A Non-Linear Entry on Linearity (-ish)

I did it! I managed to beat the crane game and get the bom...oh...it was just magic powder. I noticed a spot down on the beach where there's a weak wall, and was eager to get in there and start some minor demolition. Ah well.

This session was brief (and so to is the writing of this), but it really brought back to me the prevalence of farming in these adventure games. It's kind of annoying, but it's also an ingenious way to keep things open-ended to some extent while keeping things linear.

At early points in a game like this, usually you just want to barrel onwards and upwards, but those who stick around and try to explore everything they can will often be rewarded. That's what getting this magic powder was really all about, and rather than carrying on and finding a chest full of rupees so that I could have more than one play of the game at a time, I stayed put.

I farmed out rupees in the grass around the crane game, and in the field just to the north. Every time I spent all of my hard-earned cash, I went back out and I rounded up more. Ultimately, the whole exercise probably cost me about 15 minutes of play time, but that's 15 minutes that I could be deeper into the story.

Hence, the difficulty curve of these sorts of distractions are what deter most players from them. And hence developers are able to keep players on the straight and narrow until an easier way opens up. In this case it might've been a chest, but in others it will be a single directly related item used in the place of a McGyver-esque combination of items for effects that don't seem to be planned for.

Now that the distraction's over, I'm off to the Mysterious Woods to meet with the owl once more.