The Video Game Revue

Zelda: Twilight Princess

Something that I neglected to mention in my post yesterday: Sunny smashed a glass of water while playing Wii Sports. And I don't mean that she knocked it over and it smashed on the ground; she literally punched it with the wiimote while bowling and it shattered in an upright position. Fortunately, Sunny wasn't badly injured, although she did cut her finger while picking up shards of glass. Let that be a warning to you Wii players out there.

I'm about seven hours into Twilight Princess, having just cleared the first ever horseback sword fighting sequence in a Zelda game. I hope that isn't too much of a spoiler for anyone; it's been well publicized that Twilight Princess has horseback fights. My impression of the game so far is that it's an excellent game all-round and well worth investing in the Wii for if you're a dedicated Zelda fan. I do not think that the outrageously high Metacritic score of 98 is deserved, but it does belong in the 90 range for sure.

As you've probably heard, the other Zelda game that Twilight Princess has the most in common with is The Ocarina of Time, and the resemblence is quite strong. Seeing as how Ocarina is one of the most beloved Zelda games ever, this is very good news for serious Zelda fans. Wind Waker was a bit of a different cup of tea (although still very good), and Minish Cap has more in common with A Link to the Past than Zelda 64, so fans of Ocarina have been waiting a long time for a follow-up (since Majora's Mask, if you enjoyed that one.)

Personally, I found Ocarina of Time to be frustratingly cryptic in many places--it's a very challenging game in terms of needing to comb over areas and experiment in order to find your way forward. If you don't like to get stuck in video games, Ocarina will frustrate you, and one of the things I said about Wind Waker when it came out is that, thankfully, it is much more friendly than Ocarina in terms of the challenge factor. In terms of difficulty, from what I've seen so far, Twilight Princess leans closer to Wind Waker than Ocarina, but it still throws some decent curve balls.

It's important to acknowledge that Ocarina's deep difficulty factor is by design and, in fact, largely in keeping with the roots of the series. If you go back and play the original The Legend of Zelda, you'll find that the game requires a lot of tedious exploration and experimenting with items to progress through the game. Back in the 80s, home computers were not nearly so common, and a lot of players didn't have access to FAQs and walkthroughs to explain the finer points of the game. As such a player, I found that spending literally hours upon hours toying around with different items in the game and memorizing large portions of the world map through sheer repition was part of the fun of the game, and it made such a lasting impact that even now I can pick up Zelda and clear the first five dungeons or so in short order. What takes me roughly an hour of play time to accomplish now is the cummulation of dozens of hours of exploration that I went through when I first played the game, and to me, Ocarina represents largely the same kind of gameplay. That's why when I'm playing a game like Twilight Princess, I actually enjoy getting stuck for short periods of time where I need to take a deep breath and patiently revisit my options.

Twilight Princess tries to strike a balance between being challenging without being frustrating, and I respect that. It takes a lot of guts in the current state of the gaming industry to truly make games hard. A couple of decades ago, the standard formula for most video games was that they could be finished in one sitting, but that they demanded many hours of practice to develop the skill to be completed. Over time, that pattern shifted so that games became longer and had much more gentle learning curves. Consider that Ninja Gaiden for NES takes less than an hour to play from start to finish, but it's so difficult that unless you've played it for 20 hours or more and have gotten regular practice, it's unlikely that you'd be able to finish it. Now consider Resident Evil 4, which took me 26 hours to finish, but where I spent very little time repeating any particular area. Ninja Gaiden quickly ramps up in difficulty to the point where you need to start over, whereas Resident Evil 4 also ramps up in difficulty but gives you plenty of time to keep pace with the game so that there's rarely much doubt in you're being able to finish it. Twilight Princess doesn't force you to play the same areas over and over again to the extent that Ninja Gaiden does, but it does make things difficult enough that you're likely to get stuck and spend some time exploring the same area over and over for a while.

The graphics for Twilight Princess are pretty sweet, but I don't know if they truly qualify as "next gen." Although the framerate is smooth and there are plenty of pretty effects, what you see here is really only a moderate improvement over the quality of visuals that Resident Evil 4 brought to the GameCube. Twilight Princess is certainly easy on the eyes, but at no point have the graphics been so impressive as to make my heart skip a beat. The artwork for this game is amazing, however.

The control scheme isn't bad, although there are so many buttons with the wiimote-nunchuck combo that occasionally I've found myself struggling a little. Shaking the wiimote to perform sword slashes is novel, but I find that it makes timing a little bit more difficult and a result the gameplay isn't as fluid as it was in Wind Waker. I'm starting to get to the point now where performing different motions with the nunchuck produces different combat moves, and I see a lot of potential there. Also very cool is being able to simply point the wiimote at the screen to aim items like the slingshot, bow, or boomerang--it's much quicker and more intuitive than using an analog joystick for the same task, which leads me to believe that there may be some serious potential for FPS games on the Wii. Overall, I find the control scheme to be a bit muddled, but it's not a big problem for this game. The novelty factor masks what little needless complexity there is here.

Between the graphics and the controls, I wonder how the GameCube version of this game is going to compare. I could imagine the GameCube version looking almost as good, but the control scheme is going to end up feeling quite different I suspect. I wish they would have included a feature for the Wii version to allow you to use a GameCube controller with it as if you were playing the GameCube version, but I likely would only have used that to see what the GameCube controls are like.

Twilight Princess is a welcome return to the Zelda series with a lot of classic Zelda mechanics present in full force, and what I've played of it so far has been thoroughly enjoyable. If you're an old hand at Zelda 64, I suspect that Twilight Princess will bring back lots of good feelings and likely make you want to fire up your Nintendo 64, if you still have it. And if you don't have your Nintendo 64, well, there's a good chance that Nintendo will release Ocarina of Time as a Wii-playable game at some point--probably by using their online store for downloadable games.

posted by Parappa @ 9:30 AM