To give myself a greater sense of perspective when reviewing Ocarina of Time 3D I started to replay Twilight Princess, the most recent home console entry in the Legend of Zelda series. I also decided to reread one of my older 1UP blogs written way back in 2008 where I described whyTwilight Princess was “my least favourite Zelda game”.
Despite being a little rambling, my old article nailed a few of my problems with the game but replaying it now I’ve realised that there’s a lot more to it. Though I have lots of little problems with it (such as the disappointing graphics) my core issues are with its pacing, story and repetition.
Pacing
This game takes an age to start building momentum. If the poorly explained mandatory fishing segment doesn’t derail you, it takes around two hours to get to the first dungeon. TWO HOURS. And this is for a person who’s already played the game before. Talk about your slow burns.
Part of the problem is that they handhold you through absolutely everything at the outset, having to ride horseback, herd goats, scrounge up money to buy a slingshot, teach you how to fish (badly) teach you to use the slingshot, teach you about a sword and so on. These objectives have to be completed in exactly the right order for your to progress beyond the tutorial village.
During the opening scenes of the other 3D Zelda titles you have one or two basic objectives to carry out. They drop you into open areas and let optional dialogue from NPCs fill you in on the details of the controls if you need them. It’s an elegant arrangement that allows players to choose how much assistance they want before moving on to the meat of the game. This is not the case inTwilight Princess.
Things only really get going after the third dungeon, the Water Temple. The plot finally start to get explained and you move beyond the boring and simplistic “rescue the irritating kids” opening story thread. Speaking of which…
Story
This was the aspect I ragged on hardest in my old blog post. To recap my thoughts, the game teased fans with bringing the underlying continuity of the series to the forefront, presenting clear connections to other games. The appearance of the Temple of Time and the Master Sword resting in a forest were clear connections to Ocarina of Time and A Link to the Past, for example. However, they also muddied the waters in a lot of ways, in the end leaving me with about the same number of questions as answers.
Even if you don’t care about series continuity, the plot here wasn’t anything that special. It eventually boiled down to another confrontation with Ganon and it lacked any notable moral or strong thematic presence that the previous two 3D Zelda titles had.
I think the overriding theme was forgiveness, what with the once-exiled shadow people and those from Hyrule teaming up against a common foe. However, when Midna destroys the only link between their two realms at the end it seemed to contradict this.
Twilight Princess’ Link might be the one I’m least attached to. The character has always been a mute avatar for the player but here he seems especially bland. He starts out quite literally as a farm boy (apparently an orphan since no family is ever mentioned) before being swept up by his destiny. He seems to have the smallest range of emotions for any incarnation of the character, never being surprised, scared or sad like other Links. A lot of the time he seems pretty robotic, especially in some cutscenes where he appears so uncaring and meek to come off as creepy.
A mismanaged tutorial is only partly to blame for the long, dragging opening. It begins on the dullest, least epic introductory scene to a Zelda title ever, filled with… well, just a whole bunch of dialogue really. No epic foreshadowing, no opening narration to give back story, no prophetic dreams; nothing. If you don’t remember it, just take a watch.
While the tutorials in the opening village take about half of an hour to get through, a lot of other story stuff happens before you’re even allowed to set foot in the first dungeon. Enemies attack (for no apparent reason other than to further the plot) kidnapping the village’s irritating kids, Link gets pulled into a nearby twilight zone, gets turned into a wolf, is imprisoned in Hyrule Castle, meets Midna, meets Princess Zelda, gets a little bit of backstory, catches a load of electric insects, clears one area of twilight, gets transformed back into human form and somehow ends up with the classic green tunic. Can you see why this takes two hours?
Repetition
You could argue that the whole Zelda experience itself had already become repetitive by the timeTwilight Princess rolled around. However, this particular Zelda seemed to go to great lengths to stretch out the experience. The series has long featured side-quests that require a lot of revisiting old areas and grinding for money or items but never has this blighted the main story… with the exception of the Wind Waker’s late-game Triforce hunt, that is.
The game actually has its own mini version of this later on. Before you can get to the Sky Temple you need to seek out all the bird statues that can be controlled by the Dominion Rod scattered throughout the overworld. Thankfully, this doesn’t require you to find individual maps, pay a ridiculous fee to translate them and then hunt them down like Wind Waker. However, it takes about twenty minutes to get to them all and the resulting effect basically amounts to opening a door.
Remember those dreadlocked enemies you were forced to fight in tiny arenas? You should do, because you have to defeat groups of these guys at least a dozen time throughout the course of the game. Why is this so bad? Because the encounters are the same every single time you have to face them. They can only be beaten by felling them all in one attack, otherwise the last remaining one will resurrect his buddies. Beating them down is fine for the first couple of times but the fact that these one-note encounters keep constantly cropping up over the course of the game is really aggravating.
While the basic wolf Link mechanics were solid these sections were also overexposed. They came in two flavours; prolonged insect fetch quests and following scent-based bread crumb trails. Much like the aforementioned enemy encounters, these get old really fast.
Closing Thoughts
I’d like to state plainly that I don’t hate Twilight Princess. There are definitely things to appreciate in it like Midna who is maybe the most fleshed out character in the series, some visually impressive moments and the many fan-service references.
It is undeniably flawed though, something you can’t often say about a Legend of Zelda game. I didn’t even talk about how it clearly intentionally apes Ocarina of Time, an almost decade-old title at the time of Twilight Princess’s release, instead of blazing a new trail for the series. This and the other aforementioned issues are so substantial that I still find it strangely uncomfortable to sit through the game considering how refreshing, polished and damn-near perfect Zelda games usually are.
Let’s hope that the upcoming Skyward Sword is a return to form for the series.
In Ocarina 3D the Happy Mask Shop has been drastically remodelled with more swanky curtains, a carpet, a classier rules board and err… disco balls. There are also masks on display on the shop floor now.
Recognise them? They’re all from the Happy Mask Salesman’s travel bag in Majora’s Mask! You can even just about make out the Mario mask obscured behind the mirror on the right hand side. Also, they seem to have doubled up on the blue ape-looking mask to make up space.
Things are also a bit more vibrant behind the counter. But what’s that over the salesman’s right shoulder? It’s his travel bag without all the masks! That’s another nice touch.
Those are the only two Majora ones I’ve found. They’re pretty obvious if you think back to what the shop looked like in the original release of Ocarina:
I would have loved to have seen a post-credits scene that galvanised Ocarina and its sequel further, much like the Chrono Trigger ports for the Playstation and DS did to Chrono Cross. There’s no additional dialogue with the Skull Kid in the Lost Woods who is strongly implied to be the same one in Majora’s Mask, I checked. Ah well.
Thanks for reading and let me know if you find about any references I might have missed in the game.
