Twilight Princess Chapter 8: Killing Bugs (For Fun and Profit)

Before I begin, I wish to make an announcement:

Originally, Ocarina of Time was the next game on my list to be re-played. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I spent the entirety of the last weekend in July playing through Ocarina of Time with a good friend of mine, and since we played up to and through the Shadow Temple, I figure there isn't much point in my re-hashing things at this point in time (not that I'll be finishing Twilight Princess anytime soon...), so I've decided to move Ocarina of Time down the list, as well as Majora's Mask because I just don't really feel like playing that either. As of now I'm undecided as to whether I should play No More Heroes, No More Heroes 2 or Fragile Dreams next, but I'm leaning toward Fragile Dreams simply because I haven't played it before.

So, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Midna and I commandeered the Twilight Bird and flew up Zora's River, dodging flaming arrows and falling boulders the whole way. Somehow the Twilight minions are demolitions experts, I guess? Whatever. Either way, it didn't stop me. At the top of the river, the bird deposited us on a sheet of ice.















Zora's Domain is frozen, you say? NO!!! I couldn't imagine that ever happening before in the history of Zelda!

After we got over our surprise that Zora's Domain could possibly be frozen, we moved on and made our way up an unnecessarily-difficult-to-climb precipice in order to get to the Zora throne room.















After we went inside, we were greeted with the...actually pretty depressing sight of every single Zora, frozen beneath the ice.















What to do, what to do...well, we should probably melt the ice. I wonder what could possibly be hot enough to melt all this ice in one go? I seem to remember a giant rock almost falling on my head back on Death Mountain. Midna has the same idea, so we warped back there.















No, really? I thought it was glowing red and steaming because it was cold. Let's go.
















I'll say one thing for Midna: her super-strength is really, really useful.

This next picture is supposed to be the rock falling into the throne room, but cell phone cameras being what they are, this is what you get.
















That's actually not too bad. Okay, anyway. The rock melted the ice, freed all the Zoras and refilled Lake Hylia, making the spirit spring accessible.
















You know what? I did. I did, because the thing almost fell on my head on Death Mountain, and as we all know, these things don't happen unless the thing falling ends up being significant later on. So there.

As we were about to leave the throne room, a mysterious voice stopped us. It's a Zora...ghost?















No explanation for how she can see us. I guess ghosts hang out in the Twilight?















Well, that's interesting...














That's...really sad, actually. Brutal.

She asked me to do something for her (I think) but I've already forgotten what it was. Something about her son, probably. Yeah, I already found him, lady, but thanks for the heads up.

After Rutela's ghost left, I tried to chat with some of the newly-unfrozen Zoras, but they were all too dazed by having been frozen to say much. You know how it is.















I'm wondering if this guy is experiencing the mother of all ice cream headaches? Because if he is, I sympathize.

After we left the throne room, Midna provided some illuminating comments on the water currents.
















So we can just float down the river to get to the spirit spring? Cool! Let's go!

We floated our way down the river, got to the spring, and Lanayru's sad remnants gave me the Vessel of Light. Wait...what's this? We have to go back up the river? But...we were just there...

Midna and I were forced to take control of another Twilight Bird and fly back up the river, this time attempting to kill the four Twilight Bugs that were flying along with us. Fortunately I managed to do this in one trip up the river, or otherwise I probably would have thrown the Wii remote at the TV. After we got off the bird, we found another Howling Stone leading to a golden wolf near Hyrule Castle. Cool, I guess.

So we made our way all the way back up to Zora's Domain, killing bugs along the way. This took longer than expected because no one in this game builds anything on a flat surface, apparently. Why is the throne room so much higher than the rest of Zora's Domain? It is a mystery...

Eventually I finished killing bugs in Zora's Domain (I didn't take pictures of this in the interest of time) and we floated our way back down the river to get the last one, which was located allllllll the way back in Hyrule Castle Town. So we had to run all the way back there to get it. If you read my last post, you might remember that I already killed this bug and left the Tear of Light there because I couldn't pick it up.

When I got to Castle Town, those Twilight wall things popped up and I had to fight three more Twilight Beasts. At first I was pissed about this, but then I remembered it meant I'd be able to warp to Castle Town, so I vanquished the Twilight Beasts with the Force Attack or whatever it's called and made my way to the second-to-last tear. I found it just sitting on the ground, chilling. Okay, cool. I picked it up, and immediately Midna started wondering where the last tear could be.















Suddenly a new tear appeared on the map!















I wonder what that could be. Let's go find out!

I was delighted to realize that I could just warp back to Lake Hylia instead of running all the way back. But when I got there, there was thunder and lightning in the sky and something really big was swimming around in the water.














I had to swim out to some wreckage floating in the middle of the lake to get to the last tear on the map. It was about this time that the Jaws-ripoff music started playing, and when I got close, this thing came out of the water.
















Yeah, that's...not friendly-looking at all.

For the Twilight Bug Boss, I had to jump on the thing and attack it a couple of times to make it float helplessly in the water, upside-down, so I could climb onto it and use my special attack to kill all its legs at once and defeat it. Me being me, I fought the thing for 20 minutes and died once before I remembered to use the special attack and kill it. But at long last, the boss was defeated...















...and the last Tear of Light appeared.















Yay! We made the last of the Twilight go away!















Midna, of course, only has one thing on her mind.















Go hide in your shadows, imp. Lanayru wants to tell me a story!

Lanayru, who is apparently a giant snake, then started telling me some story about how magicians tried to take over the world or something.















Hey, it's the nifty music from Ocarina of Time! Cool!














In the next picture, the scene started changing right as I took the picture, but I figure it still illustrates things pretty well.















Ilia? What are you doing here? Dammit, where's Zelda!














Well, this is still a cool story, I guess...
















OH GOD SHE'S GOT A KNIFE!














I THINK SHE KNOWS ABOUT ZELDA! AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!














RUN AWAY RUN AWAY RUN AWAY














Wait, who are those guys?

















Oh, so that's where the light spirits come into the story. You'd think they could have shown up before now.














Yay, you actually did something useful!
















Random hill is random?

Apparently the dark magic that got sealed away is contained in the Fused Shadows or something. Who knew? I mean, I thought Midna wanted them to decorate her house with.
















Lanayru ends the story with a warning.














Um, cool?














Link, have you even been paying attention this whole time? I think he's been thinking about Princess Zelda. Talk about a one-track mind, huh? Well, he'll probably be looking at Ilia sideways for the rest of his life, for sure.

And with that, we exited the spring...and Lake Hylia was all prettified again!
















Next time: Lakebed Temple!