Back before Al Gore invented the Internet, Demelza used to buy guidebooks to help us with our travels (and travails) in Hyrule. She still has the books, along with the related game cartridges and various iterations of Nintendo consoles, gathering dust in a storage unit. Indeed, we pulled out the ten-year-old Wii guidebook to Skyward Sword and have found it still relevant to the Switch remaster of the game, although one must translate references to Wii remotes and Nunchucks to the appropriate Joy-Con maneuver. Like the American abroad who can’t speak French (or any other language), shouting often substitutes for translation. Comprehension is remarkably similar, it must be noted.
By the time we played Breath of the Wild, we had discovered a whole new world of online walkthroughs, You Tube videos, and Reddit threads to guide us when we were lost, stuck, or generally befuddled. (It should be noted that we are still terrified of our Instant Pots, online guides notwithstanding, but that’s a different story.)
We are fond of online walkthroughs, we admit. It’s easier to Google “How to get through the Yiga Clan Hideout without stealth” than to, you know, get through the Yiga Clan Hideout with stealth. (And that reminds us, click here to see how a Zelder clears the Hideout.)
Generally, we have great respect and gratitude for guidebooks and online walkthroughs. We have but one minor observation we would put in their Yelp reviews, if we understood how Yelp works: whoever writes these walkthroughs is better versed in gaming than in writing.
For example, all too often we read something that goes like this: “Enter the main chamber and then make your way to the next room ….” And yet a quick review of the map reveals that there are no less than four rooms off the main chamber; which of these, then, is meant by the “next” room?
Better still – what about that “make your way?” How many enemies, pitfalls, or hidden passageways are encompassed in (or rather, ignored by) that simple phrase?
Recently, we were making our way to the Ancient Cistern in Skyward Sword. The guidebook we were using advised thusly: “Proceed to the Ancient Cistern.” Aha. Therein lay the rub. Between us and the Ancient Cistern was a lack of processional directions.
After the book failed us, Demelza consulted an online walkthrough, one of her favored sources. She was disappointed to learn, however, that it ignored entirely the point about making one’s way and assumed the player was already in the Ancient Cistern.
Still not to worry. There’s more than one online walkthrough, eh?
Eh, indeed. We found no less than three additional walkthroughs of the Ancient Cistern, all with nary a mention of how, precisely, to enter it.
One guide informed us that, after talking to the Dragon Faron, a series of cutscenes would reveal the Ancient Cistern to us. Yea, verily. The cutscenes did indeed lead us to a room full of water, from which we could see the entrance to said Cistern, but the cutscenes didn’t leave us on the platform to enter said entrance. Which would have been nice.
Seriously, sometimes cutscenes can be annoying, coming as they do just as a badly needed heart begins to flicker away. Or when Fi, also known as Captain Obvious, lets us know there’s a 97 percent probability we failed our mission, and we kinda know that already.
But if a cutscene is supposed to reveal an Ancient Cistern to us, then by gum, we expect it to lead on, Macduff.
(Clever, literate readers will no doubt object that the proper quote is “lay on, Macduff,” but the oft-misquoted “lead on” worked better for purposes of our rant.)
And while we’re on the subject of walkthrough complaints, what’s with casual references such as “once you’ve cleared the room of enemies, “after defeating the sub-boss,” or “you may have noticed that when you entered this room you were attacked by a four-armed, axe-wielding skeletal pirate and several archers with considerably better range and aim than any you’ve previously encountered.” Imagine us pounding the table!! Can we have a little head’s up, please, before you tell us to proceed into the room? Or, when faced with a four-armed, axe-wielding skeletal pirate, are we simply expected to “lay on, Link, and damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’?
But we are not without our own mental resources, after all. We didn’t get to be our age without knowing a thing or two. (That we survived the pressure cookers in our mothers’ kitchens may have a bearing on our fear of Instant Pots.) Eventually we surmised – correctly, as it happened – that we needed to jump into the water in the chamber to which the cutscene had led us, then execute a spin underwater such that Link would leap, dolphin-like, out of the water and onto the doorstep of the Ancient Cistern.
The actual doing of that could well be the subject of another post. There would be material enough, trust us. And if we were writing a walkthrough, we would be sorely tempted not to write it like this: “To enter the Ancient Cistern, one must perform a perfectly timed spin in precisely the right place; failing that, throw the Joy-Cons this way and that, and don’t look at the screen at all, it will only confuse you.”
Hold, enough!