An Accidental Sequence Break in Tears of the Kingdom

 There are different approaches one can take to an open world game.

In a game like Skyrim, the "main quest" is one that can sort of be lost in the shuffle of all the other various stories you can play through. And when you defeat Alduin, there's still the whole world sitting around, waiting for you to complete other quests and stories.

Elden Ring was kind of fascinating, in that the actual nature of the game didn't change that much from the Dark Souls and similar releases FromSoft had made - the only real distinction was that the world was far larger and not as bottlenecked.

The notion of an open world game could, arguably, be traced back to the Zelda series, and the first game that introduced this idea of a big world to explore with all of its deadly dungeons.

The point is: Tears of the Kingdom has quests in a way that is more familiar to the Elder Scrolls or even World of Warcraft model than the Zelda games I grew up on. Yeah, we had Navi yelling in our ear every five minutes to go do the Water Temple already, but in a certain sense, the experience of the game was linear, so there was almost a distinction between "doing the story" and "doing quests" that were more like found objectives out in the world (the most epic in Ocarina of Time being the timed merchant-trading series that ultimately got you the Biggoron Sword, which took both hands but actually did more damage than the Master Sword).

So, here's what happened to me:

In terms of "main quest" progress, I'm pretty far. I've finished the "Regional Phenomena" quest that takes you to the four major dungeons at each corner of the world (that basically correspond with the four non-Hylian races and their settlements, each of which had its own Divine Beast in Breath of the Wild). I've also found all the petroglyphs and the memories contained in them, and I've gotten the Master Sword.

So, the endgame is coming close.

But it might take me less time, because I went exploring.

There's a lightning storm in the south central part of Hyrule (I believe it's above an area called Faron) that looked similar to the blizzard over the Rito village before you complete the Wind Temple. I built a Zonai airplane and flew over there, carefully stowing any metallic weapons or shields (though I've found if I want to make some lightning-charged chu-chu jelly tossing a metal shield into a pile of raw jelly in the middle of a storm is a great way to do it).

There, I found a shrine as well as a pair of doors that, like the Temple of Time, required a certain number of hearts to open. I'm at something like 13 or 14 at this point, so I had more than enough, and what I got was a weird little Zonai device that shot a laser into a particular statue down on the ground level. Building another glider-airplane thingie (and overshooting it, which was pain,) I brought this device to the statue, which unlocked a deeper structure that led to a platform that took me down into the Depths.

This... this felt pretty huge for something I had just stumbled upon.

And it turned out that it was huge. The head was for a construct that would be designed to allow the spirit of Rauru's older sister, Mineru, the Sage of Spirit, to inhabit. Like the other dungeons, I had to do a number of related tasks - in this case, retrieving the parts for Mineru's construct, which each involved some Zonai engineering puzzles - and then transport the pieces to the frame for the construct (I had actually done something similar with a giant Bargainer statue and a set of eyes earlier).

Then, I got to ride the construct - which is not the most convenient as simply walking drains your battery charges - on a journey to the Spirit Temple (I fought a Hynox on the construct along the way). And then, the Temple itself jumped immediately to a boss fight - one that was less about dealing damage and more about knocking a corrupted construct into an electrified wall.

And Lo and Behold, I got my fifth Sage ring activated and another ally for my honestly unwieldy, giant adventuring party.

I'm sure that there were quests that were going to lead to this experience, which I have yet to come across. But, credit to Nintendo, they allowed exploration to lead to this discovery, and I suspect they'll have alternate quest text to acknowledge that I did this before I was officially supposed to.