It's been close to two years now since The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was released on the Gamecube -- I, of course, being the son-of-a-bitch-bastard-purist that I am decided to go with a regular controller than play with the waggle-fest Wii-remote. (This may or may not have been a mistake now that I've played some of the Wii version; it controls pretty well and is a little more fun, but since I'm so used to the inverted Gamecube game, I spend most of the time accidentally running right into walls, expecting an open doorway to be there. Maybe my brain is just weak. Eh.)
When the game was first announced, I nearly crapped my pants, and for what seemed like ten long years, I waited with feverish anticipation. In hindsight, it seems rather hilarious -- imagine, an sixteen-year old kid, delusions of his own masculinity, star player on his high-school football team, giddy with excitement for a game named Twilight Princess. Doesn't exactly make you feel like a man. Neither does playing football, for that matter.
As a son-of-a-bitch-bastard-purist, passing up the Wii version (which arrived in stores first) in favor of the Gamecube version was the most difficult thing I've done (kind of sad, really). Yes, I took sneaky peeks before I got the game at whether or not Ganondorf was coming back (he was) and whether or not there would be any ice levels (I'm a sucker for snow and the obligatory snow-game-music [see: Metroid Prime], and yes, there were).
But most of all, I wanted to know whether Link would drown in a horrible flooding apocalypse, dying a tragic and heroic death trying to save the world.
I mean, because if that happened, I'd be convinced that my favorite video game series of all time would reach literary new heights.
It didn't.
Instead, it went in a different direction.
Hindsight is key here. When I first plugged in the game, I pretty much knew what I was going to get: same swordplay, same dungeon-crawling, same exploration. Really, this isn't a bad thing -- the swordplay was excellent, the dungeons were extremely clever (albeit easy), and with a massive world to uncover, the feeling of exploration was never better. The game was polished and refined beyond anything else on the market.
Each installment in the Zelda series, however, tries to do something unique, thus justifying its reason for existing at all. Of course, any game series main objective is to make money, but Zelda always has seemed to have larger aspirations than simply being a money-maker.
Which is why Twilight Princess seems foreign to me.
The game goes deeper than just a retread. Really, it desires solely to be an homage to the entire series, Ocarina of Time specifically. As such, Twilight Princess never does anything new or innovative or has any annoying talking hats (oh, wouldn't that have been GODLY!) -- and worse, it's completely conscious of both its actions and existence.
Believe me, despite what your inner nerd denies, this game has its problems. I had to literally pry the rose-tinted glasses off my face in order to see it, but this game is freaking tedious. I mean, the only reason I really endured those stupid bug quests was to get on to the better parts. It's like eating a bowl of Lucky Charms, where eating the okay-tasting cardboard-like oat-things first will only lead to the sweet savory taste of the marshmallows.
Twilight Princess gets better in its final acts, where it confirms the player's suspicions all along -- that this is the game you've been playing all these years, just in a different flavor and without all the talking hats (oh, how I WISH! Ezlo in 3D! My GOD. I'm drooling buckets.). Ganondorf is behind all of the events in the game, and Link saves the world. Again.
In the end, I guess I just wanted Twilight Princess to rise to literary greatness, instead remaining a mere video game. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Being a video game ain't half bad.
POST SCRIPT: I don't agree with the entirety of this review, but the author does make some good arguments about the subtleties of the game in general. Argh, but it makes my inner fanboy cry.
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