In a mandatory cut scene, a character tells you “Head toward the dueling peaks, then, follow the road to Kakariko village.” Hestu, the inventory expanding broccoli homonculus, is standing on the side of that road in a conspicuous location.

It’s a game about free exploration, it’s silly to expect the player to directly follow these instruction. Just make him part of the mandatory tutorial area or have him come to you after collecting your first 10 seed or something.

I only found out about the guy after finishing the game.

It’s not just the tree guy. The whole game’s like that.

Here, let me give you another example of the counter-intuitive gameplay I encountered:

The volcano. It’s hot. I need to travel up it.

First attempt: Check my available tools for something. Bombs, no. Timestop, no. Ice pillar, maybe? no. Swords, Shields, Bows… no.

Second attempt: Explore the area, see a hotspring. Try to map out a route using hotsprings as a cooling source. No dice.

Third attempt: Visit all the major cities for info, nothing found other than the volcano is hot. No vendors selling any items that can help.

Fourth attempt: Circle around and try to find a tunnel, putting on all my desert gear to reduce heat damage. Catch fire regardless, no cave found.

Fifth attempt: Load up all my food and make meals, brute force my way to the base camp. No assistance there, have to teleport out.

Sixth attempt: Doing a completely unrelated hunt for a shrine, bump into the NPC selling fire resist potions at a horse stable. A horse stable I mostly ignore because the game lets you teleport everywhere!

Do I feel accomplished, finally finding this only way up the volcano? No! I feel like Nintendo just wasted my time!

Even worse, when I finally make it to the Goron city and buy the fireproof armor, I bump into a Goron who gives me half the recipe to make the fire resist potion. Not even the whole recipe. And he was far far beyond the base camp I brute forced to. If he had been in all the other cities, and with the full recipe, maybe this wouldn’t have been such a challenge of dumb luck.