Breath of the Wild
Almost two years ago I was blabbering how I started playing BotW with the Project Assistants earlier that year, found two Divine Beasts and left them do their things, and continued exploring the world. I kept playing half-randomly whenever I had time from other things, so a year ago I had got to a situation where I finally felt like checking the first boss. All the maps had been unlocked and all four Divine Beasts were located.
War elephant Vah Ruta
When this happened, I was wandering in the Zora's domain, so I went to the artificial lake to meet Prince Sidon. From the docklike thing we attacked the megaelephant and then the first of the four dungeons. Inside Ruta I first had to get the map from a map room, that allowed me to move the machine's water-spouting trunk up and down. Then I had to find and activate all four control points, so that the central console could be cleansed from evil (or Malice or Blight). There were no basic enemies, just some Guardians, weird eyes of evil and skullspawners that you could just bomb to death. While destroying the eyes the Malice also mostly disappeared from the area.
After collecting all the treasures I could, I returned to the central console that rather surprisingly released a boss ready for a fight: Waterblight Ganon. The boss had two-stages and after about a dozen attempts (and with sweaty hands) I emerged victorious. This had been less frustrating than I expected.
With Vah Ruta freed from the evil being controlling it, the endless rain in the Zora region finally ended, so you could actually climb around in the mountains. Ruta walked on top of a mountain and lit up a targeting laser beam into the middle of the Hyrule castle. While chatting with the Zora king I got rewarded with a fancy spear, but the much more useful reward was princess Mipha's Grace - a passive skill that revived you to full health after death. The cooldown was something like fifteen minutes, which was not a problem outside these bigger fights, I assumed.
Robotic bird Vah Medoh
Somewhat full of myself I went to the Rito's area and to stop the second warmachine. Again I had to prove my skills so that someone would bother to bring me to the beast. The fight that took place freefalling in the skies was pretty simple, you could control your movements with tactical use of the paraglider and some glowing spheres were to be blown up with bomb arrows. After that I got inside the machine and to search for its map room. With the map I had control over Vah Medoh's tilt and flicking it more or less port/starboard was the way the puzzles got solved, to get the treasures and the consoles opened.
Again the main console released a manifetation of Malice, who flew around and among other things attacked with small whirlwinds. Now I didn't need to swim and I had loads of space to avoid and shoot from. Murdering this two-phase monster was easier than the previous one, but I still needed a few tries.
Revali, the hero who was the previous pilot of the Divine Beast was also caught trapped as a ghost inside the machine. He too apologized for his arrogant assholiness a hundred years and gave me a new skill, Revali's Gale, that gave me three upwards-directed air blasts (again with about 15-min cooldown) that made traveling easier. Pretty handy stuff, I just most of the time simply forgot that I had this sort of a skill available.
Electrocamel Vah Naboris
Before I spent any more time in Gerudo's deserts, beyond unlocking the tower, I went for a months-long adventure to anywhere else. The scorching desert with its inherent problems simply didn't interest me. At some point I ran low on sidequests and such, so explored the southwestern map around the main town, because the prerequirements just bothered me.
Of course there were some longish extra quests to be taken care of before I could be taken to the wild lightning bolt -blasting robotic camel. When approaching the AT-AT -like machine and firing bomb arrows into its stompy feet I also had to surf on a shield while also following the local monarch close enough (they were wearing the lightning-proof hat). That was just as annoying as escort missions usually, which should've let me know what kind of annoyances were waiting just behind the corner.
Inside the mechacamel the plot was the same as in the two earlier robots: this map room allowed rotating the barrel rims to reveal passages, provide platforms and reveal consoles. The main one contained an electroshock boss and oh my how immensely annoying it was. Its second phase was even more annoying, because why not. After way, way too many attempts and muffled oaths the monster got destroyed.
The ill-fated champion's ghost gave me a skill as well, Urbosa's Fury was a three-charge "deliver damage to enemies nearby" attack with a similar cooldown to the other skills. I only remembered to purposefully use this skill only once, when defeating a sandwormy monster, otherwise I activated it only accidentally. A couple of now unlocked extra tasks allowed me to borrow the princess' anti-lightning helmet, which was super useful in the common thunderstorms.
Geckorobot Vah Rudania
I left the volcano-dwelling robotic lizard last because I hadn't bothered to check how and with which items one could survive in the heat of the volcano. Much earlier I had braved the heat and unlocked a Shrine for the teleport pad in the middle of a lava lake, but that wasn't even remotely useful. Ultimately I had to find a traveling merchant from the other side of the world to buy some Goron Spice, so I could brew a heatproof elixir that then kept me alive until I could find a dozen fire lizards or something, so I could give them to someone who then gave their fireproof pants (or was it a shirt?) as compensation. The rest of the outfit I had to buy from the Goron clothes shop in the middle of the volcano.
Funny thing: the ice sword was enough to cool you down in the desert during the day, and the fire sword kept you warm in the desert's cold night, but only the outfit made of a wood-fired stove was good on this mountain. Oh well. For a few weeks I poked at the sidequests, went somewhere else for some other quests and whatnot, until I returned to the volcano when nothing else was progressing. The approach-fight to Rudania was simple and easy, or maybe I was expecting something as stupid or worse than Naboris.
The fourth and final Beast was slightly different: it was completely dark when I entered. After playing with torches for a while the map room opened the windows and I could turn Rudania from left to right. The same story followed, the boss fight was following the elemental line to fire. Now I was certain that these clowns were tougher every time. Despite that the fire monster died pretty easily, which was only a relief after the electrobeast that I didn't think I wanted to see ever again.
My fourth bonus skll was Daruk's Protection that I don't think I used even once on purpose, because I didn't encounter anything more special than normal everyday enemies from now on. Most of the random spawns I just bombed to bits or just evaded.
What about the Calamity Ganon?
By the early May '23 I had got all of the side and bonus quests solved, at least those that I had found. My quest log had only one entry left: "Defeat Ganon", so what I had left was to cook my pockets full of the most effective foods, and spending any and all of my money to buy all the arrows in the universe. If this sounded boring and grindy to you, it sounded like it to me and I didn't quite find the motivation.
Then the sequel was released.
Tears of the Kingdom
This game apparently continued pretty much straight after BotW, in the intro clip a megazombie magicked half of the wolrd into the skies, broke Link's supersword and burned his hand while Zelda disappeared into the abyss.
Adventuring started calmly on the Great Sky Island, the tutorial part was pretty similar to the previous game. In the first area you talked to characters who told what and why, you got your new skills from Shrines (a few of them at least) and played with them. When you were done with that, you jumped off the floating island towards Hyrule and the game actually just started.
During my few sessions so far I haven't done anything exciting. I followed the main quest just enough to get the next basics unlocked, such as the Central Hyrule map, a Purah Pad (like the Sheikah-slate in BotW), and the glider to make traveling around that much easier. I found out that if you jumped head first into the Malicious holes in the ground, there was an underground layer as well. The map was three-leveled this time.
Fooling around in the floating bits was pretty fun, you could get from island to island by building some stupid-sounding things ("what if I added rockets on this floating bit and pointed two forward and one up?") and whatever came to mind. That was not going to be fun for everyone, but as said, I had a good time, but I also didn't hate the building stuff in Fallout 4. If there was something too evil, you could always just jump off the cliff and find something else to poke at.
I didn't do much underground yet, I just opened a couple of teleportation pads by activating some glowing things. One of the holes didn't have a glowtree under, so I traveled with fan-powered minecarts in the darkness to see what I could find. At the end of a really convoluted trip I encountered the chief of the Yiga clan from the previous game, and to my surprise defeated him on the first try even if I was running out of weapons.
Yes, the weapons still broke painfully quickly and that was just as annoying as before. Now you just could modify them by Fusing them with some other items. So far my favourite random object was a wooden stick with a flame emitter on it - the stick just caught fire and my invention was less useful than I had thought. This feature was just a bit useless in a closed arena miniboss fight, because there wasn't anything to pick up and modify.
So far so good, fun times and at this rate I'd spend another two-three years before being anywhere near the end :D
