The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

"Twilight Princess - too much, and too little."

Whatever happened to the Hyrule I loved? I fondly remember Ocarina of Time. My mother bought that game for me when I was nine, and I adored it. The world of Hyrule was so unlike mine. It was massive, but not big enough that I could not know and master every single cranny and cave. The dungeons were challenging, but not impossible, and the bosses were epic. When I beat one, I felt this self-satisfaction I could never again replicate in any game. Twilight Princess, for the Wii, calls itself the successor to this game, but fails to match its glory. It is a disappointment.

I will say right now, however, that I am only about halfway through the game as I review it. But unless there's a major shift in the game between now and the end, I doubt my experiences will change at all.

GAMEPLAY: 5/10

Hyrule is too big. It is too big in size, and in time length. First in concerns of size: with all the fields to run through, I am a bit too humbled by its scope. The land doesn't seem familiar. Nothing happens in too much space. Warping, a skill you acquire early on in the game, helps some, but it presents a paradox: it makes the game too small. Why ride on your horse (arguably the most fun part of the game) when you can warp and instantly appear where you want to be? Why design a world so huge if you don't even take advantage of it?

Furthermore, things just take too long to happen in Twilight Princess. For example, you have to suffer through two hours of fetching items before you slay a single enemy. It takes eight hours to reach the first dungeon, five more for the second, and even more for the third. The amount of time the game takes becomes overbearing and disheartening. To get any satisfaction at all out of a session, you have play for an hour or more, which is time I just don't have.

It breaks my heart to say it, but this Zelda game gets tedious. Take the Tears of Light. Without revealing anything about the story, at three separate points in the first third of the game you have to gather fifteen of these tears. The game shows you precisely where they are on the map, and it's very easy to get them once you arrive to the spot where they are. The problem is it takes about an hour to find them all each time. Most of your time is spent going back and forth, just getting to the places where these tears are. It's boring, dull, and unfortunately a huge part of the first third of the game.

But all that aside, what about the dungeons? Because the dungeons are what makes a Zelda game, and they have been since the first game for the NES 20 years ago. I am reluctant to say that the dungeons in Twilight Princess are a disappointment as well. Zelda has always prided itself on having the perfect balance between action and puzzle, and Twilight Princess's dungeons fail to live up to this expectation. There are very few enemies, and where there are any, they are simply an annoyance and are no challenge to beat. The puzzles are either very obvious, or pull-out-your-hair difficult, with few in between. The dungeons are very linear this time around, with the formula being: find the item about halfway through, use the item to beat the second half, use the item to beat the boss. Every time. It gets tiring. There is none of that self-satisfaction I described at the top, because the dungeons are either too obvious and linear, or too impossibly challenging.

The bosses, although the look epic, are hardly a problem once you get into battle. Z-target onto some weak spot, use the item you acquired in the dungeon to bring them down to you, slash like crazy, lather, rinse, repeat. Once you beat them, you're left wondering: “Oh, is that it?” Then you collect your heart piece, leave the dungeon, and feel a bit empty inside.

Okay, so there are a lot of bad things about the game. But it's not entirely bad. There are snippets of complete awesome spread through the game. Many of them involve being on your horse; an epic cavalry battle soon after the first dungeon is not quick to be forgotten. Some of the dungeon rooms, although there are few, have that perfect level of challenge, so you feel good and proud when you pass through them. Being a wolf in the Twilight Realm is surprisingly more fun and more useful than I thought; you can use senses to discover hidden things like the Lens of Truth in Ocarina of Time, and the combat system is as good, if not better, than Link's human form's. And there's something about killing enemies in Hyrule Field that I never get tired of.

Twilight Princess is a Zelda game, so of course it has its good points. But unlike any other Zelda, the bad points weigh it down way more than they should, and the game suffers.

CONTROLS: 3/10

The Wii's pride and joy is its remote. As you probably know, the remote is a motion-sensing device that take your arm movements and imitates them in the game. This allows for huge innovation in gameplay, an opportunity that Twilight Princess almost entirely ignores. The way you swing your sword is by swiping your wrist – any sort of swipe results in the same on-screen action, so in effect it's the same thing as pressing a button, but more tiring and more unnecessary. Paradoxically, as the game moves on, the control system becomes less and less easy to use, as you grow tired of swiping your wrist to fight enemies.

Some of the actions, however, are simplified and made better by the remote. For example, aiming at the screen to shoot an arrow is easy, quick, and intuitive, a welcome improvement over the analog aiming system games have grown to tolerate.

But there are two main problems which result in the control rating to be so low. One is the spin attack, which involved shaking the nunchuk and swinging the remote. I must be doing something wrong, because the spin attack usually works only half the time I try it. (And yes, I know you have to wait after one a bit before you can spin again.) In a game where timing can be so important, this is a problem. Controls should be immediate and easy to use.

Second, and more major, is the bobber fishing at the beginning of the game. This is required to continue, and the controls are so confusingly explained it took me 45 minutes to catch the two fish necessary to continue the game. I am not in the minority here. In the first few days after the game was released, message boards were filled with people complaining about how long the fishing was taking them. Controls should never, never, NEVER be this confusing, and for that, the rating falls a few points.

GRAPHICS: 6/10

The art style of Twilight Princess is great. The colors, the lighting, and the design work very well and are a distinct upgrade from Zelda games past. But I was rather let down by the technical quality of the graphics. The polygon count and texture quality were those of three years back, and I was disillusioned by the roughness of the environment compared to other games of this time. I know that the Wii simply cannot reproduce the graphics of the PS3 and Xbox 360, but that is hardly a reason as to why I shouldn't dislike it. Graphics aren't really that important to me, and they never caused any problems in the game, so I'm content, but not impressed.

AUDIO: 5/10

Well, the remixed tunes from the past are good, but I knew that eight years ago. Twilight Princess's new melodies aren't memorable at all and will not stand the test of time like others did. They work in the game, but aren't special and don't stand out. I can't easily recall a single one.

The controller speaker has a very poor quality too. The sounds are gritty and tinny, and aren't immersive at all, which is what I gather they were supposed to be. They were an annoyance, but luckily they can be turned off.

STORY: 3/10

I don't care I don't care I DON'T CARE. Evil power takes over world, Link is destined to stop it, what a surprise. The cutscenes in this game are way longer and more prevalent than in games past, which was surprising, and while the story is maybe a bit more interesting than it used to be, the games gives it way more focus than it should. To me the story in Zelda is pretty irrelevant, and the amount of time the game spends on it is a huge drawback.

REPLAY VALUE: 6/10

The game is long, which is both a curse and a blessing. A blessing because there's so much to do that it'll last you a long time. I appreciate that, and I like the idea of a long game. But because it's so exhausting, there really isn't much of a need or want to play it again.

OVERALL: 5/10

It's Zelda – so you're guaranteed quality in that. And you can tell there was a lot of time and effort spent into making this game. But a lot of choices the game made – the length, the puzzle factor, the important story – simply don't agree with me, and detract from the experience, and for that I have to give the game a 5 out of 10, or an average rating.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/27/06