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: Hyrule’s Long Goodbye

Twilight Princess was always intended to be the last ‘traditional’ Zelda game before the franchise took a leap into the unknown with a ground-up Wii title. The switch from GC to Wii gives an aura of change, but after a few hours getting comfortable with the control scheme, you will find yourself in very familiar territory. It seems Nintendo has been listening closely to its fans, or, at least, that vocal contingent crying out against cel-shading and the general direction the franchise took in tWW.

As a result, TP is a lot of things tWW wasn’t – long, taxing and ‘realistic’ for a start. It most closely resembles ALttP in structure, OoT in gameplay and Majora’s Mask in tone. It’s said to take place a hundred years after OoT (or 99.9 years after MM), and the evidence is there – Castle Town, for example, is a clever riff on the OoT version, complete with static angles and stray dogs.

Even so, anyone holding their breath for a little Timeline love should probably stop now. Twilight Princess revisits and recycles elements from previous games in the franchise, but doesn’t do much about making this story ‘fit’ in some neat illusion of sequence. tWW attempted to make progress in the broader Zelda narrative by setting itself up in the far flung future as a new beginning. If anything disappoints me about TP, it is that – rather than build on an amazing premise for genuine exploration, TP takes a step back to give us more of the same.

As for the story itself, Twilight Princess will go down as a minor work when compared to the emotional complexity of Majora’s Mask and tWW. It didn’t reach the same places for me. Still, I have to give them credit – this is NOT about the Triforce. Twilight Princess tells the story of Midna, and how her destiny becomes intertwined with that of Hyrule. It gives a predictable formula a pinch of spice, so in its familiarity it feels somewhat fresh. Think of it as OoT if it were about the Skull Kid – epic and intimate at the same time. And that’s not to say there aren’t some beautiful, unexpected moments that hit me where I lived – just that the main narrative drive didn’t live up to my hopes for it.

But what Twilight Princess may lack in narrative, it more than makes up for in variety and presentation.

I took the most direct route I could find through the game, eschewing much side-quest meandering, and clocked in at just over forty hours. TP doesn’t give you the option of saving your file for another play through, so where you save as you’re approaching the endgame is where you’ll end up after you beat it (or at least that’s how it seems – if someone else played differently, let us know). I saved at the entrance to the final obstacle, so after defeating the Big Bad I was plunked back down in front of a dungeon that the game didn’t remember I completed.

No skin off my nose – pretty much every area of TP is a joy to play. And it gave me the option of turning back to Hyrule proper to take in all the sights I was too busy to see before. I’m going to stay a while. There’s still so much to do (for example, I didn’t even discover the fishing hole until after I beat the game). Nintendo’s A Team has brought us a world teaming with content, and I am eager to get the most from it. That alone puts TP in my top tier of All Time Greats. It is a game of volume. You have to fetch, joust, fly, float, ride, wrestle, protect, attack, swim, climb, detonate and participate in community fund-raising – for starters. That doesn’t account for the variety of new Items; some of which you’ll discover by happy accident; many of which go down without question as my series favourites. The franchise affection for ‘transformation’ is put to good use in the wolf mechanic – being a wolf felt very ‘wolf-y’ to me, although not as complete an experience as being a seagull in tWW.

The quest is divided to two main sections, and gets increasingly broad the deeper you go. Twilight Princess acts as a master class in How to Build a Game Epic. For the first leg, your attention is localized in the Southern and Central provinces of Hyrule. Each success opens more of the map, brings more characters into play, gives you greater opportunity to explore and a ton of new ways to do it. By then end I was left feeling a little breathless that all the varied experiences belonged to the same game.

While much as been made of its somewhat ‘last gen’ graphics, I don’t think haters have a leg to stand on. TP marries the stylistic flourish of tWW and the attempted realism of OoT into a game world that is at times stunningly, startlingly beautiful. It’s not high-def – there are blurry textures – you’ll see the tip of your cap pass through your shield in close-ups. These things are there, so there’s no point in pretending they’re not. Just as there’s no point in pretending they’re a deal-breaker, either. I am definitely of the camp that thought cel-shading was a step in the right direction – it is timelessly good to look at. But TP is a very handsome game. The world is complete unto itself, and it plays so believably within context that I found myself buying into it whole-heartedly. Miyamoto always said it wasn’t about making it ‘real’ – building a cohesive game world is about enabling the player to suspend disbelief, and the Hyrule of Twilight Princess very ably does. The lighting effects are spectacular – cloud shadow moves over the green plains and the draw distance extends to the visible horizon. Animation is silky and precise. Clear water ripples with reflections, petals float in the air, mist makes the early mornings dream-like and rosy. There is a lot of there, there.

One last thing – the temples. There are seven big temples, two shorter-but-satisfying ones, and about five that stand out for me as the best of the series (Snowpeak being number 1). Everything I wanted and more – challenge, variety and atmosphere.

I’ve used ‘best of the series’ twice now. That’s no mistake – TP very consciously sets out to be, at its core, fan service to those of us who have been following along. It takes a little bit from everything that came before and refines it so it works perfectly. This IS the definitive Zelda experience. Play Twilight Princess, and you will understand completely where the series has come from. It lives up to its pedigree in a big way. It is the very essence of the Zelda-as-we-know-it, an indelible image that will define what the series was before it becomes what it will be.

As for what the future holds – who knows. I won’t get to speculating until I’m ready to move on from TP, and I can assure you that won’t be until well into the new year.

It is great to be back in Hyrule again. I intend to make it a long goodbye.

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