Zelda Continued

Aaargh. I'm very eager to start blogging about recent experiences with Dragon Quest III, which I finally reached max levels on last night. I had meant to briefly summarize my last year, but writing brings back memories of things that belonged in this blog had I been writing, and I just can't leave them out. It might take me a few entries to catch myself up.

After finishing Wind Waker, I had plenty of fun searching through other Zelda games for their respective collectibles. As a warning to the reader, certain treasure locations will be discussed below. 

My next game to go through was Minish Cap. My initial playthrough and subsequent re-scouring had left me missing two pieces of heart. I also (mistakenly) thought I was missing an amulet that is mentioned in the Swordman newsletter. I had casually browsed some message board topics on this game and had read a post suggesting that the Light Arrows, which I had found, were permanently missable. Wondering if the same was true of this supposed amulet, and wanting a more focused re-scouring of the game, I decided, as with Wind Waker, to start the game over.

Some weeks later, I had completed and scoured the game over again, and had found one of the two pieces of heart I had been missing, in a hidden bomb cave on Mount Crenel. I hadn't the faintest idea where the last one could be, and was losing heart (no pun intended). But I came up with a plan that worked surprisingly well. 

I had been playing the game on the Wii U Virtual Console, since it was cheaper than buying a used copy and money is always tight. But sometime around then I was visiting family out of state and asked my brother if I could borrow his Game Boy Advance copy of the game, on which copy I had played the game my first time years ago and on which copy my original file remained. I figured if I could take the game with me I could search the game again at leisure while on the bus or train, since my available handheld gaming time is many times larger than my available console gaming time. I also wanted to take a peek to see if I might have found it years before on my first playthrough.

The strategy brought results surprisingly quickly. As it turns out, I had not found the piece of heart on a previous playthrough. But after playing for a few hours here and there while out and about, on the way home one day, I passed a location that jogged a memory. Early in my replay, I had taken mental note of an NPC comment about the bell in the town square, telling myself to check on it later. When later came, I forgot about it. For some reason, on the umpteenth time I passed that bell, I remembered it. Sure enough, jumping into the bell with the Roc's Cape yielded my last piece of heart.

The amulet presents something of an interesting story. After I had helped a few nice ladies find a home in my replay and getting their reward, something about the item name and description jogged a memory from playing Dragon Quest games on the Famicom. The Japanese word 守り, or まもり, ("mamori" in roman characters), which appears a few times in the Dragon Quest games, effectively means "something that protects," and apparently can refer to any kind of charm or an amulet. For example, the Charm of Rubiss from Dragon Warrior II and the Sacred Amulet on Dragon Warrior III both translate from this word. With some creative Googling in Japanese, I was able to verify that this was also Japanese word used to translate the items "Din's Charm," "Nayru's Charm," and "Farore's Charm," whose descriptions perfectly match the description of the "Amulet" mentioned in the Swordsman newsletter. I am now certain that these are in fact the items referred to in the newsletter, but the clue is muddled due to a translation inconsistency. It wasn't too hard to confirm on gamefaqs.com that there is no amulet in this game.

I had intended from this point on to simultaneously work on completion of Phantom Hourglass and Twilight Princess, one for when I was out and about and one for when I was at home. I don't remember my exact timeline, but I don't think I really even got started in earnest on Twilight Princess until after I had replayed most of the other handhelds. This was due largely to having a lot more time to play the handhelds. I think I was also probably distracted for a bit with Breath of the Wild. At some point I was also working on my solo Dragon Quest II challenge, and that might have been in that time frame.

Phantom Hourglass was fun for me to play through. It gets some flack online for its non-traditional setup, but I found it very refreshing to have such a different take on a classic formula that had in some ways begun to feel stale to me. I think the controls, though non-traditional, were implemented very well and helped add a fresh a new dimension to classic Zelda items. The story was fun, and Linebeck has become one of my favorite supporting characters in the series. And the part where you're asked to make an impression on your map by pressing it against another was one of my single favorite moments in modern gaming history. I puzzled over it for maybe a good ten minutes before I finally realized the solution. I thought it was ingeniously creative and I loved it.

The only real complaint I have is that the environments, particularly in the dungeons, are overly simple for the most part, which unfortunately does make the game feel less deep than most other entries. But it's still plenty fun. And I, for one, really enjoyed the Ocean Temple with its intricacies. When I replayed the game, after enough practice, I ended up with a perfect time of 25 minutes left in my hourglass.

Yes, I replayed this game as well. After revisiting everything I was still missing around half a dozen Spirit Gems, and I knew a replay would force me to look closer in each area. And since this was the first game on this list that I had never completed, I felt a replay would help me better digest my impressions and keep my memory of the story from getting lost so quickly. But I didn't finish completion in my replay. When I found something I just went and picked it up on my other file. It's quite a chore to get all of the ship parts on one game file (I gather it's easier if you have a friend with the game, and was easier still before they discontinued the non-local wi-fi service) and I didn't want to waste the effort I'd already put in.

The Spirit Gems are hidden well. Most of the ones I was missing were in the western half of the world, so starting over served me well finding them. When I got to the end of the replay, I was still missing one Courage Gem. I was a bit discouraged, but while roaming back and forth in odd moments of the day I was passing through one area where I flash of inspiration that panned out. I think it was on Mercay Island, where you start, where I was passing through a cave I'd been through many times, and watching the water fall in the background somehow gave me the thought of wondering where it was flowing to. Knowing I could extend my view with my bow or my boomerang, I tried it, and found to my utter delight that there was a switch I could hit off screen. The switch activated a treasure chest that had my last gem, and I was quite thrilled to find it.

I ended up consulting a guide in that game to confirm I'd found all the treasure charts, since the game doesn't tell you how many there are. I had wrongly assumed when I collected forty that it would be a nice, even number, but it turned out I was missing one. I took a guess at a possible location for the missing one and did consult a guide to see if it was a reasonable guess, though I couldn't confirm it from the guide alone because I didn't remember where I had found all of the others. But it was one of four that are randomly available in the same minigame, and trying the minigame for about ten or fifteen more minutes confirmed that it was the one I was missing. This is one of the only times where I wasn't able to get full completion without a guide, though I never checked one until I believed I had full completion.

This seems like a good spot to cut this off for today. I'll see if I can fit the rest of my year into one more entry tomorrow.