When The Wind Waker released on the GameCube in 2003, many fans were dismayed by Nintendo's choice to drop the more realistic graphics of series predecessors Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask in favor of the cel-shaded graphics presented in their newest title. While The Wind Waker proved all doubters wrong, by not only standing the test of time to be seen as one of the GameCube's finest titles, Nintendo was hit financially by this decision. The Wind Waker remains one of Nintendo's poorest selling console Zeldas. At the time, Nintendo believed they couldn't make such a mistake again, and so a return to the style of graphics seen in the N64 Zeldas was made. And three years later, Twilight Princess was born.
Now, before we go any further, I want to make something clear: fourteen years later, Twilight Princess remains one of the weakest console Zeldas to date. It has divided many longtime fans of the franchise, and even now there is no consensus amongst fans as to whether the game is worthy of bearing the illustrious Zelda name of its predecessors. Some believe it's one of the greatest games of all time, all platforms included. Others believe it's a mediocre Ocarina of Time remake, desperate to stoke a feeling of nostalgia in fans of the franchise, instead of trying to carve its own name in the annals of gaming history. And many believe it's somewhere in between. I fall within the third group. Twilight Princess is a great game, amongst the best the GameCube and the Wii ever had to offer, though it never quite rises to the soaring heights of some of its vaunted forebears.
For one thing, Twilight Princess failed to wow gamers visually, as Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and even The Wind Waker, with its vibrant colors, gorgeously stylistic art design, and endless blue seas, had done with such great effect in the past. Twilight Princess's visuals weren't exactly bad by the standards of 2006, but they were definitely dated. While it's impressive in scope, and has a few gorgeously-designed areas, like The Sacred Grove, and Snowpeak, and The City in the Sky, the game is absolutely full of muddied textures and jagged lines, and is often utterly lacking in details. With the launch of the PS3 in the same year, and the Xbox 360 the year before, The Legend of Zelda had gone from a series that was always a leader in jaw-dropping visuals, to one that was distinctly behind the times. Good art direction in some of the game's most beautiful areas helped mitigate this problem, but it wasn't enough to open my eyes the same way Ocarina of Time had opened them eight years before. The only thing that was truly impressive was its scope. Twilight Princess has an enormous world for the player to explore.
And that brings me to the next glaring issue. The overworld. For such an expansive chunk of land, there is remarkably little to do. Most of Twilight Princess's Hyrule is just endless fields and slopes, with no meaning and no purpose, bereft of textures, much of it ending in hideous black chasms that fall into the bottomless crust of the earth. It's ugly, and it's boring. Why have such a huge world when there's virtually nothing to do? Ocarina of Time's Hyrule was also quite empty, but it wasn't as noticeable because it was so much smaller. Twilight Princess's world is several times larger, but both worlds have about the same amount of things to do. If the world is going to be several times larger, then logic says it should have several times as many things to do, to keep it from feeling too empty. Instead, you end up with the barren husk that is the world of Twilight Princess.
On top of that, Twilight Princess's world, in large part due to its size, is divided up into many sections, all of which have distinct chokepoints where you must go to pass through to another section. This severely limits the feeling of freedom the player has while exploring the world, especially on horseback. The glorious feeling of galloping across the rolling hills of Hyrule, so powerfully embedded in the minds of those of us lucky enough to play Ocarina of Time in 1998, is almost completely gone. The wide-open plains of Ocarina of Time, that allowed you to go almost anywhere on the map, are gone. Now you must follow a linear path, from zone to zone, to get to where you want to go. To make matters worse, the entirety of the map doesn't open up to the player until very late in the game. Therefore, there's almost no free exploration. The freedom of exploring Hyrule that I so enjoyed in Ocarina of Time, and that same freedom of sailing the wide seas in The Wind Waker, both of which opened up to the player almost from the very beginning of each game, is sadly lacking in Twilight Princess.
Another area in which Twilight Princess was a disappointment was the sound department. Just like with its visuals, the game's audio was distinctly dated, even for 2006. But unlike its visuals, which were held back by the limited capabilities of the GameCube and the Wii, there was little reason for this to be the case with its sound design. While Twilight Princess's soundtrack was beautiful, and certainly a pleasure to the ears, it was all computer-generated, lacking the invigorating delight of a live orchestra, as had already been becoming quite widespread in gaming by the mid-2000s. Why Nintendo was still so far behind (with one of their preeminent franchises no less!) is something of a head-scratcher. You could also go a step further and question the lack of voice acting, but as a Zelda purist and a lover of reading, I won't quite go that far.
The last major area in which Twilight Princess was a disappointment was its story. Twilight Princess went with a darker approach in comparison to past Zelda titles, and in the early stages of the game, it seemed to pay off. While the game starts off quite slowly, with Link as a farmboy in a small village on the outskirts of Hyrule, things pick up quickly when he meets the titular princess and companion-guide Midna, who takes our hero on a great quest to save the kingdom of Hyrule from the invading forces of the Twilight Realm. Midna is by far the most fleshed-out and interesting companion character in the Zelda timeline, and absolutely one of the shining lights of the game, a true character as opposed to an annoying voice constantly telling you what to do. But as the game progresses, the story falls apart, in large part because the writers tried to do too much. Instead of focusing on the story of Midna and the villain Zant (Midna's great nemesis), the writers tried to include Link's childhood friends (including Ilia, a possible love-interest that was never properly developed), Zelda, the Sages, and Ganon. Ilia disappears halfway through the game and plays no significant role after that. Zelda hardly appears at all, and never actually meets Link in his human form until the last scene of the game, making their connection at the end feel quite awkward and forced. And Zant is utterly ruined when Ganon comes into play, with Ganon himself being forced haphazardly into the story. In the end, besides Midna, Link doesn't make any true connections with any of the characters present in the game. This results in a story that feels utterly devoid of life, just like the empty overworld on which you must travel.
But alas, there are some positives to be had in this game as well. And here's some good news: in the areas in which Twilight Princess is strong, it is really strong. This is especially true of the game's dungeons. Like all Zelda games of the past, Twilight Princess has many, and fortunately, they were developed with far more care than the game's overworld, with some beautiful sights, interesting puzzles, and monstrous enemies to slay. The dungeons in the game are huge and extremely fun from beginning to end, getting bigger and more complex as the game goes along, culminating with the glorious City in the Sky, a match for Ocarina of Time's best. The gameplay has improved from Ocarina of Time as well, with tighter controls for the swordplay and horse-riding, vastly improved archery, and a bigger and better variety of items, though the items still suffer from the age-old Zelda problem of only being useful in the dungeon in which they're found, with limited use after that. This small problem aside, the game controls extremely well, and the ability to use your sword on horseback results in some of the fastest-paced, most intense combat in Zelda history. To top it all off, Twilight Princess had the biggest bosses of any Zelda game to this point, each one towering over you as you reach the endpoint of every dungeon. Unfortunately though, that leads me to my last negative criticism. The game, and especially the bosses, are far too easy. This was a slope that Nintendo had been sliding down for a long time, as the series had been getting easier and easier post-NES. But even compared to Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker, the game is very easy. It's disappointing to see a huge and intimidating boss, just to beat him within a few minutes without breaking a sweat. And lastly, just as disappointing as the easy bosses was Wolf-Link. The mechanism of changing to a wolf was simply a throw-back to the Light World-Dark World mechanism of A Link to the Past, another attempt of Twilight Princess to press the nostalgia button. The wolf segments are easily amongst the most tedious of the game, and each time I was forced to turn into my furry Twilight Realm counterpart, I was counting the seconds before I turned back into a human.
And that concludes my thoughts on The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. While it's a great game that hit the nail on the head in the areas that matter most, specifically in gameplay and dungeon design, it's also disappointing in many ways. The overworld is overly huge and devoid of life, the storyline is unfocused and emotionless, the game's graphics and audio were distinctly dated even back in 2006, and the game is far too easy. But most unfortunate of all, Twilight Princess doesn't have the same feeling of adventure that Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker had before it, as its overworld is much more linear and restrictive than those of its older siblings. And yet, despite all that, it still manages to provide a remarkable adventure, and perhaps it's simply testament to the incredible quality of the Zelda franchise as a whole that a game as good as Twilight Princess manages to come off feeling as a bit of a disappointment. It is, in fact, a great game, a title that will be remembered for all time as one of the best of both the GameCube and the Wii. But in Zelda terms, that is merely average.