Totally this game. This one. With the wolf
Yes, I'm of course talking about Okami, a hugely underrated gem from 2006, where you play as Amaterasu, the Japanese goddess of light reincarnated as a white wolf returned to Earth to save the world from darkness. You use this magical brush to wipe out enemies, restore life to Earth, and other magical feats. It's a stunning cel-shaded game with this really distinct Japanese inspired art style. I picked it up immediately after it launched after I saw a preview for it on X-Play, which was at the time my favorite TV show because I was a loser. I had never seen anything else that looked like it, and...
Wait...something's not right. This isn't a Zelda game. It's one of those "Like Zelda, but..." games, in the vein of Darksiders, Beyond Good and Evil, and Similar but Distinctly Different from Zelda: The Game. Sorry, I meant Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Sea.
Original character, do not steal
Those aren't Zelda games. Zelda games don't have weird animal gimmicks. Lets start this proper. *Ahem*
Wait, what's that wolf thing?
So this has a wolf thing too? Well, at least you guys can hopefully understand the confusion. Also, I'm sure these jokes would have worked much better in a video. Regardless, in 2006 there was ANOTHER adventure game where you play as a hero turned into a wolf with a sassy sidekick saving the world from darkness. This one is a little more well known because people actually, y'know, played it. Only like two people I know personally, but I'm sure this game has more than dozens of fans like Okami does. It's an odd mistress, this one, because while it was originally developed for the ill fated, low selling Nintendo GameCube, it was re-purposed to be released on their new console, the Nintendo Revolution Wii. And despite being originally slated to come out on the GameCube, it actually came out on the Wii BEFORE it got a GameCube release. Heralded as a glorified update of Ocarina of Time, this game is rated incredibly high among critics and fans alike. And I have but one question: Why?
At The Time/Background
Lets just get this out in the open: the Wii is a console for kids that had maybe four games worth anyone's time, all of which were about Mario and none of which were about the awful "innovation" that motion controls brought along with it. It's the real reason that Nintendo has garnered the reputation of only making games for children while all the grown up gamers have taken their Dorito dusted fingers over to other console. Yes, Wii Sports was fun the first couple times I played it. Yes, even my Grandma played the Wii. And games should be fun; there is no limit to when a gamer should start playing games nor is there such a thing as being too old for them. All I'm saying is that the Wii was and forever will be a gimmick console that sold on gimmicks alone and barely had a library to back it up. The Wii sold gangbusters despite itself (being nearly $200 cheaper than your competition will do that), with it's awful, vaguely racist marketing, it's lackluster library of shovelware games like Ninjabread Man, Chicken Shoot, and Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and an absolutely abysmal third-party game selection. Seriously, if you wanted any of the "Big AAA Gaming" titles that came out between 2005-2010 you were shit out of luck if you only had a Wii. Want to play Skyrim? How about an Assassin's Creed game? Maybe you want to play Batman: Arkham Asylum? Better save up that allowance and get yourself an Xbox 360 kid, because Bethesda, Rocksteady, and Ubisoft aren't playing that motion control bullshit.
Now despite my complete distaste for motion controls and my lack of respect for the console as a whole, the Wii does have a very small, very particular library of games I like. Super Mario Galaxy is my favorite 3D Mario game, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is about as close to a good FPS as you'll get on the console, Super Smash Bros Brawl is the only game I even wanted for my Wii, and New Super Mario Bros Wii is fun, I guess. But the Wii my family owned was used more for Wii Fit and Wii Bowling than anything else. This led me to using my own "I've got a job now, I'm a big boy" money to buy myself an Xbox 360. That's right, for the second generation in a row, I was a traitor to my preference, deciding that a $300 console was much more affordable to a part time pizza boy than my precious Playstation loyalty and the $600 price tag that came with it. And despite my immense hatred for Microsoft, the price had me swayed swayed.
In The Beginning
We open to a scene of Link on horseback riding around Hyrule field. Seems a bit familiar, does it not? Maybe, in playing all of these Zelda games, we have ourselves traveled back in time to Ocarina of Time and are witnessing what it actually looked like underneath those limited N64 textures.
When you start the game up, we are greeted to a cutscene of you talking to some horribly disfigured man about how at night you can feel spirits. After that really weird, one-sided conversation, this guy tells you he was supposed to deliver something to Hyrule Castle. But apparently he can't go and asks you to go in his place. You silently agree, and leave to your house. You awaken the next day, and go wrangle some goats because this is a Zelda game after all, and what would a Zelda game be without...goat...wrangling.
Something seems off here, am I sure this is the right game? Yes? Okay...
So, you wrangle the goats, go home again and...go to sleep?? You wake up to find four horribly disfigured children outside your house talking about a slingshot.
Jesus Christ, did they go through a wood chipper?
You go buy it, stop a goat from escaping, get a wooden sword and a fishing rod, and then get magically transported into a dark dimension by some weird hand that pulls you into a wall of darkness. You are then transformed into a wolf, locked in a jail cell, and left to die.
Some imp named Midna shows up to make fun of you because she is mean. She calls you a baka and tells you that she doesn't really want to help you get out of prison (despite leading you out herself), escape back to the light dimension (even though she helps you do it), or save your own world (even though she is going to). You escape prison, fight some stuff and travel back into the light dimension. Despite this, you are still a wolf. A
The Quest
Your job now is to guide Midna to gain the fuse shadows to remake...something. I'm still not really sure, it's like a helmet that unleashes her godlike powers? Anyway, you do this and then get attacked by Zant, the baddie for this round of adventures. He takes your fuse shadow shards, turns you back into a wolf and curses Midna in an attempt to kill her. She tells you to get to Zelda
You run to Hyrule Castle in a desperate attempt to safe her. You reach Zelda and she recognizes you as the bearer of the Tri-Force of Courage. She saves Midna's life and points you in the direction of the Master Sword, which will break the curse keeping you a wolf, and the Mirror of Twilight, the only thing that can stop Zant and his brand of dark magic.
Once you get to the ruined Temple of Time (yeah, call backs baby), you are met with an admittedly difficult puzzle, a first for the Zelda franchise. Once inside, you retrieve the sword, transform, and set off for the mirror. Except...the mirror is broken. And the pieces are scattered across Hyrule spreading evil. The power is corrupting the world around it.
You venture into the desert, going into an absolutely awesome dungeon with a sweet gimmick involving the new Spinner weapon. You grind on rails and hop across gaps to other tracks. It's really neat and I wish it came up more in the game.
After that, you catch a fish and follow an Abominable Snow Beast to his...mansion? With his...sick wife. What the hell happened to this game? Anyway, you go to this mansion because he has a mirror shard in their room. He goes to make soup while his wife sits on the couch sick. She sends you all over the mansion, not really remembering where her room is, until she suddenly remembers. Along the way you get a Ball and Chain which is the greatest weapon in the history of video games. Do you know how awesome it is to bowl over a bunch of enemies with a giant wrecking ball? It's amazing.
Anyway, she leads you into her room, looks in the mirror, and she get's corrupted. You fight her and feel really bad because she is cute and adorable and you hit her with a giant wrecking ball.
You return to the ruined Temple of Time, where reinserting the sword brings out a mystical stairway that takes you through a beautiful temple filled with fun puzzles and these weird bells throughout the stage. What are these for? Well, when you ascend the temple to the tippy top, you get a rod that allows you to give life to statues. You use the bells to transport them to lower levels. You fight a giant spider, smashing it with the statues around it. It's neat
Once you leave this temple, your abomination of a companion Ooccoo tells you that your staff was supposed to have the ability to fly to the land in the sky.
Just look at that hideous beast
This is where the game decides it needs to be longer and adds a fetch quest. The game has you collect things to jog the memory of your friend Ilia, the least awful looking human model in the game. You go to a doctor to deliver a bill (yes, really), you smell a spot in a room to track down a stick (yes, really), and you go to an abandoned village to meet an old lady who has been waiting for you her entire life. She gives you a thing, you touch a statue, you go find 6 more statues, you collect letters from the ancient Hylian alphabet (yes, REALLY), and then finally, FINALLY you find a cannon. You launch yourself into the sky and become knock-off Spider-Man when you get two clawshots and fling yourself across the skies.
You put the mirror together, go to the twilight realm, touch some stuff, fight Zant and then...well, you know how this goes. Tri-Force, Ganon, the Hylian Gods. It's just the same old thing that it has been for the past five games. Then it's over. Yep. It's that anticlimactic
Lets just talk about the dungeons I guess. There's a lot of them. The first three or so are super unmemorable and I hate them. The latter dungeons are cooler with cool items that don't follow the whole Forest Temple, Fire Temple, Water Temple template that all Zelda games ever follow. But these first few are a total chore. That's why I didn't bother touching on them during the quest recap, they're just...nothing. Weightless, even more so than the dungeons in past games. They introduce mechanics that are used maybe once afterwards. I don't even remember the bosses, which if there's a level where I forget the boss fight, it was a bust.
The forgetability of the first few bosses is a real bummer because once you get to the Yeti House, the boss battles that follow are great. Starting with the ball and chain guard in a cramped hallway, the game's creativity for these fight ramps up tenfold. And yes, that's how boss battles in games should work; you start easy and get progressively harder. But since the difficulty curve of this game never really goes beyond "better keep a fairy in a jar just in case!", the game suffers from most of them just not being interesting. But yeah, ice temple and beyond just has cool gimmicks for the fights and just the right amount of tension. The final fight in particular, while clunky because they still haven't gotten controls for Epona working all that great, does feel like a final fight. It's grandiose. Unfortunately it does feel like a rehash and that you've been cheated out of something because well...the main bad guy is just a pawn. They pull the ol' switcharoo on you with maybe an hour left in the game and just kind of dump Zant on the curb. And while I didn't think Zant was anything special in terms of character, it was nice to have someone different for a change.
Five of the six game we've played for this have had Ganon as the final encounter. That's not really a problem. It's not even really a problem that they do the switcharoo if it's done right, like it was in Link to the Past. But here, it's just seems lazy. Like the developers decided Zant just couldn't carry the game on his own. There's so little build besides a few throwaway lines about "the power", which are highlighted in bold so they must be an allusion to Ganon. It just seems cheap and I don't like it. It would be different if like, the twist was that Ganon was the main bad guy and Zant was the puppet master in the end, because that's sort of unexpected. Or if you fought Zant, then Ganon, then an even MORE powerful version of Zant. Just something outside of the typical stuff would have been welcome for me. And it's not because I dislike the Zelda formula by any means; I've played through and (mostly) enjoyed 5 of these games that follow this story pattern. It has nothing to do with it being over done or stale. It's just that when you promise something different, and then just go back to the old story at the end it feels like they were afraid to stray. As if they didn't just make a game where you play as a wolf for 40% of it in a series who's previous game looked like a Pixar movie gave birth to that kids show about the pirates
The CriticismYou put the mirror together, go to the twilight realm, touch some stuff, fight Zant and then...well, you know how this goes. Tri-Force, Ganon, the Hylian Gods. It's just the same old thing that it has been for the past five games. Then it's over. Yep. It's that anticlimactic
Lets just talk about the dungeons I guess. There's a lot of them. The first three or so are super unmemorable and I hate them. The latter dungeons are cooler with cool items that don't follow the whole Forest Temple, Fire Temple, Water Temple template that all Zelda games ever follow. But these first few are a total chore. That's why I didn't bother touching on them during the quest recap, they're just...nothing. Weightless, even more so than the dungeons in past games. They introduce mechanics that are used maybe once afterwards. I don't even remember the bosses, which if there's a level where I forget the boss fight, it was a bust.
The forgetability of the first few bosses is a real bummer because once you get to the Yeti House, the boss battles that follow are great. Starting with the ball and chain guard in a cramped hallway, the game's creativity for these fight ramps up tenfold. And yes, that's how boss battles in games should work; you start easy and get progressively harder. But since the difficulty curve of this game never really goes beyond "better keep a fairy in a jar just in case!", the game suffers from most of them just not being interesting. But yeah, ice temple and beyond just has cool gimmicks for the fights and just the right amount of tension. The final fight in particular, while clunky because they still haven't gotten controls for Epona working all that great, does feel like a final fight. It's grandiose. Unfortunately it does feel like a rehash and that you've been cheated out of something because well...the main bad guy is just a pawn. They pull the ol' switcharoo on you with maybe an hour left in the game and just kind of dump Zant on the curb. And while I didn't think Zant was anything special in terms of character, it was nice to have someone different for a change.
Five of the six game we've played for this have had Ganon as the final encounter. That's not really a problem. It's not even really a problem that they do the switcharoo if it's done right, like it was in Link to the Past. But here, it's just seems lazy. Like the developers decided Zant just couldn't carry the game on his own. There's so little build besides a few throwaway lines about "the power", which are highlighted in bold so they must be an allusion to Ganon. It just seems cheap and I don't like it. It would be different if like, the twist was that Ganon was the main bad guy and Zant was the puppet master in the end, because that's sort of unexpected. Or if you fought Zant, then Ganon, then an even MORE powerful version of Zant. Just something outside of the typical stuff would have been welcome for me. And it's not because I dislike the Zelda formula by any means; I've played through and (mostly) enjoyed 5 of these games that follow this story pattern. It has nothing to do with it being over done or stale. It's just that when you promise something different, and then just go back to the old story at the end it feels like they were afraid to stray. As if they didn't just make a game where you play as a wolf for 40% of it in a series who's previous game looked like a Pixar movie gave birth to that kids show about the pirates
This one. I didn't know the name, I had to google it.
Jesus, where do we begin.
For starters, this game is UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGLY. Even for the time and even with the "update", the models are absolutely hideous. What Wind Waker did to improve the visuals Twilight Princess has successfully erased just as fast. Link is about the only appealing model in the game. From the townsfolk to the Gorons, this has the worst visual style I've seen since I saw Food Fight.
And I know this whole project I've been like "Oh man, get dark Zelda. Let's have some consequence in the fight for the fate of the world" but you can be dark and not be bleak. Look at Link to the Past. I know I complained that the world shouldn't be purple, but I'll take a nice colourful "dark world" with some more evil atmosphere in music and tone over...well, this.
It's just all bloom and drab colours drowned out with more bloom. Link to the Past at least has the excuse of being limited by the 16-bit system's palate and capabilities. This is just bleak. You could argue it's a stylistic choice; the real world isn't sunshine and rainbows after all. But if you go that route, it's a choice I didn't enjoy and don't approve of.
Storywise, it is darker than all of the other Zelda games except maybe Majora's Mask, and that opinion depends on which side of the "Game Theory" you sit about the game being about coping with death. But even if this IS the darkest of the games, then it undercuts it's own serious points. I don't want to talk too much about them to avoid spoiling things for people who haven't played, but there is some "death" in this game that just...isn't really death. The consequences disappear as fast as they show up. And I don't mean like in Dragon Ball where they just get wished back to life. It's one of those "oh, that? No, they're fine now" types of situations. And when it happened I was like "Oh shit, this is what I'm talking about!" But one dungeon later and they're back, fine, and everything is just swept under the rug. That's bullshit.
There is some imagery that I guess could be considered creepy, but really it's just ugly. There's a lot of "nope" in this game, but not for the conventional reasons of being a nope. Let me try to explain what I mean: Jump scares are nope worthy. Horrifying tension is nope worthy. Inevitable challenge can be nope worthy. An overweight male clown running a cannon shop in a tube top is not worthy of nope status, but because of how it looks it becomes a nope. It's nope because it's gross and ugly, not because it's dark or foreboding.
There is some imagery that I guess could be considered creepy, but really it's just ugly. There's a lot of "nope" in this game, but not for the conventional reasons of being a nope. Let me try to explain what I mean: Jump scares are nope worthy. Horrifying tension is nope worthy. Inevitable challenge can be nope worthy. An overweight male clown running a cannon shop in a tube top is not worthy of nope status, but because of how it looks it becomes a nope. It's nope because it's gross and ugly, not because it's dark or foreboding.
*fearful screeching*
And I probably come off as some edge lord talking about how the game should be darker; and a hypocrite for complaining that the world is bleak and lacks any interesting colour or imagery. But it is about a world of darkness taking over the light world. Actual, literal darkness is threatening to overtake the entire planet. So forgive me for being upset that the worlds themselves are all boring but this game has a girl who has no friends who lives in a castle and invites bugs to hang out with her. It has moments of fun and colourful wonder that have always helped keep the Zelda franchise appealing. This lacks most of them. And in this case, you can't have both. They don't balance here and I'm not even sure Nintendo could have balanced them if they tried.
What's that? The musician hasn't mentioned the games soundtrack once? Maybe it's because there is none to speak of? The intro title song and Hyrule Field are good, but the rest when they show up are just rehashes of older songs. And minus the boss music when you fight a dragon (by the way, you fight a dragon), none of it feels grand or epic. In fact, when the music is prominent, it's annoying; like when you use the canon or when you find the Ooccoo in a dungeon. I am not a fan.
What I AM a fan of, however, is the combat system. It flows so well this time around you'd almost think it was designed to be an evolution of the games that came before it and not some silly motion control garbage. Throughout your adventure, you find these howling stones that let you howl and summon a golden wolf. You find said wolf in human form to learn new fighting techniques. And they are awesome. They make the combat so much more engaging and give you a ton of options. The finishing blow brings the down-stab from Zelda 2 and Super Smash Bros fame and puts it in a game people actually want to play. It gives you tactical advantages against shielded or armored enemies. You can easily get around enemies that are always guarding from the front. You can stun enemies that give you a hassle. And you have options to reduce hordes when you get surrounded. And then there's mortal draw, which deals only death. It makes you feel so unbelievably powerful that I can't believe they didn't think to have this in a game before it. Some of this was probably done to accommodate for the motion controls, and does make the game a fair bit easier than it probably should be. But it's fun. And I'll take fun and functional over frustrating and boring.
And this is in a Zelda game! Not a dungeon crawler, or a Gauntlet game where that kind of thing is the norm. It fantastic and needs to be built upon. More combo choices I say! More fighting mechanics! I just want more!
A lot of the new items you get do end up being really cool, if less than practical more often then not. The Spinner is a really neat item that literally is only used three times. THREE TIMES. The Dominion Rod is introduced to take the place of the mind control song from Wind Waker, but it is used in one dungeon and to solve a fetch quest. It's talked up like it's going to be useful, and that it's a rod that grants flight, but it does...nothing. The Ball and Chain is the most empowering weapon ever created and you can't help but feel like a complete badass whenever you use it. It is slow, but man when you hit something, it's not getting back up.
The real shine for the items is on the dual hookshot, that lets you be less cool Spider-Man. You can climb the unclimbable, scale the unscalable, and fight a goddamn dragon in the sky. It's the best item in the game and makes it go from an average game to a slightly above average game.
And with that, I guess that's it. Twilight Princess is just alright. It's far from bad, even if I don't make it sound that way. But after the other games that all caught me and hooked me, this one just couldn't do the same. There's something about the whole atmosphere of the game is just off to me. It lacks...something that the other games had. It's hard to put my finger on exactly why I couldn't get into this, but I just couldn't. It could be because this game is significantly longer than the previous entries, nearly doubling the time of Wind Waker, a game I also complained was not long enough. It could be because the first half of the game leaves a lot to be desired as far as dungeon design. It could be because the visuals are a huge turnoff to me. It could be because the story is much more invasive this time around. That was a problem that I had with Wind Waker but to a much smaller degree. The game didn't stop me after each dungeon to go on a monologue about why this is important and how important Link is. It felt like the worst parts of a Christopher Nolan movie, where the game tries to tell you what you're doing is super important instead of just letting you feel it. Majora's Mask did this right with the moon being a symbol for the fate of the world. When the castle gets sealed away by magic in this one, it has a hint of that story telling approach, but at that point it's too little too late.
Overall, big picture, this is the worst of the Zelda games I have played for the series. Not nearly as bad as Adventures of Link, but not on the level of the others. I love Link's design, I love the combat system, and I learned to love Midna. The last couple of dungeons are fun and a couple of the characters are charming. But on the whole, I didn't enjoy this. It does the usual 3D Zelda trend where the first 3/4 of the game is a boring pain in the ass, and then the last 1/4 is good. But this is 25 hours of tedium and boredom for 5 hours of quality content and that is just not okay for me. It was a chore; a hurdle to jump over to get to the final stop on the Zelda Project train. Arbitrary rating of 5 out of 10. Sorry fans of the game, I just didn't like it. As the inside joke between my friends goes: I'm a little gay. But not as gay as Twilight Princess.
So we've come to the end, ladies and gentlemen. The big one is next. And, as I write this, I've put in about 20 hours and have next to nothing to show for it; and trust me when I say that that is not a bad thing for once. It's what kept this review waiting. It's what this whole project was supposed to build to back in March. I don't care that it took me this long to get to it because I'm addicted, and we'll see how this plays out. Breath of the Wild is here and the next time your eyes and this site meet, I'll be reviewing it.
And this is in a Zelda game! Not a dungeon crawler, or a Gauntlet game where that kind of thing is the norm. It fantastic and needs to be built upon. More combo choices I say! More fighting mechanics! I just want more!
A lot of the new items you get do end up being really cool, if less than practical more often then not. The Spinner is a really neat item that literally is only used three times. THREE TIMES. The Dominion Rod is introduced to take the place of the mind control song from Wind Waker, but it is used in one dungeon and to solve a fetch quest. It's talked up like it's going to be useful, and that it's a rod that grants flight, but it does...nothing. The Ball and Chain is the most empowering weapon ever created and you can't help but feel like a complete badass whenever you use it. It is slow, but man when you hit something, it's not getting back up.
The real shine for the items is on the dual hookshot, that lets you be less cool Spider-Man. You can climb the unclimbable, scale the unscalable, and fight a goddamn dragon in the sky. It's the best item in the game and makes it go from an average game to a slightly above average game.
And with that, I guess that's it. Twilight Princess is just alright. It's far from bad, even if I don't make it sound that way. But after the other games that all caught me and hooked me, this one just couldn't do the same. There's something about the whole atmosphere of the game is just off to me. It lacks...something that the other games had. It's hard to put my finger on exactly why I couldn't get into this, but I just couldn't. It could be because this game is significantly longer than the previous entries, nearly doubling the time of Wind Waker, a game I also complained was not long enough. It could be because the first half of the game leaves a lot to be desired as far as dungeon design. It could be because the visuals are a huge turnoff to me. It could be because the story is much more invasive this time around. That was a problem that I had with Wind Waker but to a much smaller degree. The game didn't stop me after each dungeon to go on a monologue about why this is important and how important Link is. It felt like the worst parts of a Christopher Nolan movie, where the game tries to tell you what you're doing is super important instead of just letting you feel it. Majora's Mask did this right with the moon being a symbol for the fate of the world. When the castle gets sealed away by magic in this one, it has a hint of that story telling approach, but at that point it's too little too late.
Overall, big picture, this is the worst of the Zelda games I have played for the series. Not nearly as bad as Adventures of Link, but not on the level of the others. I love Link's design, I love the combat system, and I learned to love Midna. The last couple of dungeons are fun and a couple of the characters are charming. But on the whole, I didn't enjoy this. It does the usual 3D Zelda trend where the first 3/4 of the game is a boring pain in the ass, and then the last 1/4 is good. But this is 25 hours of tedium and boredom for 5 hours of quality content and that is just not okay for me. It was a chore; a hurdle to jump over to get to the final stop on the Zelda Project train. Arbitrary rating of 5 out of 10. Sorry fans of the game, I just didn't like it. As the inside joke between my friends goes: I'm a little gay. But not as gay as Twilight Princess.
So we've come to the end, ladies and gentlemen. The big one is next. And, as I write this, I've put in about 20 hours and have next to nothing to show for it; and trust me when I say that that is not a bad thing for once. It's what kept this review waiting. It's what this whole project was supposed to build to back in March. I don't care that it took me this long to get to it because I'm addicted, and we'll see how this plays out. Breath of the Wild is here and the next time your eyes and this site meet, I'll be reviewing it.
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