That One Sidequest / The Legend of Zelda

The series, with its emphasis on exploration and minigames, has more than a few sidequests that are sure to test the patience of players.

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• Getting all 20 hearts in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past includes not one but two luck based missions, one of them giving you 2 attempts to pick a chest containing it out of 20 or so randomized chests, while another gives you 30 seconds to dig around in a vast empty field with roughly 500 possible spaces to find it in. The only saving grace for both games is that you're likely to at least make back enough Rupees to cover what you spent to play them, so you can simply keep trying until you get it.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
  • The Big Poes. You have to use your horse and start in a specific location in Hyrule Field and head in a specific direction to make the Poe even appear, and you have to chase — at high speed — said Poe and shoot it twice before it disappears. And you have to find all ten in order to have access to the final empty bottle. One in particular near Gerudo Valley has a nasty habit of vanishing into a wall almost instantly. Plus regular Poes, who only net you a measly 10 rupees, show up immediately after the Big Poe escapes, so unless you know what to expect, you might be tricked into thinking you caught the Big Poe.
  • The Piece of Heart you get by racing Dampe a second time. You have to do it in less than a minute, which is extremely hard even if you use the Longshot to speed through the last room. Thankfully, there is a way to cheat; playing any warp song pauses the timer for about two seconds (so you'll have to do it a lot).
  • Getting the Biggest Quiver from the Horseback Archery Range in the Gerudo Fortress. Even if you go for the 100-point clay pots to boost your odds, there is very little room for error, as they're nearly as difficult to hit as a bullseye. It's incredibly hard to get the 1500 points required, and for extra fun, it's entirely possible to end up with 1,490 points. When something like that happens, it feels like the game is taunting you.
  • Getting the Biggoron Sword. It's a huge Chain of Deals, and several of the missions are timed, including the last one. The timer for the final leg of the journey is four minutes, and you have a margin of error of maybe ten seconds. And if you do happen to fail, you have to go several steps back in the Chain of Deals before you can retry this one particular segment, and they're not exactly a breeze, either. To make this even more of an example, if you use a warp song, the time limit on what you're carrying drops to 0:01, causing you to lose immediately.
  • The Frog Ocarina Piece of Heart. After playing all of the non warp music to the frogs in Zora River, you then can play a minigame for the frogs to catch flies. Each one corresponds to a note, which is extremely difficult to memorize which frog jumps on which note you play on the Ocarina. Furthermore you are given about half a second to react to each fly otherwise you fail the minigame and have to start over.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask:
  • The goal for the reunion of Anju and Kafei involves a lot of waiting^note except in the 3DS version, where you can jump to any hour of the day, many travels, lots of opportunities to mess up the quest, and (for players to accomplish 100% Completion) the majority of it needs to be done twice over all three days. As one final kick to the nards, the majority of the rewards for doing this sidequest are subpar at best^note You get the Keaton Mask, Postman's Hat, and Couple's Mask, each of which are only good for a heartpiece a piece, and a bottle of Chateau Romani which would be worth it if it was possible (at least without Guide Dang It! levels of Sequence Breaking) to finish this sidequest before the odious Zora Egg event that requires a lot of bottles and if you didn't receive it quite literally minutes before having to reset to the dawn of the first day.
  • The race against the Deku Butler after beating Woodfall Temple. You follow the Butler through a long tunnel, and if you mess up once, there's a good chance you'll have to start the entire thing over again, and at the cost of a whole heart. ^note If you don't mind taking a cycle to get the Bunny Hood before going back and racing him, then it turns into a cakewalk.
  • The Swamp Shooting Gallery. This particular challenge gets you the largest quiver and a piece of heart, but is tough going without superhuman reflexes or repeating over and over again. It's still more forgiving than the Town Shooting Gallery, which requires you to shoot, on average, more targets per second to get a perfect score.
  • The Gilded Sword's increased power and reach makes it worth getting, but it can be tricky to do so. Basically you have to go swordless for a night, beat the boss of Snowhead Temple, win at the Goron Race Track before the second day is out, and go swordless for another night. The Race Track is the hard part, as the high speed steering can take some getting used to, you have to watch your magic, especially if you didn't get the meter upgrade, and if another Goron bumps into you on an incline, you lose your spike rolling. For extra fun, try doing this all on your first visit to the zone. The temple is doable without a sword, though getting all of the stray fairies takes some finesse.
  • The race with the Beaver Brothers. The first time is reasonably easy, but subsequent races are more difficult due to the higher number of rings to pass through and a small (but decisive) decrease of the time limit. It has to be won twice for a bottle, and four times for a Heart Piece.
  • The Don Gero side quest. You have to get four frogs together so that they can perform a song. Two of the frogs are out in the wild (Clock Town and the Swamp) while the other two frogs are inside the mutant frog mini-bosses that are in the Woodfall and Great Bay Temples, meaning you have to spend a lot of time trekking through two dungeons to reach them. On top of this, the frogs won't gather at the pond near the Smithy's house unless it's spring, which means you have to clear the Snowhead Temple to break the wintry curse. You do all this traveling and backtracking just for a single Piece of Heart.
• The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games: It is absolutely insane what you have to go through to get all the Magic Rings in this game (or all 64 rings really, between both Seasons and Ages).
  • First, there's the Bomber's Ring. It requires you to score perfectly (8 rounds out of 8, flawlessly) in the Goron Dance Hall on Platinum, the highest difficulty level. It's a game where you have to enter the button sequence EXACTLY as it's given — in the right order and with the exactly same rhythm and timing. And on Platinum, some of those sequences are more than 10 buttons long. You have to do that perfectly 8 times in a row, and even at that level, it's still randomized. It's slightly easier on the 3DS Virtual Console due to the inclusion of Save States.
  • Then there's the Light Ring L-2. It's one of four rings that can be won by scoring 350+ at the Lynna Village target gallery. The game itself isn't that tough, but the absurd rarity of this ring is. You'll win the other three rings (which you can get in other ways) dozens of times. But to win the Light Ring L-2 (available ONLY from this mini-game) requires such astronomical luck, because of how extremely rare it is, that it's like winning a real-life lottery. You'll spend hours upon hours upon hours winning the same rings over and over again before you probably just give up and content yourself with 99% completion.
  • Really, to gain all 64 rings across both Oracle games has to be the most extraordinary feat in the Zelda series. You have to play both games at least twice (four playthroughs in all) in order to account for unlinked and linked versions of both. And there are some (like the Rang Ring L-2) that are so laughably rare that you can go through all four playthroughs and never see them. They're that badly randomized.
  • Special mention to the linked game Hero's Caves, each of which contains an exclusive ring as its final prize. Each of them is itself that one sidequest.
  • Easy to get but hard to find is the Gold Joy Ring. It can only be found by bombing an unmarked spot on a literally random wall in the Goron caves in Ages. How anyone was supposed to find this one is beyond comprehension.
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker:
  • The battleship minigame in Windfall Island. An entirely luck based affair where you have 24 shots to hit three hidden targets (of 2 spaces, 3 spaces, and 4 spaces) on a grid of 64 spots. Simply winning isn't terribly difficult, but merely odious and rupee-draining as your tactic basically amounts to blindly shooting until you win. Beating the high score, which requires you to do it in less than 20 shots, requires absurd amounts of time and luck and a king's ransom of rupees — it's no small wonder the guy running this grift earned enough money to buy his own island, and the fan community created an absurdly in-depth probability calculator that increases your odds of, but doesn't guarantee, winning.
  • The Nintendo Gallery requires you to get a deluxe picto box (only accessible past a certain part of the game), which can only carry three pictures at a time, and get a full-bodied, front shot picture of every single character in the game. This includes temporarily-accessible bosses and characters, enemies (though some palette swaps count and others don't). Ever tried to take a decent picture of something when it's trying to kill you? And you have to wait a full day for every single figurine to be made. And the characters that you can't take a picture of (Great Fairies, sage spirits, etc.) have to be bought. According to the guide, there are 134 in total. That's 268 times you have to play the song of passing. The Wii U remake adds several major changes to the sidequest to make it much easier.
  • Trying to sort 25 letters. Twice. On Dragon Roost Island, to secure a heart piece, the player must quickly sort a letter into one of six spots, a 3x2 grid. There is only 30 seconds to do it. The real problem is how much time it can take to have to move from one side to the other. The tenths of seconds wasted more often than not will cause a failure.
  • The Forest Water quest. You're given a bottomless bottle of forest water and 20 minutes to get to 8 islands scattered all around the ocean that each have a dying tree. You'll be pestered by Gyorgs and Seahats every step of the way, you have barely enough time to get to the islands even with a walkthrough telling you specifically where to go, and of course it centers around the game's well loved sailing. The Wind Waker HD with its vastly improved sailing mechanic and 10 extra minutes to complete the quest made it much less painful.
• The figurine quest in The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is like The Wind Waker quest, but with one addition that makes it even more frustrating: it's required to get the final Heart Piece. There are 136 different figurines in the game, six of which being bonus ones that can only be gotten in the post-game. They're gradually unlocked throughout the game, and to get them, you have to pay special Mysterious Shells. The more figurines you own, the less likely it is you'll get a unique one; unless you pay more shells. You'll inevitably run out of shells multiple times, which means you have to buy them at the low, low price of 200 Rupees for 30.^note Or alternatively, use Beedle's Green Picolyte — which increases the chance of finding Mysterious Shells — and the Great Spin Attack on big patches of grass to collect a bunch of them for much cheaper; especially in the European version, which charges 100 Rupees for the Green Picolyte instead of 200. How many do you have to get in order to be given the Heart Piece (and access to the sound test)? All of the main 130 figurines.
  • The final level of Anju's cucco catching mingame. For reference, you have to grab 2 Gold Cuccos (which you can't hold for more than ~4 seconds) and 1 white cucco (which is literally at the other end of town, across a river) all in under 55 seconds.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
  • Poes. They are scattered all over the (very large) map, you don't even get a hint as to where they are and, unlike the Gold Skulltulla quest from Ocarina Of Time, you have no way of knowing if you've found all the Poes in any one area. They only show up at night (in the one 3D Zelda game where you can't control the day/night cycle), they respawn so you'll have no clue if you've fought any one specific Poe and won its soul yet and three of them are in the Cave of Ordeals (see below). At least the reward is useful — more so than other Zelda examples, at least. If you kill all 60 Poes, he'll give you 200 Rupees every time you talk to him, essentially making him a free power source for your magic armor. It's slightly less frustrating in the HD Remaster, since the game now counts how many Poes you've killed and adds in a special lantern that detects nearby Poes.
  • The Cave of Ordeals. Fifty rooms filled with every type of enemy in the game. The final room even has three Darknuts. And there is next to nothing in terms of healing items, and the rooms are small. It ups the difficulty the second trip through, with the last room containing four Darknuts. And apparently the Postman made it through as well.
  • Beating Yeta in a sled race. The first race, against Yeto, is fairly easy as long as you're careful. The race against Yeta is a lot more difficult in comparison. To beat her, you have to take the high-up shortcut, which A) has a very small entrance point, and if you miss it (and don't know how to jump) you'll smack into the wall and thus never, never catch up and beat Yeta; and B) takes extreme precision to avoid falling off the edge. You can't beat Yeta to the finish line unless you go full-speed every inch of the way from start to finish.
  • One sidequest involves getting a barrel of hot spring water from Kakariko to Castle Town. On foot. Through a part of Hyrule Field infested with digging, flying, and ranged monsters. Did we mention the barrel explodes if you or it get hit, and that you need both hands to hold it? Oh, and the best part: There's a time limit, if you take too long to splash the waiting Goron the water loses all its qualities. Is there a timer to tell you when you can restart? No, apparently timers are for wimps.
  • Golden Bugs. The only difference between hunting them and hunting the Poes is that you can get the bugs whenever you want provided you have the right equipment. They can also be quite hard to spot.
• Want to obtain all the ship and train parts in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks? Then you'd better be ready to sacrifice your life and sanity to the randomness gods. All the ship parts in PH are random. Thankfully, there is a sure-fire way to get four of the parts of the golden (and best) set - accomplish specific tasks in multiplayer mode. Spirit Tracks makes it apparently easier by having you cash in specific treasures for train parts, but the treasures are random. What's really obnoxious is that each game sets certain treasures as being rarer than others, with some being absurdly rare. This means that while the big treasures are fairly easy to get enough of, you will be hindered by the worthless trash that you need fifty bajillion of but the game has made nigh-on impossible to find.
• Spirit Tracks also has the Dark Ore sidequest. Not only is Dark Ore 200 rupees a pop, but it apparently melts in sunlight, which means you don't have the time to dawdle. You also have to have opened a couple of specific warp gates, and also have to go through what must be the temple of Tektites, with their god Rocktite. Oh, and you can only get hit once, otherwise you won't make it with enough. And if you're one short? Then it's all the way back to the Fire Realm to shell out another 200 rupees for you! Luckily, if you manage to kill Rocktite before attempting to fetch the Dark Ore, it will not respawn when you pass through the tunnel.
• The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword:
  • The harp minigame to finish up the Lumpy Pumpkin quest line. It gets particular rage because you don't get direct feedback on whether you're doing it right until the song ends (although the harmony sounds incomplete if you're doing badly). Add to it the potential difficulty a player has with using the harp, and the fact that you have to listen to the proprietor yammer on whenever you have to restart, and you can see why players deride it.
  • The Rickety Coaster. Getting a Piece of Heart requires going really fast, which isn't too much of a problem. The problem is that the motion controls don't work too well and interpret "lean left" as "lean right" from time to time, making it a Luck-Based Mission.
  • One of the Heart Pieces comes from a minigame where you must shoot tossed pumpkins with your bow. This is extremely difficult, since you have to hit almost every pumpkin to earn the prize, requiring very careful aim and shot-leading with a really drifty and wobbly motion controller. It's especially frustrating because the pumpkins aren't worth fixed amounts of points — their value goes up as you hit more of them in a row, and drops back to the lowest level if you miss one. As if that's not bad enough, some of the pumpkins are worth double points, but they show up purely randomly (you could get several 2X-kins or none at all in any given round). Plus, the guy throwing them often waits an irritatingly long time between throws (it's a Timed Mission!). And he throws them farther and farther later in the game, often over the top of the screen so you can't even see the damn things for half of their trajectories, but sometimes he'll switch back to throwing them a short distance without warning just to mess with you.
  • One Heart Piece you get from the minigame where you are shot out of a cannon, and have to use the Wii Remote to maneuver Link through five rings randomly floating around in the sky, while dodging huge balloons that bounce you in a different direction, and then land on top of a specific space on a spinning wheel that happens to be incredibly small. This one is hard even if the Wii Motion Plus doesn't screw up on you during this event.
  • Also the bug hunt, mainly because the Wii Motion Plus is almost guaranteed to mess up while you're trying to catch the bugs, which makes swinging your bug net a lot harder than it should be and you have a very short time to find and capture all 10 bugs.
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds:
  • Getting all of the medals from the Shadow Link fights. For starters, it's reliant on Street Pass and a Socialization Bonus, making it impossible in certain parts of the world to begin with. While the game can generate Shadow Links on its own, it takes at least four hours, and that's only while the game is active/not in sleep mode. A normal playthrough takes about eighteen hours. Second, the Shadow Link enemies you can get will vanish whether you lose or win against them, and will not return. Third, some of the specific medals have ridiculously tough requirements. This includes beating Shadow Link by only using the Pegasus Boots and shield, a different one for using each offensive item as a finisher (including the rather ineffective Lantern and Net), and beating Shadow Link without walking.
  • Hyrule Hotfoot, where you have to run all the way across the world map from Lake Hylia to the north of Kakariko Village within a time limit. The first time it's not so bad; 75 seconds should be enough without much effort, but if you're going for the Piece of Heart, you have to do it in 65 seconds. This requires Pegasus booting everywhere, and the path is filled to the brim with rocks, trees, statues and other junk to bump into, as well as caves to accidentally enter, which isn't helped by the short line of sight due to the Top-Down View. And don't even think about calling the broom — the timekeeper will call you out on it and disqualify you. He won't catch on, however, if you warp in Lorule, and there are convenient fissures near the start and end points that allow this.
  • Octoball Derby is not nearly as difficult or time-consuming as it seems, but it deserves an honorable mention, especially because it's required for a Heart Piece. It's a baseball minigame where Link has 30 tries to hit jars or birds to gain Rupees and he has to earn 100 Rupees to win the Heart Piece. Easy enough once you get the timing of hitting the ball down, right? Unfortunately, the only direct control you have is over your stance, using highly sensitive controls, and getting a handle on how to influence the direction of the ball is a hair-pulling exercise especially if you know nothing about how to hit a ball with a bat in real life. Even if you get a handle on the timing and get somewhat used to how to influence the ball's movement, there's almost no margin for error unless you've mastered the controls to a degree the vast majority of players won't. The jars only cough up one Rupee a piece, with the exception of a single special gold jar that, while it respawns after being broken, still only provides 5 Rupees. The most likely way to win is to hit at least four birds who give 20 Rupees each (although theoretically you could win if you hit a gold jar for at least 20 turns), but they only appear if you hit three jars in a row, and the jars become scarce (and thus harder to hit) pretty quickly. You can respawn all the jars by hitting one of two crabs in the field, but they're constantly moving so it more or less boils down to luck. To be fair, the game gives you one big piece of mercy by making the ball 'hone in' on the birds, but occasionally even that seems to be a "when the game feels like it" deal.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
  • "A Gift from the Monks" requires you to complete all 120 shrines. Even with the Sheikah Sensor pointing out any shrines nearby, some of them are difficult to find, and completing them can be a pain too.
  • "Captured Memories" requires finding all of Link's memories. There's a traveling NPC who can give you hints if you find him, but more than likely you'll just be looking at the photos, and some are incredibly vague (including one that's just a generic-looking forest). And, for good measure, there's one in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
  • "Under a Red Moon". Figuring out you need to stand on a nearby pedestal without armour during a Blood Moon is easy; actually doing it is not. The Blood Moon is random and while it has been theorised that killing enemies increases the chances of one, the actual success rate of the method is mixed — the only reliable tactic is to repeatedly light a fire and skip to the next night, burning through your flints and/or fire-based equipment and arrows, listening to a 6-or-so second long loop of accordion music, over and over and over again, until the game decides to just put that damned moon in the sky and let you do the trial. This is made somewhat easier if you buy the DLC and acquire the Travel Medallion, so you can place it near the pedestal and warp right over to it when a Blood Moon does appear. Talking to Hino at the Dueling Peaks Stable also helps, as he can tell if a Blood Moon scheduled to happen when night comes.
  • "Stranded on Eventide". As soon as you get to Eventide Island and activate the quest, you are stripped of all your equipment and inventory. The test requires you to open a shrine while scavenging for equipment and dealing with some high-leveled enemies, including a Hinox. Dying during this is also a pain as you are sent off the island, requiring you to waste time going back. To make matters worse, while the island has some decent equipment on it, the majority of the quality gear available is made of metal... which will quickly get you killed by lightning due to the island's near-constant thunderstorms. And let's not get started trying out this sidequest on Master Mode.
  • "The Lost Pilgrimage". You are to watch a Korok named Oaki as he makes his way through a forest without him seeing you. Oaki is small and blends in well with the background, so he is easy to lose. Since you are in the Lost Woods, deviating from the path Oaki takes will warp you back to the entrance and make you start over. Oaki also has a tendency to speed up, slow down, stop, and backtrack with very little warning. And if Oaki sees a wolf, he gets scared and calls for help, which most players take as a sign that you should help him, but you shouldn't, because you still can't let him see you. Instead you have to either snipe the wolf from a distance or distract it with a piece of meat.
  • Though it's not technically a sidequest, completing the Hyrule Compendium qualifies. It requires you to take pictures of every weapon, shield, animal, plant, and enemy in the game. This includes bosses and super hard enemies like Yiga Clan assassins and Lynels. You can buy pictures from Symin at the Hateno Ancient Tech Lab to make it easier (including bosses once you defeat the final boss); if you're hoping to get all the photographs yourself, be warned that several are permanently missable if you don’t act fast enough… including regular and Mighty Lynel weapons, meaning you have to defeat a minimum of three Red and Blue Lynels before a certain point in the game to get the pictures for the Compendium.
  • Collecting all 900 of the Korok seeds, since they are scattered sparsely throughout Hyrule and figuring out how to get the Korok to even appear can be a task in itself.
  • "The Weapon Connoisseur" is more annoying than outright difficult. A boy named Nebb in the Hateno Village asks Link to show him a total of eight specific weapons. The annoyance comes from the fact that most of the weapons he asks for are ones that the player may have to do a LOT of searching around for, and two of the weapons he wants to see can only be found in the possession of Yiga Clan members, one of which isn’t obtainable until you make it to their hideout, which is located in the Gerudo Desert, one of the most dangerous areas in the game.
  • The DLC "Trial of the Sword" sidequest is basically this game's equivalent of the Cave of Ordeals and the Savage Labyrinth. Unlike those, however, Link will have none of his gear on hand nor will he be able to use any of the Champions' Blessings, practically leaving him at the bare minimum level of defense. As a result the trials require relying heavily on skill and resource management. It becomes downright unfair when playing on Master Mode, since the enemies have regenerating health, defense greater than the weapons you'll find, and have stronger variants.
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom:
  • A series of side quests that can be more annoying than difficult depending on where you are in the game: The Great Fairy Fountains, which in BOTW unlocked by spending an increasingly large amount of rupees, are instead unlocked by helping a group called The Stable Trotters in Putting the Band Back Together so that the Great Fairies will know that the world hasn't ended. The main issue comes in actually getting The Stable Trotters to each Great Fairy Fountain. You have to modify their wagon using the Ultrahand ability and guide the wagon to their destination. If you jostle it around too much, the Maestro will throw a fit, causing you to not only return to where you started, but also for whatever contraption you built for this task to magically disassemble itself. That last part is primarily an issue because building things manually is a pain in the neck. Due to how the game's physics work, if a part is slightly out of place it causes the whole contraption to fail at its intended purpose. As such, doing these quests before you get the power that lets you build things you've already built automatically can cause quite the headache.
  • The Korok Seeds from Breath of the Wild return, and this time there 1000 of them. There actually are just as many individual Koroks to find as before; 200 of the seeds are instead gotten from a set of mini-quests where you have to reunite one Korok with another using your Ultrahand powers. There are 100 of these quests, each of which net you 2 seeds. While they do add variety, and there aren't nearly as many of them as there are regular Korok seeds, there are still a lot, and by comparison they're much more labor and resource intensive to complete, since you need to either carry the Korok to its destination or build a vehicle to transport them.
  • Helping Addison with his signposts. Where there are nowhere near as many signposts as Koroks, each of them actually takes a fair bit of effort to set up correctly due to being physics-based puzzles. The other issues is that unlike the Koroks, whose seeds allow you to upgrade your inventory space, Addison rewards you with Boring, but Practical items like rupees, meals, and tickets that give you a free night at a stable. These items are certainly handy, but they're also things that the player can easily obtain for themselves and thus don't always seem to be worth the effort.