#jt plays botw

[maryellencarter]

today i have parried:

* bees, twice

* like a dozen rocks a bokoblin kept throwing at me

* three decayed guardian lasers

* one shrine guardian laser (those little buggers are *tricky* because they don't use the same timing cue as the big guardians -- you have to allow for the laser's travel time because it's functionally a projectile)

i keep forgetting flurry rush is a thing that exists. part of the point of this playthrough is to become much better at flurry rushes because you cannot beat tears of the kingdom without them, and that game has an advanced scaling system where the enemies get stronger faster if you are successfully doing flurry rushes and so forth, so i certainly do not want to practice them in that game (which has already kicked my ass a lot, it feels *much* harder than botw).

...aaaand then i tried to practice flurrying a blue boko and got killed. first death! luckily i am cautious and save approximately every ten steps (holdover from when i was running mass effect 3 on a laptop so underpowered it would crash to desktop every time there was a lens flare) so death doesn't lose me much. i still find it annoying though

[parksrway]

botw when I open it for the first time since totk's release

[lesbovalentine]

u know its so funny i dont even see people talk abt totk anymore. botw had such an impact on the series that its like unavoidable like its now the default zelda online. and we spent years getting hyped for the sequel then it came out and after a few weeks of excitement it just kind of faded out of view. kind of hilarious

[hekcle]

Guys since totk has been around for a hot bit do y'all wanna see how my first Zelda experience is going?

[jtgunner]

I'm doing some streaming tonight! This time, I decided to do a livestream on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the Nintendo Switch in preparation for Tears of the Kingdom! Come hang out!

WATCH IT HERE: https://www.twitch.tv/JTGunner11

[transfire]

want to play totk so bad but. i still havent even finished botw. i was so close to finishing it and i just dropped it and ive never finished jt

[dazzlingworld]

i want to talk about my favourite game but theres no 1 to talk to 😡😡😡

[rupees]

i literally love zelda im sorry i love it so much i onow its like my entire personality at this point but it is my favorite thing in the world it makes me so happy

[yutadori]

the art for kh 3 and botw are soooooooo so so gooood

[maryellencarter]

have started a new playthrough of breath of the wild with the intention of practicing the combat techniques, which i am quite bad at. (look, shield surfing and flurry rushes both require using three of the control inputs at once, i know i have ten fingers but i was never very good at playing chords on the piano either)

i don't know how far i'll get on any of these goals, but i'm also sort of vaguely considering:

* 100% run? have never finished one. there's at least one korok (near the akkala tech lab, uphill boulder golf with a lynel in the middle of the course) that i'm genuinely just not sure i can complete. i want to do this part glitchless if at all, so no seed duping allowed.

* clear all enemies no blood moon run? this is technically possible, although the timing to get the blood moon shrine to spawn without actually respawning enemies is quite tricky. there's a save-reload exploit that lets you delay the blood moon for a full cycle at a time, which would be pretty necessary for some of the night quests to be completable. my main interest in trying this is to force me to actually fight more enemies (and therefore get better at the combat) rather than rely totally on sneaking around and avoiding them. also to make weapons rarer and therefore more valuable/exciting to find, because in a normal playthrough i usually get overloaded on high tier weapons pretty quickly, especially once i get woodland tower with the respawning royal claymore. it's not actually possible to completely clear the map, because there will always be random spawns, like nighttime stalkoblins, or yiga after you defeat master kohga, but i feel like it'd be pretty entertaining to just be waltzing around past enemy camps you cleared and having them continue to have been cleared.

* all chests run? this would not be a true 100% objective because i have no interest at all in the glitching required to get "impossible" chests. perhaps "poke my nose into every nook and cranny" run would be more accurate -- there are so many tiny hidden things in BotW that even people who've spent thousands of hours in the game have never seen. this kind of goes hand in hand with the no blood moon run, because i'll definitely run out of hero's path time long before i finish any such playthrough, so the main way to tell if i've already been somewhere (other than my own memory, which *is* pretty good for BotW locations because the geology is so realistic it feels like an actual landscape and sticks in my memory the same way) will be if i already killed off the enemies there.

* no guides run. at least until like 99% completion or so. i've been playing pokemon violet with a collectibles map constantly open, which is about the only way i can enjoy that game because the geology/geography is just impossible for me, and i have played BotW the same way on other saves, but... hyrule feels, idk, homey enough? it already lives in my bones enough that i can, and want to, run around it like a real place and get to know every corner. like i did with my childhood hometown, and have not had the spoons to do irl since. i'll definitely make a great deal of use of the sheikah sensor (i've done all shrines before -- on the switch lite, which is a *trip* for motion controls shrines) and any other detection things like the korok mask, any ingame method i'm granted to find the collectibles.

* no amiibo run? this is more practicality because i left my botw amiibos at leia's. but also they always feel a little game-breaky, not even so much with the exclusive drops as just with the extra resources you get early -- i don't even remember most of the places you can find safflina in the game, just because i always get so much from zelda amiibos if i'm scanning them daily, for instance.

i'm playing on my switch lite again because the regular size switch really kills my hands in handheld mode. my beat-the-game save is also on the switch lite and i didn't want to overwrite it so i made a secondary profile. so far i have done the magnesis shrine (failed deeply at using the metal boxes in the shrine to bop the guardian on the head, which will kill it if you do it right but you have to either use motion controls to fling it down or get the guardian to stand under the box while you drop it from a great height) and almost shot king rhoam for a squirrel because he was wandering around in the forest (as the old hermit, of course) and i didn't know he could spawn there if you dick around long enough before completing the plateau. so i'm already discovering things! ^_^

(the main issue with attempting a no blood moon run is that i am absent minded and usually fail to notice it's a blood moon night until it drops the cutscene on me. that will probably be the major obstacle there. i don't expect to run completely out of weapons -- at minimum i can always get more yiga gear, champion gear, and once i have the master sword it recharges. i've never attempted trial of the sword, idk if i will? certainly not until i'm much more confident with my combat techniques)

one of my favorite things about playing video games is that there's always an intended way for you to solve whatever puzzle is presented to you. in games where the intended way is the only possible way, i get pretty frustrated, because i do not have the 30+ years of gaming history knowledge that most games assume -- i got my first controller in 2021 (for PC, so as to decide if i even wanted to get my first console, the switch, which i also did in 2021). but botw is so committed to the open-world creativity thing that there are usually a bunch of different ways to solve the puzzles -- for instance, there are many "stand on this switch and the door opens, now find something to put on the switch and hold it down so you can go through the door" puzzles, and there's always something provided like a barrel or a chest to put on the switch, but on many of them you can also use the stasis rune or 1-3 campfires (which are weirdly heavy) to hold the switch down. so it feels... idk how to articulate this... when i know i *can* just use stasis or a campfire, it's more fun and less frustrating to try to figure out what the game devs were thinking, what the intended method is and especially how they signposted it. (i have watched so many botw streams just trying to get a feel for how the devs handle signposting, because i don't have much of that assumed gaming background -- mainly mass effect trilogy, which handled signposting and loot placement extremely differently in each game -- and i'm not naturally very observant. leia says i'm high INT/low WIS, and that definitely applies to my irl perception score too :P another reason to try for an all chests type of run. getting in the habit of Perceiving things more)

(mass effect 1 is why i even bought botw though. i absolutely love the open world aspects of dicking around on the uncharted planets, except when i trip over thresher maws, so i was like "people are calling this the best open world game ever? i will Investigate" and they were correct)

(also i am very impressed that moldugas are not thresher maws. so damn many things copy dune and have their desert sand burrowing giant enemy be sandworms, complete with the blue tongues, which i always think of as thresher maws because i encountered those way before dune. moldugas are completely unlike thresher maws except for the burrowing and popping up at you. i genuinely can't figure out if there's any rl critter they're supposed to resemble, but by god they're not fucking sandworms)

[maryellencarter]

The other main reason I'm doing a "low fast travel" run of Breath of the Wild, rather than "no fast travel" (besides not wanting to re-climb the Plateau tower and not wanting to get stuck in a lake / on Eventide with no raft) is that the stealth armor is my main armor set, it takes 30 stealthfin trout to upgrade fully, and they only spawn in the waters in and around the Lost Woods. Meaning that by far the fastest way to farm them is to do the Trial of Second Sight, catch one in Lake Saria, then set it to your sensor and run into the Lost Woods. Every time the fog in the area eats you, it resets the fish spawns in Lake Saria, so you can warp straight back to Kuhn Sidajj shrine and catch another 2-4 stealthfin trout.

If I was doing a *no* fast travel run, I could of course actually walk through the Trial of Second Sight area ten or so times for the same result, but I can't be arsed.

[maryellencarter]

* man, i always forget how friggin tough that gang of monsters on hateno beach is. two black bokos and a blue moblin, jesus. i was Not prepared, but i didn't die (although they did get me for two fairies)

* i genuinely don't know if i'll be able to get *back* from chass qeta or eventide without warping. i know eventide is a full three stamina wheels gliding from the top of cape cales with a tailwind, and gliding is significantly less stamina-costly than swimming. and you can't make a raft stay on either island through the relevant loading screens

(currently i have 1.4 stamina wheels and i just barely managed to swim back from that one rock where kass points you toward the gold rupee chest)

(i always take stamina first these days, because two extra hearts is Not Much but two extra fifths of a stamina wheel is quite a bit honestly)

hm. not sure how i'm gonna handle getting the master sword in this playthrough. usually i get to three wheels of stamina -- that is, ten upgrades -- head into the lost woods, grab the warp point, bop over to hateno and turn my stamina into hearts, then warp directly back and pull the sword, then warp right back to hateno and swap back to stamina. don't know how that's going to go with actual travel. i'm also making an effort to sort of let the game guide me, because i'm really interested in seeing how it does that, but i'm pretty sure that will lead me to doing waterblight without the master sword, which i've never tried and am not confident about...

i mean, technically i could get the zora armor and then leave for the lost woods before tackling waterblight. that might be sensible honestly. and if i kill my way through the annoying electric path on the way into zora's domain the first time, then as long as i keep on top of my blood moon skips (which i have so far *knock wood*), i can waltz right back in even before i take out waterblight.

or. *or.* hmmmm. spose i head up north like bolson and purah direct me. spose i let the various zora point me into the domain. i'm not sure how much precedence that's going to take because i do have like 36 korok seeds burning a hole in my pocket, and it'd be nice to actually have slots for all those lizal weapons instead of letting them despawn. but *if* i get the zora armor and then go to akkala to find hudson and robbie as instructed... i don't have to go back by the lizal road, because i can take the waterfalls south of akkala citadel straight up into upland zorana and cross over to the domain that way.

(i usually put waterblight off until after i have gale at the very least, so i'm not terribly used to thinking about the ways the zora armor can alter traversal mechanics. i just realized the other day that the amount of effort the game puts in pushing you towards the domain -- you can trip over zora directing you there from as far away as ridgeland tower or lake hylia, if i recall -- is probably because it really, really wants you to get the zora armor early.

(look, i can't stand having my player character forced into romantic relationships, okay? cannot stand. and that's mipha's whole personality until age of calamity. even her champion's ballad stuff just doubles down on it. the zora armor is specifically and explicitly her equivalent of a friggin *engagement ring* for link. i've always avoided using it as much as possible because that makes me really uncomfortable. but the waterfall traversal integration is... probably a big thing i'm missing in how the game guides you, huh.)

[maryellencarter]

I think I found the route you're *supposed* to take up to Shee Venath early-game. Just south of Kakariko Bridge, opposite the road turnoff for Fort Hateno and points east, there's a deep glacial cwm, very obvious on the map, that leads you up into a bigass boko camp, and then if you clamber further up past a couple of korok puzzles following the patches of green grass as they wind around the mountain, you'll spot Shee Vaneer (the southern and higher Dueling Peaks shrine) looking like it's on the same mountain you're on. If you head towards it, you stumble across Shee Venath in its little cubbyhole just under the northern peak.

I still haven't tested whether there's an actual good way to get up from Shee Venath to Shee Vaneer without chugging a bunch of stamina restores on the way. I'm *trying* to get to Kakariko and buy my damn stealth armor, but with the no fast travel, there's a ton of "I should just check out this other thing while I'm here". At least I did get Hestu's maracas so I have space for a couple more weapons now.

[maryellencarter]

"low fast travel" run continues: having climbed all the way up to shee vaneer because i discovered you can see shee venath from a korok spot above bosh kala (look it's the photographic memory i'm pretty sure i know all 120 shrine names if i think about it okay? the totk ones aren't sticking at all though. i can clarify locations and associated puzzles about the botw ones but i'm not sure anybody reading this... cares really), i am now considering whether i'm stubborn enough to do the glide-and-climb *back* up to shee vaneer after solving shee venath.

(i am still doing them guideless or i could just look up the answers :P i had to look up some for my first all shrines run but once i've seen the solution it's much easier to understand the possible strategies to get there)

(technically "guideless" fell to "i have been around the entire circumference of the great plateau wall looking for a sword i know is here but my fucking irl perception check is not high enough to spot it" but i'm okay with that. i'm trying to rely *primarily* on memory and exploration, as much as possible. sometimes i need to know where to look and/or what i'm looking for, or i will Not See)

i am entertained to discover that from the summit of shee vaneer peak you can see ta'loh naeg through a gap in the pillars of levia, hinting you towards kakariko if you've been ignoring it thus far.

i really, really need to get back on the damn path though. i need hestu. i have nineteen korok seeds and i keep dropping perfectly good weapons i haven't even used because i only have eight slots, and i'm committed to keeping my basic tools on hand at all times: a torch, a hammer weapon, an axe, and a korok leaf.

(what am i gonna do when i've broken all the axes and they're not respawning because it's a no blood moon run? i rely so much on the respawning double axe at woodland stable. ...hopefully have the master sword or something? jeez. i usually try to save it for situations where it gets powered up, like the divine beasts and the castle.)

i did successfully manage the exploit to delay the blood moon for another week -- you save around 11:57pm in game, let the last few seconds run until the first frame of the blood moon cutscene hits with that BOOM, hit home and close the game, load it up from the manual save (not the autosave from the blood moon occurring), and the extra loading time squeaks past the "blood moon timer is reset to zero" flag but doesn't actually trip the "enemies and weapons are all respawned" flag.

the exploit itself is so simple you can do it by mistake, and in fact that's how the streamer I learned it from discovered it. The challenge comes from paying attention to the blood moons; remembering not to leave a shrine, divine beast, or the castle right after midnight unless you're sure it's not a blood moon night; not being able to roll over nighttimes with beds or fires unless you're *very* sure it's not a blood moon night; using your knowledge of the game to pace out your kills so that, for instance, you don't go after a lynel or a hinox until you have space for his weapon drops; the possibility of running out of weapons is a little higher in master mode because of health regen (calamity ganon in master mode is a *beast*, i doubt i'll ever play master mode myself for that reason, i'm too cautious to play a mode that doesn't allow for slowly whittling down health), but i'm sure it could also happen in normal mode, especially since there are just fewer total weapons in normal mode.

I don't know if it'll be physically possible to fill out the Hyrule Compendium without buying any pictures, during a no blood moon run. I'm stacking a lot of goals that I haven't seen anyone else do all in the same run. I know it's possible for certain weapons to go extinct in the game even during normal play -- I killed all 22 lynels in my main save without ever getting a mid-tier gear drop, because I was so scared of them that I put them off until they'd all evolved into white-maned or silver lynels. (There's a non-scaling blue one in the castle gatehouse for the compendium photo, but he won't drop his weapons unless you save-reload during the fight.)

in other news i have successfully parried a chuchu! it didn't damage it any though. shame.

[maryellencarter]

okay look i wasn't going to tame every friggin horse in the game until i found a 4 speed when i already knew they can only spawn in set locations

and with no fast travel i refuse to toddle around on a 2 or 3 speed

still *mostly* guideless

[maryellencarter]

Holy fucking shit. I don't know if I can adequately express how gobsmacked I am right now. You know those annoying little games where there's a square or rectangle, usually wooden, and a little ball bearing, and you have to tilt the board just right to make the ball bearing go through a maze? I'm crap at them. I got one for my tenth birthday and never beat it.

There's one in Breath of the Wild that you have to use Switch motion controls for. It's universally loathed. (There are several motion control puzzles in Breath of the Wild, and they're all annoying, but this one is attached to the warp point for one of the places the game sends you as part of its extended tutorial sequence, so almost everyone who's put in more than a few hours on the game has encountered it. It's also, I feel confident in saying after beating all the others, quite possibly the suckiest. It's definitely right up there with the one where there are three balls and three pockets on a board and you have to wiggle the board to get a ball in each scoop.)

Point is. I just now went in there to take one last crack at it before trying to learn speedrunner techniques to bypass it.

I beat it on the first try.

I don't know what the fuck happened. If I'm possessed by the ghost of a skilled gamer or something. It just... I did it. Without even using any of the tricks people recommend. I've beaten all the other shrine puzzles in the game that I thought I'd never manage, too. The very last shrine I need for 100% is Eventide Island.

I *never* thought I was going to Eventide. It's a complicated combat/stealth trial where all your gear is temporarily removed and you have to just work with what you can scrounge. But now... if it's the very last one... I don't know. Maybe.