GDwarf

Twilight Princess, I’m not going to go into the history of its release because most of the people reading this will know about that. I will say it has been probably the most hyped Zelda game ever made. Do I feel it lives up to the hype? In many, many ways the answer is yes. It falls short in a few respects, but no game could really do what this one was expected to, so I don’t hold that against it.

I’ll start off with what makes Twilight Princess stand out against other Zelda games: its story. The Zelda series has never had complex stories, and Twilight Princess doesn’t really change that. You’ll usually be able to tell exactly what’s coming, although the game did throw a few twists at me that I didn’t see coming. The Zelda team has, however, made the story come to life. This is the only Zelda game, save Majora’s Mask, that I’ve played straight through from beginning to end without getting sidetracked. While Majora used a time limit to do this, Twilight Princess does it simply through the strength of the story and the characters you encounter. The game just gripped me, I wanted to finish it to help these people and set things right, and I had to do it now, tomorrow might be too late.

The gameplay in Twilight Princess is an interesting mix of old and new. Anyone who’s played Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, or The Wind Waker will be at home with the controls in a very short amount of time. Adapting to the Wii-mote happens fairly quickly. It took me about an hour, and the rest of the controls have changed little from the other 3D Zelda games.

The new part of the controls comes from how combat is handled and how the Wii-mote is used. Combat, while fundamentally the same as in the other games, is more…dynamic in Twilight Princess. I found myself leaping around, throwing out spin attacks, finishing moves, and parries. Even Wind Waker’s amazing combat falls far short of what was accomplished in Twilight Princess. The Wii-mote is implemented quite well. There is a very slight delay between when you swing it and when Link reacts, but I never found this to be an issue, not even when timing was key. The new controller really shines, however, when it comes to using ranged weapons. It is now a viable tactic to pull out your bow and quickly pick off an approaching mob of enemies. Rather then slowly adjusting your aim using the analogue stick you simply point and shoot.

No one will question the statement that Majora’s Mask was, by far, the most atmospheric Zelda game ever made. Twilight Princess does not dethrone it, but the developers were obviously influenced by Majora’s Mask. Twilight Princess is dark. Not ‘M’ rating dark, but still one of the darkest Zelda games ever made. It also has, as I mentioned earlier, a sense of urgency that has been absent from most games in the series. The world itself seems alive, characters go about their own lives, and the little touches that Nintendo is famous for are everywhere. The one that really sticks in my mind is this: I was wandering around Hyrule Castle Town, enjoying the music, when I suddenly heard someone singing. Intrigued, I started looking around the area I was in, until I saw, off to the side, a group of minstrels performing. As you got closer the background music slowly faded and was replaced by their music. As everyone always says about these things, it seems minor, but it added a massive amount of depth to the world.

This brings us quite nicely to my next area of review, the music. Twilight Princess has great original and remixed music, I’m listening to some of it as I write this, but it does suffer from re-using old tunes too much. Re-using old tunes can do amazing things for the feel of a game, The Wind Waker had almost all original music, and it’s judicious use of old tunes really helped make the game. To paraphrase one of Lord-of-Shadow’s articles on The Wind Waker, when I heard the A Link To The Past music play, that is when I knew I was playing a Zelda game. However, Twilight Princess re-uses songs too much. Several times I’d enter an area to hear music that seemed to have been ripped straight from Ocarina of Time. It’s a minor issue, but it’s a shame that they couldn’t have done more remixes on-par with the amazing Death Mountain music.

So, is Twilight Princess the best Zelda game ever made? I’d say certainly. It’s fun, engaging, the story is beyond compare, and it has an interesting juxtaposition of new and old. Is it perfect? No, certainly not, but I can guarantee that it will be easily the best Zelda game you’ve ever played. It took me 34 hours to play through the game without sidequests. (With sidequests I’m probably looking at 50-70 hours) So you’ll certainly have plenty of time to enjoy the game.

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