The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii version)
So, apparently, Twilight Princess has a bad reputation these days. From what I can gather, people find the tear-collecting sidequests a waste of time, the game painfully slow to start, and this iteration of Hyrule too small, with nothing much to explore. Obviously, to each their own, but these are not my feelings about Twilight Princess at all. I can list, briefly, what I consider to be the major flaws in this game:
1. It looks a bit muddy these days
2. I liked Zant as a villain, and was slightly disappointed when Ganon turned out to be behind it all again
3. I would have been happy to let that pig king keep Colin.
Link starts off as a humble goat-wrangler in a tiny village, preparing for his first trip out into the world to deliver a sword to the Princess in Hyrule Castle. When bizarre humanoid monsters attack his friends, he is concussed, abducted, transformed into a wolf and imprisoned in a mysterious Twilight Realm with a weird, sarcastic imp named Midna. She taunts him and bitches at him but helps him escape because she needs his help.
The Twilight Realm is her home, and it has been conquered and perverted by a man named Zant. Zant has caused the Twilight to spill over and curse the people of Hyrule, plunging them into perpetual dusk and turning them into spirits who don’t know they’re trapped; Link and Midna must first restore light to the land, then reassemble the broken Mirror Of Twilight that will send them to the Twilight Realm where they can find Zant and defeat him.
I don't think I have a favourite Zelda game, or even a best one. Each of them is excellent in its own ways and falls short in others, so choosing a favourite is more like a pick-and-mix of which aspects you would retain from any given game but if I really had to choose, my duelling top two would be this and Wind Waker. Both are flawed, but both come closest to ticking every box possible.
Twilight Princess has, arguably, the strongest story of any of the Zelda games. It's not quite as simple as "Go hunt Ganon because the Princess told you and also something about destiny". It’s revealed that the Sages banished Ganon from Hyrule by sending him to another dimension – the Twilight Realm – with no thought for how it might affect that world or anyone in it. Zant is a servant, an underdog – resentful, ambitious, weak – and he's easy meat when Ganon needs to use someone to engineer his return. He gives Zant seemingly endless power, as long as this puppet is still useful.
Midna’s distaste for Zelda, whom she perceives as hypocritical, privileged and lazy, is rooted in the callous way the rulers of Hyrule threw their trash into Midna’s backyard. Her eventual friendship with Link develops only through lengthy hardship. It feels real.
I can’t think of another Zelda game where the sidekick character was quite as involved as Midna. Navi is just your fairy buddy; Tatl wants to be reunited with her brother. The King Of Red Lions’ story is, fundamentally, over, since he’s already dead, and all he can do is guide you. Fi lives in your sword and wears nice tights and never ever ever shuts up, but Twilight Princess is arguably Midna’s story more than anyone else’s. It’s a really welcome development. Even so, Link’s involvement in the quest never seems arbitrary – he has his own clearly-defined motivations, which is pretty impressive for a character who never speaks. He goes from “I need to not be a wolf” to “wow, I need to rescue my friends” all the way to “I guess I better beat up on that pig-wizard thing so Midna can go home”.
I’m not sure why people complain about Hyrule’s limited scope. It’s always felt plenty big enough to me. Hyrule Castle Town is bigger than it's ever been, and the various portions of the map all join up in unexpected ways - a tunnel here, a river there, an unexpected trip on a kargarok. The map may be composed of distinct "rooms" but they overlap in such a way as to make it feel bigger, more real. Actual exploration is required: there are routes through Hyrule that you stumble across, rather than being forced to follow them by the plot, and that's a nice development.
Granted, it might have been nice to have the Zora Kingdom amount to something more than just fish-people lounging in a pool, or to have something else in the mountains except two snowboarding yetis, but that’s a minor complaint for me, as is the muddiness of the graphics. As I recall, they looked spectacular at the time; it’s a shame they haven’t aged well. My biggest peeve in this game is that the Great Fairy only appears in the Cave Of Ordeals, and she looks like a battered orphan. And if that is the biggest peeve I’ve got, this game must be doing a lot right.
There are plenty of subgames and mini-quests in Hyrule, like the fruit-bubble-popping game at Lake Hylia or Agitha's bug hunting or Jovani's ghost hunting, even if the town only had maybe three or four accessible houses - I suppose it's the curse of expanding game size: people complain about how small the game world is, the game world gets bigger, so you have to fill it with something, and then people complain that there's nothing to do except mindless fetch quests. If you're a completist who absolutely cannot leave a dungeon without opening every chest, fetch quests are great. Not everyone feels that way, I know.
Some people apparently hated the tear-gathering tasks, which surprises me as I loved those sections: I felt they added variety to the gameplay. It was nice to have just enough to do as Wolf-Link. I remember, at first, dreading being stuck trying to navigate a whole temple with him, but in the end the game struck a great balance in allowing you to flip back and forth, and Wolf-Link being another tool you could use as needed. The atmosphere is eerie and they don't go on long enough to become boring.
The dungeons themselves are fantastic, although they are often thematic retreads of previous dungeons. Because the game designers keep sticking with the same basic setting, they end up recycling old ideas. We're in Hyrule, so we have Hyrule Castle Town and Field, and the Zoras, so we have a water temple, and the Gorons, so we have a lava-themed temple, and there's always a forest temple, whether it's the Deku Tree or the Koroks or the Kikwis. There's enough innovation, though, to keep these settings feeling (mostly) fresh, although the deja-vu is strong in the Water Temple, which apparently must always be torturous in any timeline. (Even the Water Temple's boss feels like a retread.)
The final battle with Ganon felt appropriately epic. The game made good, limited use of the Wii’s motion controls, using them only in specific situations or when it felt appropriate (unlike Skyward Sword, which was determined to use them for every last damn thing whether it worked or not) and the high point of that was actually going up against Ganon in combat. As in Ocarina, the fight had several stages, though in that game, you start out against Mostly Human Ganondorf and progress to Massive Pig Wrestler Ganon. Here, you start out against his puppet, Possessed Zelda, then face off against the brute force of his pig incarnation, and end up at twilight on Hyrule Field for a swordfight. It centres the swordplay aspect - in focusing on Link and Ganon as swordsmen, it has a pleasing thematic purity that makes the end all the more satisfying.
One area where the Zelda games often feel less satisfying is their endings. We rarely get anything compelling, post-victory, to reward us for our efforts - we've spent an entire game saving Hyrule (or Clock Town, or somewhere else on the DS I suppose), and I always feel it would be nice to see the benefits afterward, maybe get a chance to explore the place and play the subgames and finish off any incomplete side-quests, and have the villagers say "Hey, Link! Well done for saving Hyrule, but my chickens have escaped again". At best, though, we get little shots of the NPCs as the credits roll.
Twilight Princess has one of the better endings: Zelda and Link talk to Midna, now revealed as The Twilight Princess, in front of the mirror of Twilight, and it seems like there's going to be a new age of peace and friendship between Hyrule and the Twilight Realm. And then Midna shatters the mirror, thereby sealing the two worlds away from each other forever. She knows that the possibility of contact will always present a threat to her world, so she removes the possibility. It's a melancholy ending, and it's nice that Twilight Princess actually does try to have a story with some emotional resonance.
In short: this is as close to a perfect Zelda game as they get.
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