In a nice design feature, once the boss of a dungeon is defeated, Link gets the ability to teleport right to that boss from the dungeon entrance on future cycles and kill the boss to open up anything in the wider world that requires that specific dungeon being cleared. But I have a couple days left on this cycle anyway, so let’s take advantage of that to clear as much stuff as I can.
Near the Deku Palace in the swamp, there’s a house whose inhabitant bears a familiar curse. Thankfully, freeing him only requires killing 30 skulltulas, and they’re all in the basement of his house. This is basically a mini-dungeon with one type of enemy, and a lot of the skulltulas aren’t easy to find and/or kill and/or collect tokens from. It would have been much easier with a hookshot, but oh well. Once the skulltulas are cleared, the now uncursed man gives Link the Mask of Truth, which functions more or less the same as in Ocarina of Time.
The tourist center’s photo contest has ended, but Koume, once she’s rescued from the woods again, has a new idea: she’ll put the boat on rails and ride around dangling a target from her broom. If Link can hit the target 20 times before the boat ride ends without hitting Koume too many times, he gets a heart piece. My basic strategy for this boiled down to spray and pray, and I had one run end because I hit Koume too much. Once it’s done successfully without making too many holes in the witch, Link gets a heart piece.
Back in Termina Field, there are holes Link can fall down to find groups of four gossip stones. One of the stones in each group is larger than the others, and the Mask of Truth reveals the larger stone changes color if a song’s played near it. The four groups are linked; changing a stone’s color changes the corresponding stones in the other groups as well. Link only knows one of the songs the stones hint at, so he tracks down all four groups and plays the Sonata of Awakening for them, making them all green and getting a heart piece for his trouble.
On the third day, Link can go back to Romani Ranch and visit the entrance he didn’t the first time. There, a woman has set up a dog racetrack, and invites Link to bet on the dogs. With the Mask of Truth, Link can hear the dogs’ opinion of their chances before betting on them, and I never had one with a good opinion of its chances fail to place at least high enough to get my bet back. Actually winning second or first was a rare event, and Link spent most of the day here trying to pick winners. Once he finally won enough, he got a heart piece as a final reward.
There are more minigames, but one’s like the Deku Scrub Playground that requires winning three days in a row, and the other two are archery games which I’m kind of terrible at, so I’d be all for a new set of days even if this set weren’t close to running out.
Three Days of Learning That I Really, Really Hate Archery Games
The three day minigame is run by Honey and Darling, the equivalent of the dancing couple I found so amusing in Ocarina of Time. They dance in the center of a spinning platform while Link gets to try to hit things on the wall before the song finishes. The first day is bombchu bowling, the second day is bombsketball, and the third day is archery. There’s a – I don’t know if it’s a glitch or intentional, but if Honey and/or Darling gets hit by the weapons, they complain about it, and while the text box is on the screen, the timer doesn’t count down. I only discovered this in the third day when my spray and pray style, plus the way archery focus works meaning they constantly entered the line of fire, meant they sometimes got hit, whereas I’d have had to seriously pancake up to hit them with the explosives. I’m better at the other two games, so that was the one I needed this for anyway. Anyway, the first two days they give Link 50 rupees, and the third day a piece of heart.
Then, because you can never have too many archery minigames, there’s one in town, and one near the swamp. The one in town has Link shooting at octoroks, trying to hit the red ones while avoiding the blue ones. Getting a good enough score on this is fairly easy; getting a perfect score is frustrating. The swamp version has waves of enemies who all need to be shot to get a reward. This wouldn’t be bad, except the wolfos and guays can permanently disappear if Link doesn’t shoot them in time, and the reward tiers here are Perfect and Even More Perfect. For both games, the first reward is a quiver upgrade, and the second reward is a heart piece.
By time I get through all this, the moon’s getting awfully close to doing its thing. So – you know. Rupees in the bank, Song of Time, new cycle.
Next: Winter is coming.
