The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

I recently finished this the newest installment in the Zelda series on Nintendo Wii. Overall I would rate this game 4 out of 5. The story is good. The controls are good. The graphics are good. The gameplay is good. Everything about this game is good, but not much is great.

The Zelda series is one of the most popular game series of all time, because it is its own genre. The Zelda games are puzzle games, action/adventure games, and role-playing games all in one. Twilight Princess fills all these niches. It is an improvement in many aspects over previous Zelda games. Although you spend a bit of time running back and forth across Hyrule in Twilight Princess, it is no where near a bad as in Ocarina of Time. Not to mention you get Epona (your trusty steed) very early in the game. Epona greatly improves travel times. Also, once you reach a certain point in the game you have the ability to warp between specified warp points.

I feel that some of the previous Zelda titles made some of the solutions to puzzles too ambiguous. Who remembers being trapped in a dungeon while bombing everything and pushing and pulling every object in the room while simultaneously killing every monster over and over and over just to look in Nintendo Power (or the internet) to find out that if you stand in the middle of the room and spin clockwise twice and then once counter-clockwise the doors would open and the princess would throw you a quicky before you went off to kill Gannon. OK, maybe I exaggerate a bit, not to mention deviate on a tangent. So, Twilight Princess has plenty of puzzles and push the buttons in the correct sequence to open the doors type of activities, and all of make sense, at least in Hyrule. None of the solutions are so ambiguous that you need outside help. Unfortunately, none of them are very challenging either. I know that this game's target audience hasn't finished High School, let alone college, but still.

The lack of sufficient challenge carries over to the combat. None of the enemies (regular or Boss) are very difficult to defeat. I was able to go through the entire game without ever dying in combat or using a fairy to revive myself. The only times my life got low was when I jumped off one too many cliffs or into lava too many times.

The above is mostly complaints, but I really don't have many more. Seriously, my only other significant complaint is that the swinging of the wireless Wii controller isn't perfect, so sometimes you swing your sword instead of bashing a critter with your shield. The game designers made the combat so easy that this wasn't ever a matter of life or death, so it was frustrating but not a big deal. That's it everything else about the game was either good or at least not bad.

I had fun playing the game. There are plenty of side projects. Game play is reasonably non-linear. There are a lot of nooks and crannies to explore and discover. Link gets some cool new toys, my favorite was the double hook-shot (although they call it something else in this game). There are some funny characters, and some fun minigames. The fishing is good, not to mention you can lure fish or fish with bait.

I highly doubt I will replay this game from start to finish, however I do intend to go back and finish some of the side projects, as well as explore some more nooks and crannies.

If you have a Wii or a Game Cube, it is definitely worth picking up this game and spending 40 or so hours playing and beating this game.