Impa points Link toward Death Mountain, where the gorons keep the Spiritual Stone of Fire. She tells him he’ll pass through her village, Kakariko, on the way and he should look around before going up the mountain. After hinting that Zelda’s Lullaby will help prove Link’s connection to the royal family, she does the ninja smoke bomb disappearing trick with a Deku nut.
Kakariko Village
Kakariko Village, as its inhabitants explain to Link, was a Sheikah village, but now that the Sheikah are down to just Impa, and she spends her time protecting Princess Zelda, she opened up the village for everyone. This seems to be a fairly recent development and there’s a lot of construction going on and parts of the village are blocked off, although I’ll be going over some of those blocks here in a minute.
The most notable house in the village belongs to… a bunch of skulltulas? The central skulltula in the house explains that they’re cursed, and if every Spider of the Curse in the world was destroyed they would return to their human form. They offer to make Link rich if he can break the curse. So that’s what the deal with the gold skulltulas and their tokens.
Outside, there’s a lady tending a cucco pen, only there aren’t any cuccos in it. Turns out they’ve gotten loose, and as usual it’s up to Link to chase them down. Three are easy enough to find. A fourth is hiding in a crate. A fifth is in an area that’s seemingly inaccessible until Link discovers a new feature to this model of cucco: they can’t quite fly, but if Link’s holding one while he’s airborne, he’ll fall with style, and more important, slowly. So Link can jump from a higher area across the way from where the fifth cucco is, land in the area, and toss both cuccos out and deliver them back to the pen.
There’s another cucco are behind a lattice fence. This took a whole bunch of tries, but Link is just barely able to clear the fence. And when I say just barely, I mean he’s lucky the physics engine isn’t robust enough to have him catch his foot on the fence or else he'd probably have landed on his face. Chucking that cucco out of the fenced area, it becomes apparent there’s a second one back there. Link can ride this one out and land right in front of the pen, and then it’s just a matter of finding where they all landed. Once they’re all in the pen, the woman rewards Link with a bottle and explains that… she has an allergic reaction if she tries to pick up cuccos? Well, it explains why it was up to Link to round up the cuccos, although maybe there’s someone in the village she could change jobs with?
The Graveyard
The obligatory graveyard area is just off Kakariko Village, and is tended by the groundskeeper at night and a boy who imitates the keeper during the day. Link can push the graves open, generally revealing ghostly enemies called poes, who seem to have replaced ghinis. One of the graves has a Hylian shield, another has a treasure chest guarded by a ReDead, which sounds more like a name for an ex-wight than for a wight, but I didn’t name them. ReDeads have a paralyzing gaze and then come up to Link and try to hug him to death, and are so annoying it’s better to come back in a few minutes. As for the Hylian Shield, it’s too big for child Link to use normally, so when equipped and activated, he turtles with it. Heh.
The main graves in the graveyard belong to the royal family and a pair of brothers named Sharp and Flat, who were royal composers [1]. When Link examines the brothers’ graves, their poes come out, and when defeated, explain that they died protecting a secret for the royal family from Ganon. They hint that Link might be able to use that secret if he can prove his royal credentials. Zelda’s letter doesn’t do the trick, but as Impa hinted, the lullaby does, and Link enters the royal tomb.
Bones are strewn willy-nilly about the place; you’d think the royal family's tomb would be a little more arranged. There are three ReDeads to sneak by/fight, and Link is rewarded by learning a new song for his ocarina, the Sun’s Song. The brothers were focused on its ability to control time, and turning day to night or night to day at will is a neat ability, to be sure. But there’s another, more immediately useful ability: any ReDead that hears it is frozen in place, allowing Link to sneak up behind them and stab them to death with little worry, which makes the trip out of the tomb a lot easier than the one in.
On the way out of the graveyard, Link stops to kill the other ReDead and grab the heart piece it was protecting. This game has a nice change from the last two: every heart piece gives Link a heart refill when he finds them, not just when he finds one to increase his heart containers.
Next: Homecoming.
[1] But now they’re decomposing [2].
[2] Old joke. Bad pun. Couldn’t resist. …not sorry.
