Twilight Princess

Twilight Princess is a Zelda game that totally tried to make Zelda all dark and edgy when American audiences complained about how cartoony Wind Waker was. So they made Link a Wolf?

I’m about to be pretty critical of this game, but I don’t want to give the impression that I think it’s bad. I just think it has a lot holding it back from being really great.

Twilight Princess is very easy. Like real damn easy. Like oddly conflicting with the dark tone easy. The bosses and minibosses are practically just cinematics in how trivial they are. The dungeon and puzzle difficulty is way less than, say, Ocarina. Everything’s been heavily streamlined.

This, coupled with rather plain aesthetics make a lot of this game very forgettable. This game actually has quite a few minibosses and such that you probably completely forgot about. They were so trivial to defeat that they never made an impression.

Something like the Lakebed Temple is centered around a giant staircase which can be turned to change waterflow. It’s a perfectly fine puzzle, but like… it’s kind of boring? Like the whole dungeon is based on this turning staircase? It’s not that striking. Or memorable. I don’t remember the forest temple at all. The dungeons just aren’t that strong. I remember the Temple of Time in this game because it was really cool and striking and awesome. I want more of that in this game.

The items in this game are all surprisingly not useful. You use them in the dungeon but are rarely used elsewhere. The spinner, ball ‘n chain, second clawshot, even the iron boots are surprising useless. They don’t seem useful as a sort of general adventurer. And let’s face it, the spinner is idiotic, and is based on turning the gameplay into Quick-Time-Events.

One aspect I find pretty amusing is how all the main characters look amazing in this game. Link, Zelda, Midna, Zant, Ganon all look great. And then the NPCs for some reason all look absolutely friggin’ hideous. Random citizen? Bizarre-looking troll. Mini-game salesman? A freakshow. The friendly guy who sells you shaved ice? An abomination.

Lastly, I never quite “got” Midna. People seem to like her character and I have no idea why. She just acts like an asshole to you all game while you do everything for her. And then turns out to be a beautiful woman? I feel like it’s some anime trope or something that I don’t understand.

Again, these are relatively minor gripes. Link controls very well (although the wolf form controls erratically) and it does do the Zelda formula very well. But I do think it misses out on some of that adventurer spirit that other titles capture well.