The big drive for this section of the game is hunting Poes. The series has made some tedious collection sidequests before, but this one has to be in the running for the worst of them. Overworld Poes only come out at night. That’s a reasonable restriction, to be honest. Except… unlike the other games with day/night differences, there’s no way for Link to change day to night. So, you’ve got periods where Link can be standing right where he saw a lantern, but twiddling his thumbs waiting for the sun to go down. I suppose the intent is to go off and do other things during the day and come back at night, but there are problems with this. Poes aren’t always in the most convenient locations. There’s one on the island Link tries to land on during the Cucco glider minigame. And this isn’t Majora’s Mask, where time passes no matter what you’re doing – day and night stand still in certain locations, some obvious, some not. So… yeah, stand where the Poe spawns (or in a nearby area, if time doesn’t pass at the spawn point) and wait it is. And that’s when you happen to know where the Poes spawn.
Oh, and Jovani was wrong. Getting twenty of them cured his cat, but he’s only partially cured – he can move, but he’s still golden. Getting him back to normal is going to mean finding the rest of them: forty more. I suppose it was too much to hope that I could wrap up this quest about halfway through the game. Actually, given how annoying they are to find, I’m guessing the idea is you’ll run across twenty, enough to complete the main part of the quest, by chance, and get a pretty nice reward: a bottle with Great Fairy’s Tears, which functions approximately like the Elixir Soup in Wind Waker only it’s a single serving. (Jovani hints that there’s a source for these out in the desert.) The reward for sixty is probably going to be “Hey, you did this because you’re a completionist, now you can rest easy. What more do you need?”
While in Hyrule Castle Town, there’s a minigame run by a guy named Purlo who dresses kind of like Tingle. The game is called the STAR game, which is an acronym for four random words from the game’s instructions: “So, Track, And, Runs.” The full instructions are even more “someone really wanted our initials to spell” the word than the MCU’s name for SHIELD. Put more simply: There’s glowing balls in a room, and Link has 30 seconds to grab them all. With the Clawshot, it’s pretty easy to shoot around the room and grab all the balls. When Link Clawshots and grabs several balls in one go, three girls watching him play start squealing, and after his success, they drop hearts and run off if he tries to talk to them. Oh, but the main reward for finishing is a quiver upgrade from 30 to 60 arrows.
Out the south gate, the golden wolf is waiting to see Link again. The latest maneuver is a follow-up from the shield bash, called the helm splitter: Link vaults over the foe while they’re stunned by the shield bash, hitting them once, and whacks them again in the back for good measure. Again, I thought Helmasaurs would make a good foe to practice on, but they just curl up in a ball when shield bashed and there’s no chance to use this.
There’s one last minigame to play, this one run by a bird. The bird calls a giant Kargaroc to carry Wolf Link back up to Zora’s Domain, and along the way, Link can pop balloons for points. Popping the balloons isn’t really hard. There are two complications: each time Link pops the same kind of balloon as his last one, the points he gets are doubled, which means he needs to pick one type (strawberries are worth the most points, and putting together a string of 10 of them is enough to win outright). And second: yeah, flying the Kargaroc is still tricky, and if Link fall off, his score is 0. The reward for getting 10,000 points is a heart piece. There are two more heart pieces Link can get at this time: One in Lanayru’s cave, and the other in a cave by Eldin Bridge.
Now that Link can turn into a wolf mostly at will, there are some interesting places to dig and find underground caverns. One, in the barn at Ordon Ranch (the goats don’t like Wolf Link), and has a sparkly Rare ChuChu, whose jelly is functionally equivalent to the Great Fairy’s Tears. There’s another one with a great many ChuChus north of the castle, including blue ones, so I don’t think buying potions is ever going to be a concern. At this point, with two big money sinks behind me (1000 for a heart piece and 1798 for the Magic Armor), I’ve been using the Magic Armor to drain rupees rather than leave them behind. I’ve still got nine insects I can give to Agitha (with three left to find), and the Ordon Ranch cave has pots with a lot of rupees I could probably farm if I get desperate.
Next: Boaring onward.
