One aspect I actually don't care for in Tears of the Kingdom
First off I want to explain that I absolutely love this game and feel as though Nintendo really knocked it out of the park. The scaling difficulty that results in 90% of the map being totally optional, the way that there is no one true way to complete the game and the fact that there is more than one way to skin a cat are just epic and like nothing I have experienced in an open world game at any other point in my life.
I love this game... well almost all of it.
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If you've played this game, you already know that that is in the picture but if you haven't played it I'll explain was a splashfruit is.
Splashfruit is introduced to you in the Kingdom of Zora, which are the fish hybrid creatures that as I recall we were first introduced to in Ocarina of Time.
Their livelihood is dependent on clean water sources and when you first encounter them in their part of the map, there is a bunch of goop on the ground that is cluttering up the area and as you will find out later, is causing a lot of problems for their empire. This stuff on the ground is called sludge in the game.
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Stepping in sludge doesn't hurt you directly thankfully, but it does make you move really slow and leaves you open to attacks. Until much later in the game (so I've heard) you do not have the armor necessary to withstand very many hits so being in sludge during a battle can make you open to death very quickly.
There are a couple of fights with large, heavy-damage-dealing enemies that I have encountered so far that if you are standing in sludge, the fight will be over quite quickly. Both of these enemies are covered in a sludge type of armor that is impenetrable unless the sludge is washed away with..... you guessed it, splash fruit!
That is fine in itself because it is evident that this will be the case because by the time you get to those battles they have been talking about sludge for a long time and many of your quests have been directly related to it. The problem is that the splash-fruits are not just everywhere and I have run into a situation where I am extremely low on them. Therefore, I was forced to abandon what I presume is the end of a rather long quest in order to go and run around and search for trees... and there aren't very many of them.
In TotK money is very difficult to come by so even though there are a few vendors that sell splash fruit, you really should be saving your money for various armor upgrades later on because that is where you will really need it.
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this sub-boss is actually defeatable by other means but is much easier with a splash-fruit covered arrow, which is also a rare and limited resource
I don't really mind wandering around to gather resources but since there is no XP in this game, getting into fights randomly that aren't not attached to your overall game progression is just a waste of other resources such as your very breakable weapons. I try to avoid battle as much as possible but every now and then some throwaway mobs corner me and I am all but forced to lay down the law, deteriorating my weapons in the meantime.
I suppose if I were to offer any advice here it would be to not use your splash fruit or really anything else unless you absolutely must, because it will be a big factor later on, you can basically count on that. Restocking of any sort of supply is a true pain in the butt in this game and for the most part they are completely optional. On this particular boss that I am facing though, there isn't really any other feasible way of removing his sludge-shield and therefore you must have a lot of it.
I'm sure there are other similar moments awaiting me later on in the game and while this is annoying, it certainly isn't a deal-breaker.