The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (contains spoilers)

Waterblight Ganon rematch, and also that room early on in the Trial of the Sword with two Silver Lizalfols and a lot of water.

So it took me... a while to buy a Switch but I finally did, and this game with it. Shockingly, it's quite good. Whoever knew.

Given my fondness for sequence breaking (is it still called that when the game lets you do it?), as soon as I was told to go north I just wandered off in a different direction and somehow the the first settlement I came to was the bazaar/Gerudo Town. I've unlocked most of the towers and maybe 20-something shrines. I have yet to speak to Impa. Annoyingly, I did run into one of the things the game doesn't let you do - light the Hateno Tech Lab furnace before speaking to Impa; The brazier just isn't there. I am currently in a very silly 'issue' of wanting to get as far as I can in a weird order, but also that order meaning I have to do so without the basic runes and compendium.

I try to get the compendium as quick as I can so I do as little backtracking as possible to try and remember what I missed from it.

Especially when you have to start hunting rare bugs/plants

God that sensor+ is a lifesaver

Ok, finally actually got round to talking to Impa. Well, I did unlock the rest of the towers and Revali's memory first. I did, however, have enough ancient parts left around to immediately get all the rune upgrades.

I also made the mistake a while back of trying to get the Phantom armour early. The helmet is guarded by a Lynel, which I just couldn't manage to evade. So that's where my first ancient arrow went.

Also, doing a bunch of snowling now. So much armour to buy...

I'm tempted to play this again, the call is addicting, but I know I've exhausted every inch of the game for now. Wanna let it sit for a spell before getting back into it all over again. But yeah, I love tackling Lynels. It's what I do for fun just coming hot off the plateau with 3 hearts! It's an easy way to get really good gear insanely early!

So...even though I'm not big on playing off tv, I'm thinking of getting back on this after beating it a few months back.

I got the money for the DLC (I've had it since Christmas in fact) but I think there's some stuff you can do after beating it one time first isn't there?

Should I download the DLC first and then play, go around Hyrule a bit to see if anything is different first?

I think the only thing that changes is the monster shop guy now keeps track of how many minibosses you've beaten, and gives you medals when you kill every Hinox/Stalnox, Molduga, and Talus in the world.

Trapped in quarantine, I finally decided to take this game off my to-play list. It's every bit as awesome as I've heard an expected, but there's just one thing that bothers me: holy hell is Hyrule's geography fucked, even by videogame standards. I'd be genuinely interested in anyone who's able to make all those neighboring biomes and their associated topography make scientific sense.

It’s fun to take two steps to your right and watch the temperature drop 40 degrees, isn’t it?

I'm sure the reason Hyrule's geography is fucked is because of all the villains wrecking havoc.

And you know the malevolent giant pig spreading malice.

There are walls of special air with abnormally high insulative properties and low thermal conductivity separating all the different biomes.

Symptom of Space Compression. Simple as that. Current estimates put the overworld in the game at about 360 square kilometers. While that's huge for a game, it's about the size of a large city.

Or, if you want a fun explanation: Magic. The god-dragons were like "wouldn't it be funny if we made all these different biomes strictly separated by inches?" That's why they're flying around all the time; they've gotta keep them updated.

The dragons are jerks if they want to screw around with the weather instead of stopping the malice. That infected one of them already.

I like to assume that space is compressed by exactly as much as time, so that an in-game day's worth of travel would be a full day's worth of travel on a full sized Hyrule.

Since time is compressed so that 1 real-time minute = 1 in-game hour, this would make the "real" Hyrule 60 times as long and 60 times as wide, or 3600 times the total area.

I have no idea if that's big enough for the various biomes to realistically exist.

Going by that adjusted surface area, BOTW Hyrule is a little bit larger than real-life Peru, which is a country that includes tropical rainforests, mountains (volcanoes included) and rocky deserts.

So I'd say Hyrule is indeed large enough to have multiple distinct biomes. Just, probably not these specific biomes.

Edited by Kayeka on Mar 23rd 2020 at 5:30:17 PM

California has biomes that look like that. Well, no Tundra.

But

Everything else. dense humid forest (dunno about rainforest though), deserts, snow-capped mountains

California has snow capped mountains?

We do have snow and mountains, but not to the extremes of other places. Can confirm as a resident of California that we have all the biomes and all the weather. It’s crazy.

As an aside, Hyrule was a land magically created by three goddesses, so science and realism take a bit of a backseat.

And they have issues with what's close to a demon invasion wreaking havoc every few centuries. It's not something easy to add to the equation.

Fun fact about travel measured in in-game time: The stables are mostly spaced apart on the roads so that travelling from one stable to any nearby stable takes between 8 and 12 hours, if you're non-stamina running on foot or on a horse walking at the second speed. So if you wanted to roleplay Link as some weirdo who likes sleeping in a bed every night, you could.

This also applies to walking from a town to the nearest stable, although Zora's Domain cuts it really close, because walking up the winding path to Zora's Domain takes 10 hours even after all of the enemies are cleared out. No matter which stable you start from there's an extra few hours getting to the start of the winding path (and you can't take your horse up the winding path), so if you leave the closest stable right at the crack of dawn you barely make it to Zora's Domain before sunset. This makes sense, of course, because the footpath to Zora's Domain was built by people who never actually need to use it.

Even then, discounting all the monsters, there are more than a few campsites on the path to Zora's Domain

California has very very high altitude mountains. A person can go skiing in the morning and be on the beach in the afternoon.

Looking at in-game travel times has made me realize something else. A lot of people, myself included, like to say that the Calamity happened on Zelda's birthday, but... she wrote a diary entry in Hyrule Castle on her birthday before heading to Mount Lanayru. Now, riding from Castle Town to the base of Mount Lanayru in less than a day is possible, but the walk up the mountain path to the Spring of Wisdom and then back down, that takes over 10 hours without accounting for however long Zelda spent praying. For Zelda and the Champions to be walking out Lanayru Road East Gate while the sun was still setting (as we see in the memory) they would need to arrive at Mount Lanayru no later than 10:00am. Even if their horses could gallop the entire trip (and they didn't seem to have horses at all in the memory), Zelda would need to write that diary entry at 12:00am and then depart at 12:01am to make that timeframe.

Realistically they must have either spent a night in Kakariko or camped out near the base of the mountain. And that means Ganon waited until the day after Zelda's birthday before destroying the kingdom.