Finished this a good few weeks back and I've been putting off this post ever since. I think it's time to dive in now...
BLOODY MASSIVE HAEMORRHAGE OF SPOILERS!!!!
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!!
First off, though I agree with Suedey's criticisms, I don't think I could honestly say I was disappointed in any way. The game offers exactly what it says on the tin, with plenty of other brightly-coloured sweeties hiding at the bottom. If I have problems with it, it's more of a niggly feeling really, that the game falls just short of the experience it should have been.
My first insinct is to say this is something I've felt of the series since it was taken over by Aonuma. It's certainly true of Majora (which has great atmosphere and some brilliant bits, but which I always found a bit to finicky to actually complete) and Wind Waker (Lots of little things to do, but with a gameworld spread far too thinly, and short main quest that suffers the same). In reality though, I don't think it's Aonuma's fault.
I had my problems with Ocarina too. The world seemed a little too open for me, which may sound odd, but when I think Zelda, I think of Link to the Past and Link's Awakening specifically. I think tight winding paths snaking around rivers full of evil Zoras, over bridges and into waterfall caves that warren deep into the mountains, stuffed full of Keese, Stalfos, treasures and plenty of places to use those treasures imaginitively. By comparison, the games since have seemed a little barren.
It's an unrealistic expectation to have really, because the technology available and therefore the series itself has changed pretty dramatically since those days. What I really want is another Link to the Past which is as much a step up from that game as it was to the first Zelda. It's an unatainable ideal, really. I think I go on about this a lot here (so much so that I'm starting to irritate myself) but I really haven't ever seen anything like it before or since in videogames. LttP remains one of the most stupefyingly complete and mind-bendingly concise videogame experiences I've ever seen.
It creates a living, breathing world that is both epic and intimate. It's very, very big, but all the details that connect it together are very, very small. There's wonderful presents from Nintendo on every corner. Lots of big ones clearly signposted on your way through the adventure and hundreds of wee ones for clever players venturing off the beaten path. Building a gameworld like that would have been a worthy task for any developer at the time, but in that game Nintendo did it twice and then stacked them inside each other into a big physical paradox of a design that you'd be very hard pushed to replicate on similar hardware, never mind today's.
SNES Zelda is like the Golden Age of comics. Big, bold themes of courageous spirit and adventure weaving through the brightest lights and deepest darkness, painted in pixellated primaries that fire straight to the back of the brain. When the games grew up, they lost a lot of that.
I think up to this point, Majora's mask had done the best job of recapturing the feeling of that 2D Hyrule, stacked to the gills with bright, musical treasures. Wind Waker does the best job of recapturing the visuals. It looked to me exactly as a 3D Zelda should.
But where the hook of LttP expands that world, these games perversely limit it. The MM three-day time limit before the manadatory reset to Clock Town (and resulting repetition of the scripted events you've already been through) robbed a lot of the required fun and leisurely freedom from exploring and getting to know that world. The manipulation of the wind in WW just highlighted how much of a pain in the arse it could be moving from place to place in that flooded Hyrule.
So Twilight Princess then.. which in places really does feel like a concerted effort to marry these two eras of Zelda game into one exhaustive package.
It has the look and feel of an adventure for "grown-ups". Big overcast skies, the corruptive forces of the emo realm, a real-world mediaeval look. But it has the whimsical stuff and the bright colours too and it's all placed within a world that is, at first glance, as packed as it is large. It's a Hyrule that's capable of giving you serene sunrises that draw very subtle and subdued rainbows off the surface of the water before there's a FLASH and a BANG and all of a sudden you're fighting a horrible, pulsating electrical bug thingy, or somebody falls on their arse or something.
TP's Hyrule has plenty twists and bends. It has rivers that can be followed to their source and mountains that can be clambered to their peaks. It's big on little details and rewards careful combing with lots of lovely wee treats. There are caves stuffed with Keese hidden halfway along tricky rockfaces, and these caves are often like mini-dungeons, instead of tending towards Ocarina's default of yet another wee grotto with its collection of beetles, pots and grass slightly rearranged (though these make a comeback too, but slightly more varied this time).
There's Zora Armour! It lets you dive to the newly-massived depths of Lake Hylia! Or swim underwater all the way from the Zora's Throne Room to Castle Town! There's a cane (yay!) that lets you control big statues and smash things that bullied you earlier on. There's the Clawshot (a sensibly redesigned Hookshot)! In fact, there's two of them! With some lovely wall-to-wall ziplineing as a result! There's some really impressive-looking bosses which'll make you back off with a case of the shits one minute and burst out laughing the next.
There are some great dungeons in the game. The first that springs to mind is the Water Temple at the bottom of Lake Hylia. It follows the grand tradition of Zelda water dungeons by being a total head-fuck. It's a proper, full environment, with its tributary rooms that each have to be solved so they can feed into the overriding puzzle of the multi-tiered central chamber. Brilliant wee moments there too. Hanging over an abyss from giant cogs by way of the clawshot as the room clanks and turns all around you, water churning away behind the scenes.
The Temple of Time is fantastic too. Going back in time, transforming the ruins which housed the Master Sword (which I'd only thought about in the vaguest sense) into the temple they used to be is something that works a treat, tying Oot, TP and LttP together in one slight stroke, making Zelda fans squee at the same time. It gives an effortless sense of history to the adventure and to the series as a whole at the same time.
And that dungeon itself is very clever. What seems like a rather linear and lifeless trek is turned on its head at the halfway mark, as you have to make it right the way back down to the start, giant stompy statue in tow, rethinking every room to accomodate it as you go.
Special mention has to go to:
The City in the Sky. Simply because it was a total, total bastard.
The western-style "bowfight", picking Bokoblins off of roofs and gantries as you make your way through a ghost town. Know what you're doing and it can look very cool indeed.
Looking for the key to a dungeon's boss, only to find a succession of vegetables and cheese that you cart back to a giant, over-enthusiastic Yeti sos he can make a hearty soup for his ill-wife.
Hyrule Castle. From the grounds or from atop the roof at least, is a thing of epic beauty, and the perfect place for the final showdown. It feels like a real castle, and not just another dungeon with a coat of paint. The illusion's not so great when you're making your way up inside it, but still....
The Wii controls, which I imagine transform the game a good bit. They are intuitive and beautiful. Very easy to pick up, slotting into the experience like they were always there. There's a slight problem in that targeting a weapon such as the boomerang or clawshot without the pointer fixed on the screen brings up an illusion-shattering "PLEASE POINT THE WII REMOTE AT THE SCREEN, FANNYBAWS!".
The wonderfully evocative bits where you communicate with a ghostly wolf by howling songs underneath the moon.
Midna.
Midna. Midna. Midna. Midna.
She's a beautiful, impish little thing bursting with personaility and attitude and emotion. Bossy and put-upon in equal measure, Midna is a wee darlin' who needs far more airtime than this game could ever hope to give her. She should totally team-up with Tingle (sadly absent here) in the best odd-couple adventure you've ever heard of.
Twilight Princess tries to cover all the main fan-favourite bullet points of the previous game even down to including the slingshot (which becomes absolutely fucking useless when you find the bow and arrows like, five minutes later). But the game still falls short, in large part because of this. In setting out to be the comprehensive be-all and end-all it's only natural that those things they have actually missed will stick out like sore thumbs. These things will also invariably be different from player to player anyway, so it's not really a winnable situation.
The Twilight Realm and the wolf are probably the most obvious things here. After the opening sections of the game, these elements really take a back seat. The twilight realm is not really used at all from there on in, instead it's relegated to nothing more than the barrier to stop your entrance to Hyrule Castle.
The wolf is a bit of a damp squib as well. It looks good, moves good and sounds good but there's no great reason for it to be there, and no great story reason why it actually is there. Its abilities are nothing that couldn't have been added with an item or two, really. It does allow for the following of scent trails though, which is a nice addition, as everything around you save the trail dims out and you bomb it along, oblivious to the world around you and the enemies uselessly trying to attack. Works particularly well when searching for the kids in the opening section, but again loses much of its rush when the story cranks down a gear.
The biggest omission is a bit of a no brainer though. Side missions. It's one of the things that are absolutely, bloody essential for a Zelda game as they are one of the things which have always married the grand scope of Hyrule with the personalities of the people who live there.
It's something I was trying to pin down before Suedey pointed it out to me elsewhere. There's a couple of collectathons in the game, (COLLECT A TON OF TINY BUGS!! CAPTURE A MILLION POE SOULS!!) but these do next to nothing to enhance the experience. They can effectively be reduced to bullet points, the rewards they offer are impersonal and of little use, especially if you've already finished the game (which you will have done before you come close to completing these).
There's no photographing secret lovers in midnight trysts. There's no staking out villages to teach sneaky wee thieves the error of their ways. There's no reuniting estranged families, even though it looks set up that you will. The beginning sections of the game make it look like it's really going to deliver on these aspects. Theres some great narrative pushing the adventure onwards, as Link heads out of his village with the responsibility of saving the kidnapped children, you can almost see how this personal little story is going to propel him into his role as the demon-slaying, dungeon-hookshotting hero of legend. The villagers of his hometown even change to reflect those first steps of his adventure (something that always irks me in RPGs is when you head back home to family and friends that have nothing more to say to you than they did four dungeons ago. As if gathering shards of shattered sun-gods and slaying giant plasma-farting space-whales were something you'd do every lazy Sunday)......
Nothing really comes of this though. Characters settle down after a little bit and patiently wait for you to go off and do your own thing, remaining in status quo till near the end or even during the credits. Save for a few choice developments here and there, there's an almost criminal lack of character connection. This is especially keenly felt in the last three dungeons which are sandwiched together with hardly a breath between them.
In all, these potentially major flaws are largely forgivable, because what TP does, it does very well indeed. It doesn't come good on some promises but it keeps all the major ones and looks very bloody good while it does it. It's a game that can stand near the roof of the Zelda pile, but it's not quite the top-tier it was maybe made out as. There's also the promise of further downloadable content that Nintendo have hinted at. While it's not a particularly desirable prosepct to pay for stuff that felt missing from the original experience, this Hyrule does feel more like one with great potential to be added to, rather than one that is unfinished, |
