One of my favorite techniques for wasting time, resources, and my enemies in Breath of the Wild is attaching things to Octo Ballons. If you get the right number of balloons for your object, you can cause it to float at about chest height, which puts it in the perfect position to blown wherever you like using a Korok Leaf. Since you’re not striking anything with the leaf, a single leaf can last you through a number of battles. Unfortunately, the balloons will pop after a short time, so you have to be precise, quick, and dilligent. Otherwise your carefully arranged maze of traps you’re going to blow onto the unsuspecting Bokoblins will fall at the wrong time and ruin the whole effect. After all, it’s only impressive if YOU set off the series of explosions that causes fire or shock or ice to rain upon your enemies.
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I’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 11
At one point into my first play-through of Breath of the Wild, probably at 1 or 2am on a night I had to be up early for work since that was pretty much the entire month following the release of the game, I discovered that I could hold items I’d been collecting in my hands. For whateve reason, it never occurred to me that this could serve any purpose other than to cook things over a fire. I’d, of course, discovered that you could interact with objects in the world before you picked them up, but it had never occurred to me that it might be useful to put them back into the world once I’d put them in my pockets.
Continue readingStory Dictation Or Discovery In Video Games
I’ve been playing a lot of Super Nintendo games recently. Most of which I played previously, but some for the first time thanks to them being freely available as a result of my Nintendo Online subscription. I may have started playing them because Earthbound was recently on it, but I’ve played more than just the one game. While many of them are nostalgia plays or simple, mindless enjoyment I don’t have anything interesting or useful to say about, I’ve been thinking about the approach to storytelling the games developers took in this early, limited medium.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 10
It has been a lot, the past few weeks. I find myself feeling just broken-hearted, exhausted, metaphorically out of breath, and incapable of mustering the energy to do any of my usual blogging stuff. So, I am turning to my old, familiar fallback of writing about The Legend of Zelda. This time, I’m going to talk about the very first Legend of Zelda game I ever played. It was a well-received game, lauded by many as the pinnacle of the franchise (though I’d contest that) and a game-changer in terms of what a player could expect from a top-down adventure game, so much so that it is still being used as the gold-standard decades later when people make games in a similar style. For those of you who haven’t guessed it already, I’m talking about A Link to the Past.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 9
One of my proudest accomplishments across the Legend of Zelda franchise is that I’ve managed to always be incredibly accurate with the bow and arrow in any of the games that have one. In some of them, I’ve been even more effective with the bow than I’ve been with the sword. To be fair, the main example I have is Skyward Sword and I’ve never been good at the motion controls used in the game’s sword fighting. I always wind up fighting the controller rather than my enemies. It isn’t hard to be better with the bow when that’s the case. The other instances are all top-down Legend of Zelda games, so that’s more of a movement prediction and zoning thing than an aiming accuracy and skill thing.
Continue readingI Needed A Rest
Turns out the last post that went up was my 600th post. It feels very appropo that it was about trains and death metaphors, but I do wish I’d realized before it went up. I’m pretty sure I could have come up with something specific to 600 even as exhausted and foggy as I was last week, and then I’d have had an extra post and a smaller gap between blog posts.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 8
I’ve pretty much hit my mental, emotional, and physical limit this week, so I’m going to set aside all the thoughts and plans I had for complicated, introspective, or interesting blog posts and just really dig into some Legend of Zelda stuff. Specifically, mounts.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 7
Once more, the events of my life have conspired to leave me emotionall drained, exhausted, and on the downswing of my depression wave (and I was doing so well over the last few days!), so let’s return to the one topic that will ALWAYS cheer me up: The Legend of Zelda. In Breath of the Wild, I’ve been doing a Master Mode play-through. The plan originally was to find all the koroks, do every quest, and absolutely 100% the shit out of the game this time. Just go all-in. Unfortunately, since this is my 5th full-play through (not counting two I started but never finished), I’m finding myself having a difficult time staying engaged.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 6
This time, I’m not as sad as I am tired. I got my teeth fixed up the day before writing this, after over a year of problems that are (maybe) finally resolved, and I made myself a nice dinner of food I’d been avoiding because of the chewing involved. And promptly gave myself food poisoning. A saga fit for a sitcom, truly. It kept me up late into the night and I’ve spent the day as a largely useless lump doing his best to keep up with the world around him, so let’s talk about something I could almost literally write about in my sleep: the music of the Legend of Zelda franchise.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 5
I really ought to rename this entire series to reference Breath of the Wild since it’s the main game I’m going to be talking about. I considered it during the inception of the second “episode,” but I didn’t want to take any options off the table so early in this series. Maybe I’ll eventually write about the music of the franchise or the way that loss and self-sacrifice play a part in every iteration of this story. Or maybe I’ll just forever write about Breath of the Wild because there’s just so much to say about this huge game. Like the introduction of falling stars and the somewhat mystic mechanics that exist around them (at least until you look them up online, anyway).
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