Zelda: Twilight Princess

So i recently finished Zelda: Twilight Princess on Nintendo Wii. I have to say, it's not a bad game. But, there's something about it that just doesn't sit quite right. I'm not trying to compare it to Ocarina of Time; that was an absolutely amazing game. The story was enthralling, the controls fluid and the temples memorable. Yes, even the Water Temple. I spent HOURS playing through that temple... (ok, it just FELT like hours). But let's face it: when talking about a franchise series like Zelda, it's impossible to do any kind of meaningful review WITHOUT talking about its past incarnations.

Twilight Princess is a completely capable game of its own accord. It's fun, controls are intuitive and the formula is more or less the same (kidnapped princess Zelda, 7 or 8 temples, and Gannon as the final boss). But the thing is, even with all that, it's just... missing something. As far as the Temples go, it still has the oh-so-memorable "Water Temple" that you'll spend more time than you'd care to playing through, but it also has another entry (one players of Link to the Past and other Zelda titles may be remotely familiar with): the Ice Temple. A temple so predictable and concise you'll have guessed the ending at the beginning and verify it in a few short minutes of game play.

It's not that the Ice Temple is easy... on the contrary. Nintendo opted to make up for the brevity by ensuring none of the random enemies inside drop any hearts. So you'll either have to buy the (usually superfluous) health potions or just get used to playing with that annoying beeping sound you get at low hearts.

Anyways, moving on to the game as a whole, if you've played the Zelda games before, you're in for more of the same thing. As stated earlier, Zelda's been kidnapped, Gannon's the bad guy and you, Link, or whatever you choose to name yourself, has to rescue Princess Zelda and restore peace to the land. However, here's where a problem sets in. You only really know this if you've PLAYED other Zeldas before. After you've traveled the land and conquered the myriad of temples littering it, you finally enter the castle of the royal family where Princess Zelda is being held captive by the evil King Gannon. Of course, Gannon has not been mentioned before this point in any meaningful way and Zelda has had a total screen time of a few minutes in the game so far. As a zelda fan, you're happy to see the titular character and the staple bad guy, but i can't help but feel like they were more or less stuck in there at the last second. Now, admittedly, being in the, what? Twelfth installment of the series, it's probably pretty rare to find a gamer who's never heard of Zelda and/or Gannon. But it's still lazy not to include a story that builds up ALL of your characters! It's like watching a movie where the only characters you learn anything about are the ones you knew going into the theatre and everyone else in the movie is just there to piss you off (if you don't know what this is like, see Transformers).

Other things the game did wrong was the whole money issue. Zelda series in general seem to be unable to get this right (i've no idea why, it doesn't SEEM like it should be that difficult). In Zelda 1, you are literally STARVED for rupees while in Twilight Princess you're looking for excuses to spend them. The problem's compounded by the fact that the game awards practically all of your endeavors by showering you with MORE rupees. So much so that you get sick of opening treasure chests after a while. There were a number of times i'd go through an enormous deal of trouble to get to a treasure chest only to find that it contains 100 rupees, not the heart piece i had hoped it would. Because of the games new feature where Link only takes rupees that'll FIT into his wallet, most of these treasures went unopened in my game. Even with the magic armor that actually CONSUMES rupees as you wear it, i was constantly turning down chest after chest. If only real life were this full of riches...

All that being said, the game's not bad. It's still entertaining and probably worth a few dozen hours of game play at the least (more if you do the side quests). But if you're expecting it to be another Ocarina of Time, you'll be pretty disappointed. In fact, you may have to lower your standards a bit in order to fully enjoy this one. But, on the plus side, at least you won't have to spend most of the game sailing.