After the release of the Game Boy Advance, Capcom's subsidiary Flagship was finally able to release a fully-featured handheld port of A Link to the Past, now with additional secrets, sound effects from Ocarina of Time, and a brand-new multiplayer mode called Four Swords. With the Link to the Past port finally accomplished, Flagship began developing their third original handheld Zelda: The Minish Cap. Like the Oracle games, I had never played The Minish Cap prior to this retrospective, and honestly I wasn't very interested in playing what looked like a smaller Link to the Past. With that flippant opinion at the forefront, I did my best to approach The Minish Cap with an open mind and tried very hard to keep my thoughts as objective as possible during its surprisingly brief duration.
Review: The Legend of Zelda - The Minish Cap
The first thing to note is that The Minish Cap discards the Link to the Past art style in favor of a design very similar to The Wind Waker, a style which you now know I absolutely adore. Unsurprisingly, the sprites are colorful and the world is vibrant as a result. The music greatly resembles A Link to the Past, even using an almost identical rendition of the Overworld Theme. Within the first few moments of gameplay something seriously clicked for me. Right away, I was utterly smitten by everything about The Minish Cap from a stylistic standpoint. I just want to throw that out there before I get into the meat and potatoes of this Zelda stew.
The narrative of The Minish Cap carries a similar flow to The Wind Waker, but aside from story beats it feels like its own beast. Like The Wind Waker, the story begins with a legend long before the story opens and tells an entirely original tale. In this story, monsters invade Hyrule and are fended off by a young hero who is aided by the microscopic Picori race. The Picori are celebrated as mythical, and every year a tournament is held in their honor where the winner is allowed to touch the sacred blade of legend.
In a first for the series, Link and Zelda grow up as childhood friends. Zelda is still princess, but because Link is the grandson of the castle blacksmith the two share a close friendship. The story opens on the day of the tournament and the one hundredth anniversary of the Picori descending to Hyrule. Legends state that a gate to the Picori realm will open, and because of that the festival is the most bombastic in Hyrulean history. After the player visits the festival with Zelda, the victor of the Picori tournament is shown the Picori Blade. The victor, Vaati, reveals his intent to open the chest and recover the legendary Light Force--known in later eras as the Triforce. Zelda is turned to stone and monsters are released from the chest the Picori Blade was stored, so Link is tasked with finding the Picori to restore the blade.
Already the story is far simpler than many of the previous Zelda games, and because the world is somewhat smaller than A Link to the Past it never begins to feel overwhelming. There's also the presence of Vaati, a much more interesting villain than Ganon in many ways and who has been severely underutilized by Nintendo. Vaati is deeply intertwined with the overall narrative of the game in surprising ways, and he's fleshed out over the course of the game in a natural progression of events. I deeply appreciate that the game goes out of its way to set itself apart from past games of the series, and because of this individuality it's easy to simply say it's worth your time and you should play it immediately. That wouldn't make a very informative review, so I'll continue.
The assistant this time comes in the form of Ezlo, a cursed Picori who takes the form of a bird. Ezlo latches on to Link's head and becomes his iconic hat, but aside from that he's very similar to The King of Red Lions in that he seems to know more about the world than Link, though he's reserved about giving away information. Ezlo begins to take on a mentor role to Link throughout the game, and the bond that grows between them feels natural and heartfelt. When Navi left during the end of Ocarina of Time, I really felt nothing. Without giving too much of the ending away, I started to feel genuinely emotional knowing later incarnations of Link would never again interact with the Picori--or Minish, as they're known to themselves. Furthermore, in keeping with the connection with the King of Red Lions the player can interact with Ezlo at any time--and finally, this interaction is mapped to a designated button. I can't begin to describe how giddy I was to know that The Minish Cap was answering every single complaint I had with previous games in the series and did so with such little fanfare.
Like The Wind Waker, the main objectives of The Minish Cap focus on a small number of large dungeons spread across the world as opposed to a multitude of dungeons sprinkled around Hyrule. In the interim between playing the Oracle series and The Minish Cap, I began to wonder if those games would have benefited from a smaller dungeon count. By the end of my Linked Game, I was utterly exhausted by the sheer number of similar-looking dungeons and would have definitely preferred a smaller count. The Minish Cap still retains some of the esoteric nature of handheld Zelda games by forcing players into an involved string of events before gaining an item necessary to move the plot forward, but it never forces the player into these long events.
One of the reasons I'm fine with this in The Minish Cap is that when compared to the Game Boy Color Zelda titles, The Minish Cap is an absolute blast to play. I never liked movement in the previous handheld Zelda titles simply because the restricted NES Zelda-like controls felt very limiting. The Minish Cap is unrestricted from the set X and Y-axis movement of the previous games and feels far more like A Link to the Past, though many gameplay mechanics have been touched upon in important ways.
Combat is overhauled to a point that it completely overshadows A Link to the Past and even allows players to learn new techniques from Dojo masters scattered around Hyrule. Unlike The Wind Waker, elements like the Dojo are never forced upon the player, and since the plot never funnels players and allows them to step away and explore it feels like a true sequel to A Link to the Past in many ways. Orca from The Wind Waker felt like wasted potential since he served as a forced tutorial and only taught Link an upgrade Spin Attack, but the Blade Brothers more than make up for this with a suite of techniques Link can learn. In fact, many of these techniques return from Adventure of Link, and it was shocking to see the plunging attack finally return in such a unique and useful way.
To offset the small number of dungeons, players can randomly find trade items called Kinstones. This new item serves as an overhaul for the goddamn worthless trading sequences of past games and allow for a highly customized approach to finding secrets. To summarize it quickly, the Kinstone system allows players to trade their half of a Kinstone to an NPC who is always holding a specific half. This will unlock a secret on the map which, thankfully, is marked until the player decides to swing around and pick it up. Since Kinstone drops are mostly random, this allows for some side quests to open up in different orders each game. My only complaint is that one of these Kinstone quests is missable, and the item it rewards is extremely useful for the final boss. As an aside, I actually found the final boss in The Minish Cap to be fairly challenging, requiring quick thinking and utilizing many of the game's mechanics in intelligent and fun ways.
There's also no shortage of Pieces of Heart this time around, and unlike The Wind Waker players don't have to go too far out of the way to augment their health bar. In fact, I'd say Pieces of Heart are given out like candy; even though the player will only have an 8-heart health pool at the end without doing side quests, I never once felt like I was underpowered because I simply pieced together so many Heart Containers that it felt closer to a standard Zelda game.
Like The Wind Waker much of the plot revolves around bolstering the Picori Blade, but it's taken to such a ridiculous level that by the halfway point I was in a state of pure bliss. Players will gain a total of five swords by the end of the game, each incrementally gaining new power which also bolsters one of the new gimmicks of The Minish Cap. Before I get into that I want to seriously reiterate how hard I fell in love with the focus on powering up the sword, and by the time it upgraded fully to the Four Sword I had the urge to go back through the entire world just to play with it. It's not quite the Master Sword, but the differences are neither good nor bad--they're just different.
Each Zelda game has a unique gimmick, though I'd argue for the NES games this was more of a necessity than a gameplay twist. A Link to the Past introduced the two-stage setup and second world, Link's Awakening introduced jumping and multiple songs, Ocarina of Time created an entire system out of music and implemented two distinct eras while innovating a new type of 3D gameplay, Majora's Mask had the repeating time feature and masks for different gameplay styles, Wind Waker introduced complex wind physics and the Great Sea, and the Oracle games pissed about with their stupid season- and age-changing mechanics.
When I started The Minish Cap, I thought the only gimmick was that it had a new villain. After a few minutes of play, Ezlo is introduces a size-changing mechanic to the game which allows Link to enter small structures. Many of the bosses are simply regular monsters who are colossal in comparison to Minish Link, and navigating around simple buildings as a microscopic being is implemented so well that I'm baffled it hadn't been thought of before now.
The second new gimmick, and the one I was surprised by the most, is the Four Sword mechanic which is strengthened each time the sword is upgraded. The Minish Cap is a prequel to the Link to the Past mode Four Swords and the Gamecube Four Swords Adventures, both of which being multiplayer-focused Zelda games which center around a team of Links facing down against none other than Vaati, who in those games is a mindless beast.
The creation of the Four Sword in The Minish Cap means that the four-player nature of Four Swords is introduced in its nascent form here, where Link can split into multiple bodies using the sword's charge ability. By the end of the game, players can split into four bodies; this is implemented so smoothly over time that it might honestly be one of the best introductions to a new mechanic in the entire series. Players aren't able to create clones until after the second dungeon, nearly halfway through the game. As the game continues, more clones can be created at once to push huge blocks or fight bosses but it's used sparingly and each puzzle associated with the clones is typically built up toward, rather than thrown haphazardly at the player.
A feature of the Game Boy Zelda games I had yet to mention was that players could opt to customize their buttons to any item they wanted; in Link's Awakening for example, players would have to equip both the Pegasus Boots and Roc's Feather to leap across some of the bigger gaps, but this was an extremely cumbersome mechanic and I grew to hate it more the longer it went on. The Minish Cap does away with most of the problem by allowing the right shoulder button to be used for examining or moving objects, completely doing away with many of the annoyances like the Power Bracelet being an equippable item.
At this point the Zelda series had begun to implement a formula for dungeons by having players clear much of the dungeon, pick up an important item to advance through the later parts of the dungeon, and use that for the boss. The constant item switching was mostly fine in Link's Awakening since the formula hadn't been so set in stone by that point, but implementing this new system into the Oracle games made many of the dungeons a complete slog to sit through. Because The Minish Cap does so much with so little, these annoyances are almost entirely gone.
That's not to say what I fell in love with the most from The Minish Cap is that it fixed complaints I had with previous games. It's a solid entry into the series, albeit on the shorter side--I finished it in about two days. Rather, everything in the game bursts attention and care, from its multitude of named NPCs to the gorgeous art style and music. It does rectify many of the mistakes of the previous handheld Zelda titles, but it also adds new features and streamlines the game flow when compared to the cumbersome and restricted Game Boy titles. If this is what Flagship could do with all of Nintendo's resources at their disposal, then it's sad to know they haven't been given the chance to try a bigger title.
Verdict
I could sing The Minish Cap's praises all day, but I feel like I wouldn't have been so enraptured with the game if I actually knew what I had in store. This game was a complete surprise and I'm kind of shocked that it doesn't receive that much love from Nintendo, especially considering its major characters are so fleshed out. I would guess it's because it technically wasn't made by Nintendo, but to have its characters ignored in games like Hyrule Warriors so blatantly seems like a massive oversight. I'm stealing the words of another critic here, but The Minish Cap oozes with creativity despite being so humble in scope. The story is almost entirely detached from any other Zelda title and the most heartwarming moment of the plot is such a little detail that I didn't expect it to resonate with me so much. The Minish Cap is a game deserving of your time, even if it's been neglected by Nintendo. Don't look up a walkthrough, don't look at anymore spoilers than I've likely given out, and play it at a relaxed pace. This is the most pure, condensed Zelda title I've played yet, and even if it is on the short side, it shouldn't be missed out on.
No comments:
Post a Comment