Friday, November 24, 2017

Breath of the Wild EX Log, Entry 6



Tourok - Korok Hunter


I've been in the middle of replaying Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, but with the latest update(s) of Breath of the Wild I've been hooked again, specifically with hunting for the last remaining adorable, little Koroks, which is the only thing that I have left to do in Normal Mode, before the 2nd DLC arrives. And my goal now is to find as many as possible, if not all of them, until the Champions' Ballad finally gets released.

I could use the Interactive Map on Zelda Dungeon to quickly reach this goal, but I still want to find as many of them on my own using a combination of the Korok Mask and the Hero's Path Mode, two very useful features from the first DLC. With the Hero's Path Mode I'm focusing on areas, where I haven't walked for the last 200 hours, but naturally there's no guarantee that I haven't missed anything on my previous paths, so basically I have to comb everything all over again. But it will help, as soon as I'm done with re-wandering the entire world, because then I can focus on the gaps.

Of course there are levels of self-imposed video game challenges that will end in a masochistic waste of time, so with the final dozen Koroks I will certainly succumb to the temptation of using a solution map like the above to be done with it.



A Path of Ice and Sand


I should be through with the hardest parts, though, because I'm finally done with completely exploring the Hebra Region, which took quite a while and a huge amount of motivation. I still did learn some new things on the way, like the fact that large snowballs might get created anywhere in the area and they do leave Amber behind, where sometimes you might just find random drops of Amber on your way. The other thing was essentially a new type of Korok puzzle...


After leaving Hebra, I arrived at a total of 793 Korok Seeds, so I found exactly 25 Koroks there, which was a good haul. It was probably the area with the most Koroks left, but it felt really good to finally leave this place... Those lush, green colors!


It's much more fun looking for Koroks in other places that are not some depressing frozen wasteland. But now take an educated guess, where I ended up next...


Another quirk to my current Korok is hunter is a "no teleporting" rule that I established after leaving Hebra. In Hebra I used the Travel Gate on top of the peak to built momentum, but now I'm trying to thoroughly comb the areas following the natural lines on the map. If you teleport, you might miss something on the path that you've skipped. Well, and it also looks nicer in Hero's Path Mode.

But this approach brought me over the Rayne Highlands to Satori Mountain, from where I went off to the Gerudo Highlands - the other gigantic snow area in the game. It's not as bad as Hebra, because it's made of wide plateaus that apparently don't even have any Koroks on them. There had been lots of treasure chests there, which I had found already, but the Korok Mask didn't show me anything new.

And often it's checking the map, which reveals new Koroks to me. Of course there are many spots, where you can't make out anything on the map at all, but you can still check for interesting spots like trees on a hill and I was quite surprised that there were still a couple of Korok stone formations left for me to find on the map. And there are probably more, so all I have to do is study the map for them.

After the Gerudo Highlands, the Gerudo Canyon areas were next and in general every environment with lots of verticality will take about three times as long to explore, because there can always be something on the different levels of the walls...



And the stop after that was yet another snowy mountain, the Daval Peak... But luckily I've already explored both Mount Hylia and Mount Lanayru with the Korok Mask, so I should be done with the frozen parts for now and I can look forward to the lush jungles to the east.


Current Progress:
  • Koroks: 815/900
  • Map Rate: 92.96%

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