Zelda: Twilight Princess

I know that it is kind of sad that though I’ve had Zelda for a year and a half now and still I hadn’t finished it. In fact, I had only gone through about two of the dungeons so far. That’s why with this downtime and my computer down, I decided to finally work on the game. I didn’t ever get into the game previously largely because of school interfering with my ability to as well as my interest in EQ2 being at a peak until recently.

So I decided to give it a go again and I did fairly well. Completed the game in about two weeks time with only a few hours a day being allocated to play (also minus any out of town time). I also did it with minimal help from any guide. In fact, I thought the game was far easier than Wind Waker. It was a very straight forward game, I knew exactly what to do at almost any step. Most of the time when I looked at guides, I knew what to do, I just didn’t know how to do it. For instance, once there was a hidden school that I just couldn’t figure out how to do despite the in game help given on it to teach me… stuff like that. This changed a bit towards the end in Hyrule Castle where the game became much more difficult in figuring out the puzzles.

The story itself I thought was rather cool. I know that one thing that this game got hit on from many in the media was the repetitiveness of the story… which is true. Although I did think this one was very different from the last few. I thought the Twilight aspect of the game (including changing into a wolf) were quite different from anything we had seen in the series previously and  brought the game an overall creepiness that we hadn’t really seen either. I liked Midna (despite her annoying squeaks when she was riding on the back of the wolf) and the new bad guy (I think it was Zet) very much. In my opnion however, this story would have been ten times better had the game ended with the destruction of Zet… I realize that what would Zelda be without Ganon, after all he is one of the three triforce. However, this is part of the point, it has gotten old to constantly see him. Why couldn’t they have made it in the story that the destruction of Zet foiled Ganon’s ability to return to the world and seen an end there?  I thought Zet was a fine enough end opponent to stand on his own and this twist in the story would have offered people something new to the series that would have really changed it. I was also half expecting Midna to be Zet in the end helping Link to let loose Ganon which would have been a nice, though expected, twist as well.

For the Wii aspect, I did think that all the motions went fairly well for the game… I think what it did right was there wasn’t a ton of movements on it. I think the games that haven’t done well with motion capture have tried to do too much. But really there were only 2 movements with the nunchuku and maybe 3 with the controller. I actually thought they could have done with a few more… like I swear in the original demo they had you pulling the bow back for the bow but this was absent, likely because it just didn’t work well. But I think stuff like this would have done wonders. I thought the much touted fishing was very poorly implemented. It didn’t really feel like I was fishing, it more felt like i was holding the pole over the water, and this has been an issue with the three or four examples of fishing that I have toyed with thus far. They for some reason can’t get the motions of the actual fishing correct, maybe the Sega Bass Fishing game does it better since that is full fledged. But I didn’t really bother with it here.

My main problem with the game is the lost opportunities in it. With the early introduction to the hawk, the horse, the monkey, and the wolf… I really expected this game to use animals in a large way. And while we later also added the boar… you never really did much with any of these animals outside of the wolf. I think they could have done something really great allowing you the player to call each of these animals at will allowing more puzzle play with them. Or even better, what if you could transform into each of these after unlocking them? This could have been a really cool aspect of the game that also would have been new. And maybe they really had this intention in the beginning but didn’t have the time to implement. Oftentimes, they do a sequel on the system for these games… there was 2 N64 games, there were 2 windwaker games… I’m hoping that there is a second Wii game that kind of takes this concept into fruition into a full fledged game.

Obviously this game is a must pick up game for the Wii and easily one of the better titles available even now after almost two years. I don’t think anyone would think otherwise as the series has traditionally been one of Nintendo’s best and highest rating.