by theygamesScreenshot by PC Invasion
Normally, when you encounter the Seized Construct inside the Spirit Temple in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you have to take it down using Mineru’s construct. But interestingly, the developers designed the fight to be beatable using Link’s standard moveset. Doing so in the Spirit Temple arena will prove quite impractical, though, as the gloom-coated floor forces players to either use Mineru or stock up on food items that can heal gloom damage. However, if you skip the Spirit Temple quest and head straight to Ganondorf’s lair, the game will force you to face the Seized Construct without Mineru’s aid. Read further to learn how to overcome this limitation to defeat the Seized Construct.
Fighting the Seized Construct without Mineru
General Strategies
Whether you have Mineru’s construct or not, your goal in the Seized Construct fight involves hitting the boss with melee attacks to knock it into the electric fence for a big chunk of damage. But whereas any melee attack with Mineru would eventually knock the Seized Construct back, Link can only send it back by landing the final hit of a combo or a charge attack. The best moves to do this with are the charge attacks for either one-handed weapons or the Eightfold Longblade. Since these moves take the form of a single, powerful strike rather than a rapid series of attacks, they excel at knocking the boss away in an instant while preserving weapon durability.
For much of the fight, the Seized Construct will walk up toward you and attempt to strike with one of its fists. Although you can sidestep this move for a flurry rush, doing this will waste valuable weapon durability while dealing next to no damage unless it sends the boss to the electric fence. Instead, I found that parrying the strike before retaliating with one of the aforementioned charge attacks proves much more efficient. The timing for the parry does come a little bit later than you might expect, however, so feel free to simply move away from the attack before countering if you find yourself having trouble with the parry.
Note that once you successfully damage the Seized Construct with the electric fence, you can knock the boss into it again immediately afterward for some extra damage. This won’t inflict as much damage as the initial impact against the fence, but it can speed up the fight a fair amount if you manage to do it in time.
Miscellaneous Moves
After it takes damage, the Seized Construct will usually jump to the far end of the arena and perform one of a handful of moves against you. The only one you really need to watch out for is when the Seized Construct attaches two cannons to its arms, as the blast radius of each cannon shot is difficult to avoid on foot. Fortunately, the Recall ability can reverse the movement of the shots well before they hit you, nullifying the threat outright. Additionally, if you cancel Recall once the shot makes its way back to the Seized Construct, it will explode and stun the boss, allowing you to smack it into the fence once more.
As with the other main bosses, depleting the Seized Construct’s health to the halfway mark will trigger the second phase. This sees the boss equipping various Zonai devices and flying into the air before attempting to dive down toward you, emphasis on “attempting.” Seeing the boss fly up may look intimidating, but since the fight is designed primarily around the slow movement of Mineru’s construct, the attack won’t even come close to hitting you if you so much as jog out of the way. And of course, dodging it successfully will leave the Seized Construct open for another trip to the electric fence.
Screenshot via PC Invasion
Using Zonai Devices
Whenever the boss hits the fence, it will drop whatever Zonai devices it happened to carry during its last attack. For the most part, these Zonai devices are mainly meant to help Mineru, so Link generally won’t find too much use for them when on his own.
The cannon does serve as a notable exception, however. When controlling Mineru’s construct, the cannon becomes the ultimate Achilles heel for the Seized Construct, able to interrupt it out of any attack. Although operating a cannon with Ultrahand or attaching it to a weapon or shield as Link may be more awkward than aiming it with Mineru, it is otherwise still a powerful tool.
The Seized Construct’s Big Weakness
Ultimately, though, I feel that the cannon becomes almost irrelevant when you can just use Bomb Flowers instead. In this fight, Bomb Flowers have the same properties as cannon shots, meaning they can immediately stun the Seized Construct for yet another electric fence attack if they connect, no matter what the boss chooses to do. When attached to arrows, Bomb Flowers can turn this fight into a complete pushover. They especially help whenever the boss starts flying up to attack during the second phase, as this move normally prolongs the fight by quite a bit otherwise.
If you try and complete the final section of the game early without doing any of the temples beforehand, the Seized Construct will serve as the fifth fight in the gauntlet of bosses you have to take down before reaching Ganondorf. In that context, there exists the possibility that you might run out of Bomb Flowers before reaching this fight, which honestly doesn’t make the fight that much tougher. But considering the relatively high difficulty of the gauntlet as a whole, you’ll definitely still want a good number of Bomb Flowers on hand to reduce the chances of the Seized Construct fight throwing you off guard. Before tackling the final area early, search around the Depths to stock up on as many Bomb Flowers as you can.
From my experience, the Seized Construct is one of the easiest of the main bosses in Tears of the Kingdom, and beating it without Mineru doesn’t really change that. It certainly makes for a nice breather between some of the more difficult bosses if you decide to attempt the early boss gauntlet.
Screenshot via PC Invasion