In Breath of the Wild, one learned certain rune skills on the Great Plateau before one ever left – well, the Great Plateau. And this was fine and good.
Then there was the Ta’Loh Naeg Shrine near Kakariko Village, in which one was to learn such useful tactics as sidehops and backflips, parrying, flurry rushes, and charged attacks. This was less fine and not very good at all. Finally we did succeed by mashing buttons and racing about – in the same manner in which, given eternity, a monkey with a typewriter will eventually type the collected works of Shakespeare.
Upon leaving the shrine, we promptly forgot everything we allegedly learned there.
There are more combat training shrines in Tears of the Kingdom. A lot more, or so it feels to us. And in them, we once again feel like that monkey with a typewriter, tasked with creating Macbeth, then Hamlet, then – you get the idea. It’s a Midsummer’s Nightmare.
We’ve previously discussed the four training shrines on Sky Island, where, similar to BOTW’s Great Plateau, one learns the basic tools of the TOTK game. This whine – er, this post – is about the combat training shrines.
Now, not all of the training shrines are horrible. There’s Teniten, in which one gets to throw one’s weapon at a training construct. As we often throw our weapons accidentally (ahem), we caught on to this tactic right quick. In a related throwing shrine, Yamiyo, we happily threw fire fruit instead of our weapons.
We didn’t do badly at archery, either – Makurukus shrine was a piece of the proverbial cake. Z-Target, shoot the construct in the eye, do it again with another couple of constructs. We practically felt embarrassed to take the light of blessing – although to be sure, we did take it. (Itzal did not feel embarrassed; Demelza is employing the royal “we” to be nice.)
In contrast, just getting to another archery shrine, Taunihy, deserved a light of blessing on its own. The journey, which takes place in the skies over Hyrule, began to feel like the definition of insanity. We are not fans of plummeting through rings of light! Once there, however, the training was a simple matter of jumping into plumes of air and shooting the hapless constructs below.
And then there’s the shrine in which we learned the Sneakstrike. Sneakstrike is not, it should be noted, a skill that we employ often, as we are more prone to blundering into enemy camps and alerting the bugle-playing Bokoblin guard. And yet, how difficult could it be, we asked ourselves? And certainly the first part of the Sinatanika shrine easy enough. All we had to do was crouch.
Boy howdy, do we know how to crouch. Granted, most of the time Demelza crouches when she means to do something else, like activate a rune or a skill; and in most of those instances, she’s in front of a Lynel or Moblin, when crouching is neither called for nor advisable. But hey! We know how to crouch. We’ll take the advantage.
Except. In the second part of the shrine, one has to sneak up behind a patrolling construct. Sneaking is not our strong suit. It’s not even our second-best suit. Shoot, this suit is at the very least at the cleaner’s, and more likely it’s destined for a rummage bin. And yet, we prevailed, and earned our sneaking stripes.
(Demelza finds it interesting that when she searched the interwebs for the correct spelling of the shrine for purposes of writing this post – who comes up with these names? – said search pulled up a Reddit string in which players were bemoaning the Sinatanika shrine as the most difficult of the combat shrines, the most difficult in TOTK, and maybe the most difficult of all shrines EVER, including Rohta Chiga and Mirro Shaz. Hm, maybe we’re missing something here…but although it did take us a time or two, Sinatanika IS NO ROHTA CHIGA.) (Itzal demurs.)
In TOTK, players encounter Kyonisis Shrine just south of Hyrule Castle. In Kyonisis, one is supposed to learn perfect dodge and perfect guard. For us, this shrine was the awful equivalent of the long-ago Ta’Loh Naeg. We do not, as a matter of course, use perfect dodge or perfect guard or perfect parry or anything of that ilk. We are decidedly imperfect.
The instructions for perfect dodge, for example, required locking on to the construct with Z-target, then strafing – which in our minds is something a low-flying plane does – holding left or right on the left stick, pressing – um, something – and then going in for a flurry rush. Sure. Uh-huh. We might have been flustered but we were surely not flurrying. Nonetheless, eventually this particular monkey managed to type “to be or not to be,” about the time we’d figure that our perfect dodge was never to be.
Then there was the backflip, in which we were directed to target the enemy, backpedal, then jump. Now, backpedaling we understand! We do it regularly! IRL as well as in gaming! Um, but not, apparently, backpedaling n the matter in which one needs to do in order to backflip in TOTK. And have we mentioned that these instructions direct one to do everything in a particular order and sometimes simultaneously and omg, it is all too much for a Zelder! Yet another Shakespearean phrase came to mind: “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” which was how long we thought we’d be in the thrice-damned shrine.
We approached the Eshos Shrine, in which one receives training in shield use, with trepidation. Our parrying skills are not, shall we say, worthy of being called either parry or skills. And sure enough, we died to the construct with balls of electricity AND USED UP BOTH THE FAIRIES WE’D EARNED IN THE LONG SLOG TO TAUNIHY SHRINE. (One wonders if, somewhere in Hyrule, there is an anger management training shrine…)
In each of these combat training shrines, the training construct, who advises that our other attacks are useless here, (ha ha, they’re mostly useless everywhere) might as well have parroted another Shakespearean phrase: Cruel to be kind. (No, Zelders of a certain age, it’s origin is not that song. The phrase is a wee bit older, like us.) Tough love, avowed the construct. In other words, we were to learn these skills or die trying. Which we did. Die, that is.
Having at last completed the training shrines, we finish up with one final jot of wisdom from the Bard: “Tired with all these, for restful death I cry.” On the latter point, we’re sure a Gleeok will soon answer our plea.
To accompany our frustration with combat training, we choose a cocktail straight from Will himself: the Romeo and Juliet, or in our version, the Link and Zelda.
We acknowledge that there are various mainstream cocktails labeled Romeo and Juliet, most involving cucumber and mint. Itzal eschews the former, Demelza the latter. Like most couples, romantic or video-gaming, we compromised with something entirely different: a cocktail that reflected romance – strawberries and champagne – but that we liked the taste of, to end in a preposition, which surely Shakespeare never did!