The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
I would like to open this review by temporarily pushing through the fourth wall in the wrong direction and addressing the fair Hylians who may be reading this:
Please think twice before naming your child Link. I know it is very nice, and you want to keep the legends alive with a heroic name like that, but you are putting all of Hyrule at risk. By the time he reaches adulthood, or maybe even sooner, a great evil will sweep the lands and things will turn very bad indeed. And he will be struck mute. Thankyou for your time.
As you may have gathered by that overlong introduction, the latest Zelda adventure Twilight Princess has something of a traditional air to it. After the soggy cel-shaded Wind Waker the series has turned back to the texture-mapped fields of green and found them under the shadow of a malignant force. Death and decay have become the norm, and Hyrule's only hope is a hero by name of Link... oh, you guessed.
Whether this is a good thing or not is difficult to judge. The series doesn't seem to know who its audience is any more. On the one hand, it is so steeped in tradition that there are a number of de facto obligations for the game to fulfil, yet on the other it is a console launch title trying to appeal to new players. This leads to a few inconsistencies, such as finding a magic boomerang that can manually lock on to five things at once and then having to use it on multiple targets exactly twice over the whole game. The numerous references to previous titles are designed to appeal to (and rely upon the experience of) seasoned green-hats, but anyone who has ever taken up sword against Ganon before will naturally have all of the skills and foreknowledge to breeze through the adventure. It takes all of three seconds to work out that a new-found enemy is a Stalfos and then you know how to defeat it. This is a flaw which has affected many of the Zelda titles since the N64: The game over screen is harder to find than Chris Houlihan.
The only significant difficulty is in fighting the slightly broken controls, particularly on the Wii. Sword attacks are made by swinging the wiimote, and the various other attacks (including the famous spin) are the result of swinging the nunchuk. As a little test, see how quickly and reliably you can press a button with your thumb and then try the same by waggling your wrist. You will strike on accident just by twitching a little too fast, and will also miss counters thanks to the half second longer it takes to flick the wrist. Given that any wiimote action translates to the same sword swing, this is a gimmick that manages to make life harder than it should be at various points.
However, before this review takes a further turn for the worse, it is worth noting that easy does not mean bad. This is where I can show my hand and perhaps prevent the hate mail by saying that Twilight Princess is one of the finest Zeldas ever crafted. When the major criticisms are that you are quite similar to Ocarina of Time and can be completed by a casual player, you really don't have a great deal to worry about. There are some new features, most notably is Link's ability to change into a wolf in order to explore the Twilight Realm and take advantage of his beastly abilities by tracking scents and leaping for the jugulars of his enemies. The use of the wiimote to aim with projectile weapons is an option which soon reveals itself to be incredibly useful. It takes five heart pieces to make a new container. Five!
One of the major faults of Wind Waker was its disproportionate size; lots of sailing and not much to do when you made port. Twilight Princess corrects this mistake admirably by appearing to be quite small initially and then opening up to reveal a very girthy adventure indeed. Hyrule Field itself is largely empty and largely large but its surroundings conceal a number of quests and dungeons. These are also pleasingly lengthy with some sort of gimmick or puzzle in almost every room and little in the way of stumbling lost around maze-like sprawls. The only disappointment is in the anticlimactic boss encounters, which stick firmly to the tradition of "use new item on obvious weak point" and, due to Link's virtual indestructibility, fail to raise the tension as much as they should.
This is a tremendous shame as in all other respects the world of Twilight Princess does a good job of making you care about its inhabitants. Graphically it is not terribly impressive in these high definition days, and (even on Wii) it is a Cube game at heart with all the blurry backgrounds and special effect shortcuts associated with the system. Characters are a little pointy and their textures a little soft focus, but they really come alive through their actions. Link says more through his body language than other RPG characters do through their mouths, and his actions in wolf form are something special. Even Midna, the impish guide who assumes a Minish Cap role, changes from a hated slavedriver to an ally with a genuine emotional attachment thanks to her well-handled scenes and cute little warbles. The feeling of immersion is further enhanced on the Wii through the simple use of the controller's internal speaker: Anything in Link's hand makes a noise in yours, be it the twang of a bow string or the ratchet of the clawshot. It sounds like such a small throwaway thing, but it adds another channel to a surround sound setup and is genuinely involving.
In Conclusion
It is little touches like the above that really make Twilight Princess shine. There is no real revolution here, and very little evolution. With this instalment the Zelda series has simply matured, giving the rainbow-filled Hyrules of yore a darker and more adult edge while still being reasonably safe and child-friendly. If you are looking for a new action adventure title with interactive gestural swordplay and an original storyline, you will not find it here. If you are looking for a solid example of Zelda game filled with bottled fairies and frozen Zoras and still get chills when you hear the Temple of Time theme, then you just might have to knock Ocarina off your number one spot.
| Hyrules |
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| Hysucks |
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| Final Score | |
|---|---|
| Graphics: | Subtle |
| Traditions: | 8/10 |
| New ideas: | N/A |
| Five pieces of heart (out of four) | |
| Like every other Zelda you've ever played. But a little bit better. | |
