Review: The Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess
The writing on the wall should have been so clear in retrospect, but even the title of this new Zelda screamed unnecessary edginess. "Twilight Princess?" Just the word Twilight evokes thoughts of darkness and melodrama, so it should come as no surprise that Nintendo tried to create a game oozing with edgy darkness and edgy melodrama only to drop the ball hard. This Link was more similar to the adult Link from Ocarina of Time, weathered and ready for a harrowing adventure because that's what you wanted, I guess.
Unlike many previous games in the series, there's no legendary tale to serve as the backdrop in Twilight Princess, instead dropping the player into a melancholy conversation between Link and his mentor, Rusl. Between the two disparate tones of darkness and melancholy, the latter is executed much better and the opening scene sets the mood perfectly. The game begins to falter almost immediately after, and doesn't pick itself up for a fairly long stretch.
In past games the plot setup is delivered quickly, though a better description would probably be 'efficiently.' A story doesn't need long and drawn-out exposition to introduce its conflict, and games like Ocarina of Time and The Minish Cap exemplify this aspect. That's not even considering the NES Zelda games which simply throw the player into the game without worrying about story at all. I'm all for a good story in a video game, but if a video game takes more than half an hour to introduce its conflict I consider that poor story-telling.
If Twilight Princess took a while to establish its story like The Wind Waker I'd be much less annoyed. In that game players are given their outfit, the sword, and go through their first dungeon by the time the player is out of the tutorial for Twilight Princess. The tutorials aren't even fun or very engaging; rather, the player is forced to herd goats and play with kids to teach them how to use items. It's horribly unintuitive and at times it can be outright patronizing. Tutorials in Twilight Princess are invasive and seep into every corner of the game, further increasing its linearity.
The overall size of the game world is much larger than Ocarina of Time, but it's still much smaller than the Great Sea. Despite the larger size, linearity is a major problem and is probably the worst in the series by this point. Majora's Mask is also very linear--requiring players tackle each area of Termina in order--but at least that game allows players to actually explore the entire field map whenever they want. Twilight Princess regularly cordons off chunks of the world map to make sure you're heading toward the dungeon it wants you to finish. Road blocks stop the player from entering certain parts of Hyrule, some requiring Epona to jump while others need to be taken away by characters who don't appear until the story concludes. A bridge will be removed from the map at one point preventing the player from going back for an extended period of time, and at its most egregious there's actually a locked gate that a character opens as the story continues.
You'll note I keep referring to the story as the main element blocking players from parts of the game, and that's because Twilight Princess is easily the most story-focused game of the series by this point. Unfortunately, it's more long-winded than anything else and typically falls back into tropes more often than not. Worse than that, the story often feels like a bigger, more bombastic, less time-efficient Ocarina of Time. Let's take a look at how the games open to show what I mean.
In Ocarina of Time, Link is awakened by his new companion Navi in order to save the Deku Tree from its infestation. The player has to navigate the small Kokiri Village in order to find a sword and gather rupees to buy a shield. After clearing the Deku Tree the players are given the Fairy Ocarina and are able to access all of Hyrule Field, though Lake Hylia, the Gerudo Valley, the Zora Village and Death Mountain are barred from entry until the items required to enter those areas are found.
The story in Twilight Princess begins without a word of backstory to contextualize the narrative, but Link and Rusl discuss the twilight and Link's upcoming visit to Hyrule Castle to present the royal family with his new sword. Before night falls, Link is asked to herd sheep. In the morning, the villagers' children appear and beg Link to play with them, so the player needs to go out and buy a slingshot. In order to buy a slingshot, a series of events need to be completed: climb a hill, knock Rusl's wife's baby carriage out of a monkey's hand using a hawk, take a fishing pole from her to catch a fish for a cat to cheer up its owner, then buy the slingshot, and finally return to the children. Rusl shows up to Link's house and gives him the wooden sword, and after using the slingshot to kill a spider blocking the way to his house the player is forced to clear a tutorial explaining how to use both the slingshot and the sword--despite the fact that the player would have just used the slingshot to knock down the spider.
I'm pretty sure I know exactly why this long string of tutorials was implemented, the reason being that Twilight Princess was postponed to be a launch title for the Nintendo Wii. Unlike the Gamecube version which used a controller setup almost identical to The Wind Waker, Twilight Princess struggles with implementing the at-the-time brand-new Wii Motion controller, and as such many of the standard Zelda functions had to be reworked to play correctly on the controller. The directional buttons can each be assigned items making it the most readily-available set of items in a Zelda game, but these items have to then be assigned to another button to actually be used.
There's no camera control unlike The Wind Waker and the Gamecube release of Twilight Princess, and since there aren't enough buttons on the controller the shield has simply been relegated to a parry on the left nunchuck, although this move has to be unlocked by the player. The sword is also changed to the extremely gimmicky Motion Controller as a waggle instead of a simple button press. That's not to say the sword follows the player's movement; rather, the waggle replaces a simple press of the B button. Players still need to manipulate the control stick in order to swing in different directions, which makes the finer control of sword combat feel horribly confusing as both hands start to work against each other.
I want to stress that the Wii port of Twilight Princess was likely created as an afterthought to get more people to buy the experimental new version of a Zelda game. Most people would list at least one Zelda as part of their top ten games of all time, and anecdotally I know more than a handful of people who buy new Nintendo consoles just to play the new Zelda. There's something of a running joke among the older game-playing crowd mocking Zelda as a stereotypical "casual gamer" game series, as most people who bark about Zelda being the best games ever made have either not played much of the series or simply don't play video games. It's a crass stereotype, but stereotypes exist for a reason. That's not to say Zelda is a bad series of video games--if you've been reading this blog you can probably guess it's one of my favorite series in video game history--but its reach among even the non-game playing public is widespread.
Naturally, more people bought Twilight Princess on the Wii and that version received a Nintendo Selects reissue; the Gamecube version, which released a month later, is commonly identified as a fairly rare game. I didn't play the Wii version until years later and found the port to be lacking, due not in small part to the flipped nature of the game world. This likely didn't disorient players who played the Wii version first, but after playing it so many times on Gamecube it was just weird to play the same game with a vertically flipped world. In case you weren't aware, the entire game was reversed in order to accommodate the fact that players would be swinging the Motion Controller with their right hand and wanted Link to match the player's movement
I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Link being a left-handed character if only because it's so unorthodox, so for that reason alone I can't imagine any version of the character being legitimate without the left-handed nature. Furthermore, the HD re-release keeps the Gamecube presentation and only allows players to play the game flipped on the new Hero Mode, which is intended as a harder difficulty option. With that in mind, it's pretty evident the Gamecube version was the game Nintendo intended to play.
I wanted to bring all this up because I'm almost positive players who were using Twilight Princess as their introduction to the Wii's controller almost definitely needed to become accustomed to the controls, but since the Gamecube version is the exact same game these tutorials just comes across as trite. The fact that players have to kill a spider and then show the game they know how to use the slingshot is beyond patronizing and I can't believe there's no option to skip it. One of the kids even gives Link a prompt to skip the sword tutorial, but if the player selects no the game berates them for being rude to children until they say yes.
Oh, but we're not done talking about the game's intro yet. After assuring the kids the player knows how to play the game, a monkey appears and everyone chases it. The player fights bokoblins and is given the game's lantern by an NPC in order to continue through a cave. I don't understand why the bokoblins simply couldn't have been easier than normal and the player couldn't just learn how to control the sword by fighting them. After finally reaching the end of the road, the player rescues one of the children and the monkey before returning home. Another day passes and Link has to herd goats again. Ilia, the daughter of Ordon Village's mayor and the primary romantic interest, chastises Link for not taking care of Epona. After following her to her favorite spot all the way outside the village, Link and Ilia are attacked by mounted bokoblins and their moblin leader--or something else, I don't know, apparently moblins weren't good enough for Twilight Princess and this is just some new guy.
Link is taken into the Twilight Realm and turned into a wolf, then dragged to Hyrule Castle. Midna, an imp in the Twilight, helps Link find Princess Zelda who sends him back to Ordon Village. The player then has to recover a sword and shield from Ordon Village while sneaking around the hostile villagers, who are all panicking because their children were abducted by the bokoblins. Link then has to collect bugs who absorbed the Tears of Light from Faron, one of Hyrule's Guardian Spirits, in order to return to his human form. After this, the player explores the first dungeon and is finally able to explore Hyrule Field. Mostly. After the first open and horrifically empty area of Hyrule Field, players are once again forced to enter the Twilight as a wolf and collect more Tears of Light.
This is basically the entire setup for the first half of the game: enter a new province, gain a Vessel of Light from the Guardian Spirit, kill some bugs which require exploring more or less the entirety of the province, then return and gain Link's human form to explore it a second time. Think about A Link to the Past forcing players to enter the Dark World every time they want to explore a new area of the world map, or Ocarina of Time forcing the adult character to return to the Temple of Time to scope out every new temple as a child. You could argue it already does this with the Spiritual Stones, but this serves the purpose of introducing the world as well as giving the player a new perspective when they return as an adult. In the case of Twilight Princess, it just feels like busywork.
Go back and look at how much more content is required for the player to tackle in a linear order before they're able to access a limited version of Hyrule Field when compared to Ocarina of Time. Worse, much of this could be entirely cut out; the first goat herding minigame could be cut out entirely, the player could have simply started out with the sword, Rusl's wife could have just asked Link to find her baby carriage, Rusl could have just given Link the slingshot, and the entire three-day opening could have been condensed into a single night before night fell. It would still have taken longer to get into Hyrule Field than Ocarina of Time, but every single one of these instances of forced story could have been removed entirely without damaging the integrity of the story. No really, look at all the suggestions I have that could have been cut out: were any of those necessary to understand the world, characters, or narrative any better? My response would be a resounding no.
It takes even longer to get into the world than even The Wind Waker, and when it does it's so limited and barren that it feels like a second thought. The railroading is all in service of the dark narrative, but there's hardly anything darker than Majora's Mask to the point where it seems like it's trying too hard. I know the term tryhard is going out of vogue when discussing stories, but seriously, just look at this.
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| You creeped out yet? This is what you guys wanted isn't it? |
As I mentioned in the beginning, the mood that I always think of positively in relation to Twilight Princess is that of melancholy, but it attempts this so rarely that I can't think of many times it actually works. The opening with Rusl talking to Link about the sadness of twilight is one of the best examples, but after that is an equally memorable scene where Link simply watches Ilia play with Epona. The scene is brief and even a bit lonely, and if it focused on that rather than attempting a dark and serious story I'd be far less harsh. Even worse, the dark tone clashes completely with many of the NPC designs.
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| Pictured: Looneytunes McDipshit |
If the tone had simply been of a lonely hero attempting to fight an alien force, I'd have been completely fine with that. Having ridiculous moments meshes in fine when the game is attempting to be forlorn, but when eyeless spooky ghost characters are killing each other it's just out of place entirely.
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| Silly, fun Zelda. You told us you hated this though. |
Twilight Princess uses the same engine as The Wind Waker, but it takes a few cues from The Minish Cap in that many of Link's sword techniques must be discovered and learned by a skeletal tutor. What's really annoying about this is that many of the techniques are just elaborate versions of Link's parry moveset from The Wind Waker, though rather than a simple press of the A button players need to input commands. Here's a brief example: one of the parries from The Wind Waker involved Link rolling to the side of an enemy and striking them from behind. In Twilight Princess, this same move needs to be learned and in order to execute it, the player has to double-tap the A button and end with a sword attack.
All the involved sword mechanics in the world mean nothing if the game is made easier to accommodate the controls. Since there's no way to actively raise the shield, Link simply has it raised at all times. Since the advanced sword techniques are optional, the game is balanced in a way that players can still win combat without them; with this in mind, Twilight Princess has a combat system which automatically blocks most enemy attacks, a sidestep which avoids all attacks the shield can't block, and a hidden pool of techniques that utterly decimate most enemies. For a game that strives so hard to be the dark, edgy flipside to The Wind Waker, it's baffling that it could be so much easier.
Since I've already compared the gameplay to its prior entry, I want to point out why the passive shield is a step down from even Ocarina of Time. In Ocarina, players needed to raise their shield in order to avoid attacks, but since enemies would attack at random and raise shields of their own there was a real sense of tension in combat. Looking at Stalfos in particular, players needed to watch their enemy's movement and take advantage of weaknesses when possible. Twilight Princess's approach is closer to A Link to the Past in that the shield is raised by default, but even the top-down games in the series after that game featured a shield that needed to be raised with a button press. Twilight Princess in turn takes steps backward from innovations in both the overhead and 3D Zelda games to the point where everything is trivialized for the player. If you thought The Wind Waker was too simplistic, then I would hate to learn what hoops you'd jump through to justify Twilight Princess's dumbing down of mechanics that already worked fine.
Even though it looks more complex, the fact of the matter is that combat is simply more convoluted. That's what I'd have to say is the biggest flaw of Twilight Princess: the developers knew what they wanted to avoid, but didn't know how to replace the controversial aspects of the series with something all fans would enjoy. The combat is simplified even with new mechanics and the story, despite having so much expository dialogue, does very little more than Ocarina of Time despite wasting so much of the player's time.
Different factions are introduced throughout the game, though their importance is highly inflated. The Gorons are Zora return from Ocarina of Time, though they're both largely unchanged aside from more busy design elements. There's a league of adventurers who later become the resistance to the Twilight invasion, but they're only shown to be actively resisting anybody once or twice throughout the story. If you're not going to utilize an established organization, maybe that organization doesn't deserve to exist.
Zant is an extremely interesting villain and I love his portrayal, but because this game was made by cowards he's quickly overshadowed and replaced once again by Ganon. Ganon appears closer to the end of the game and accomplishes very little, but at least two of his four boss phases are complete nostalgia grabs for previous games. The fact that the final battle is a repeat of the final boss of The Wind Waker further makes me think of this game as a half-hearted apology for The Wind Waker, but that just makes me hate the game more. Yeah, Twilight Princess has more dungeons and the game is less colorful and it's more grim just how everyone wanted, but the polish is simply not there.
Speaking of dungeons, I need to make one final complaint about the linear design of Twilight Princess. In previous games, each dungeon would give Link an item which would help the player explore the world and open access to more of the world. Many of the items in Twilight Princess are almost completely forgotten about after the dungeon they're required in; the dungeons are also completely linear this time around, only allowing Link to carry one key at a time so the player doesn't get lost. It's not like these dungeons are intricate mazes, so to force players down one path is a hideous design choice and it's made all the worse by the formulaic approach to new items.
I mentioned this in an earlier review, but as each Zelda comes along the developers seem to lose more of what makes the series so unique. By the time of Twilight Princess, players are literally going through the motions and completing each dungeon in a set pattern that gets old quickly--as an aside, this game doesn't even attempt to give players an option to explore dungeons out of order. Even The Wind Waker, with its six main dungeons, gives players an option to approach two of the later dungeons in either order.
Each item should legitimize itself as both a tool for combat as well as exploration--the main tenets of a Zelda game. Twilight Princess marks an era of the Zelda games losing the plot and the approach to dungeons encapsulates this by shoving an item carelessly into the player's hands and forgetting about it as soon as the dungeon is over. Many of these items are fairly unique and I would have loved to play around with them more, but there simply aren't enough uses for them after
Truth will out, as the saying goes, and most of the naysayers of The Wind Waker shut their mouths the moment they either tried the game or matured a little. I don't fault them for that if they made the judgment as a child because I did the same when I first saw The Wind Waker, but after playing the game I quickly appreciated what it was setting out to do and felt ashamed that I ever doubted it. With Twilight Princess, all I can see is a pathetic attempt to capture the nostalgia for a game that didn't need it.
Verdict
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is an ugly, patronizing game that fails to convey both the tone it's attempting to capture and the melancholic mood it fails to utilize. It's bloated to all hell with an ugly, empty and enormous overworld full of generic caves. There are way too many Pieces of Heart, too many dungeon items lose their utility as soon as Link leaves the dungeon, the sheer volume of nostalgia grabbing is embarrassing, and for the first time in the series (unless you're like me and feel this way about the Oracles) it finally feels like the Zelda formula is unraveling. Like the Oracle games, this is the perfect example of a game that exists if you need a new Zelda game to play, but it's far from a memorable experience and feels cobbled together more often than not.
If you absolutely have to play Twilight Princess, go for the Wii U HD Remaster. Unlike The Wind Waker HD, this version adds no irritating element like extra bloom but it does fix most of the annoyances that actually could be fixed. There are fewer Tears of Light to collect, players don't bang their sword on walls, and the hard mode allows masochistic players to play the game in the Wii's vertically flipped mode. It completely eclipses the Gamecube original, but in my estimation it's little more than polishing a turd.
Zelda 3D remaster mini-reviews:
http://subjective-objective.blogspot.com/2016/03/mini-review-zelda-remasters.html
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