What Did We Play Yesterday?

Crushed koroks: 2

Clearly, this will be my gaming life for the next month. I opened a partly-buried sky tower (now 2 remain) and discovered the most chaotic shrine EVER, which basically hands you a tank and says, "Go get 'em." I set myself on fire no less than 3 times, but I walked away with a better understanding of the zonai weapons and a bigger heart, thanks to all the charred robots left along the way.

I finally made a list of ingredients to find to upgrade my armor, and set off south to find warm safflina. I did not find any! However, I did find some swift violet, which I hadn't discovered yet and will need a crapton of, and farmed a nice number of fire-breath lizalfos horns.

Up until this point I've generally avoided enemies because if you're a button-mashing whack-a-moler, and I am such a person, the battles just slow you down. On a whim, I fused a ice lizalfos tail to a sword, and it one-shots those bastards like you would not believe. Simply incredible. Fighting those guys is a lot less tedious when you don't have to wack them 2343 times and switch up weapons twice because they break, so I'm gonna do a better job of experimenting with fusion and exploiting weaknesses. I already figured out attaching dazzle fruits to arrows made taking down a Hinox so much easier. I know this is super basic strategy for this game, but my ratio of picking mushrooms+climbing hills to fighting has historically been like 99 to 1 percent.

(I now know lizalfos tails have a TERRIBLE drop rate, so I won't be using those anymore. This dude Zeldas.)

Crushed koroks: 2

Yesterday, I glanced over my previous posts and confirmed I did IN FACT get the Zora armor. I have been playing THE WRONG SAVE FILE. As you can see, the correct file has much better stats. Fortunately, I only spent a few days doing that.

Once reunited with the proper Link, I promptly re-did a few shrine and korok things I missed on this file, and built the things much more competently this time. I got about 6 koroks but was only able to crush 2. I decided to start nabbing falling stars when I see them. I also found a Yiga hideout that was way scarier on the outside than it was inside, which granted me some Yiga pants and a map showing where the rest of the bits are. Finally, I rounded out the play session with some treasure hunting. Didn't really find anything particularly good but it's the thought that counts. I think I'm finally starting to embrace the building aspects of this game.

Koroks: 5. Continuing to hit up shrines and scope out areas that aren't well defined on my map. I found a bunch of koroks but only ONE was crushable (proof attached). I was also reminded of my two favorite quests, the satori/bubbl gems, and Misko's treasure. I did not find a Misko cave but I DID find a satori cave so yay. I had to do some building, which I'm terrible at, but I managed.I also managed to kill a Hinox by filling it with bombs and dazzle fruit. It was not an efficient kill, but it worked.

Obligatory random screenshot since I forgot to take any others. I'm still visiting unfinished shrines, but I've expanded my efforts to include exploring sections of the map that don't have an adequate number of place labels and therefore weren't properly explored. I'm especially keeping an eye out for wells.

Memories of my previous playthroughs, both of this game and the first one, are starting to blur in my mind so I keep having the craziest deja vu. Didn't I already meet the person who transforms dubious food? (I guess not, because talking to her started a questline.) Didn't I already get the swim armor? (I guess not, because it's not in my inventory.) Did I SERIOUSLY not finish all these familiar-looking shrines? (You know the answer...)

I've been meaning to get back to TOTK but it's always a bit daunting to jump back into a game like this somewhere in the middle. In the past, I've started a new game, but this time I set the goal of completing shrines beginning at the Hyrule Field area and working outward. This worked really well, as some of them were tutorial shrines I'd skipped for whatever reason and I was able to brush up on the mechanics.

After completing 5 or 6 of these I decided to pick mushrooms and explore wells, as one does. I found this big skeleton guy buried under a bunch of rocks. Gosh, I wonder if I'll regret digging him out? (I did regret it.)

Simulcra is a lost phone horror game with creepy elements and jump scares. I haven't played a lost phone game in a long time and I was in the mood for a horror game, so I yoinked this one off my backlog. The mobile interface is fun to navigate, and you have to dig through phone calls, texts, emails, and other stuff to solve the mystery. The voice acting is a little over the top, and the language is a little stiff sometimes, but overall it's been an interesting experience so far with some nicely creepy effects.

There is some weirdness with text input. It took MANY tries to come up with a saddest moment the game would actually accept. I tried some serious things and some silly things and it ended up taking something like, "Filling out this prompt is my saddest moment," because by then it really was.

Things got a little hectic in Nodebuster. There's a sweet spot in the beginning and middle of the progression where the updates notably improve the experience, but once you unlock the upgrades that allow you to gain permanent HP increases with each kill things get a little silly. I thought I was on the verge of beating the game when I unlocked the lab, which is a massive resource sink. You have to grind out red resources (bits), convert them to green resources (netcoin), and dump them in the maw. I lost interest at that point.