BatchGC’s Hyrule’s Worst Security Systems
Authors Note: This is just a bit of fun. I don’t want anyone complaining that my ‘mock-umentary’ doesn’t coincide with the current timeline or Hyrulian geography theories going around. This is merely an example of how bored I can get in my spare time. Enjoy…please!
And it’s a bit longer than I thought it would be. Sorry about that.
Hyrule’s Worst Security Systems
We sent our testers throughout the land to try and break into some of the empire’s most ‘well-guarded’ locations, just to see what we could get away with. The results were not good, and are here for your entertainment.
Disclaimer: Hyrule’s Worst Security Systems accepts no responsibility for any thefts, damage to property or break-ins that follow the publication of this document. Equally, Hyrule’s Most Wanted denies any claims that this document instructs or encourages the public in any such crime. Honest.
So, in no particular order…
1. Hyrule Castle (Circa OOT)
The prestigious home of our early monarchs, set in the north of Ancient Hyrule, with working drawbridges and an army of guards at its disposal. As a worthy precaution, the entrance to the town at the foot of the hill on which the castle stands is locked every night, except when a princess and her nanny are escaping some green-skinned, bog-eyed loser from the desert. As if that wasn’t enough, wild dogs ‘mysteriously appear’ at night to deter any villagers from sleepwalking. Very impressive so far.
What isn’t quite as impressive is the fact that these so-called ‘wild’ dogs immediately adopt the first person who stands in front of them. And surely the castle could afford something a little more vicious than Yorkshire Terriers!
The guards aren’t all their cracked up to be, either. The ones outside the castle stand in the exact same spot for the duration of their duty, completely ignoring anyone who walks around outside their field of vision – even if their just behind them. Someone really needs to have a word with the chief of security there because there is a definite element of corruption in his troops. One man was lazily hiding in the shed by the drawbridge. Initially we thought he was guarding the army’s stock of lovingly sculpted pots, but he actually invited us to break every single one. Another allowed us through to the Castle grounds, bribed by a measly ten rupees. Others were spread throughout the land, apparently auditioning to be a talking clock.
For the home of the most important people in the land, this security system is abysmal.
HWSS Rating: 2/10
2. Hyrule Castle (Circa ALTTP)
Presumably the Castle built to replace its rather shabby predecessor, this building is in the centre of Not-So-Ancient Hyrule. Being surrounded by a moat is always a plus, but there are no less than three bridges over it, and none of them are drawbridges. Still, rather than an empty field with a few idle, bored guards, this castle had a large, thick wall that surrounded it, topped by archers.
It’s probably a bad message to send out, but the guards are actually more effective at dealing with intruders when they’re under the control of the King of Evil’s shadowy assistant, rather than our rightful king. Whenever we got anywhere near the castle, or sneaked about inside, they came running towards us, swords drawn. Unlike Ancient Hyrule, this castle had zero tolerance for intruders. You don’t get thrown out so that you can try again - these guards were out for blood. We must have gone through five crates of blue potion just to get to the dungeon.
Speaking of the dungeon, it’s very well designed. Filled to the brim with manic, red-eyed guards, the dungeon’s most impressive features are locked doors and a Bottomless-Pit-O-Doom™. Pity the guards are easily pushed into it, especially when you throw the conveniently placed pots at them. Equally well designed is the upper tower. Admittedly, all of the floors are designed in the same way, but the best troops are up there. There wasn’t enough blue potion in the world to convince us to go up there.
So, apart from the occasional flaw so far, why is this system so bad? Well, it’s not as bad as the previous castle, but there was an easy way in. Simply cutting some grass to the east of the castle revealed a hole into a cellar. In the next room were some guards, but that was it. Surely, if they built this cellar, they’d realise that there is a hole in the ceiling! Especially as there is a puddle of water in the corner, created by the rain.
Still, definitely an improvement on the previous castle, but needs a few things seen to.
HWSS Rating: 5/10
3. Ganon’s castle (Circa OOT)
On the face of it, this castle is a lot better than our own monarch’s is. Owned by some bog-eyed, green-skinned loser from the desert, it somehow floats over a lake of lava, with no bridge over the unjumpable gap between the doorstep and the path leading up to it. The décor is certainly the most unique we’ve found – it really has that ‘End of the World’ feel about it. The main doorway isn’t guarded, but the entrance hall features two beamos scanning the room. As with all beamos, unfortunately, there are definitely some blind spots, but Beedle’s Beamos Inc. insist that they are working on a better model. Watch this space, folks!
The lower floor is home to the magic power generator things that provide the barrier to the keep with energy. Each generator is hidden behind two or three rooms of cunning, head hurting, reaction-testing booby-traps (possibly some of the most ingenious traps we’ve had the pleasure of being impaled on), although the generator rooms are empty. Shame that.
The keep is home to a lot of stairs. In fact, most intruders will probably be bored or exhausted by the third floor. Those that aren’t must face armoured knights, skeletal warriors and sword-wielding lizards if they want to reach the top. These were expertly trained and our team lost at least two arms to the Iron Knuckles!
The whole castle is rigged to collapse at the will of its owner, and the ‘fire escape’-style exit route is also guarded by skeletal warriors and hidden rings of fire. Those who can manage to get their way past that must contend with a paralysing redead, cunningly positioned by the back door.
The security system itself then is the best we’ve seen. The owner however is quite incompetent. He did not notice as we called upon his arch-rivals, the Sages, to create a pretty rainbow bridge for us. He did not notice his tower losing power as we destroyed each evil-energy-generator. And he did notice us hacking and slashing our way through his bodyguards. Why? Because he was too busy playing the organ. As if that weren’t bad enough, he was playing his own theme tune. How vain is that?
HWSS Rating: 8/10 (In the hands of a competent evil king)
4. Ganon’s castle (Circa TWW)
Clearly the guy with the organ fetish must have spent way over his budget on the last place. We dropped by to see how he was doing about two or three hundred years after our first visit and found him in a secluded castle at the bottom of the ocean. Brilliantly, he’d built it very close to his rival’s elaborately decorated castle, and had sent an army of rubber-jawed pigmen to attack it (thus winning this year’s Hyrule’s Worst Neighbour Award).
No lake of lava this time around, though – he did manage to put some inside though. This time, the entrance is a crumbly bridge. He may have broken a few holes in it, but he forgot to remove the hookshot targets! His incompetence never ceases!!
Inside, there is no longer the powerful magical barrier, but a magical lock that leads to the staircase (he obviously can’t afford a keep anymore). This magic can be broken by killing off his four monsters, each of which are hidden behind a single, booby-trapped room and a smaller pigman. These new guards are far less intimidating as the previous ones and didn’t present the challenge we were expecting. He obviously can’t afford decent minions now. In fact, he must have got the bargain package on bosses. Not only are there only four different ones, they are the same as the ones that we had to battle to get here. What was it, sir? Buy one, get one free? Clearly he saved the freebies for his castle, because they’re in black and white. It’s worrying that he can’t even afford colour monsters anymore – obviously the career as a professional organist didn’t work out. We’re actually starting to feel sorry for him now.
Having said that, the lousy system at the bottom of the staircase lulled us into a false sense of security. We were in no way prepared for the colossal puppet he hides up the top. Obviously traded in his organ for it.
HWSS: 4/10
5. Deku Palace
This one made us laugh. A lot. To begin with, it looked promising. Tall, wooden walls. Located in a poison swamp. Two outer gardens filled with troops. Two soldiers on the door. Several anti-flying-deku-scrub towers in each garden in case of aerial assault. Only deku scrubs allowed in.
Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ends. The two gardens, while large and maze like, contain nothing of value. Which begs the question: why, in the name of Din, are so many scrubs protecting it? And rather than building the gardens in front of the Royal Chamber, therefore providing a long and complicated route for any would-be deku anti-monarchy assassins, the two gardens are either side of the path into the Royal Chamber! We didn’t even have to work out which door was the king’s chamber, because the troops on the door told us!
And it’s all well and good placing sentry towers in the gardens in case of an aerial attack, but why bother when you could simply cut the power to the floating deku flowers that provide the perfect entrance to the prisoner’s cage. Those things couldn’t have been very cheap, so why bother buying them in the first place?
However, as alert as the garden guards are (and they are incredibly alert), they are let down by the two moronic imbeciles guarding the palace gate. Not only did these guys tell us where the Royal Chamber was, they let us back in after we trespassed in one of the gardens. They let us back in when we trespassed in one of the other gardens. They let us back in when we took off our Deku masks, knowing that we were Hylian. They let us in…this is the best one…they let us in after we tried to free a monkey who had been wrongly arrested and dipped in a pot of boiling water. There was no point in counting how many times we were let back in because we, repeated felons, guilty of trespassing, aiding and abetting a prisoner, damage from Deku bombing and urinating in the gardens, were never turned away.
There really isn’t anything else we need to say, is there?
HWSS Rating: 1/10
6. Gerudo Fortress
For a place run entirely by women (sorry! We didn’t mean it!), this place is very secure. There is an army of female guards, whom we consider to be booby-traps in themselves (stop it! We didn’t mean that either!), since they are tantalisingly beautiful. In fact, it is harder to break into their fortress if you’re a man than it is if you’re a woman. Something to do with hormones and natural attraction probably. Just the sign of their marvellous orange skin, their deep pale eyes, their curvy…
… Moving on. The fortress is very well designed. The inside is so maze-like that, when approaching a door to the outside, we often found we weren’t where we wanted to be. And the guards are just as numerous inside as they are outside. Anyone caught is either locked away in a cage or thrown into the pit. Since the cages were full during our visit, we were thrown in the pit. Here lies the first flaw; once you’ve got over the excruciating back pain from being thrown into this rock pit, anyone with a hookshot can jump out and leave. From there you can pick off the guards.
Herein lies the second problem. As alert as the guards are, they’re very vulnerable to attacks from a distance. If they weren’t so close to being half-naked, they’d stand a better chance. One hit from a regular arrow anywhere on their body, be it a foot or an arm, will knock them unconscious for a good few minutes. Once they wake up, rather than alerting the rest of the fortress, they simply resume their patrol. Having said that, with the amount of guards there, there is no need to raise the alarm; intruders will run out of arrows before they get anywhere useful. The worst guards are those bearing two swords. These have the skills of a gymnast and are very deadly. Which, in combination with their ravishing looks, left us no chance!
Surprisingly, this is the place that really scared us. We thought we were going to spend the rest of our lives being thrown into that pit, so we tried to help a few fellow men who had been locked up in the cages. Even more surprisingly, once we’d freed all four, the Gerudo second-in-command let us be a member of their organisation – no sex change required. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that this place is run by organ-fetish man! He gets about a bit, doesn’t he?
Anyway, now that we were members we could get up close and personal with the guards. Time to get those phone numbers!
HWSS Rating: 6/10
7. Pirate’s Fortress
The independent Termina branch of the Gerudo Fortress is a pleasant coastal property. This, too, was quite secure, and had roughly the same security set-up as the desert fortress. Gorgeous guards (though nothing we did impressed them enough to let us join). Maze-like interior. Actually, that’s about it really. In some ways, this place is more secure than the previous fortress. In others, it’s far worse.
The improvements made lay in the location. Thanks to being by the coast, the pirate’s can afford speedboats to patrol the harbour area, which is hidden behind a huge, impassable steel gate. If the boatwomen catch you, you are hurled from the top of the gate, on to the rocky cliff next to it. Also, there are only two ways into the fortress; via the speedboats and wherever they dock, or by a hidden underwater tunnel, which is guarded by mines and mazes and so on. Best pack your aqua-lung if you’re heading here.
However, this place also suffers from the same flaws, and worse. The guards are just as vulnerable to regular arrows, but they’re also spaced out so that removing one guard creates a blind spot in the patrol area. What is laughable is that, if you get caught inside the fortress, you’re thrown out onto the gantry above the speedboats – right next to the door into the fortress. And it may only be a minor point, but there was definitely a wasp’s nest in the main chamber, which is bound to affect the guards.
Only slightly worse than the last place, but good choice of location.
HWSS: 5/10
8. Forsaken Fortress
The organ-fetish man redeems himself with his surface base of operations! Nice and secluded in the corner of this region of the Great Sea, it boasts several automatic cannons on the outside, three searchlights on the inside, and a nice shipwrecked theme to boot. Clearly this is where the money for the underwater castle went, since an army of a size we’ve not come across before mans it. More money has also been spent on spreading the rumour and reputation about this place; all the local islanders we asked directions from were scared out of their minds by the mention of this place, even pirates!
Approaching the fortress was very tricky. Unless you have a small dinghy that can get under the cannonfire, your ship is doomed. The only way we could get in was catapulting over the wall, but this is very hard to calculate. So on the impervious rating, this thing scores top marks!
Like all good fortresses, this one features a jail cell. Like all jail cells we’ve come across so far, this one had an escape route, which you could use again and again. Someone really ought to employ a minion or two to find those things! The fortress is incredibly large, and very hard to navigate, and the evil pigmen that patrol everywhere are the most alert we’ve ever seen. They even heard our footsteps as we crept away from them – and we were hiding under a barrel. If they see a barrel that is out of place, they’ll throw their torch and burn it. These guys were highly trained.
Once you’ve escaped the lower levels, the path to the top is still guarded; this time by little helium-voiced creatures that go ‘na-nah’ every two seconds. Who poked us with sticks. Continuously. Most annoying, but easily killed, so they need a bit more training. Added to that, the searchlights (if you didn’t take care of them) scour the awkwardly thin ledges along the path. A solitary pigmen will activate razor sharp spikes at the top, preventing you from turning back. And just when you think you’re safe and you’ve reach the top (complete with little girl sized cage), a ruddy great big bird picks you up in it’s beak and throws you out to sea. Not before showing you off to organ fetish man, of course! Nice one, OFM!
HWSS Rating: 9/10
An excellent documentary, batch. I would say mockumentary, but most unfortunately, everything you say is quite true. Poor, poor, organ-fetish man...
(By the way, the first time you said that, I broke into hysterics. Heh, organ-fetish man ^_^ )