Do you acquire/unlock any items through story-line, rather than buying or renting them from the shop?

I started playing A Link Between Worlds on release and so far I love almost everything about the game. I'm about 8 hours in and have done a lot of side-quests so just reached the Lorule.

The mechanic for items in the game differs a lot from the Zelda series in it's way that you can rent (for around 50-120 rupees) and buy item (for 800-1200 rupees). It's a cool function that makes a lot of side-quests accessible much sooner then what we (Zelda game lovers) are used to.

Link to all items

But my question is this: Do you get items from story-line? (So that you don't spend like 1200 rupees on a item that you will get 2 hours later).

Solution 1:

You don't need to worry about "wasting" your Ruppees, as every item only exists once. Those that can be rented/bought cannot be found at all. Those that can be found, are not available for rent or purchase.

The items you get throughout the story are:

• The Sword
• The Lamp
• Ravio's Bracelet
• The Power Gauntlets
• Zora's Flippers
• The Master Sword
• The Titan's Mitt

The items you can find in dungeons or on the overworld are:

• Bottles¹
• The Hint Glasses
• The Butterfly Net
• The Pegasus Boots
• The Bee Badge
• The Stamina Scroll
• The Master Sword Lv 2 & 3²
• The Hylian Shield
• The Blue & Red Mail

All items rented or bought from Ravio are necessary to finish a dungeon, except for one: The Boomerang.

Given the fact, that the Sand Rod is rented by Sage Osfala at the beginning, you will need to save him first before you can rent the rod, thus turning the Sand Rod into some sort of special case, in that you have to "find it" first before you can rent it.

¹: There are 5 bottles in total.
²: To upgrade the Master Sword, you need to find 2 out of 4 Master Ore, then visit the Blacksmith in Hyrule for the Lv2 upgrade. For the Lv3 upgrade, you will need the Lv2 upgrade, the remaining 2 Master Ore, and you will need to pay a visit to the Blacksmith in Lorule this time.