It’s finally out.

After about 7 months of delays, I finally put out my thoughts on Expedition 33 which you definitely haven’t heard about already after all the discourse on the game occurred leading up to and shortly after the Game Awards. Not all that’s really left on my plate is actually talk about some anime I managed to watch in the past couple months.

We continue listening to Majora’s Mask with the Mountain Village, which honestly isn’t all too accurate of a description given that there’s one building with two dudes inside making up the entire village. Much like the Southern Swamp, the motif is shared but with its own chilly vibe and with a more ominous build-up leading into the main melody. Fitting as I’m currently enduring below 0 temperature and will be for the next week or two.

Close but no cigar

I do plan on trying to tackle E33 this weekend and get that damn thing out of my to-do list because it’s looking close to empty and I want it to be as done as possible going forward into a year of potentially new games to talk about. I can at least say I’ll get E33 done before those games come out.

As I said last week about the Giants being not so “present” in the game, Oath to Order is your dungeon end song you play after a dungeon’s first clear to essentially wake them up from wherever the giant is slumbering in the corner of Termina you fight through. I actually somehow still remember the tune of Oath to Order but it’s probably because of how unsettling the Giant’s voice is for teaching you the song the first time. As if the game wasn’t creepy enough, the good guys who are about to help you are also creepy. I also vaguely recall the giants or something from the grandma in the Stockpot Inn saying scary stories about them too, unless I’m getting the two stories mixed up.

One last burst

I’m not making any promises, and it’s not like that has any meaning here with this topic in particular, but I am trying to wrap things up with stuff I want to do before my holidays ends and it might be possible for me to get through that since I made some progress, we’ll see. In other news, one of the manga I’m following had its anime adaptation air today so I guess I’ll have something to talk about in 11 weeks time, along with the other two series I did want to talk about soonish.

One might forget the fact that Termina, while being a mirror world with “mostly” similar people, has many elements that Zelda hasn’t revisited as a concept. The Giants present in Termina are on of the few who haven’t made a reappearance in some shape or form. They’re in some weird pocket dimension that you see at the end of a first dungeon clear but you won’t seem them again until the very end. At least the titular mask’s creepy eye sort of came back in the way of Fused Shadows but these giants never did.

And it’s already New Years

Being around family makes it tough to really work on anything, it seems as if the whole day just passes by in a flash. Definitely won’t be getting E33 out before that, oh well. There’s actually some games for me to look forward to this year, at least I can try and make a resolution to not laze out on writing these going forward.

Maybe it’s because this game is the “sequel” to Ocarina of Time but Woodfall is the first temple but I remember it being a lot tougher to figure out compared to the likes of the first two dungeons of Ocarina. Not to mention, the music is eerily tribal which foreshadows who you’ll be fighting as its dungeon boss.

Merry Christmas

Festivities caused some delays and it’ll be a challenge to get Expedition 33 out before the New Year rolls around between all the other stuff I’m trying to get done.

Next in line for new music that didn’t necessarily survive the passage of time is the Sonata of Awakening. Like the Ocarina of Time’s Temple warp songs, this allows one to gain access to the swamp’s Woodfall Temple. I do wonder if its the weirdness of Majora’s Mask in general that makes its exclusive tracks so difficult to call-back to in the newer Zelda titles. We’ll hear the Song of Healing motif again in Twilight Princess but the rest of its special temple songs are hardly ever heard again.

Expedition Sweep

E33 swept the Game Awards and a DLC promptly dropped in celebration with a completely new area, a bunch of superbosses, and a photo mode so now I really have no excuse to finish up that post. I did get through some of the stuff I’ve been wanting to work on so hopefully I won’t take that long before I get to finish that one up with photos.

There are a lot of repeat songs from Ocarina of Time renamed for Majora’s Mask on the OST between the Swamp and here but the Deku Palace is unmistakably a new piece. I don’t think Deku Scrubs have been all that explored after Majora’s Mask despite sharing the important “deku” name with important figures like the Deku Tree. Only relevant in fantasyland, I guess.