in an alternate timeline, link wakes up and sees his sword broken and decides that he’s done, he’s not doing this again, he is going to retire and become a traveling cowboy chef and avoid everybody who knows who he is. he does the tutorial shrines, then swears off going anywhere that he can’t take his horse. his goal is to visit every stable without a map or fast travel. and he did it
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i made a 19 minute video of all the best parts of this experience, but here are the main takeaways:
impa lets you investigate the geoglyphs with her even if you haven’t been to the fort yet. which means you can go up in the hot air balloon with no paraglider. luckily horses function as a water bucket mlg so this is one part of the story you can complete without going too far away from your horse. i did eventually go to the fort, but before you can get a paraglider, you need to go into the depths, and you really can’t take your horse down there. there’s probably a way but it must be awful.
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the horses discourage taking them strange places. they will pull your wagon, but they refuse to be on a moving platform of any kind. they will walk over a bridge, but if the bridge starts moving or drifting away in the water, it will buck you off and teleport to solid ground. any attempts to lift your horse using machinery will result in your horse being an immovable object. the horses also will not Swim, and if the water gets too deep they will again buck you off and then swim to solid ground. i spent a lot of time messing with this and trying to get my horse named Fish to swim where we were trying to go, which sometimes works and often doesn’t and takes a whole lot of time.
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it was fun playing the game in a different sequence than i was used to! there were a lot of little gentle pushes scattered around the map telling link where he might go if he were interested in doing his job, which was neat.
so horses can’t go to the depths, and they also can’t go to the sky islands. they also cannot go in the desert. huge swaths of the game are unplayable if you follow the horse rules. unlike red dead, your horse is Not by your side all the time, and also not even required. so, although the game does contain horses, it is not a Horse Game itself.
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there’s just not enough to do with the horses. the stable point upgrades are fun, but there’s not really any horse minigames like racing or hurdles or anything. there is an equestrian loop, but it’s just a circular path with no jumps. there’s also no brushing your horse or horse breeding or anything. you Can feed your horse snacks and pat your horse and search the wild for exciting combinations of horse coat genetics, and you can go to special locations and stables to get the Special Horses, and you can go to the Horse God and revive dead horses. but the horses all have the same personality and most of the time they either stand there or run away. it’s not like in skyrim, where your horse might wander off and try to stomp a wolf to death with its hooves when you’re not looking. you can’t even register the skelehorses!!!!
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so that’s my consensus lol it was still a fun way to play. there’s probably a speedrun category called horse% where you try to get all the special horses registered in your stable. well. maybe not, since some of the special horses you need a breath of the wild save file to get. but a stable% speedrun, that makes sense. it it probably doesn’t involve travel by horseback, if it exists
i rate tears of the kingdom Not Applicable out of 5 stars!
the persecution of lefthandedness is insane to think about because it was so intense for so long, in some places still is, without any clear profit motivation. sheer love of the game. as late as the 70s at least they were smacking my stepdad’s hands for it with a wooden ruler at school, to this day he’s in weird ambidexterity situation where he’s not great with either side and notably clumsy due to poor hand-eye coordination. just wtf
It is fascinating to me that people also think of handedness as an example of bigotry that just…went away. As you note, it…hasn’t in some places. I know people who grew up in the mid-late 90s who still had this problem.
But also, and this is really important to keep in mind regarding bigotry that still causes in many ways larger problems, that the structural problems are not actually fixed.
If you go to any computer lab or public library, the mice will be on the right side of the computer. Sometimes they can be moved. Sometimes they can’t. Many computer mice are curved to only fit in right hands.
It is impossible to find lefthanded scissors without going to a specialty store, because most scissor makers don’t even make them. And it’s not just a matter of grip; the slicing side of the blades is obscured if you use righty scissors in your left hand, so your cut is off.
All those signing pads with the little chained styluses? Almost always on the right side, often not even long enough to stretch to the left. Makes signing for lefties extremely difficult.
I caused actual muscular problems in college having to twist around in order to write at right-handed desks in college when there weren’t enough lefty desks–and there never were. Some classrooms didn’t even have a single one.
I could go on.
But the point is, bigotry isn’t just a mindset shift. People can’t just decide they’re not bothered by that particular difference anymore and everything’s fine, because society is still structured and designed to cause problems for marginalized people. And they’re never even going to notice all the little ways their life is bent to convenience them that inconveniences others.
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