Here’s a short list of lessons we learned later rather than sooner and would have preferred the reverse. Some may have a different list – did you know Link can take selfies? – but these are the ones we would have found most helpful at the start of the game.
- Killing enemies, particularly the hapless Bokoblins, is a quick way to earn badly needed weapons and small treasures. Sometimes you even get to steal their roast beast! Defeating enemies may seem efficient and it is certainly satisfying, but they don’t stay down. In fact, they come back stronger as the game progresses. Therefore, consider this balancing act: Unless you need to kill an enemy just then – it’s standing between you and a treasure chest, you covet the weapon or other items it will drop when defeated, or it’s attacking and thus it’s a clear case of self-defense – consider whether you ought to just leave ’em be. Run, as it were, away!
- You can sit by a fire to move the clock forward. You can also forget to pause the game while you’re making a cocktail. Both these acts will result in the passage of time, which in Hyrule runs at roughly an hour of Zelda time to two minutes of real time. Passing the Nintendo time is helpful if you don’t like adventuring at night, or if, for purposes of a quest, you need it to be a particular time of day. If you don’t want to waste precious daylight, however, pause your game when you’re researching, refueling, or arguing with your Zelder partner.
- Weapons and shields break. A lot. Someone ought to sue the manufacturers (of the weapons, not the game, take it easy, Nintendo lawyers) for shoddy workmanship. But until that happens, don’t use your fancy-pants new claymore to cut down trees or break boxes. Use a bomb instead. Yep, even for the trees, which take two bombs to generate a bundle of wood. Using a sword or other weapon unnecessarily only increases your frustration when that weapon inevitably breaks after you’ve struck down three trees in the prime of their lives and, oh, smashed the ground a couple of times for good measure. (Itzal had a propensity early in the game to slam his sword into boulders.) (Itzal denies this accusation categorically and cites poor manufacturing, already introduced into evidence.)
- Gather as many Korok seeds as possible, either before or immediately after the first time you meet Hestu, the NPC who exchanges the seeds for increases to Link’s inventory space. You’ll really want those inventory upgrades, lest you find yourself down to a single rusty blade because you couldn’t carry more weapons into a heated battle. Hestu shakes his maracas once on the road to Kakariko Village and again at the next stable you visit (Woodland, Riverside, or Wetlands); after that, he hightails it to his final location in the Great Hyrule Forest.
- Make climbing towers a priority early in game play: they open up the map for the area in which they’re located. There are a few, however, like Akkala and Eldin, that may be better left for later in the game. In fact, we visited Hestu in the Great Hyrule Forest and popped into the Ancient Tech Lab in Akkala region well before we’d done those regions’ corresponding towers.
- Follow your Sheikah sensor and activate shrines, as many as you can, as quickly as you can, even if you don’t enter and complete the shrines at the time. The shrines act as fast travel points whether you’ve obtained their orbs or not, and you’ll want as many travel points as possible, particularly before you’ve opened all the towers.
- When Link first wakes from his long slumber, he spends the day on the Isolated Plateau, earning the “runes” that are instrumental to the rest of play. Pay attention not only in these four rune shrines, but also in Ta’loh Naeg shrine near Kakariko Village, where you learn to parry and flurry rush. We wished we’d paid attention to this important training and practiced after. Later in the game we had to hone our parrying skills– and, ahem, eventually we did kill a Guardian with a pot lid – but we never got the hang of the flurry rush in our first play-through. Or, truth be told, in our second.
- Don’t eat Endura carrots raw just to restore hearts, and the same goes for hearty radishes, Staminoka bass, and other foods with a “buff.” Cook them into a dish instead to release their special properties.
- You’ll need rupees in this game. Selling jewels is a quick way to build your stash, but sell only what you must, such as to raise cash to wake a Great Fairy or buy armor you can’t get another way. Otherwise, hang onto your sapphires and rubies and think long and hard before hocking ancient droppings like gears, screws, and shafts. (Never, ever, sell a Giant Ancient Core!) Chances are good you’ll want these items to upgrade armor, finish a quest, or something else you haven’t foreseen in the initial giddy rush to fill your wallet. Selling luminous stone, on the other hand, is quick and easy fast cash. You can build up rupees slowly: bomb trees (a green energy source; they grow back) and sell the resulting bundles of wood, or gather restless crickets, which can also be sold. True, they don’t fetch much, but a few crickets, lizards, and bundles of wood each day may enable you to hoard instead of sell the diamond you may need later.
- Always save your game before trying something dangerous. Or before trying anything new at all, really. You can reload the game to an earlier save point if you go up in flames or waste weapons and hearts in a fruitless battle. The game will also auto-save, but that won’t protect you if disaster strikes before. Also, you can only have so many save points in queue – so watch your list.
- Bomb arrows don’t work in the rain. Conversely, they work only too well in Eldin; if you pull them out in that area, they’ll explode, harming Link but leaving his target unscathed. Don’t waste your expensive bomb arrows in either of these situations.
That’s it for the short list. We acquired many other lessons along the way, principally that Lynels are the worst form of enemy animation ever contrived, but these are the ones we wished we’d known at the get-go. We’ll share others as we go along.
And now, to the get-go! It’s time for Link to wake up!