Directional Pad

Reviews » The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess [Wii]

Disclaimer: The screenshots presented in this review should not be used as a deciding factor in purchasing it. When I took them, I only had access to the Wii’s default composite cable, and composite video just doesn’t look great on my computer’s TV tuner. Composite Video on a big TV, or S-Video / Component Video on any TV will look infinitely better than the screenshots shown below. So just please don't hold my awful screenshots against me or the game.

It is exceedingly uncommon for a game to be nearly universally praised as perfect. It simply doesn’t happen that often, people’s opinions differ too wildly; you just can’t expect that many people – let alone game critics – to agree on such things. When such a game does roll around, it’s safe to assume It will be heralded as game of the year, a console-selling game, and if everything aligns just right, it will slide its way into the short list of best games ever.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is one of those games. Despite constant delays, the controversial push from the Gamecube to the Wii, and some questionable last minute sweeping changes, Nintendo really pulled this one off with flying colors. The end result is a refreshing new take on the Zelda franchise. Everywhere you look in the game, things are being done differently, characters are being portrayed in variations of their original roles, new characters and new motivations are introduced, new weapons are brought in, or old weapons are reworked so you use them in new ways. The settings have familiar names, and serve familiar purposes, but are presented in different ways. What Nintendo has delivered for this latest outing into the land of Hyrule is, in my opinion, the best we’ve seen to date. Not the best in the past two console generations, not the best 3D incarnation, the best. Period.

Twilight Princess starts, as many Zelda games do, in a sleepy town on the outskirts of nowhere called Ordon Village. This tiny little town is home to our latest Link, a teenage ranch hand, helping herd goats, and generally just living his life as the role model for the kids in the town. A recent evil monkey infestation sends him off on a journey to a temple deep within the nearby Faron Woods, where Link finds himself face to face with a giant glistening wall of darkness, which consumes him.

It seems that the residents of the former Sacred Realm – a dimension bordering the normal reality of Hyrule – have decided to start exporting their homeland, which they have taken to call the Twilight Realm. These extra-chunky zones of Twilight have been dropped all over Hyrule, transforming the local critters into pitch black perversions of their normal selves, and providing tentacle-faced elder-god-looking villains a means of transportation to Hyrule from their normally secluded Twilight Realm. Humans who were formerly occupying these regions of space are reduced to spirits, displaced from their normal reality and cognizant of what seems to be going on, but unable to change anything due to their lack of form. All humans except for those chosen by the Triforce, like our epic hero Link, who just gets himself stuck in the form of a wolf.

In this first Twilight zone, Link meets up with one of the more amicable recent immigrants from the Twilight Realm, a short little Twili named Midna. After freeing the wolf-afflicted Link from a prison, Midna joins Link on his quest to set things right, and helps . . somewhat, since she apparently has something to gain from Link succeeding, though exactly what that is remains a mystery, as Midna isn’t the most forthcoming of companions Link has ever had.

Ok, ok, I promise that’s all of the story I’ll be discussing. I also promise that nearly all of what I’ve explained so far is covered in the first two pages of the manual, so it doesn’t even scratch the surface of this very long game.

Gameplay in Twilight Princess is split into two rather different modes, Link and Wolf-Link. You’ll be spending significant periods of time in both forms. The beginning of the game eases you in and forces you to get equally used to both forms, by following this format: You find a new area that’s been converted to a Twilight Realm and turn into a wolf, you find the Guardian Spirit of that area who charges you with the task of restoring the region to normal, you go on a bug-hunting/exploration phase where you learn where stuff is and do some minor puzzle-solving, restore the region to light and do some exploration as a human, and then make your way to the region’s temple, possibly with the assistance of an item found during the two phases of exploration. From there, it’s standard Zelda operating procedures. Explore temple, find keys, unlock doors, find a map and compass, find the temple’s special weapon, and then find and defeat the temple’s guardian boss, generally with the temple’s item.

Twilight Princess throws in a couple curve-balls in this pattern, though. Some temples have multiple items in them, most temples require finding items outside of the temple just to get in, some temples require that you find several items before getting in. Most of the temples are also far from being straight-forward dungeons like some of the ones found in previous games like the Deku Tree and Dodongo’s Cavern from Ocarina of Time. All the temples in Twilight Princess have some kind of extra over-arching puzzle aspect to them, like the Forest Temple, where in addition to the standard puzzle-solving, you have to rescue a set of friendly monkeys to help you progress through and eventually complete the temple. Another feature Twilight Princess has brought back from some of the 2D Zelda games is the inclusion of minibosses for pretty much every temple.

Surprisingly, despite switching from the Gamecube to the Wii late in the game, the game plays and feels like it was built for the Wii from the ground up. It might sound weird to attack by flicking the Wiimote around, but after awhile it feels totally natural. And aiming, man, after you’ve successfully picked off five moblins in quick succession with the bow and arrow, only to then turn around and nail a clawshot target, you’ll wonder how the hell you ever managed to aim at anything with a control stick. Combat is what you’re probably used to from other recent 3D Zelda games, with z-targeting and attacking with either your sword or your variety of sub-weapons, but yet again they’ve built off the most recent stuff and made It better. In case you skipped it or don’t recall, in Wind Waker, when you were able to perform a special move, like those required to strip armor off Darknuts, you just waited until a big flashing “A” popped up on the screen, and if you mashed the A button then you did some wacky special move like a somersault or rolling slash.

These moves are back, but are handled in different ways. For starters, you have to unlock them, by finding “howling stones” scattered throughout the world. Finding one will unlock a training session that bestows a new move, like a shield repelling attack, or the rolling slash, the recurring spin-attack, a helm-smashing overhead attack, all kinds of stuff. Rather than a big blatant “MASH ‘A’ NOW, OK?” thing, you have to do specific things. For instance, the shield attack used to disarm opponents is performed by raising your shield and jabbing forward with your nunchuck hand. Similarly, the spin-attack is done by waving the nunchuck back and forth. This change means you have full control over how your duels go, and that’s important, because depending on what you’re fighting, you’ll probably want to change your attack methods. Armored Lizalfos tend to require rolling or helm-splitter attacks, whereas Darknuts need carefully timed jabs. You can’t just rely on constantly swinging your Wiimote around and expect it to carry you through the entire game.

It really has to be reinforced that Nintendo clearly took some time to do everything right that they could possibly do right. There’s obvious stuff, like art direction, the ability to do widescreen if your TV supports it and length (9 full long dungeons, compared to Wind Waker’s 5 and a half), but there’s some stuff that doesn’t get mentioned a lot. Personally, the fact that the world was jam-packed with stuff to do between dungeons was something that stuck out as especially awesome for me. There just aren’t any dead zones of the world map. Everywhere you go, there are Heart Pieces to find, hidden treasure chests to stumble upon, bugs to catch, poes to assassinate, or my personal favorite: caves to explore. Along the sheer rock faces of the landscape of Hyrule are breakable walls which lead to little side-quest caves to wander through. The caves in Twilight Princess go far beyond the little diversions found in Wind Waker, instead these caves are big, they’re deep complex mazes where you’ll find enemies, poes, chests with assorted treasures, and so on. It won’t be like the little dinky one-room caves found in Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker, though there tons of hidden grottoes like that scattered throughout Twilight Princess as well.

Unfortunately, even for games I deem to be perfect, I just have to find a couple things to bitch about, and Twilight Princess is no exception. Luckily, the only things I could find are incredibly petty, to the point of being completely insignificant, and are only vaguely worth talking about because I feel it's my duty to give you both sides of the coin, even when the other side is completely inconsequential. First hilariously petty problem: It’s kinda easy. I died maybe twice, very early on, and both due to being incredibly retarded. On the other hand, difficulty in Zelda games doesn’t come from combat, but instead from puzzles, which can at very select times be very challenging in Twilight Princess. Second stupid petty problem: Needless rupee descriptions, and stupid wallet tricks. When you first get the major denominations of rupees, description text is displayed, saying “Hey, you got a green rupee! That’s worth one rupee!” or “Hey, you got a yellow rupee! That’s worth Ten rupees!” That’s fine and all, but it will repeat this for the first of each denomination you get every time you start the game. You will be seeing these pointless dialogs so many times you will be sick of them by the end of the game. The other problem here is that unlike previous Zelda games, if you find a chest and it contains a rupee denomination greater than you have “space” for in your wallet, the game will conveniently tell you “You found a purple rupee! That’s worth 50 rupees! But you don’t have enough room for it, better put it back!” This makes it exceedingly hard to get a full wallet, and while I understand their concern to not let people waste rupees due to wallet capacity overflow, it sucks to have to remember which chests my compass says I can get, but I can’t actually get until I go buy some random crap.

It really makes me feel geeky even bringing this up, but it also sorta bothered me that at the last minute, Nintendo decided to mirror the whole game. The decision to do this stemmed from the switch to the Wii. Link has always been a lefty. Always. When they started mapping the Wii controls, they found a lot of right-handed players swinging their right hands to make Link swing his sword with his left, and they decided that was Too Weird. Rather than mirror Link, they mirrored the whole game. The map is mirrored, all the assets are mirrored, all the locations are mirrored, all the dungeons are mirrored, everything. If you didn’t know this, you probably wouldn’t notice, because it has absolutely no bearing on the gameplay, but the world how it is in the Wii version is wrong. Ocarina of Time taught me that the Gerudo desert is to the west, Kakariko Village is to the North-east, and Death Mountain is farther north beyond that. If the game wasn’t flipped, that’s where they’d be in Twilight Princess, but thanks to the flip it’s all wrong.

Similar to my complaints about difficulty are my issues with the ease of the side quests in the game. Zelda games are always full of side quests, optional gear to find, heart pieces, ghosts to hunt, fish to catch, minigames to play and so on. While Twilight Princess has all of these, has tons of them, and has in my opinion the best versions of some of them, I was able to complete nearly all of it largely unassisted within 45 hours, along with the rest of the game. The distressing part of this is that there’s really more side-quest content in the game than usual, but it was easier to come across. Heart Pieces, for instance, required 4 parts to complete in all other Zelda games, but in Twilight Princess they bumped it up to 5, so there were 45 different pieces spread out across the largest incarnation of Hyrule ever, and yet I had no problem whatsoever finding them all. There are three separate bomb bags to find, and a bag capacity upgrade, and they were practically thrown at me. The few little minigames to be found, well, sure, I had to play them a couple times each to get the scores required for payoffs, but I didn’t spend nearly as much time replaying them as I did with Bombchu Bowling or the two Shooting Galleries in Ocarina of Time. When I complete a Zelda game, I expect to have some kind of post-game stuff to clean up, but in Twilight Princess all I had left was hunting Poes, which is great and all, but there’s 60 of them, and they’re hard to keep track of, no way to tell if you’ve gotten one or not unless you go there to check.

But again, please keep in mind that these are stupid insignificant petty things that didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment of the game whatsoever. And they shouldn’t get in the way of your enjoyment of the game either. Really, at this point, the only thing I can possibly think that should keep you from playing this spectacular can’t-miss videogame is the widespread unavailability of the Wii itself. If you can’t get your hands on a Wii yet, I can’t expect you to play it, but you’d damn well best be picking it up if and when you buy a Wii. If you don’t, you’ll be doing a great disservice to yourself.

Twilight Princess - Wii

Presentation

While it might not provide the same level of graphics you’d see over on the PS3, it’s still the best-looking Zelda game ever, and still manages to hold its own among contemporary games.

Gameplay

It’s traditional 3D Zelda with twists, embellishments, and arguably the best control scheme for anything ever.

Replayability

It’s about as replayable as any Zelda game is. You probably won’t be finding anything new on future passes through the game, but it’ll still be so fun that you won’t care.

Value

It’s retail, and it will probably stay retail for awhile, but the real cost for entry is buying a Wii. While it’s totally worth the price of the Wii, they’re still hard to find, but even then, this is worth camping out in front of Best Buy for.

Overall

It’s the best game I’ve played all year. It’ll probably stay the best game I’ve played until the epic batch of PC games roll out in mid 2007.