TotK #11 – Purah Pad Upgrades

I’ve been continuing to play a lot of Tears of the Kingdom lately! After finding a Korok seed on Satori Mountain, I enjoyed this beautiful sunrise.

When I returned to Lookout Landing, I spoke with Robbie and he thanked me for fixing his balloon (in the previous entry). He surprised me by telling me he could now return to his laboratory in Hateno Village! He told me to meet him there, and he could make improvements to my Purah Pad. I went there immediately, and he added the sensor.

Yes! I’ve been wanting this for a long time! It’ll help me find shrines, treasure chests, or any other items I’m looking for (assuming it’s something I have in my Hyrule Compendium). He added more features to the Purah Pad, and the most interesting one (other than the sensor) is the Hero’s path mode. It shows my path around Hyrule, and it will store up to 256 hours of gameplay worth! Very interesting to see which areas I haven’t touched yet.

In Breath of the Wild, this feature was included in the paid DLC (which I never bought)…so this was my first time experiencing it. You can even “play” your history in sequence…complete with Link’s yells for each death. It was funny seeing my 6-7 deaths in row on the map, from early in the game when I got stuck up on a sky island with no way down. 💀 This will be very helpful going forward.

One other interesting thing about Robbie’s Purah Pad upgrades is how low the requirements were for the extra features. One feature required five types of monsters added to my compendium…and I had at least 87 at this point. I feel like I must be late in getting these upgrades.

Once my Purah Pad was completely upgraded, I finally headed off to Hyrule Castle…not knowing if I was going into the “final” battle or not. When I arrived, I had to visit several areas around the castle. At each point, I was ambushed by groups of monsters.

Eventually, I reached a point where I fought a boss, of sorts. I try to avoid spoiling the plot too much in the blog, but I will say that it was not the final fight. I won the battle, and I was told to return to Lookout Landing.

On the way back, I used my sensing ability to seek out treasure chests. But some of them weren’t worth the effort, with as little as a single rupee inside! 😛

(Warning: Slight spoiler in this paragraph. Skip to the next paragraph to avoid it.) Back at the landing, Purah, the sages, and Link discussed what we should do next. It was determined that there should be another sage (besides Zelda) out there, that we haven’t met up with yet! So Purah told us to split up and look for clues. This basically gave me free rein to do what I’d been doing anyway: Exploring at my own pace. And I’m okay with that. I’m in no rush.

I decided to go back to where it all started: The Great Sky Island. But even though it was a nice trip down Memory Lane, I didn’t find much that was new or particularly helpful there, aside from a few treasure chests.

Back down on the surface, I spotted a rainbow in the distance from near Rassla Lake. I think it’s the first one I’ve seen in this game, although I know I’ve seen some in Breath of the Wild before.

I found a new geoglyph in the southeast region, and then I returned to Lurelin Village to complete a few side quests.

A short time later, a Korok that was separated from his friend gave me a reason to visit Eventide Island. In Breath of the Wild, Eventide Island provided a unique challenge, where you had tasks to complete without access to your normal clothes/armor or weapons. Honestly, it was rather tedious, and I wasn’t interested in doing that again. But fortunately, Eventide Island doesn’t operate the same way in this game. I was very relieved.

The island still has its challenges, but they don’t feel cheap like the BOTW ones. Although I had a problem defeating one group of monster forces, because one (or more) of the enemies kept disappearing and I couldn’t finish them off. But eventually, I completed the task (after dropping into the Depths for a bit).

I found a pretty cool helmet down there in the twilight, but I won’t spoil exactly what it was. 😉

I finished up what needed to be done on Eventide Island, and then I took a break. And this where I’ll wrap up this entry. Here are my latest stats:

My shrine count is now at 73 (up from 66 last time), my lightroot count is up by just one, and my Korok seed count has risen dramatically, from 95 to 124. Here is my Compendium progress:

• Creatures: 72/92 (up from 64)
• Monsters: 94/110 (up from 87)
• Materials: 106/126 (up from 97)
• Equipment: 119/175 (up from 106)
• Treasure: 6/6

There’s so much more I want to do! I’ve been in a groove lately where I don’t want to stop playing. 😆 I’ll see you all next time. 🙂