The year 2017 was actually a very difficult and challenging year for myself and my family for various reasons. It seemed one crisis after another was demanding our time and attention. I'm sure it's a primary reason why blog ended up dying. But it's not to say I wasn't still working on my video game projects. I just didn't have time or energy to write about it.
Looking back, it seems most of my gaming for the last year has been centered on The Legend of Zelda. I had been replaying the series up to Twilight Princess, with intent afterward to finish the games I hadn't yet played.. By around March of last year, I had completed my replays, and had also completed Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, A Link Between Worlds, and Skyward Sword for the first time each. I enjoyed them all, and found myself particularly impressed by Spirit Tracks and Skyward Sword, which I think may have become my new favorite handheld and console Zeldas, respectively.
I got Breath of the Wild for the Wii U and Four Swords Adventures for the Gamecube for my birthday. The latter I have been playing only intermittently when my brother comes to visit, since it's primarily a multiplayer game. The former I have played and enjoyed intermittently, but it does take a lot of time to do even small portions of it, and it's on the console that my daughter plays most, so it's not easy to find available time for it. Furthermore, when I got the camera rune on the game and started using it to fill my compendium, it reminded me so much of the figurine collecting in Wind Waker that I just had to go back and finish finding everything. Since then I've devoted the bulk of my video game time to finding the collectibles in the Zelda games, an effort I finished (excluding Breath of the Wild) about a month ago.
Finding things like pieces of heart and other collectibles is one of my favorite things in the Zelda series. I find it very rewarding to find things without use of a guide. Not wanting to rob anyone else of that, I considered formatting this with black background text to help anyone from spoiling treasure locations. But it looks ugly and is difficult to read and edit, so I am giving a disclaimer. Anyone who wants to find said treasures on their own can skip the rest of this entry and come back to it after they've found them on their own.
My time finding everything in these games has been immensely rewarding, starting with Wind Waker. After finding all of the figurines I could, and still being short a couple of figurines, pieces of heart, and treasure charts, I decided to start a new game file. I didn't want to do a second-playthrough file without finding everything on my original file, so I started a new original file. Playing through everything again forced me to take a closer look at everything than I might have if I'd just started revisiting locations, if only because it was less boring. It would give me a chance to document where I found everything, which I thought would be helpful. Also, I had reason to suspect that several figurines I was missing might not actually be available after a certain point in the game.
On my replay, I ended up finding several pieces of heart that I had previously missed, one of which was in a place I swore I had checked, but apparently hadn't. I also found my missing treasure chart (I think I had only been missing one when I started the replay). Interestingly enough, the chart I was missing was one I remembered finding on my other file. I must have quit without saving and forgotten to go back and get it. But this is where documenting the locations of things really helped me out, so I could check my other file to see what I was missing.
I nearly broke my own heart one day, when I was looking at a message board topic for the game online that I thought was innocuous, and read a sentence that I belatedly realized was revealing the general location of a piece of heart. However, when I looked there on my old file I didn't find it, and took heart that maybe I misunderstood it. When I got to the same point in my replay, I realized a much more comforting truth: it was actually one I had already found and then forgotten about.
I scoured the whole world again as soon as I had the second pearl, just to make sure there weren't any permanently miss-able things at an earlier stage. I made extensive use of my telescope just to make sure I didn't miss anything not shown on the map. (Incidentally, it turned out that the one chart I was missing was the Big Octo Chart. This strategy helped me find all of the Big Octos without it, which accounted for two of my missing pieces of heart.) Then, after going on to complete the rest of the game, I was still missing one piece of heart and six or seven figurines.
At game's end, there was nothing for it but to go through each map square again, racking my brain for anything I hadn't tried. The last piece I found was the one you get from sinking a cannon ship, I think near Rock Spire Island. I had occasionally considered maybe one might drop as treasure from such a ship, similar to one of the Triforce Charts, but since I never saw any other such ship drop anything important, I really didn't think this would pan out, and didn't put much effort into trying it. But try it I finally did. By this time I had probably spent over a month all told on my replay, looking for pieces of heart, and when I found this last one everyone in my house knew it for how loudly I yelled. I think it took me over an hour to calm down and focus on anything other than how ecstatic I was to finally find it.
After all this, I was still missing a handful of figurines which I had to assume were the members of Tetra's crew, only one of whom can be photographed after getting the pictobox (Niko can be photographed when you get bombs from him.) If I had counted more carefully I would have realized that her crew would have left me one short still, and I might have figured out who that one person was. As it was I guessed that you may need to do the second-playthrough mode to collect all of the figurines, similar to how you have to get all of the rings in the Oracle games. (It actually turns out that, unlike the Oracle games, you can only do a single second-playthrough--fortunately I didn't know that or I might not have tried to do it, and I wouldn't have inadvertently discovered the actual solution like I did).
When I actually got to Tetra's ship and realized I would still need one more, I made a guess that I hadn't previously considered, which turned out to be correct, that one of my missing figurines was Tetra herself. I had previously assumed that Tetra herself would not have a figurine, as she was already represented by a Zelda figurine. If I hadn't made that assumption, I might have realized that all figurines were in fact available without doing the second-playthrough mode, because as it turns out all of Tetras crew, including Tetra, get figurines with a single pictograph of Tetra. And Tetra is, however briefly, available for a pictograph when she follows you to Hyrule.
Ultimately, I finished the second-playthrough mode with all of the figurines, pieces of heart, and treasure charts. I would like to go back sometime and complete a first-playthrough file with all these including the figurines, but I have definitely had my fill of the game for the time being. With a large feeling of accomplishment to motivate me, I moved on to the rest of the series. I'll detail more about that in my next entry.
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