aubergion | Tears of the Kingdom: Signs Point To Kakariko (Reply)

If it weren't for the quest marker, I would never have ridden west.

Every plot hook at Woodland Stable points east, towards Kakariko Village, and I had no way of actually knowing which way Princess Zelda was. But the map pointed me due west. So, despite feeling like I was horribly metagaming, I did ride west, just to see what the game wanted from me. The horse import was very convenient. With my five-spur Inqy, the journey took no time at all. Given that what the game wanted was to introduce me to the new replacement for the Sheikah towers, I think I made the right call!

Teen Purah is throwing me off a bit, but I do like the boost a few years of maturity seem to have given her. I wonder how much of her aging is the passage of time and how much is her tinkering again. It does seem like it'd take at least a few years for all the infrastructure to be set up. The materials caches for Ultrahand courtesy of Hudson & company are a nice touch. And it's good to know that all the swords got eaten by the Gloom, as the new Malice is called. Makes me feel a little better about my poor old Master Sword, wherever it may be.

Overall, I don't think this sequence is any more or less linear than the suggestion to go see Impah post-Great-Plateau, It just felt a lot more jarring because Rauru didn't tell me where to go, the pin on my Purah Pad told me the next stop on my quest was Lookout Landing with zero in-world justification. I think this could have been handled a lot more deftly, especially since Purah herself is the next NPC to talk to and the console-analogue I'm wielding is a Purah Pad. Some sort of "please return this to Purah" auto-alarm, like a lost cell phone. It's a prototype, that'd be a reasonable feature to build in.

The Skyview Towers are so much fun! And I lowkey love that the Guardian tech lives on in those weird creepy arms, and that Link stops being freaked out after his first round getting plugged in, and then being able to reuse them to paraglide - perfection! It's so good! Paraglider my beloved, I missed you so much.

The Deeps was very unexpected - I don't think the trailers showed it like, at all? (But I wasn't paying super close attention to the trailers). It honestly reminds me almost exactly of the caves in Don't Starve. The pitch darkness, the light flowers and fireflies, the dangerous enemies around every corner (no spiders yet though). One complaint - there doesn't seem to be a way out without fast travel? I was really hoping that there would be like, a lift or a rope or something that would indicate to me how anyone else who ends up down here gets out. This feels like one more way in which the devs perhaps over-relied on the shrines. It's a lot easier to get stuck and be forced to fast travel or reload in TotK than in BotW.

The signposts point quite strongly towards Hebra at this point, but I'm in the mood to wander. So I headed east, and picked up the Barbarian armor, a couple shrines, and the Eldin Canyon and Sahasra Slope towers - Eldin via Recalling myself into the sky, and Sahasra via fast travel back to Great Sky Island followed by throwing myself off the edge. From Sahasra, I spotted the familiar outline of Kakariko Village, and decided to go where, if I'd been properly roleplaying, Link would have headed from the start. So I started paragliding down. And then this happened.

Tears of the Kingdom: Link falling through the air. On his left, there is a glowing yellow star fragment.