Holy shit, who did I miss? Bugsy?

Yay! New destination: Cyprus!

So I spent nearly 10 hours with the game over the last two days and only completed one dungeon and one section of the tower, the rest was spent exploring the world. Yep I am actually "exploring" and because of my high tolerance for repetitiveness I can enjoy doing some of the side quests. I guess I should quickly say that the last dungeon I completed was great, the dungeons alone are worth the price.

At some point between the 3rd and 4th dungeon I believe, I got the ability to transport people and right before the 4th dungeon I got the ability to transport material. To transport someone or something you talk to the person in question and they will say I want to go to a certain location and then you need to take them there while following all the rules of the track and not taking much damage. When taking items you will get attacked and if you get hit you begin to loose your cargo. Basically these side quests are all picking up one thing from point A and taking it to point B, usually takes a good 3-5 minutes to slowly travel the tracks. Not so fun.

Oddly though I am getting that sense of Zelda exploration from all this. Once you gained the ability to transport stuff all the locations you previously visit all of a sudden have new quests for you. I would arrive at a fishing village and now a woman is asking me to find her a new husband, she wanted a burly man with a big nose and beard. Another guy is trying to keep fish fresh so he needs ice. I traveled to this tree village where all sorts of lumberjacks lived so I looked for someone who had a big nose and beard and two people fit that description. Meanwhile they are selling lumber at this location and I recalled that the snow people wanted to build a fence, plus they have the ice I need for the fish. So I travel with this bearded dude back to the fishing village only to find that the guy thinks the woman is ugly, crap. So back to the log village, get the other guy and back to the fishing village, yes a match!

So what do I get for all this painful work, as you make NPCs in the world happy they open up new tracks. Basically it opens up new areas to explore. These tracks can just be a simple shortcut or lead to a new location. The reward I got for the quest I described above gave me access to a pirate hideout where I had to free a locked up prisoner through an awesome mini game. I discovered this random ice mini dungeon, complete with some excellent puzzles, cause I did one of these random quests. So that spirit of discovery is back, there are some great hidden areas to find, you just got to travel a lot... A LOT.

I have to be over 20 hours in this game and I feel like I still have a nice chunk of game to go. This is quickly becoming my handheld game of the year, I know GTA is consistently awesome (I still need to finish it) but the best of ST is better than the best of CW.