I’ve been at this whole streaming thing for two weeks now, but I’m still having a great time playing Breath of the Wild again. It’s a lot of effort, streaming six days a week (for a total of 45.5 hours streamed since April 9th), but I’m enjoying it. It makes the solo activity of playing a game like Breath of the Wild more fun when I’ve got at least a couple people hanging out in chat while I play. The amount of interaction tends to vary a bit, peaking when my sister shows up in stream since she’s big on interaction and tends to more actively respond to whatever I’m rambling about or actually prompt me with stuff. I’m still working on getting better at monitoring chat while playing the game, but everything is moving slowly enough that it’s never much of an issue. It’s not like I’ve got hundreds of people watching. I’ve got maybe 5 core people, all friends, who watch most frequently, and that’s more than enough for me. It’s not like I’m trying to make a career out of this or anything.

That said, I’ve been working with my sister, who is a much more active Twitch user than I am, to figure out how to do this whole streaming thing better. Not necessarily because I’ve got some grandiose goal in mind, but because I’ve always been interested and I might as well learn if I’m going to keep doing this much streaming before May twelfth, when Tears of the Kingdom comes out. I don’t know how much I’ll do after that, especially since I’ll be away for about a week after that for my friends’ wedding, but I’d like to keep at least some amount of this streaming thing going. No idea what I’ll be playing at that point, as I’m unsure I’ll want to stream inconsistent bits of Tears of the Kingdom, but I’ve got a massive library of games and plenty of time to figure it out later.

As far as the game goes, I’ve passed a few crucial halfway points. I’ve got fewer than fifty shrines left to find and complete, another one hundred twenty or thirty more Koroks to find, and I’ve mostly ignored the western side of the map so it should all fall into place relatively quickly now I’ve moved over there. I finally hit the much-anticipated sixty-ninth death as well, yesterday, so I’m really moving forward on pretty much all of my goals. I’m not even to ten percent of my “1000 ways to die in Hyrule” video, but I think I’ll probably end this challenge with over one hundred. After all, it has only been two weeks so far and I’ve already died over seventy times. I’ve still got every boss fight, all the divine beast challenges, and I’ve hit the point in-world where Golden enemies are starting to show up. Even my progress to fifteen hearts and headgear that’s been upgraded to tier three can’t keep me alive most of the time.

I don’t know how many side quests and shrine quests I’ve still got left. I know where most of the shrines are and usually remember the challenges well enough that I can skip most of the quest parts of new shrines, so I’m a bit concerned that I’ve wound up skipping some of them. I won’t know until I defeat Calamity Ganon, of course, since that’s when you get the quest counter, but the number of things I know I still need to do has me concerned about finishing this aspect of my challenge. There’s no doubt in my mind that I’ll get all the shrines, fully upgrade my inventory, and clear all the main quests, but I am aware that I’ve literally never beaten the third Trial of the Sword quest on Master Mode in any game file. There’s a Silver Lizalfos in one of the first few chambers of that series and I never have enough damage output to kill it. Bombs can only do so much and the healing starts so quickly that I can’t just grind through it slowly with bombs. Missing a single one means it heals past what the last few bombs did to it. Sure, I’ve been looking up suggestions for how others have cleared this particular hurdle, but most of them just say to use long-lasting food buffs and not how to actually kill the enemies like this Lizalfos without running entirely out of weapons.

Other than clearing the quests, though, I’m not worried. I suspect I’ll have the shrines, main quests, and Korok Seeds done by the time the Legend of Zelda themed Splatfest happens over the first weekend of May, which will leave me with whatever time I’m not playing that, and the nights leading up to the 12th, to find and complete all the remaining quests. It is still possible, especially if I stop goofing around as much and focus on ending combat encounters as quickly as I can rather than showing off my moves. Not every fight needs to be done in the drawn-out, brutal exchanges the game is set up for. Sometimes, you can use up a bunch of stamina while shooting a Lynel from close-range to bring it down in before you hit the ground (or shortly thereafter, when you take advantage of it being stunned by your critical its to land the last few blows required to kill it). No risk required. Also no fun involved, but it sure went a lot faster and more simply than the other two Lynel fights I’d done right before it. After all, I’m pretty good at the game if I focus on what I’m doing and stop screwing around so much. I’ll let you decide which is more fun to watch, though.