THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: Tears of the Kingdom Megathread (Please use spoilers when necessary)

[odessasteps]

I presume you also noticed 

Spoiler

Their names are the corresponding shrine backwards

 

[Contentious C]

Ran into my only source of legitimate frustration with the Fire Temple.  It kind of (as much as this game does anything) expects you to jump from base to base in a particular manner, but it's actually quite easy to miss one of the adjustments you have to make to get from some of the straightforward stuff to some of the more intricate stuff.  And then using skills within the temple is a bit of a pain.  I just found a way to cheese it with Ascend, because you can cheese a lot of shit with Ascend, but after getting it more or less done, I checked a couple of guides, and it turned out that the annoying stuff is what others are doing.  Definitely the least clever or compelling of the three I've done so far.

The best thing about the skills, once you've finished a temple, is that

Spoiler

the avatars have the decency to shut the fuck up.

 

Edited May 20, 2023 by Contentious C

[Contentious C]

Massive, massive cheeseball vehicle can be made that makes exploration a total joke with just 3 parts.  All you really need is a good enough charge to push it (though it's not fast), but I'd prioritized that anyway and I'm nearly at max.  I'm going station-to-station and finishing out the Depths map.  Maybe tonight.

EDIT: Or not, because I realized I only had two of the major map-based story points to visit and WOOF, once you actually find out what's been going on all this time...holy shit.  Even if the side characters and moment-to-moment writing can be pretty weak sometimes, they bring it where it counts.

This video does a pretty stellar job of examining the emotional rollercoaster of just about every mainline game in the series, and yeah, maybe the first one being my formative game-playing experience as a kid explains a lot about me...

 

Edited May 23, 2023 by Contentious C

[odessasteps]

I saw someone recommended building and saving "an atv" (the big tires)  for the Depths and probably some of the more mountainous areas above ground. 

[Contentious C]

Yeah, that was actually my first favorite build, especially since they're nudging you in that direction with the items persistently available and at least one quest.

Edited May 23, 2023 by Contentious C

[Craig H]

At some point, I need to go grab the Autobuild ability, but every time I think about it, I get distracted by seeking out another shrine or another tower.

There are also some "dumb" puzzles in this game. And by dumb, I mean, it makes me feel dumb that the answer to them was so obvious. One example was...

Spoiler

There's an area covered with this goo like substance. I had no idea what it was. It looked like mud. Given my experience from BotW and how there would be these globs of blight covering various areas, I figured it was something dangerous. I get to this tower and I can't get into the tower because this goo was covering the gate to the tower. I'm searching around and searching around and can't find a way in. After close to 30 minutes I see this dude stuck in it and he says it needs to be washed away.

I proceed to slap my forehead and realize, yes, it's mud. I use a hydrant to wash it all away and get into the tower easily. My first instinct was that it was mud and I thought there was no way it could be that simple. It was.

And that's another reason why I love this game. I mean, this is basically BotW Plus, but if this were the game that came out instead of BotW, people would be calling this the greatest game ever made. As it is, while it feels a lot like BotW, there's still a shitton that makes me look past having to unlock a bunch of shrines and towers again and fight 4 regional bosses before I likely have to fight the big boss.

My friends and I were talking about this too, but one thing that surprised us is how they didn't include a creator mode. We're hoping that with some update down the line, maybe even DLC, we just get a creator mode where we can build whatever we want without playing through a whole story to get all of the parts and pieces and batteries to make ridiculous machines.

[odessasteps]

I read some article today where they were saying the game was "ugly" I guess because you can't play at 60 fps in 4K HD or whatever.  Some people. 

Playing like 10 minutes a day before bed means I'm still on Sky Island. But I did watch a video this morning about how to level up your horses (lots of cooking) by visiting the horse God. 

[Contentious C]

I'm pretty close to the endgame now; I think I wandered into the "Final Boss" zone on at least 2 separate occasions anyway, just out of curiosity, but having gotten past a couple things there, I can say with some certainty it's where you have to head to beat this.  The name of the zone is also a dead giveaway if you ever stumble upon it.

I'm also far enough along to say with some certainty that there's one section that's simultaneously the most frustrating bullshit in the game and also one that wrestling fans are going to dig the Hell out of.   Luckily once you do the annoying shit, it's pretty weird and interesting after.

I think one thing people may be a little irritated by is that this very much leads you by the nose with respect to plot points; you could beat BotW with practically nothing if you were totally aces at the combat system.  This isn't going to let you do that even if you're good enough, at least not for your standard player.  I wonder if/how speedrunners will overcome that.

But at this point, I have no intention of finishing it off; I still have at least 3 outfit pieces I want to hunt in the cave system, and then it's a matter of actually getting a proper high-defense gear set.  I'm still slightly underperforming in that aspect, and since I don't really Flurry Rush too much and only parry against Lynels, it means I can kind of get my ass kicked against silvers if I'm not paying close enough attention.  Part of that, though, is I'm just generally not cooking enough, a problem I had in BotW for that matter.  I also still have essentially all of Northern Gerudo and Hebra to explore, though now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if that's where those outfit pieces were hiding anyway.  Not sure what the best way of cave-hunting would be.  Tune the Sensor+ to brightbloom seeds (aka, otherwise the most utterly worthless use of Sensor+)?

Also, if you're reading this, this is a bit of a spoiler, but it will save you a headache or 9: Quest Items will despawn in this game if you get too far away from them.

There are at least 2 separate instances where you have to do insipid fetch quests to fix something, and you can't just bring them all to the central point and work it out.  You have to do them one at a time and get the quest giver to tell you, "You have X remaining", unless you do something truly fucking nuts like glue them all to each other and carry them around from place to place for no reason.  Just save yourself the trouble and be patient.

Edited May 25, 2023 by Contentious C

[Contentious C]

So much for maxing my battery! LOL

[odessasteps]

Apparently the 1.1.2 patch fixed a lot of the duplication glitches. 

[Zimbra]

That's why I turned off auto-update 'cuz daddy needs more diamonds.

[Craig H]

I never used any of the dupe glitches. I understand there was one you did while flying because of the many, many, many YouTube videos that popped up on my feed.

Last night I again got distracted on my way to getting the Autobuild ability. This time it was launching out of a tower and landing on a sky island with one of those huge blocks you can move with ultrahand. There was another set of islands I was trying to get up to and a couple rockets were laying next to the giant block. I attached the rockets to the block and flew up really high to get to the other set of islands. Found a shrine out there by doing a green crystal puzzle and then flew over to the plains where there was another tower. And that's where I got really distracted.

So I'm at this tower and I can't get in, but someone is standing outside of it saying they could get the doors working if I'd just give them a mushroom from the caves below. The caves below are all jammed up with breakable rocks. I spent for-fucking-ever breaking those damn rocks and never found a fucking mushroom. I found other shit in there, but no mushrooms. So now I don't know what to do. 

Honestly, I wish I could just bash the guy's brains in and use ultrahand to blow the doors off the tower.

[Zimbra]

The most fun part about the gliding dupe glitch is using it to play carpet bomber by duping a bunch of bombs over a bokoblin camp.

[Contentious C]

26 minutes ago, Craig H said:

So I'm at this tower and I can't get in, but someone is standing outside of it saying they could get the doors working if I'd just give them a mushroom from the caves below. The caves below are all jammed up with breakable rocks. I spent for-fucking-ever breaking those damn rocks and never found a fucking mushroom. I found other shit in there, but no mushrooms. So now I don't know what to do. 

Honestly, I wish I could just bash the guy's brains in and use ultrahand to blow the doors off the tower.

LOL, I thought that had something to do with mushrooms, and...it doesn't.  I got frustrated with it, did something else, and then came back and found one of your "dumb" puzzles, maybe the only one in the game for me, since it points a way for a bunch of others so that you know to do them naturally. 

But, you said it yourself.  Give them a mushroom, dot dot dot.

Eventually, you can do legitimately cool shit like

Spoiler

finding a spot you can't reach normally, because it's slick or unsupported or you can't boost any other way, so you hold an item near the spot for a while, Recall it back to that point, Ascend through the object while it's being Recalled, and hop over to where you wanted to go.

 

Edited May 26, 2023 by Contentious C

[odessasteps]

As I was telling Matt, Zelda may finally make me hook up the dock for my Switch. The screen may just be too small to see all the details I need to playing in hand held mode. Keep missing things on the ground like arrows and fruit. 

I finally did the third shrine so I'm ready to finally get to the ground.

[Matt D]

So the 10 year (and thus I) have it. Started on Friday and I've made pretty good progress so far here and there. It's early days Zelda so it's all about exploring. I got to the surface, got the hanglider, and left the plot behind. I've got 3-4 towers and a bunch of gloom checkpoints (I found a horse down there and just ran like hell from everything until I had a bunch!) Gameplan is to just unlock as many shrines/towers as possible and then I can teleport around when need be. 

[Contentious C]

So, I'm probably nuts.

I had the game mostly done - down to "Destroy Ganondorf" as a main quest option, which, at this point, is hardly a spoiler for a Zelda game.  Got the Lightroots done and...then I got a little bored.  So I deleted the save game.

Yeah.

At least this time, I beelined for a few specific shrines and outfits that I knew would speed a couple of things along, but the other thing I did was skip a lot of fights.  I wasn't really tuned into what the BOTW (and by extension, this) leveling system was, but I was starting to get more than a little irritated by the predominance of silvers in the prior playthrough anyway.  It was like "Super Mutant Overlord in Fallout 3" levels of aggravation.  The biggest thing about that has been to

Spoiler

skip the temples and mini-bosses

so I've done only one piece of the questline, because as I said before, this leads you by the nose and locks a bunch of content behind the Temples.

I also didn't realize until this time through that my BIG SPOILER from the prior page is actually...not even a little bit of a spoiler at all.  The game in fact *tells you* this is the case if you bother to read the research notes that are at the bottom of the first place you visit underground.  That's what I get for barreling through walls of text.

[odessasteps]

There are videos out there that attempt to explain how leveling and experience works, both in BOTW and TOTK. All of which is from data miking and speculation, admittedly. 

[Contentious C]

After getting a little intimidated by the idea of having to do it, I finally

Spoiler

beat my first Gleeoks.  The Flame variety are *slightly* easier to defeat, if only because the parts for fully upgrading the Flamebreaker armor are less onerous than that of the Snowquill, which takes THIRTY-NINE Fire Lizalfos tails.  I just killed 10 of those dickheads and they dropped TWO tails.  The drops from the Gleeoks are straight trash, too; it's purely "I did this" swag, although some ostensibly "useful" upgrades are locked behind the King variants.  You don't really need elemental weapons, either; some guides suggest it's necessary, but only for the arrow shots, and you should have a lot of those from roaming about.

Since my defense was at 60, I honestly took more damage from falls and diving than I did the damn Godzilla wannabe.  It made up for the time the little asshole at Lake Hylia basically deleted me.

Bring lots of arrows.  Lots.

 

[odessasteps]

I finally started playin in earnest, getting the glider and exploring the depths. 

[NikoBaltimore]

I felt like quite a fool when I sunk in a couple hours in Hyrule thinking when am I going to get the glider.  I stumbled my way through a couple side missions only to realize I still had to meet Hoz at the castle.  Once I did that then I got the glider and I'm off to the races.

But before this realization one of the funniest things to happen so far is when I started the Dragon's Tears mission with Impa.  She had me go on the hot air balloon and after the cutscene said I can glide down while she works on landing.  With no water to dive into it was either jump to my death or find another way.  So since i attached the balloon in the first place I figured why not detach it.  It led to a cartoony zoom into Impa's face as she started to freak out before the screen went black.  Then it showed us on the ground with her thankful to survive that.  So yeah I'm glad that there's different ways to get things done in the game though that glider is a godsend.

[Craig H]

They really need to go the No Man's Sky route and release a patch to include a creative mode and let people go nuts without worrying about batteries, resources, enemies, etc.

[Contentious C]

I'm back about to where I was, plus a ridiculous amount of cheese.

I'm putting off the main questline stuff, mostly because I kept seeing people talk about "spikes" in Fuse, and I didn't know what they were, and you lose a really easy way to farm them if you advance the main quest too far.  So I'm trying to get those up to about 100 before I move on.

Plus, it turns out, uh, you can BREAK Lynels completely.  I've farmed the Floating Coliseum twice.  For that matter, you may be able to do it with any of the mini-bosses, though the specific mechanics of their interactions with Autobuild items may make certain ones easier than others. 

Spoiler

There are some glitched items in the mid-late game you can Ultrahand and then Autobuild for a whopping 6 currency, and typically, when you get into a fight with a Big Bad, they try to "roar" your constructs out of existence.  These, um, can't be destroyed, so they effectively stunlock themselves trying to roar over and over.  It's super fucking broken.  They will still attack you about 20-25% of the time if they aggro something besides the items, but that's still less kiting and prep and precision that you need.  I used to parry them into oblivion in BOTW; won't have to ever do that again (until they patch this, which they really ought to).

Also, USE DAZZLEFRUIT EVERYWHERE.  Seriously, it's fucking great. 

Spoiler

They insta-kill smaller Stal enemies (haven't tried a Stalnox) so you don't waste your weapon durability.  They also solve Shrine & Temple puzzles that need light, but you can struggle with this, so things like rocket- or bomb-jumping yourself into Bullet Time are necessary.  And they insta-stun the big Froxen.

Edited June 6, 2023 by Contentious C

[Matt D]

I got my last tower last night. I have a lot of lightroots. I have maybe four stamina upgrades and seven hearts. I'm starting to collect geoglyphs based on a map I found. I made it to the Wind Temple and that was pretty epic and enjoyable to get there but I'm not quite ready to do it. I've run from a lot of combat so as not to level enemies yet (but I will start soon because I know I need to get monster parts for upgrades). I have all of the miner's gear. Lucked into two pieces and had a map for the third. I have a decent amount of seeds and found Hetsu once and need to find him again. I've done maybe half to two-thirds of the stable newspaper quests. I just got my second full battery. I've unlocked one fairy. 

I'm basically enjoying myself and the exploring aspect of things, which is what I love the most about these games. I'm certainly doing more side quests than I did in BOTW since I tried to stay on the roads at first and talk to people. 

And I am pretty much building nothing. Nothing at all. Whenever I find a Korok hanging about, I leave a leaf on my map and go back later. I have more seeds than I can use at one time so far just by finding them normally. If I can figure out a shrine quickly, I do it. Otherwise, I leave it and just have another teleport point for now. I'm leaning towards the things I enjoy and leaning away from the mechanics I'm not interesting in and having a grand time because of it.

Edited June 7, 2023 by Matt D

[Contentious C]

After much shouting and wanting to pole-vault my controller into the next galaxy, I

Spoiler

finally beat a King Gleeok.  JESUS those motherfuckers are annoying.  It's basically a FromSoftware boss fight.  It deals all 3 elemental damage types, so you can't outfit-block any one, because the others will get you.  I just used terrain (mostly the occasional Ascend to get enough height for Bullet Time) and tactics and managed to get it down.

The first phase of the fight is easy if you have strong bows and 3 full stamina wheels (which I always beeline for anyway).  The whole thing with them is that all the guides tell you "use the elemental weakness" and that's kinda true, but only for those arrow headshots, and only to cut down on the number of hits you needs. But if your aim is good and if you use lock-on, you can actually get a lot of shots in without the fruit assist, and then each head gets stunned.  And, y'know, bomb arrows also work wonders.  Once they're on the ground and wailing on them is your best option, you *could* go elemental there, too, but, lo and behold, the only elemental fuses *worth* that kind of damage are...from other Gleeoks.  So if you didn't do all those fights, you're not going to have that anyway.  Just pick something big and swing.

The final phase is...the most aggravating thing in gaming I will likely complete more than once.  And only because I still have 3 more Sage's Wills locked behind the other 3 Kings I have yet to beat.  It just rains total fucking chaos down on the whole map, and it's also 200 meters over your head the whole time it does this.

Again, the guides will tell you, elemental matters, but at this stage, it's totally worthless.  What I had to do was 2 things:

1. I Auto-built a 4-piece mega-Spring for getting in the air.  Don't even think about taking them out of inventory, just spend the Zonaite in Autobuild, so you need at least 12, maybe more like 36+ in case the damn thing does something goofy like roar them out of existence multiple times (but, given the distance from you, it's unlikely to do that).

2. Once you're in the air and close enough to them, you pretty much HAVE to use Eyeballs for the homing property.  I found it to be a total joke by going with those and also using a high-end Lynel bow so that it was 32x3x100% crit damage per head.

The only nice thing about the final form is, once you stun all 3 heads, it's so high in the air and falls so far that it takes massive fall damage and you only need a couple of hits at most to finish it off.

Otherwise, fuck those guys.