Ganon may be the archvillain of The Legend of Zelda series. Lynels may be the modern games’ toughest enemies. The Trial of the Sword may be Link’s most difficult challenge. But there’s nothing I find as daunting in recent Zelda outings as figuring out what the hell I’m supposed to do with all the monster parts they throw my way.
Monster Parts Are Still Confusing In Echoes Of Wisdom
This problem reared its ugly head yet again as I worked my way up to Lanayru Temple in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. As a reward for finding a treasure chest, I got a heaping helping of purple guts. When I found a checkpoint statue shortly after, I decided to pop to the smoothie shop. I got six Monster Parts from that chest, and I wasted the first three of them in experiments that gave me the pixelated Arnold Palmer, otherwise known as an Unfortunate Smoothie.
Unfortunate Smoothies aren’t all bad. Though they only replenish half a heart, which you could get from just eating a raw ingredient or two, they also give back some energy, so I don’t mind having them on hand in a pinch.
Echoes of Wisdom runs into the same problem with these mysterious ingredients as Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, but on a much smaller scale. This is my first time finding Monster Parts and I’m pretty deep into Echoes, so it isn’t a consistent issue. But in the two most recent 3D Zeldas, I got horns and tails and guts and nails and eyes all the time, and almost never knew what to do with them.
Tears solved this issue somewhat by making certain parts useful when Fused with other items. I could slap a Keese eyeball on the end of an arrow and turn it into a homing missile. Or you could put a Bokoblin horn on and do extra damage. Elementally charged parts, like electric Keese wings, added elemental damage. This mechanic was intuitive, and easy to understand, but I could only soup my arrows up so many times before I was wasting ammunition. I still had a serial killer’s walk-in freezer’s worth of body parts that I had no use for.
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Dubious Feelings About Dubious Food
I know you can do things with those parts. I know I could look up a guide and find a helpful chart that shows me exactly how to use Hinox appendix and Lizalfo tonsil to whip up a protein shake. But whenever I attempted experiments with these ingredients over the cookfire, I ended up getting Dubious Food.
This is another area where Echoes of Wisdom benefits from its (relative) simplicity. In BotW/TotK, I could experiment for a long time and, because there were five potential variables in any given recipe, I wouldn’t come up with anything usable. In Echoes, I found a use for the Monster Parts on the fourth try, when I combined them with a pepper and concocted a warming potion. When there are only two possible ingredients, you’re bound to stumble upon a combination that works.
I guess what I want for the next big Zelda game is a clearer indication of how to best play Dr. Frankenstein. Tears of the Kingdom’s sequel doesn’t need to tutorialize how to make a potion, but I want something to point me in the right direction. I like an element of mystery, but three games into Zelda’s experiment with cooking, I feel like it shouldn’t be a mystery anymore. Or, at least, I feel like I should be able to solve the mystery without the help of an external spreadsheet.
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