Remember back on Day One on the Plateau, when Link found himself rising up from the ground on a tower, and all around him, similar spires were emerging from the Hyrulean earth?
There are 15 Sheikah towers in BOTW. Placing the Sheikah slate on the tower’s guidance stone opens up a different section of your adventure map. Although it isn’t necessary to activate a tower to explore that region, tower scaling is a priority if you don’t want to make like Moses for 40 or even more days.
The game’s story line will likely lead you to Dueling Peaks Tower after the Great Plateau and probably Hateno Tower after that. During our first playthrough, we next tackled Lanayru Tower, slogging through a dreary, watery footpath in gloomy rain, accompanied by nagging Zorans along the way. But you don’t have to march through Zora land to find the tower and attend to the Zorans’ needs as you do. You can, like Frank Sinatra, do it your way.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with following the path the game’s designers intend you to. But like the lyrics in Frank’s song, there were times when we bit off more than we could chew, and there was no doubt we wanted to spit it out. (Seriously, who knew those lyrics were in such a lovely sentimental song?)
During our first playthrough, we really, really disliked finding our way through Lanayru to the king’s palace in Zora’s Domain. We weren’t particularly keen on jumping back into it the second time, even though we knew would have to get around to it eventually. But we did want the tower activated, because of the map thing, even if we were postponing the rest of the adventure for the time being.
And that brings us to the Zelder way of activating towers: We either spit out what we’d rather not chew, or we don’t bother biting it off in the first place.
Whenever you’re on top of a mountain or a hill, open your Sheikah scope to survey the landscape. If you see an unopened tower through your scope, drop a pin on it. You’ll be able to follow that pin to the precise location of the tower, as pins are visible on the vast black expanse of unopened areas when you (try to) consult the map.
When we first played, we would compare the black expanse on our in-game map with Internet information as to the location of our desired destination, make a rough guess as to where a tower or shrine was, and then drop a stamp in the black expanse. Although it served the purpose after a fashion, it wasn’t particularly accurate. This resulted in a lot of shouting (from guess who?) and frustrated boredom (again, take a guess). Using the scope-and-pin method is much better. In our second playthrough, we were able to find and scale three towers in an hour or so without traversing half of Hyrule first in an effort to find just one.
Most towers are guarded by something dangerous or someone vicious and usually both. There might be poisonous bogs, flying Wizzerobes, evil Moblins and Bokoblins, tar-like goo called Malice, spiky brambles and thorns….it’s like the Walking Dead meet Rapunzel, but she’s quite reasonably left the tower and taken her hair with her, so Link’s on his own.
Now, you could do it the hard way. You could defeat the villains (or die trying, more like), build blocks of ice in the bogs, find and move sheets of metal to cover the goo, et cetera. Or, you could, in many cases, just do it the Zelder way: avoid all the drama around the tower by flying straight to the base of the climb, or better still, midway up the tower. We did this with Woodland and Lanayru towers both, scouting out a nearby high location and deploying our paraglider (with only slightly upgraded stamina). Later on, using Revali’s Gale, we did the same for more difficult towers – such as the Dread Tower Akkala.
Then again, you could travel each and every highway. You could take on every foe, jump across every bog. We’ll admire you. In fact, we’ll salute you with any number of cocktail choices. Have it your way, Frank.