got enough fragments to upgrade every amiibo armor and every jewelery item. I like the amber earrings the most, which is ironic since they don't require star fragments. Them and the... Opal earrings? They help you swim. The amber earrings don't help you do anything. They just give 28 armor, the same as other high-armor items. Those are the Soldier's Helmet, the Ancient Helmet, and the Cap of the Wild. The diamond circlet also gives 28 armor, and Guardian Resistance besides. So the amber earrings are just pretty and not as good as other equipment. I still like them a lot. I like the way that they look, which is like little tiny daggers of amber. Amber is the prettiest color in the world. I realized this about twelve or so years ago, when a character in a video game I was playing was named "Amber," but in Japanese, and had amber-colored eyes. I liked that character a lot. I liked her eyes. I liked her, and her eyes, so much that I enrolled in Japanese courses, travelled to Japan, and took a photo of a woman dressed as that character at Comiket, the world's largest amateur comics convention. It was great. I felt great. Several other people lined up to take that same woman's photo after I stopped her and asked if I could take her photo. I hope she felt great, too. I don't think she could possibly remember me. I was just some fat foreign guy with an American accent. My photo of her was the end result of four years of hard, pointless work that I'd decided to take on because of a video game. I say she can't possibly remember me because she had other fans right after me who also wanted a photo of her. But the few times that I did cosplay myself, I made some pretty vivid memories of my own minute-long fans. Like a teenage girl who asked to feel my arm. I obliged her and even flexed so it wouldn't just be a squishy tube of meat, but instead a hard tube of meat.. Her friend said she was drunk. I was thirty. I decided not to wear that costume anymore because of that girl. I haven't. So it's possible that the girl in the costume of the character with amber-colored​ eyes remembers the fawning fat foreigner who asked for a photo and inspired half a dozen others to ask for the same. I don't know if I want her to remember me or not. I suppose I must. And so on. I like the amber earrings because they look good on Link. That's all. I went through my strategy guide and did every side quest listed. Even the dumb ones, like "go to a big circle of rocks on the ocean and talk to the bird man and then find a treasure chest and talk to the bird man again." I read that Kass, the bird man, makes his way back to the Rito town if you complete each shrine quest of his. This is true. I'd completed every shrine by the time I learned that. So, since I'd also completed the shrine quest involving five little Rito girls, they were in town as well. They were singing in front of Kass as he played his giant accordion. I was envious of Kass when I saw that, but I don't begrudge him anything. Good for him. The girls are his daughters. It was a scene of a man returned home after a long time away, spending time with his daughters who loved him. The daughter in the middle commented on how I looked cooler than the last time she had seen me. She asked if I'd completed every shrine. "Congratulations!" She said. "Good boy!" Then, "I hope you liked the congratulations!" It was more meaningful to me than the Armor of the Wild. I talked to Kass that night, because he asked me to. He told me some things. Some pretty important things. That wasn't in the strategy guide. I found the Water Reservoir last night. It's near Hyrule Castle. It's just a pond. But it isn't labeled on the map until you go to it. Then it's labeled. I wonder how many other places I still haven't labeled. I'll storm the castle tonight after work. I'll kill Ganon and I'll see the credits and that will be that. I'll stop playing until the DLC. I have other games to play, but I'll miss this one. I don't want the journey to end. They say that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. What nobody ever told me was that it ends after a thousand miles.

I was worried that getting the 900th Korok Seed would feel hollow or anticlimactic, but nope. It feels fucking awesome.

Believe it or not, I am still meticulously working my way through Breath of the Wild. I'm up to 561 Korok Seeds and 118 shrines. If you're familiar with the limitations of shrines, you might realize that this means I must have done some more of the main quest since I last wrote. And that's true, I have. Last Tuesday, I finally bit the bullet and did the Vah Ruta dungeon for the Zora. I enjoyed the sequence where I rode around on the sharkman's back quite a bit, but apparently I did it incorrectly. See, the deal is, and this is obviously spoiler territory so anybody reading this is going to already know all of this, the Zora have a problem. Well, two problems. Three, really. But they're all interconnected. So it's basically one problem. The three subproblems are: 1. Their princess, Mipha, was killed by Calamity Ganon 100 years ago, and they blame Link for this. 2. A giant robot elephant is sitting in their reservoir generating an infinite amount of water from nowhere, which means 3. Endless rain and anxiety about the rivers overflowing and possibly rising sea levels. So the solution is for Link to go get the elephant to go away and cut that shit out. I don't know how this solves problem #1, but it totally does. Mipha's younger brother hatches a plan: he tells Link to gather a bunch of shock arrows, which are exactly what they sound like: arrows that shock the things that they hit. How do they work, you ask? That is a terrific question. Never ask it again. Shock arrows can be gotten any number of ways. For example, going to a store and buying some. Mipha's brother suggests to Link that he should instead sneak past a giant killer monster lion horse man and take its discarded shock arrows. This is because Mipha's younger brother is tall, strong, and handsome enough that he has never needed to become smart, and so hasn't. Still, I wanted to murder that lion beast, so I agreed to his plan. He might be stupid, but he's fun, and that's what matters in life. To get to the monster, he told me that the easiest thing would be to wear specially made Zora armor that lets the wearer swim up waterfalls. How does it do that, you ask? I told you to never ask that again, and here we are, you asked it again. Mipha's father doesn't seem to mind giving Link the armor, even though Mipha herself is the one who handcrafted it. Somehow. Despite not being a blacksmith or tailor. Well, that we know of. Given that Mipha's brother is stated to be over a hundred years old, and looks to be about Link's age, it's safe to assume that Mipha, at the time of her death 100 years ago, was also over a hundred years old. That's plenty of time for her to have spent a couple of years learning how to craft armor. So let's assume that she did. Despite the okay from Mipha's father and brother, some random old dude who is also standing nearby becomes very upset. As a close friend of the royal family, he has some pull, but not enough to actually stop Link from getting the armor. Still, he's upset, and Mipha's brother wants him to not be upset. So he explains to the old man that Mipha had made the armor for the man she hoped to marry some day, which is... A thing Zora women just do? I guess? Even though no Zora guys are seen wearing it? So I guess it's like a wedding dress, you just wear it once and then it goes into the closet? And probably if most Zora women have to make the armor then it would be totally reasonable for Mipha to have needed to learn how to do it at some point? And the old guy says that's exactly the problem, Mipha made it for her beloved, and so Link shouldn't be running around wearing it. And Mipha's brother points out that the armor was clearly made to fit Link and HOLY SHIT the old guy says, that means Mipha wanted to marry Link! And Link says HOLY SHIT I totally remember her wanting to spent a lot of alone time with me back when she was a lot more alive, that explains it! She wanted to marry me! And then he shrugs it off like whatever, haha, works for me, I get this sweet waterfall-climbing armor and I didn't even have to marry a fish. And the old guy has to admit that it's all worked out very nicely for Link, and he grudgingly agrees to... Not be as upset anymore, I guess. It's not like his cooperation was actually necessary for the plan to get shock arrows. So off Link goes to get the arrows. Personally, I've murdered the shit out of dozens of Lynels, but this was the first I killed, and you never forget your first. It's a hard fight if your armor isn't maxed out and you don't have sweet weapons, but once your armor IS maxed and you DO have sweet weapons, it's super easy. Specifically, all Lynels carry around bows that can fire multiple arrows, are super strong, super durable, and also they have special arrows like shock arrows. So once you've killed your first Lynel, you can just use his bow and arrows to kill the next one, and use that guy's bow and arrows on the next one, and so on, and never run out of bows, arrows, or weapons again. It's quite a fun diversion, and is why I've killed so many. They also drop stuff worth a lot of money and which is necessary to upgrade armor. Anyway, after killing the Lynel and gathering a few dozen shock arrows, I fucked off for several months of in-game time. I figured things were basically stable as they were, and I had other shit I wanted to do. Until six days ago. By that point, I had well over 120 hours into the game. I'd been playing it for about a month. I had 116 shrines down, enough Korok Seeds to max out my inventory space, and every armor set maxed out. Not including the amiibo armor, of course. Because fuck that stuff! But I wanted to get the Korok Seeds near the Zora domain, and with the constant unending rain, it was difficult. And I'd been putting off this main quest stuff for too long. So I decided to just bite the bullet and do it! I found the elephant, which wasn't hard, because it's really big, you guys, just the biggest damn robot elephant I've seen in quite some time. I swam out to it and was repelled, because I guess if it were that easy then anybody could do it. So I decided to talk to Mipha's brother. Mipha's brother had been patiently waiting this entire time near the giant robot elephant, on a dock specifically placed to let him be close to it, in fact, so I talked to him and agreed that I wanted to go ahead and stop the elephant from sitting there and spraying water into the air nonstop. So he gave me a piggyback ride and swam around the elephant in a big circle. The elephant shot big ice cubes at me, and I had no idea what to do about that. You're supposed to use the Cryonis rune on them. This breaks them. I didn't know that. I just shot them with shock arrows. I had over 500. I wasn't worried about running out of them. This also worked, so I kept it up. It seemed to me, even at the time, that there had to be a better way. Damned if I could figure it out, though. Eventually, Mipha's brother swam close to the elephant. I don't know why he wasn't repelled like I was. I assume he was just TOO GOOD AT SWIMMING. Him being close meant I was close, and I could swim up the waterfalls on the elephant's sides to get a clear shot at four special orbs on its top and shoot shock arrows at the orbs. This... Did a thing, I guess. It made the elephant move just enough that I could climb aboard. I said goodbye to my strong and stupid friend, and entered the elephant, where Mipha herself greeted me. Now, I was pretty sure she was dead, but that didn't seem to be enough to stop her from talking me through getting a map of the elephant and then updating me on my own progress every time I did something. I guess she figured I would have a hard time counting down from five without her help. Given her family, that may have been a safe assumption on her part. After doing some puzzle shit for about 75 minutes, I got to fight Waterblight Ganon, the monster that had killed Mipha. I was rather fond of Mipha by now, so I wanted to kill him, too. So I did. It was incredibly easy. I just shot him in the head a bunch of times with three shock arrows at a time until he died from all the fucking arrows in his head. There was no real strategy required. About halfway through the fight, he started throwing ice blocks at me, like the elephant had done. I still didn't know to use the runes to stop the ice blocks, so I tried hitting them with the Master Sword instead. It worked, but took me a little practice. Still, I eventually murdered Mipha's murderer, and felt pretty good about it. Mipha felt pretty good, too, despite being dead, and she appeared as a ghost to pilot the elephant again. Like she was originally supposed to. I'm pretty sure I never mentioned that part. Mipha was supposed to pilot the elephant! But she died instead! But I guess that dying isn't a big deal for some people in this world, because she totally started piloting the elephant again as a ghost. I could tell that she was a ghost because she was glowing green and had little fires floating around her. This is a pro tip from me: if you see someone who is glowing green and has little fires floating around them, then probably you are being pranked. But if it also in a Zelda game, they are a ghost. She also gave me her healing ability, which I didn't want and figured probably wasn't that good anyway, since she'd presumably had it while alive and had died anyway. Still, I couldn't refuse (it wasn't an option), and off she went, piloting the elephant to a slightly higher rock to fire a laser at Hyrule Castle. This seemed premature to me, since I wasn't planning to go to the castle right away, but I guess the elephant has some way of just constantly shooting a laser nonstop forever, because that's what it started doing and is still doing. Mipha, from atop her mighty steed, lamented the fact that she could not see her father again. It was so sad! It broke my dang ol heart, you guys!* *Nobody is reading this and so "you guys" refers to literally no one Mipha's whole backstory is that she was a gifted healer and expert spearman who also was champion of her people and even their princess, loved by all, and she just got fucking murdered and died before she could tell the man she loved how she felt and propose to him. That's her story! A woman who worked insanely hard and lost it all! Now she's a fucking ghost! She even says that she spent the last hundred years trapped in the elephant by the monster that killed her! A hundred years! Trapped with her killer! Couldn't leave! Or do anything! And she misses her dad! And he misses her! So does everybody else in her home town! They all miss her! All of that is forgotten!!! Link arrives back in town and everybody's like "sweet, all's well that ends well!" And nobody says "all you did was fix half of your fuck up from.a century ago by calming down the elephant, our princess is still dead," so Link instead is told what a cool guy he is and is given Mipha's old spear. And here's another point where my love of doing the main quest last bit me in the ass, because Mipha's dad says "oh, I see you already have the Master Sword, probably you don't even need this spear," and I said "both parts of that sentence are true" and I didn't even take it. I just left it there in the chest. Didn't need it! Don't want it! Keep it, old man! It's the only memento of your daughter you have left! I'd say maybe you still have some of her old things, but I haven't seen evidence that Zoras actually have things! They're all naked! And there are no individual houses! Maybe they have houses underwater. I doubt it. Link can't go underwater, therefore there is nothing of value underwater. That is how Zelda games work. And now there's a fucking cartoon elephant on my screen at all times! I hate it! So much! Why does it have to be there! Get rid of that fucking thing, man! The only way to get rid of it is to turn on the Pro HUD, which means that the minimap also goes away, and I DO need that. So I have to just accept that there is now a little elephant forever. Even on the loading screens, a little elephant that hops around. What a great way to honor Mipha​! The saddest girl in the world! Little hopping cartoon elephant! Fuck you! I spent a month playing, dozens and dozens of hours, I got USED to the game looking a certain way. Think of a game you've put that many hours into. Animal Crossing. Halo. Whatever! Now imagine a tiny fucking elephant gets added to the screen at all times while you're playing. Would you like that? Fuck no, you wouldn't! I hate that elephant so much. The power isn't even that great. It's a strong and useful heal spell, but it's used before fairies and it has a very long charge time, like 24 minutes, I think. Makes it a lot less useful. And that's it. My analysis of the main quest involving Mipha and the Divine Beast Vah Ruta. Here's the thing. The whole exercise, from when I went to talk to Sidon to when I left Zora's domain, took under two hours. And I can never do it again. I can't even make a separate save file right before it to play it again. That doesn't work. The main quest is surprisingly short. It feels bad! I was hoping for more info about Link's past, about the world's past, about Mipha, about the Zoras. It isn't there. I thought that maybe there would be more scenes with Mipha in the other memories I still hadn't unlocked from the photos Zelda left for Link, but there aren't. I thought that maybe I was missing some information when I went into Vah Ruta. And I wasn't. That information does not exist. Mipha is present in so few cutscenes, and yet the game turns her into such an incredibly tragic figure. No other champion gets that treatment. No Goron, Gerudo, or Ruto gives Link any grief about their def champion. The Gerudo talk about their dead champion, Urbosa, as a hero who died bravely. Little girls want to grow up to be just like Urbosa. The Gerudo chief tells Link that she respects and trusts him MORE because of his previous relationship with Urbosa. It's the polar fucking opposite! It's incredible! I did the Gerudo beast last night. It was cool, too, but not nearly as much of an emotional rollercoaster as the Zora one. I was hoping that the sequence where I rode around on Sidon's back was indicative of how I'd handle the other beasts. That there'd be someone to give Link a piggyback ride for all four. Or at least carry him. The Gerudo are all at least eight feet tall (well, the adults, anyway). I was hoping that the chief's bodyguard, a mountain of a woman, would grab Link by the back of his shirt and carry him like a suitcase as she ran through the desert and then throw him onto the divine beast, which is a giant robot camel. That didn't happen. I might write about what did happen. I probably won't. I enjoy writing these long summaries and recaps of game events. It's fun for me to go through and pick things apart, pointing out the bits where I was confused or annoyed or happy. I don't think that it gets a lot of reads from other people, though, and I can only keep it up for so long if it's for my own amusement. Doing it about the Zora was fun for me for my own sake. Doing it about the Gerudo wouldn't be. But I will say that I was, again, disappointed at the lack of backstory and the overall brevity of the entire quest line. I wanted to see more Urbosa like I wanted to see more Mipha. Well, actually, I have to admit that I wanted to see more Urbosa because she checks damn near every one of my boxes. I won't pretend I didn't think she was fucking gorgeous and also cool as hell, because that's exactly what I thought! And I guess she's just another dead lady who appears in three or four short flashbacks and that's all I'm gonna see of her. Oh well, I guess. It isn't the kind of game where I can actually date anybody (Link is too serious about his quest for that kind of thing, just for starters), but still. And that's it. I'll reread this later and that will be good enough for me.

Did some research on some of the mechanics j talked about in BotW after my last post. You'd think I'd do research beforehand, but I didn't in this case. Looks like armor reduces damage taken by a flat amount per point of armor that you have, up to a certain point. Like the example given on a Reddit thread was that a Guardian's laser can be reduced to doing three and a half hearts of damage if you have armor in the mid-40's, but any additional armor had no additional effect. And that armor-boosting food only adds a flat number to your armor rating (4, 12, or 24, depending on the level of the boost). Which basically means that I probably already can get max armor from nearly any outfit I want to throw together, and should really worry more about getting that Barbarian Armor for the attack boost and maxing it out to get 20 armor per piece from it. It won't be my armor of choice when fighting Guardians, at least, not if I have a Guardian weapon I can use, but if I can have 60 armor (enough for the maximum possible damage reduction) and a 50% damage boost from the set, then that seems like a better choice for combat than 84 armor (also enough for the max damage reduction) and no damage boost. Ah well, so it goes. There have to be limits on how much your armor can do, I suppose, and doing it this way has some major advantages. Like it means that I can wear the Flamebreaker boots to be fire resistant when exploring Death Mountain along with two pieces of the Ancient Armor for their 56 defense, and it won't matter if the boots have been upgraded at all. It makes things more reasonable for more casual players. It's unreasonable to expect all players to upgrade all armor like I'm trying to do. So a lot of my strategy from the last post just became less useful from a practical perspective. I'm not going to change it much, but I thought I should say something anyway.

Well, as I'd hoped, Breath of the Wild is continuing to grow on me. Since I took care of one of the hardest things I could do early on, so far, nothing else as difficult has come up. Possible exception: two days ago, I fought a White-maned Lynel that I just couldn't beat. It wasn't a matter of him killing me too easily, though; I just plain ran out of weapons to use against him. Next time, I'll try to bring a bunch of attack-boosting food and just really pound him. I think that's going to be the only way I can win. There's nothing that can be done about weapons breaking, unfortunately. The closest I could come to solving that problem would be to spend a day or two hunting for Korok Seeds to exchange for inventory space upgrades so I could bring more weapons to the fight. But that's a fairly minor issue, and I'm not worried about it just yet. I will be later, though, since I need to kill a fucking ton of Lynels to get the items they drop for armor upgrades. Armor upgrades are my #1 priority right now. I have my Stealth armor fully upgraded, which means each of the three pieces give 16... defense points? Armor points? Armor class? What exactly does that number even measure? I only wish I knew. But I have it, and the Stealth armor is one of my top three favorite sets, so I wanted that pretty badly. My other two favorites are the Climbing set and the Ancient set, for what are hopefully obvious reasons. But, because it's me, I'll explain all three. The Stealth set is pretty great because I can wear it while gathering items like dragonflies, lizards, and meat from animals. With the full set equipped, I can jog at normal speed right behind most enemies or animals and stealth strike them to do massive damage. This is the main way I get food in the game, since I don't worry too much about making food with added bonuses most of the time and prefer to just get food that fully heals me. Five raw meats make a.meat skewer that grants ten hearts. Since my max is thirteen, that's plenty. Especially since a lot of animals, like foxes, wolves, and larger birds, drop meat that gives more than that. If I'm lucky enough to get gourmet meat from a moose or a rhino in the frozen northern part of the map, I only have to cook two of those to get a meat skewer that restores twelve hearts. I also can't emphasize the usefulness of it when lizard hunting enough. I'm terrible at seeing the lizards in this game, so I just use the sensor and run around in tightening circles while pressing the A button until I pick them up. In full Stealth gear, the lizards don't run at all unless you press the run button yourself, or you actually touch them. So my strategy works. Which is great, and it's how I've gotten enough lizards for every armor upgrade the game has to offer. I still need to get a boatload of Smotherwing Butterflies, though. Those are a huge pain in the ass to get, even with the option to buy three at a time from a merchant somewhere. The butterflies are necessary to upgrade the Flamebreaker Armor, which is only useful in very limited situations, but it's absolutely necessary for those situations, so I really want to upgrade it as much as I can. I could get by using elixirs to replicate its fireproofing effects, but the full set gives a greater bonus than the elixirs would, so I'd rather use it if possible. I got the chest piece fully upgraded, but the helmet and greaves are stuck at only having been upgraded twice. The butterflies aren't the only weak link, though; I also need more Lizalfos Tails. Those are a pain to get, for sure, but I'm not as worried about those as I am about the butterflies. Maybe I should be. I dunno. Anyway, that's why I like the Stealth Armor. I can feel comfortable wearing it in battle now, which I couldn't before. With three upgrades, it only gives 27 armor, compared to 48 fully upgraded. Now, it is the weakest fully upgraded armor. Most armors give 12 with three upgrades and 20 with four, meaning they go from 36 to 60. And then there's the Ancient Armor, which goes from 18 to 28, or 54 to 84 with the whole set. There's a big goddamn difference between 48 and 84, so I really want to finish upgrading the Ancient Armor. I only need to do one more upgrade on the chest to do it. It's got three upgrades and the helmet and greaves each have all four. So I have 74 armor points with it right now, and that's plenty for damn near everything the game can throw at me, especially Guardians, which is what I use the armor to fight most often. I also just like the look of the Ancient set, haha. I kind of wish you could dye it better, but I'll live with what I have. The Guardians are practically a joke with decent Ancient Armor equipped. They're these giant machines with big spider/octopus legs that crawl along the ground and shoot lasers. That's all they do, but they're very good at it. They move faster than Link can run, and their lasers seem to have nearly unlimited range. Once a Guardian sees Link, they don't stop chasing him. The only way to get them to stop is to hide long enough that the Guardian loses interest. The solution is to shoot them in their eye, which doubles as a laser turret, with an arrow, which stuns them and lets you either run away from them or up to them. If you can destroy all their legs, they're fucked, so that's what I always do. Ideally, I use the Master Sword for this, but it often runs out of energy after I kill only a few Guardians. So, if at all possible, I use Guardian weapons, which the Ancient Armor's set bonus enhance. Having the full set equipped and upgraded at least twice gives the Ancient Proficiency bonus, which makes Guardian and Ancient weapons last longer and do more damage. Ancient weapons are nearly impossible to find. You're supposed to buy them. But fuck that! So I just hit up the "Major Test of Strength" shrines every time the world's monsters respawn and gather Guardian weapons that way. It's not the most efficient way, i suppose. I'll probably start buying Ancient weapons eventually. Right now, I want the money for other things. And honestly, if I were to buy any Ancient weapons, I'd want to buy the arrows. They're only good for one hit, but it's an instant kill on Guardians if you hit their eye. And unlike Lynels, which can also be killed in one hit with an Ancient Arrow, they still drop stuff (Lynels don't, if you kill them that way). Ancient Arrows cost 80 rupees a piece if you buy them in stacks of five, plus three Guardian loot pieces. I can't remember which ones off the top of my head, I only remember shafts, because if you buy them one or three at a time, the recipe changes for some reason. But the stack of five uses shafts. Anyway, I may start using the Ancient Arrows soon, since I have nearly enough money to buy everything left that I want to buy, and I can probably at least break even even if I spend money and loot drops on those arrows. But I need to keep killing Guardians until I get two more Giant Cores to upgrade the last piece of the Ancient Armor. I also need to keep killing Ice Keese, Keese being bats, to get more than thirty more of their wings. I was able to find a great place to kill Fire Keese, and the Lightning Keese keep popping up randomly in enough weird places that I have enough of their wings, too. But even after specifically hunting for Ice Keese, I've had very little luck finding them. I need only a few more to finish upgrading the Climbing Armor, but then I'll need a couple dozen to upgrade the Snowquill Armor. The Snowquill Armor is actually a higher priority, though, since I pretty much have to wear it when I'm exploring the snowy areas of the game. It's the only cold-resistant armor. The Climbing Armor is super useful an awful lot of the time for the simple fact that it increases climbing speed, but I don't ever need to wear it to fight. And shouldn't, in fact, since I have better armor for fighting. It only gives 20 armor per piece at the max, which puts it on par with the Flamebreaker and Snowquill Armor sets. Those are more useful for fighting. The Climbing Armor is only good for climbing, and I can't fight and climb at the same time. So it can wait if it has to, which it does, for now. I do use the Climbing Armor a lot, though. Probably as much as the Stealth Armor. I do a lot of climbing! But now that I've been focusing on upgrading my stamina, I don't need it as much as I used to. See, Link can speed up his climbing a lot by using his stamina up, but it's horribly inefficient compared to equipping the Climbing Armor and climbing without the boosts. But for short climbs, it's a lot faster, and the definition of "short" changes every time I upgrade Link's maximum stamina. So far, I've only upgraded it three times. I'd like to upgrade it twice more before I go back to upgrading his max health. Which means that I've only done ten shrines since Sunday, which makes sense since I've been focusing more on finding armor upgrade items. I'm fine with that. Three stamina upgrades is still a huge boost compared to only one. It's kind of incredible, actually, just how useful that extra stamina has been. But anyway, the point is, I need Ice Keese, haha. And Blue Lizalfos tails, which can be found in the same areas, so that's fine. Butterflies, bats, and lots of tails. That's what I need most now. And the two Giant Cores, of course. If I can max out the Ancient Armor completely, I'll feel pretty invincible in most areas of the game. Even when I need to wear armor to resist the weather, I can wear at least one piece of the Ancient Armor and get a defense boost. And that's great! I want that. Then I can eat food to boost my attack power and kill Lynels more easily. They're a hell of a lot tougher than Guardians, which is kind of funny when you think about it. The other way to boost my attack power is to wear the Barbarian Armor, but, ironically, it requires Lynel parts to upgrade. So it won't be much help to me when I go hunting for Lynel, at least at first. Maybe once I get the armor upgraded a couple of times and can accept the fact that it gives a lower defense than the Ancient Armor without dying in one or two hits. It's an option that's on the table, but it's not the best option. I can raise either defense or offense using food, and the other using armor, and it makes more sense to use food for the offensive boost. I'll likely never get to wear I can perfectly dodge every attack Lynels throw at me like I can with Guardians. Guardians really only have the one attack, and it has a long charge time. Lynels have several, and while all are choreographed, they're harder to avoid or prevent. I'll have to get better at fighting them, though, to be sure. There are a couple of other large-scale bosses I'll need to kill a lot of, but they're much easier to kill. Hinoxes, big cyclopean monsters, are super easy to kill. You just walk backwards in big circles away from them until they take a swing, then shoot them in the eye. My preferred attack at that point is the charge attack with a two handed sword or clubs, since it can hit many times in a row before they recover from the eye shot, but anything works. Even the toughest form of Hinox is easy to beat. Even the easiest Lynel is pretty hard. There are also rock monsters, but they're a joke. They're just tedious. Not hard at all. And skeletal Hinoxes, but they don't drop anything that living Hinoxes don't, and don't drop some things that living Hinoxes do, so farming them is a waste of time. A waste! A fucking waste!!! Of goddamn time!!! I also still need to do the shrines to get the third piece of the Barbarian Armor (I got the helmet and greaves by just sort of looking at the world map and saying "hey, a maze, I'm gonna go there now", but I haven't spotted or looked up where the third maze is for the chest piece), and the other two pieces of the Rubber Armor (I found the first piece by doing a quest, I read that one of the other two pieces requires a Shrine Quest, and don't know anything about the third piece). I also need to buy the Radiant Armor, all three pieces, but it sounds kind of shitty so I'm not in a hurry for it. I also need to buy all of the circlets from the jewelry store, and all of the monster masks from Kilton. I think I'll visit Kilton tonight, actually. The masks could come in really handy in some areas. Especially the Lynel mask, haha. But above all, I really, really want to finish upgrading the Ancient Armor. Man, I want that shit taken care of. It's just so strong! Not the strongest, though. The Champion Tunic is actually stronger, but it's not part of a set and it requires dragon pieces to upgrade. I found some strategies for farming dragon pieces, and it doesn't sound too bad, but I haven't done it yet. At all. Haha, whatever. No rush. No rush on any of it, I guess. I don't know that this post was helpful to anybody. My guess is that it wasn't. But it might give some insight into how I'm playing this game. This is why I can't watch anybody's Let's Play of the game. I'm two weeks into it and all I'm doing is exploring and farming. Haven't entered a single dungeon. Don't want to! I want to do as much of this shit as I possibly can first! This is what's fun for me! Honestly, I think that I'll find the main quests boring as fuck. It can't compare to the joy I feel in watching my stuff get better and better. I fucking love doing that. And that would be a boring as fuck Let's Play, and I would like to avoid spoilers as much as I can. It's a hard balance to strike, I guess. In a lot of traditional RPGs, I find grinding boring. I guess the difference is that there's not a lot of actual grinding in Breath of the Wild. Just exploring. There definitely IS grinding, don't get me wrong. I spent a few hours doing nothing but earning money doing Snow Bowling so I could buy armor and unlock Great Fairies. And all this time I've spent killing Guardians could easily be called grinding. But it doesn't feel the same as grinding in a turn-based game, where you just run in circles and kill the same monsters over and over until you feel like you've gotten stronger. Killing monsters doesn't make Link stronger. You gotta kill the right monsters, in the right places, and get the right stuff from them to upgrade your own stuff in the right way. That's how you get stronger. Well, tougher, at least. There's nothing whatsoever that can be done to actually make Link hit harder with a tree branch or make his sledgehammer last longer. I mean, yes, you can get a temporary boost to attack power with the right armor or elixir, but the magnitude of the boost can't be upgraded. Hopefully you know what I mean. I guess what I mean is that, with the same set of equipment, Link's armor, health, and stamina can be upgraded, but his attack power can't be. It kind of sucks, honestly, but I can see why it's done that way. Well, maybe I can't, actually. I think that a minor strength or durability boost would be pretty fucking great. Oh well, I guess! Just gotta get clever! Get creative! I just unlocked the Stasis upgrade last night at long last (I was saving my Ancient Cores, the items you need to get that upgrade, for armor upgrades, but I finally had enough to do both last night), so maybe that alone will make a huge difference when I hunt Lynels and Guardians! I'll find out, I guess!! But once again, I guess this post is only going to be interesting to me. Like my posts about Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, or even the one I made about Link Between Worlds a long time ago.