Friday, June 8, 2007

Legend of Zelda, Second Quest, Part 2

Today provided a good opportunity to hop back into Hyrule for a crack at the rest of the second quest. Instead of launching straight into a dungeon, I decided to spend some time wandering the overworld, and try to determine the locations of some items and dungeons. Here's what I found out today: 
- There's nothing at the location of the 8th dungeon from the first quest (at least not using the blue candle). Now that I think about it, I'll have to go back there and try out the whistle (as I had some success using it in other locations).

- Just north of this location, I found that the third dungeon resides where the second dungeon sat in the first quest. This time, there's an empty fairy lake, which just begged for me to blow the whistle. As expected, it dried up and revealed the dungeon entrance. At this point, I passed up the opportunity for the challenge, as I was on an exploratory jaunt through the overworld.

- There's an active fairy lake where the 5th dungeon was located in the first quest.

- The White Sword is located at the same spot it was in the first quest, in the cave near the lake at the top of the waterfall, on the left side of the Lost Hills (great news, because I was really itching to find it by the time I stumbled upon it).

- By the time I was passing the shop where the Large Shield was on sale cheaply, I had saved up enough rupees (both by battling monsters and stumbling into some 'Secret to Everybody' caves during my exploring) to purchase the shield. Hopefully this will help me in my journey.

- The location where the third dungeon used to be in the first quest now contains a merchant (of no real note).

- The empty fairy lake, where the 7th dungeon was during the first quest, contains no secrets, at least no secrets revealed by blowing the whistle.

- The structure that housed the 6th dungeon in the first quest now houses a 'Secret to Everybody'. That was a disappointment, as I'd been striking out in finding dungeons up to this point.

- I did manage to find the Power Bracelet, because it was in the same location as the first quest. I guess they wanted to take it at least a little easy on us.

- Using the Power Bracelet, I found the location where I'll be able to grab the master sword after a bit more advancement. This is located at the arrow of stones on Death Mountain (push the point stone, and a stairway appears).

- There's nothing where the entrance to Death Mountain (the 9th dungeon) was in the first quest.

- Not long after passing where the Death Mountain entrance was before, I found the new entrance to the dungeon, simply by stumbling onto the screen (the upper leftmost screen in the overworld) and, in a moment of vague remembrance, tossing a couple of bombs out. Voila, the entrance to Death Mountain!

- After finding Death Mountain, I managed to find the old man who gives you the letter to the old woman, just one screen right and one screen down from Death Mountain. There's another arrow-shaped rock formation, and pushing the tip of the arrow revealed the cave of the old man.

- While passing through the graveyard, I tried pushing a few of the gravestones to see if anything interesting appeared, as in the first quest where the Master Sword was located. Doing this revealed a heart container in the upper left screen of the graveyard. One down, 4 to go!

After a quick pitstop to visit the old woman, and pick up a bottle of Red Medicine (just in case), I ventured over to the 3rd dungeon, which I'd found earlier in my adventures where the 2nd dungeon used to be in the first quest. This turned out to be a very quick and strange dungeon. In keeping with the theme that some of the dungeons being shaped like letters, this one looked like an 'L', with a small two-room area set off away from everything else, which contained the Triforce room. This dungeon was interesting because the boss room was not directly beside the Triforce room. I wandered into a room that contained 3 Dodongos, and after defeating them, a heart container appeared, much to my surprise. A couple of rooms (and a secret passage later), I found the Triforce. However, I hadn't found the major treasure or the map of the dungeon, so I went back in to find these items. The treasure ended up being the boomerang upgrade, but that cost me some meat, since the upgrade was behind a hungry, grumbling Goriya.

After completing this dungeon, I unfortunately succumbed to a moment of weakness and visited a walkthrough website on the net, to determine the location of more heart containers. I feel a bit dirty about doing it, even though I didn't speculate at the beginning of these posts that I would go through spoiler or walkthrough free. I'm doing my best to avoid this, but I broke down, and in some ways I'm glad I did, because the two heart containers that were revealed to me I probably never would have found without the walkthrough. The first one was next to the location of Death Mountain in the first quest, but it was found by blowing the whistle. The second was located in the lower left screen of the desert in the middle of the overworld, but also found by blowing the whistle. In the future, I hope to avoid these moments of weakness, but what's done is done, so I'll move on...

The 4th dungeon took some time to find. I wandered around for a while, and actually found it completely by accident. While roaming through the Lost Hills, on my way somewhere else, I nudged a stone on the right side of the screen, and it moved. It's funny when you're coming back to a game you haven't played in years, because the minute this happened, I remembered this, but I couldn't dredge up that memory before finding it, which would have saved me a lot of time. Anyway, this dungeon provided much more challenge than the 3rd dungeon, because it was bigger and also featured the knight characters that you can't strike face on. These are rather formidable when fighting the blue variety, as they take 4 hits to kill and are pretty quick on their feet. It didn't take long for me to find a treasure in the dungeon, the Magic Book. This just illustrates how randomly arranged this quest is as compared to the first quest, since I haven't found the magic wand, which makes the magic book useful.

After stumbling around for a while, and having to drink half of my red medicine (turning it blue) in the process, I finally found the boss of the dungeon, Digdogger. He was dispatched without any trouble, and I triumphantly held the Triforce over my head just moments later. However, I realized that I hadn't visited every room in the dungeon, with the rooms I'd missed being behind the Triforce room. So I hopped back into the dungeon, trekked back to the Triforce room, and found a secret passage at the top of the Triforce room. Three rooms later, I found the passage to the Raft. Clearly that was important, and I'm glad I spent the time to be thorough. If not, there could have been some pretty frustrating time on the overworld, since I need the Raft to get to the 5th dungeon.


Before calling it a day, I did use the Raft to get the 4th heart container, located in the same place as in the first quest, using the dock on the eastern shore. The 5th and final heart container is in view on the docks on the eastern shore that require the ladder to reach. Soon it will be mine, but until then it sits there, mocking me in silence...



Well, that's all for now. Stayed tuned as I get closer and closer to finishing up the second quest of this immortal classic. Until then, take care and talk to you soon!

2 comments:

  1. This is great stuff!

    Where's part one? Did you keep going after part 2?

    I'm about to tackle the 2nd quest with a friend who has never completed it (neither have I) but we've both started it a few times in the past.

    We're planning on doing both quests in 1 sitting, however long it takes. Needless to say, we'll have to use some online help - but I'd rather use a blog like this than a stale, surgical walkthrough.

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  2. You can disregard my questions in the first comments; I've found all of the posts!

    This is fun reading. Thanks for doing this!

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