What Did We Play Yesterday?

One of the most annoying features of this game is slippery rocks, because it never fails to start raining when I want to climb some big thing. I was recently awarded the first part of the frog armor, and that is how I learned there are 3 levels of slip protection. So I can still slip, but chugging a few sticky frog potions helps.

The thought of doing enough side quests to get the rest of the frog armor made me go :P though. My interest is starting to wind down, which is fairly typical in open world games once I've put in around 60 hours. I didn't start playing regularly until December and it absorbed most of my gaming attention for the past two months. I periodically returned to Breath of the Wild over the years, and I suspect I will do the same thing with this game. Hopefully next time I'll be motivated to complete shrines and work on the main quests.

• Completing the map early had the unexpected effect of making exploration a bit overwhelming. If I had to do it again, I'd try to focus on exploring one area at a time, if only to make it easier to keep track of where I've been.
• I've discovered maybe half the shrines, but I still find them tedious and lack the patience to finish them. As a result, my heath/energy is still pretty low.
• Bizarrely, I kinda got into finding koroks! This game has a lot more variety of korok challenge, which is part of it. I've unlocked plenty of weapon/bow/shield slots (honestly, maybe too many, it takes a second to scroll through my weaposn now) so now I'm just collecting korok seeds for fun.
• There are 147 caves, and therefore 147 bubbul gems, and I've only found a fraction of them. I've unlocked maybe half the rewards. I didn't realize there was a bubbul gem in each cave when I started playing, and I have no idea how many caves I explored without finding one.
• There are 12 geoglyphs and I've unlocked about half the memories.
• I've discovered maaaaybe 1/4 of the armors, if even.
• There are 58 wells and I've found about half.
• I've barely touched the sky portion of the game. Every time I launched from a tower, I would explore whatever sections were within gliding distance, but I honestly found this aspect of the game underwhelming and generally uninteresting compared to the underground/caves/wells areas.
• IIRC I've only undarked about half the underground area. I haven't been down there in like a month.

Overall, I like this game better than the first one and I've enjoyed playing it, but I feel like the lackluster storytelling is a huge missed opportunity, and Nintendo keeps doing really annoying things from a design perspective that feel assholish and contrarian for no good reason.

Yeah, animals everywhere. I realized I could (sort of) keep large herds of animals organized by using fences between types, and I also decided the only truly tedious thing about animals is feeding, since they require several feeds before they produce. I began setting up large fields of animals that had at least 1 square on a farmhand grid, so the farmhand would feed them while leaving the harvesting to me. I figured out pretty quickly that animals can be a hassle to harvest if they aren't in 3x3 blocks so I'll probably end up rebuilding some of these sections.

At this stage 10x head isn't cutting it so I'm steadily upping the animal count to 20+, while making an effort to have at least 1 of every tree and flower within a farmhand grid. Since I put farmhands in inefficent places, I usually have few nooks and crannies here or there where I can stuff a random flower and it won't look weird.

Now that I have huge seasonally-sorted orchards on the borders I've begun slowly but steadily demoloishing my old hodge-podge orchard that was a huge mess of roads and just... everything. I'm going to keep most of the trees, but organize them more to aesthetic/theme.

I don't know if it's a coincidence or planned, but ever since I came across the Yiga Clan at the observatory the Yiga have been constantly underfoot. They disguise themselves as regular people but you can tell by the eyes and their general weirdness about bananas. They also leave around banana traps in the middle of nowhere, then act like I'm the biggest idiot ever when in fact I did it on purpose because I wanted to slap Yiga and/or set Yiga on fire and get a few extra swords. Now that I've learned there is Yiga Armor in this game I am ON THAT.

I helped rebuild a village! The later stages of this quest were kind of silly. You "help" with construction by chopping down a tree and placing it as a support beam. It was still fun and it has a lot of neat rewards. It turns out there's a grassy field near Hateno where you can cut grass to reiably produce Hylian rice, and I was able to farm what I needed much more efficiently than waiting for the shop to restock.

What's interesting about the side quests in this game is the rewards tend to be pretty neglibile, unless you're going after Misko shrines, but I still find being given a plate of stewed tomatoes or whatever very rewarding. I really love that there are a billion armors to collect in this game, and I'm warming up to the fusion system.

OH, I almost forgot.

That happened. I approached what looked like a Great Faerie bulb and a Horse God popped out. I really, truly did not expect that. The Horse God is kind of a weirdo, but they can upgrade your horse and revive ones who have died. This is cool. The game reads your save files from Breath of the Wild, if you have any, and allows you to access those horses from a stable, which I thought was a nice touch.

I've continued roaming around completing side quests. Most recently, I filled out the full map and confirmed I've barely scratched the surface exploring though I've put over 50 hours into this game. I usually settle in for a 30 to 45 minute play session after work, which is generally enough time to find something new or die trying.

One of the main plots is to Find Zelda. Ask around and Zelda is seemingly everywhere asking people to do counter-intuitive things, like go into monster-infested caves naked or ignore strange ruins. Obviously this is an imposter and not really Zelda. I think the idea was to encourage players to get into the rich sidequest economy.

Mount Doom sucked the first time, but it sucks slightly less this time. One issue I have here (and elsewhere) is there are caves that are filled with excessive amounts of rock walls that must be broken, and this is primarily done with a sword fused to a rock. There's one on Mount Doom so large I broke 5 rock weapons tunneling through it. Weapons decay makes a "puzzle" like this even more tedious. The devs understand this, but rather than Not Doing That, they make sure there are lots of rocks and swords lying around so you don't have to constantly scrounge around for more rocks and swords which would be even more tedious. So thanks, I guess? But maybe we could have just skipped the excessive rock breaking part in the first place. (I say, even though swinging around a huge sword fused to a boulder is actually kind of therapeutic.)

In the plus column, there are a bunch of minecarts lying around and it has been good fun to hijack these and send a few koroks hurtling around the mountain. The first time was an accident, the rest were for personal enjoyment. I've since begun fusing rockets to koroks and launching them into space, which is fun and has been well-received by Donut.

On the sidequest side, I'm helping rebuild a coastal village (Hylian rice is proving to be a terrible bottleneck, but I've honestly enjoyed this one a lot) and I stumbled across a mayoral race and IDK what the hell is going on in Hateno but I need rice which they only stock in increments of 4 or 5 so I guess I'm here for it.

Farm Together continues to have seasonal events at very regular intervals, so I've picked up a few cool seasonal items. The seasonal quests continue to be grindy and boring, however, so I use my auto mouse-clicker setup to plant/harvest resources while AFK. Continuing to build houses and there are only a few remaining.

I more or less finished my seasonal-order orchards and started on my large flower patches. The plan is to set up dedicated patches so I can remodel my main flower garden with an eye to aesthetics rather than harvesting. I ended up arranging the flowers in 6x6 grids loosely by type (e.g. all daisies in a cluster, etc.), with a square of grass between each quadrant so I could plop down a farmhand if needed. A farmhand would only be useful if I needed to harvest a bunch of faster-growing flowers like daffodils, and even then, having a farmhand sit idle for a task I can do myself in about 1 minute is kind of silly. Another option is having a farmhand continually water longer-growing flowers, but the ROI on Roses and Gerbera Daisies is frankly stupid compared to something like the Queen of Night Tulips, which I already have on sprinklers, and it only takes a few minutes to havest them every 2 days. If I reach the point where I have an abundance of medals I'll probably just fit these fields with sprinklers.

I've continued to relegate diamond crops and flowers to a central diamond-harvesting area. Diamonds are still my main bottleneck, but that will change after I buy the remaining plots of land and the issue will be medals. The warehouse will continue to need an increasing amounts of diamonds, but at this stage I only need like 10k a pop which is trivial with two rubber tree farms going.

I realized I am wasting some of my farmhand's passive potential and began adding more flowers and trees to farmhand plots that had open spaces. For instance, I have a handful of cinnamon trees I almost never get around to harvesting, but if I chuck a few into my animal pastures they will be harvested every single season as long as the farmhand is paid. I found having a few stray orange trees in pastures leveled that type signficantly over time (most of my trees are level 20 to 30, but the oranges are up to 60, largely because a few are being continually harvested by farmhands). Likewise, I'd tossed a few mango and apple trees in my tamarind orchard and those have levelled up nicely as well.

I never did get into decorating, so I used CE to give myself 500 tickets and went to town decorating one of the smaller houses. I got tired of it after burning about 250 tickets. Decorating is sort of fun? I guess? But not enough to actually work for it. They obviously put effort into this feature, there's a ton of furniture options if you have all the DLC, but it's not quite there and seems best as a late-game ticket sink. I have so many farmhands going, CE is the only way I'd be willing to spend the tickets to decorate.

I sometimes search for topics like, "How to collect apples in Zelda," and that is how I learned there's an autobuild ability that can be found underground at Great Abandoned Central Mine and this can be used for clever and nefarious purposes.

I decided I would go there prematurely, and boy was I in for a surprise! Without spoiling anything (does it matter?) my fave is back, and is a badder ass than ever, so uh. I guess we'll just deal with that later!

After continuing to die in dumb ways, because I'd barely upgraded my hearts or armor and one-hit deaths were distressingly common, I decided to embark on the great faerie quests and improve my duds. The great faeries are just as awesome as they were in the last game, but with 50% less sexual harassment. This questline has been one of my favorites, because it requires recruiting minstrels and transporting them while they scream and holler for you to slow down and stop making the ride so bumpy. They're a bunch of crybabies; we always get there in one piece.

In the process, I've been digging into the Gazette questlines that are located at each stable. These are actually pretty fun and varied, and I enjoy them, and I enjoy diving into wells.

So, about Link and Zelda

Zelink, if you will. There was a meme floating around on Tumblr that was like, "THis is how Link lOoKs at Zelda" and it was just Link being utterly unemotive, as always, and someone replied to this by offering a comparison of pictures of Link eating food, which is quite literally the only time he seems to enjoy living.

As far as I can tell, Nintendo doesn't want to commit one way or another. They want to have their cake and eat it too without even having to bake or ice anything. If I was gonna be generous, I'd say they're leaving it open to interpretation so fans can enjoy a wide range of Zelink without the heavy hand of canon but here's the thing--Nintendo hates fan interpretation and only wants you to do/say/think what they want you to do/say/think and it has always been this way so there's no point in being generous.

In the previous game, the Zora chick was mildly obsessed with Link (understandable), and Link evidently rolled with that but it was impossible for me to tell if he was into her or if it was platonic for him or if it was a chaste romance or a diplomatic/political thing or what. I can't tell what sort of assumption we're supposed to be making in Tears of the Kingdom either, but Link seems to get uncomfortable when characters flirt with him and IDK man. I don't see it. I think we should just let him enjoy his dubious food in peace. The Zelgan people are right, Zelda ought to tap that. She needs to fuck the bottom out of Ganon and Fix Him (which is impossible) and cause massive amounts of toxic drama for everyone. But clearly nobody in any of these games is ever getting laid, not even the horny giant faeries who no doubt awakened many size-kink fantasies and live rent-free in my brain. The smut writers of this fandom bear an unfortunately high burden.

Well I am back on my shit. I picked this game back up and play a few nights a week when I need to blow off steam.

• I finally divvied up most of my lifestock into separate areas, each with a dedicated farmhand. I still need to break out the deer and llamas.
• I'm continuing to find small hills on the map to decorate for each season event. I added a Winter Holiday one recently. I'm not totally satisfied with it yet.
• Crop planting and harvesting is slightly tedious for me now, there's not really a good way to automate this part (set and forget, as I've done with trees and livestock), but fortunately crops tends to be a small percentage of my open quest items compared to livestock, trees, and flowers.

I decided to build out my Dream Orchard, which has all the trees organized by harvest season so they can be harvested in lovely huge blocks. This requires unlocking the rest of the farmland, and I suppose I could cheat for diamonds but generally I just AFK and let my rubber trees do the work so I can make passive progress on my quests as well. My tea fields and spice fields are starting to shape up nicely. The planting cost is a bit steep, being medals, but it's really satisfying to roll through there and harvest several thousand diamonds in a few minutes, and useful if I'm just short of a goal and between rubber tree seasons.

I organized my flowers by growth time a while back. Now that I'm no longer playing daily, this is less important, but I'm still trying to think of how I want to organize my border flower fields when I get that far. I went to some effort to build dark tuilp fields for money, and at this stage I have so much money I doubt I'll ever run out, but it is still fun to run through the fields harvesting.

I have so many farmhands running I'm finally starting to run out of tickets, and decorating my many houses has been put on indefinite hold. One of my other goals was to build all the houses, and I'm doing that bit by bit. I figured out it's good to always have a house near a fast travel point so I can pop in and cook something up. Sushi is kinda the no-brainer here. You get 20 tickets, and the resource requirements are easy (fish and wheat). I do run out of wheat but rice paddies help a lot and I need to build a larger one.

At this stage, I guess the farm is visitor-proof. Outside harvesting all the crops and not tilling (which I'm sure will happen) or planting weird things in weird places there is not really anything a guest could do to mess things up, and I've got so much stuff to harvest a person could easily fill their meter in a few minutes.