“The Legend of Zelda” is a phrase synonymous with excellence in the world of gaming.  It has been with us since the early years and each iteration provides us with hours upon hours of great sword-slashing entertainment.  Twilight Princess is the 13th Legend of Zelda game to hit the market as one of the first games for the Nintendo Wii in 2006.  Originally designed for the GameCube, and then quickly adapted to take advantage of the Wii’s motion controller, Twilight Princess was released on both platforms, but was it premature, or a swashbuckling gem of delight?  Let’s check it out!

Story

Twilight Princess is an epic tale that begins with our classic protagonist Link on a mission from his hometown to deliver a package to Hyrule castle.  Just before he is about to leave, monsters attack the town and several children are captured. Link is then pulled into the Twilight Realm, turned into a wolf, and imprisoned.  Immediately in prison, Link meets Midna, a magical creature native to the realm that helps him escape and sets him on the path to restore nature to Hyrule.

Midna lets Link know that Zant, the king of the Twili, has covered the world in shadows by defeating the Light Spirits that protect Hyrule.  Link must restore the Light Spirits and find the Fused Shadows, powerful magic artifacts that can be used to combat Zant.  The story then takes off and goes through several plot twists, and really, you’ve just got to play the game to see what happens from here.

Design

Like the majority of other Zelda games, Twilight Princess is a single player action-adventure title.  The game took me about 40 hours to complete, and that was without completing any of the side quests.  I imagine there would be at least another 10 hours of game-play if you wanted to tackle those as well.  The game consists of 9 dungeons, and they are huge as each dungeon took me between 2 and 3 hours to complete.  Each dungeon has a different look and feel based either on a particular element, or game-play mechanic.  There are a wide variety of weapons and tools in the game and each dungeon brilliantly requires you to use your entire arsenal to solve the various and sometimes complex puzzles.  The final encounter in each dungeon is epic.  The boss monsters are HUGE and each requires a different tactic to take down.  It’s unfortunate that I was unable to capture footage from each one, because they were all extremely fun to play!  The final boss battle took me a whopping 45 minutes!

The world of Hyrule is massive and running across the entire thing can take quite some time.  Luckily you are provided a horse right from the start, which you can even fight from while riding, and later in the game teleportation becomes available to you to significantly reduce travel time.  There are also a ton of mini games that you could waste hours on including skiing down a mountain, fishing, and riding a canoe.

Gameplay

Twilight Princess is super fun to play, but not from the start.  The first couple of hours kind of serve as a tutorial with you running around town doing minuscule tasks for the local town-folk.  Once you get out of the first town it really takes off and gets exciting for the remainder.

The control scheme was designed to take advantage of the Wii remote’s motion capabilities so you perform different sword swings by swinging the remote certain ways.  You shoot weapons by aiming the remote at the screen.  Unfortunately, I think the game would be better with a standard controller, which you have the option of using.  After some long gaming sessions my wrist was kind of worn out.  The controls are kind of unresponsive sometimes too as I leapt to my death on more than one occasion due to this.

Being an adventure game, Twilight Princess is loaded with puzzles.  The dungeon puzzles require the use of all of your tools, and they require you to navigate multiple floors and multiple rooms to solve them.  Along the same lines, using your tools and weapons are really fun.  Shooting the bow and arrow while riding your horse is a blast, and crossing chasms using your dual grappling hooks rocks!

Presentation

Unfortunately, the graphics in Twilight Princess are pretty bad.  Being that the game was designed to run on the GameCube and then ported to run on the Wii, it doesn’t utilize the full potential of whatever graphical power the Wii is capable of.  The graphics really look aliased, so if you have a big screen TV, it’s not going to look too pretty.  Combined with the fact that the game gets off to a slow start, I was really turned off from the game the first time I played it.  I actually played the first hour and didn’t play it again for several months.  Again, once you get past the first few hours of the game, it gets exponentially more fun.

The music in the game is mediocre.  Lots of times it sounds like simple midi music instead of some of the fully orchestrated tracks we see in so many other games.  Luckily though the music doesn’t really deter your attention from the great game play though.  There also is no real voice work in the game.   Some characters speak in a foreign game language so you don’t know what they are saying anyway.

The game has a ton of cut scenes and those look pretty decent compared to the rest of the graphics in the game, but they are nothing to give props to.

Summary

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is a great game.  Aside from its obviously last-generation graphics and sound, the game-play certainly makes up for it.  It is just so fun trying to figure out how to use your equipment to solve the puzzles and kill the different enemies.  The game has been out for several years now, so you should be able to pick it up pretty cheap at your local video game store.  If you like Zelda games, you’ll love this one.  It has everything you’d want out of an action-adventure game!