Ah Hyrule, a magical, wonderful land of spiritedly tunic donning elves, majestic ocean-dwellers, and dopey, umm, rolling rock-things? In its previous incarnation, a cel-shaded paradise, islands nestled shyly inside a vast azure blanket. However, Nintendo were about to shake things up… never content with complying to expectation, Nintendo set out to create to a darker page of hylian history, and they emblazoned this page with the beautifully Gothic, twilight princess…
Now, this wasn’t the first time Nintendo had thrust link into a dark tale, Majora’s mask had done much the same some six years previously, with its misplaced titular apostrophe and twisted parallel setting. Look even further back and you will stumble upon the top down 16-bit horrors of a link to the pasts dark world, in which link is transformed, professor McGonagall style, into a rabbit. In fact; the location isn’t the only link (excuse the pun) between these two instalments, because in twilight princess link, the unlucky sod is reformed into the lupine image of a wolf by the evil Zant, although in this iteration his forced transformation is more of a help than a hindrance.But every Zelda game needs a killer plot, and this tale plays surrogate to the pinnacle of them all. A radical break from tradition for the series, you play as a forest boy, named link, by default at least, and are rather politically incorrectly tasked, along with your floating companion, with rescuing a female… okay time to take off our sarcasm hats, judgement scarves and sneer mittens, because this simple formula was stretched to the limits with TP, the paper thin base plot was reinforced with an iron girder of a depth, from the sudden twists littered along the trail, to the intense cut scenes giving the story momentum.
All of the above, though, would be pointless without a firm spine made of several vertebrates of solid gameplay. “Does it have it then?” I pretend to hear you ask… well yes… yes it does… not only does it have a heaps of fun, ever changing ideas it toys around with, such as the iron boots, an infamous symbol since there inclusion in ocarina of times water temple, being able not only to allow you to sink, but also to cling to certain magnetised walls, it also posies a heap of fun things to do on the side, whilst the hours of side play don’t quite notch up to majora’s masks mask collecting and such, collection all of TPs golden bugs can become something of an obsession, even if the reward is only rupees you won’t be able to hold most of the time… the fishing is given most weight this time round, whilst it was fun trying to get the sinking lure and hylian pike in OOT, twilight princess one ups it by introducing a book of fish to capture and record, whilst Argos may look down on this little pamphlet and laugh, it’s still a nice little catalogue which will help stretch out the play time a bit, and the roll-ball mini game works very well with the Wii’s motion control. Heart pieces are still on the menu as well; although for some reason 5 pieces are now needed to make a full container, so any collect ‘em up nuts can find plenty of things to do.
All in all twilight princess is a stunning game, with 20+ hours of base gameplay and many more to be had on the side, it is a true marvel of development, the only down side I can think of is a small section near the end, involving some statue’s, which should have been smoothed out, and the drop in difficulty due to the games waggle happy control scheme. But this is but a loose thread on a sock, it’s there, but it doesn’t really matter, because this game will suck you in like a like like (whoa that was weird to write) and only spit you out again when your 25 hours older with a huge grin on your face…
-96%-
-Lewis Tremaine
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