Ten Days in Hyrule

Today, the 29th of November, marks the tenth day I have had the Wii and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in my house. I'm coming up for air to make a few comments about the console in general and about this, the latest installment in what many -- myself included -- consider the greatest franchise in video game history. I warn you, this will be long.

Wiiiiii!

Although Stephen Colbert was most assuredly paid for this stunt on the Colbert Report earlier in the week, he has it right. The Wii is fun in a box. Everything about it is fun. Great moments in Wii Fun include:

• Discovering the way the Wiimote vibrates ever so slightly and pleasantly when you move your cursor over a button you can click. Seriously, this is an ingenious piece of design and makes it feel like you are completely connected to the user interface.
• Taking turns just playing Wii Sports with one remote at 1:00 in the morning on launch day with my son, my coworker, and my coworker's girlfriend. In this way we learned just how silly we looked while playing, and we discovered we didn't give a damn.
• Chipping in from 74 yards away in Wii Sports Golf.
• Hucking cows for more than 100 yards in Rayman Raving Rabbids -- and then hucking them into the spectator bunnies instead.

Nintendo has hit it out of the park with this console, at least in the short term. The question I can't answer yet is whether it will have legs. It is up to game developers to use the Wiimote/Nunchuck combination in inventive, yet intuitive, ways. They have to give us games that we want to play. Wii Play comes out in January in the US, and it will be a great way to get a third Wiimote and more of those brilliant party games -- but just like the GameCube could not have survived on the strength of the Mario Party series alone, the Wii will have to develop a more impressive catalog.

And discussing the catalog brings me to the game getting the most play in my house right now... The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Liiiiiiiink!

In the weeks leading up to the Wii's launch, I was frantically trying to beat Okami, Clover Studio's otherworldly, gorgeous, inventive PlayStation 2 game that proved they still had the magic after Viewtiful Joe. I didn't beat it, in part because I heard rumors Okami would come out for the Wii and take advantage of the Wiimote. But this is not a review of Okami, it's just my way of getting to point one about Twilight Princess, and that point is a Barenaked Ladies song: It's All Been Done.

See, in Okami, you're a wolf. You can only do wolfish things, and you have a little dude who rides on your head, and he does all the talking for you, and he has a big attitude, and sometimes he seems less helpful than annoying.

In Twilight Princess, you spend part of your time as a wolf. You have a strange Twilit being who rides on your back, and does all the talking for you, and you can't really be sure if she's a help or a hindrance.

In Okami, you have to beat back the creeping darkness of evil in order to restore beauty, light, and flora and fauna to the world.

In Twilight Princess, you have to beat back the creeping darkness of evil in order to restore light and sanity to the world.

Am I saying that the developers at Nintendo ganked ideas from the developers at Clover? No, not exactly. Having spent a lot of time wishing I was a screenwriter and following the film industry, I know that this parallel development thing can happen by total chance. I also know that sometimes an executive gets pitched an idea by somebody he or she hates, but he or she likes the idea and didn't sign anything before getting pitched at a bar or a party or while stuck in an elevator, and some other exec hears about it and buys the script of the poor hack who pitched it originally in order to have something similar come out. The point here is: the two games are very similar.

And that brings me to the thing that makes me sad: I feel as though Okami may be a better Zelda game than Twilight Princess is. Granted, when you're a wolf you can't use a bow and arrow or a hookshot or ride a horse, but you're a wolf with a divine brush and you can paint bombs and the wind and many other things.

Too Much of the Wrong Ingredients

This is not a lukewarm review of Twilight Princess because of the graphics (which are passable, better than the GC) or the music (which is unnecessarily tinny but nostalgic) or the gimmick (I'm okay with the two-worlds concept, it worked fine in Ocarina of Time). It's lukewarm because some of the things I love about Zelda are missing, and some of the things I dislike about it are all too prevalent.

During the first three days in your home village, the game relies extensively on the gamer being a previous Zelda player. If this describes you, you'll have no trouble piecing together what to do about a shopkeeper with a runaway kitty cat, grass that lets you whistle like a hawk, a woman missing a baby basket, troublesome monkeys, and a goofy homemade fishing pole fashioned by a young, bowl-cut blond boy who idolizes you -- all so that you end up with a slingshot.

(Hey, CO peeps still reading after all this time -- it may be worth getting this game JUST for the kittycat AI. But then again, the kittycats in Okami are totally awesome too.)

Anyway. The problem with the first three days is that if you are not a Zelda season ticket holder, you're going to have a bitch of a time getting through it, and you're probably going to need a strategy guide. It used to be that a Zelda game guided you effortlessly through the introductory phases, so that you went into the real game with a good head of steam, feeling like "hey, I can solve these puzzles! I can play this game!"

So I got through the first three days, no sweat. I felt appropriately pleased with myself for being a Zelda girl and not needing any help. And then I did my first stint in wolf form, and was utterly apalled. Why? Because being a wolf consisted of an extended lesson in "how to look at your on-screen map and follow it to the little white dots you have to collect." Out of 12 things to collect, two of them made a halfhearted attempt at being difficult to find, by which I mean I had to break a box or something to get to it even though my map indicator showed I was right on top of it. For a significant portion of the time, I was not looking at anything on the game screen, I was just watching where my little yellow arrow was in relation to the white dots. For the love of King Zora, I may as well have been playing Nethack. 

All right, so I collected my 12 things via the map, which put me face to face with the first spiritual entity of the game.

And I'll be damned if it didn't look, move, and behave just like a spiritual entity from Okami, except that it was 3D rendered and shiny.

Well, the good news about this is that by collecting these things and meeting this spiritual being, I got to go into the first dungeon. My 6 year old knows what a dungeon is. I am a connoiseur of dungeons. The first dungeon was not a total let-down, but it certainly didn't give me that consistent feeling of "Oooh! Now I see! I am smart! Next challenge, please!" that I expect from a Zelda dungeon. Instead of making it so items (small keys, tools, weapons) are the means by which you progress through the dungeon, thus making it so you never end up in a room until you can fight your way through it, the dungeons in Twilight Princess seem to rely on backtracking, forcing you to bang your head against the Wiimote in abject horror while you run around the same set of rooms ten times searching for what you missed. This is fine, once you have the compass, but you don't get the compass until very late in the dungeons in this game, which only further increases the feeling of hopelessness that I've gotten in every dungeon.

Also, some of the gimmicks in the game drive me batshit. I won't spoil by telling you how to use the gimmick, but I will say this: there is a thing you have to do in the second dungeon which makes Link move incredibly slowly and also requires you to readjust how you move Link with the control stick because your perspective changes. At some point as I listened to the monotonous sound of the gimmick device and repeatedly rammed Link into a wall in slow motion, I realized WHY this game has 70 hours of gameplay. It would have been 50, you see, but then this one programmer got himself a brilliant idea....

The icing on the cake is that shortly after the first dungeon I got stuck. I didn't get horrifically stuck, but I did get stuck, and I finally gave in and looked on the Interweb for a game guide, figuring someone might be a ways further than me. Somebody was. And what I learned was that I missed doing something extremely important when I was a wolf -- something I could not go back and do because I cannot change form at will. Technically, yes, I could continue the game without having done this thing, but it was a lot harder. And what's worse? It wasn't that I knew about it and ignored it. I never had any idea that this critical thing, this thing I could only do in wolf form, even existed.

I expect a Zelda game to use the environment and the story to keep me out of dead ends. I don't expect it to lead me by the nose using the map. Twilight Princess fails at the former to such a degree that I went out and bought a damned strategy guide, and it excels at the latter in a way that just kills the buzz of puzzle solving and the momentum of gameplay.

Control Freak

It's obvious to me that Twilight Princess was developed for the GameCube and ported to the Wii. That's all right, because it is indeed righteous to aim the slingshot, boomerang, bow and arrow, and hookshot with the reticle produced when you aim the Wiimote at the TV. But it's not all that. Making it so only one "C button" item can be used at a time, and making it so you have to shift your grip on the Wiimote to switch between those C button items, might outweigh the point and shoot feature in the long run. You can't Z-target with the bow and arrows, but you can with other projectile items, resulting in me just not using the bow and arrow very often. And until I learned how to hold the Wiimote comfortably, I was getting a serious case of carpal tunnel strain after a few hours of gameplay. In the end, if you buy Twilight Princess for the GameCube because you couldn't get a Wii, you are not missing out on enough to really cry about.

Grading on the Curve

Please understand: the worst Zelda game (Majora's Mask, I'm looking right. at. you.) is often a damned sight better than the best third-party adventure game (Starfox Adventures comes to mind). I might not be quite so critical of Twilight Princess if I had not been so smitten with the perfection of Okami right before I started playing. And I will finish the game, and I'll enjoy myself, and my son and I will look back on it fondly as the first time we could just aim the controller at the TV and let fly the arrows of heroism. But I am not going to get on board with the magazines and declare this the best Zelda ever. That title still belongs to Ocarina of Time, and I still have hope I'll one day have a gaming experience that transcends those months in 1999.