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> Completed Twilight Princess
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Jul 1 2007, 11:26 PM
Today I completed The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and I feel I can finally give my thoughts on the game. These thoughts won't include the graphics or input, since I can get past all of those.

First off, this game is long. Without spending too much time on the side quests, I completed the game in about 56 hours. Is the game too long though? Not really. The action kept on coming. Not exactly a non-stop thrill ride, but the numerous dungeons will keep you entertained.

On to the dungeons. They started off nice, but I think they got worse as the game progressed. Every one felt less original than the last. Not to say that they weren't unique, because they were, but it seemed like the puzzles got worse. I think the magnets and iron boots puzzles were the best new addition.

Now on to the characters. Overall I found the character depth disappointing. I never became attached to anyone in the game, except maybe Ilia and the village kids. What I liked about the last two Zelda games was the amount of interaction you had with the characters. In Majora's Mask you learned the character's schedules and performed tasks for them. In Windwaker the islands were richly populated with characters you could talk to, and they'd offer sidequests. So where are the characters in this game? For most of the game you'll alone. The provinces start to become pointless after you finished off the dungeons in them. Nothing brings you back to the town and the people. Midna accompanies you along your journey, but she doesn't offer much. In the beginning she'll help you out when you transform into a wolf, allowing you to reach areas you couldn't otherwise get to. Later on she doesn't do much except allow you to transform. Talking to Midna is another pointless exercise. I tend to pick up the game about once a week, and by then I forgot what I was previously doing. Midna doesn't offer too much guidance for the casual player. I think Castle Town disappointed me the most, as you could interact with less than half of the characters.

I didn't do many of the sidequests of the game. I did the stars game, and I'd collect a bug or poe when I saw one, but that was about it. Some of the sidequests sound fun, like yetti sledding, but others are boring. I hate collecting things in games. All those bugs and poes...yuck. How boring. They also added more pieces of heart to the game, which I didn't bother finding. I think those are just there to consume more time. However, I did spend a lot of time fishing. There also didn't seem to be very many mini-games to choose from.

Transforming into a wolf...cool idea, poorly executed. It started off kind of fun, using your senses to trace scents and find secret digging places. It became annoying switching back and forth between forms though, mostly because you never really found anything good as a wolf. Digging would usually just give you a couple of rupees. Following scents was a cool new addition to gameplay, but you don't use it at all in the last 1/3 of the game. Actually, you didn't really switch into wolf form much at all in the last 1/3 of the game, except for warping, which was annoying since often you'd want to be human and you'd come out of the warp as a wolf.

The weapons in the game were pretty fun. I enjoyed the new additions of the double clawshot, ball and chain, and the spinner (which was awesome). The lantern was a good idea as well. The dominion rod was fun for a while, but became tedious after a while. The bomblings were useless, just like bombchus of the past. The new targeting for the boomerang was also a nice addition. The hawkeye was a nice idea, even though I rarely needed to use it. It was handy in some places, but most of the time your enemies were too close to need it.

I missed some of the classic items, like the lens of truth, magic arrows (hell, magic in general), the feather boots, the mirror shield (my favorite), and the fire tunic. The lack of fire and magic in the game astonished me. The magic armor is a poor replacement for it.

The hidden skills were a great addition to the game, even though it came at the expense of Windwaker's parry move. At least you could do manual parrys and combine them with the hidden skills, so the parry wasn't completely lost.

Music was also sacrificed in this game. I love music, and the lack of being able to play it was a blow to the game, in my opinion. What made OOT great was it combined music and magic, which brought a surreal feeling to the game. Howling like a wolf was annoying (I hate that sound) and unsatisfying.

Boss design was fairly standard and familiar. How many times do I have to hit that damn ball of light that gets thrown at you. Believe it or not, I was actually bored by about half of the boss fights. The final boss (well 4 I guess) was especially so. Both the first and last stages of the fight were lifted straight from OOT. However, stages 2 and 3 were a bit more unique, and relatively fun. There also wasn't a large variety of enemies.

The world itself is rather large, and I'm sure there are still areas of it that I haven't explored, but it is mostly empty.

So in summary, I think the game is good, but only average. The overall game is certainly well-polished and executed, with a great art style and less than immersive gameplay. I think the longest time I could stand playing was about 4 hours. The new additions were great, but I miss some of the charm and character depth of the previous games in the series. The game is definitely worth playing, but probably not replaying. I have a save point before the end that I can use to go back and do the mini-games if the mood strikes me.

Now on a completely unrelated note, I switched browsers from Firefox to Opera, and I couldn't be happier. I still haven't found a replacement for the web developer toobar yet, but at least I'm not using 250k of ram. FU Firefox. If you ever fix your memory leak bug (not likely) and start handling pdf files better maybe I'll come back, but for now I'll stick to Opera and IE7.
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