Me and My Shadow
Jul. 7th, 2009 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnFor a long time, as far as I was concerned, "Zelda" was just the noise that people made when they sneezed with a pair of pliers clamped around their nose*. I'd only ever played Link's Awakening a bit on a friend's Gameboy, and even then I only got to complete it in about 2000 when I discovered emulation. But one of the games that we got with Whitney's brother's Gamecube was Twilight Princess, and we completed it just before I fell chronically ill.
It's one of those titles that have a mild case of the (seemingly rather popular now) layout that starts you off in one game and then throws you into a completely different one shortly afterwards. Granted, nobody who actually knew the premise of the game would be caught out by this, but coming at it with very little knowledge whatsoever, it was a very large surprise to be ripped out of the usual mundane start quests of making a cup of tea and going out to get a bag of flour for villagers, suddenly turned into a wolf and thrown into a dungeon in another dimension, and aided in your escape by a little imp-thing called Midna who then follows you throughout the rest of the game.
The presentation of the twilight sections - which you have to switch in and out of from the normal world a few times near the start of the game - is oddly Tron-like, with very blocky edges and circuit board-like lines over everything, and inhabited by unnatural creatures like giant birds with their heads sort of inverted into flower shapes. When anything emerges into the world it's built up from a shower of twitching black squares. The whole thing is really made to look like an unnatural "rip" in the game.
Only having played this one and a prequel that I would guess was from about 1996, though my sense of time is a bit skewed these days (actually, on checking, it was 1993 - help), it was interesting to see how the elements of the game I remembered had survived while being transplanted into a more complex three dimensional environment. The general idea is still much the same - you have an overworld with various little quests, and are propelled through various actual "levels" now and again to retrieve various items for the main storyline. And those levels still have the same mood as before - there are various clearly distinct rooms with individual puzzles of various levels of obtuseness in each one, although they're obviously no longer limited to one top-down screen - and you gradually hack and puzzle your way through, collecting items to give yourself new abilities, keys to open locked doors, and so on. Each one has a mid-boss and real-boss, which are often very creative in getting you to use the ability that you've just picked up in that dungeon.
Most of the actual plot is a bit of an obvious excuse to poke you through the dungeons, gathering the three pieces of the Crown or the Mirror and so on, but there was one part of it that I thought was especially well done. The cut-scene begins right at the start of this video, but I think you only need to watch from about 2:30 to understand what's going on. Up until this point, Midna hasn't really been a friend or an enemy - she guides you a bit when you're first turned into a wolf, and you do need her help, but she's also taking advantage of you for herself. But after a while of being talked smugly down to, you sort of grow a bit attached to her, and to suddenly show this oddly cute-in-ugliness creature screaming as she's absorbed by the light... I honestly jumped back a bit. After that cut-scene, you're sent back into the game with her clinging weakly to your back, all the colour drained out of her - it really feels very urgent that you have to save her. That was a real turning point for me. At the end of the game she reverts to her normal uncursed form, which isn't an improvement if you ask me.
If I had to pick out something I really didn't like about the game, I'd have to bring up the absolutely tragic shortage of wallet space. Most game characters can carry around half a B&Q catalogue in their trousers, and Link has no trouble hauling around a massive number of ability-granting tools, but is let down by the miniscule amount of money he can carry around. You start off with a limit of 300 rupees, and you can expand this to 600 and then to 1000 by traipsing around the country collecting glowing insects for an unsettlingly demented girl in the castle town, but your capacity is never enough - you always seem to be near the limit, so much that you tend to start ignoring any dropped money out of habit. The way that something as simple as bottles are such rare items is irritating as well from a logical standpoint, though you would admittedly be able to carry far too much potion around if there were more than four of them in the entire game.
Unfortunately, the message that I took away after finishing this game was that I'm now rubbish at games. Frequently, we would come up against barriers to progress and I would try everything that I could think of to get past, then Whitney - my trusted guide - would eventually read up on how to get past the latest locked door or obstacle from GameFAQs, and the solution always turned out to be something distressingly obvious like rolling against the precarious-looking pillar with a boulder on it, or using the wind boomerang on the great big fan-like object overhead. Who said that modern games are all too easy - they've just evolved gradually over time to compensate for my deteriorating brain.
* Not tested by experiment
It's one of those titles that have a mild case of the (seemingly rather popular now) layout that starts you off in one game and then throws you into a completely different one shortly afterwards. Granted, nobody who actually knew the premise of the game would be caught out by this, but coming at it with very little knowledge whatsoever, it was a very large surprise to be ripped out of the usual mundane start quests of making a cup of tea and going out to get a bag of flour for villagers, suddenly turned into a wolf and thrown into a dungeon in another dimension, and aided in your escape by a little imp-thing called Midna who then follows you throughout the rest of the game.
The presentation of the twilight sections - which you have to switch in and out of from the normal world a few times near the start of the game - is oddly Tron-like, with very blocky edges and circuit board-like lines over everything, and inhabited by unnatural creatures like giant birds with their heads sort of inverted into flower shapes. When anything emerges into the world it's built up from a shower of twitching black squares. The whole thing is really made to look like an unnatural "rip" in the game.Only having played this one and a prequel that I would guess was from about 1996, though my sense of time is a bit skewed these days (actually, on checking, it was 1993 - help), it was interesting to see how the elements of the game I remembered had survived while being transplanted into a more complex three dimensional environment. The general idea is still much the same - you have an overworld with various little quests, and are propelled through various actual "levels" now and again to retrieve various items for the main storyline. And those levels still have the same mood as before - there are various clearly distinct rooms with individual puzzles of various levels of obtuseness in each one, although they're obviously no longer limited to one top-down screen - and you gradually hack and puzzle your way through, collecting items to give yourself new abilities, keys to open locked doors, and so on. Each one has a mid-boss and real-boss, which are often very creative in getting you to use the ability that you've just picked up in that dungeon.
Most of the actual plot is a bit of an obvious excuse to poke you through the dungeons, gathering the three pieces of the Crown or the Mirror and so on, but there was one part of it that I thought was especially well done. The cut-scene begins right at the start of this video, but I think you only need to watch from about 2:30 to understand what's going on. Up until this point, Midna hasn't really been a friend or an enemy - she guides you a bit when you're first turned into a wolf, and you do need her help, but she's also taking advantage of you for herself. But after a while of being talked smugly down to, you sort of grow a bit attached to her, and to suddenly show this oddly cute-in-ugliness creature screaming as she's absorbed by the light... I honestly jumped back a bit. After that cut-scene, you're sent back into the game with her clinging weakly to your back, all the colour drained out of her - it really feels very urgent that you have to save her. That was a real turning point for me. At the end of the game she reverts to her normal uncursed form, which isn't an improvement if you ask me.
If I had to pick out something I really didn't like about the game, I'd have to bring up the absolutely tragic shortage of wallet space. Most game characters can carry around half a B&Q catalogue in their trousers, and Link has no trouble hauling around a massive number of ability-granting tools, but is let down by the miniscule amount of money he can carry around. You start off with a limit of 300 rupees, and you can expand this to 600 and then to 1000 by traipsing around the country collecting glowing insects for an unsettlingly demented girl in the castle town, but your capacity is never enough - you always seem to be near the limit, so much that you tend to start ignoring any dropped money out of habit. The way that something as simple as bottles are such rare items is irritating as well from a logical standpoint, though you would admittedly be able to carry far too much potion around if there were more than four of them in the entire game.Unfortunately, the message that I took away after finishing this game was that I'm now rubbish at games. Frequently, we would come up against barriers to progress and I would try everything that I could think of to get past, then Whitney - my trusted guide - would eventually read up on how to get past the latest locked door or obstacle from GameFAQs, and the solution always turned out to be something distressingly obvious like rolling against the precarious-looking pillar with a boulder on it, or using the wind boomerang on the great big fan-like object overhead. Who said that modern games are all too easy - they've just evolved gradually over time to compensate for my deteriorating brain.
* Not tested by experiment
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-08 02:44 am (UTC)Edit: There's not a lot of actual substance I can add to this since I'm still only about two and a half hours in, sadly. Things I can say so far, just from the extreme beginning of the game:
* Turning into a furry is awesome
* I don't like my horse, and I don't like the segments they put in the game to make me use her (like those gates that you have to jump on her.) Being But Thou Musted to give up my sword in exchange for a chance to go apologize to someone to get my horse back really wasn't a good trade. I was unhappy about that, though that bit ended somewhat unexpectedly.
* They dropped all the villagers on me all at once and I still haven't quite caught up with who's who yet. When there are fetch quests involving "I think my mom has the fishing rod you're looking for," it'd be nice to know who the Hell your mom is. Because of this, I wasn't quite as upset when the girl who was apparently my childhood friend or love interest or something got shot as the game probably wanted me to be. I mean, at that point, I still pretty much only knew her as the girl who took my horse, which I didn't even really want back but had no choice.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-08 01:00 pm (UTC)I think you'll grow to like your lovely horse a lot more once you get into the more open sections of the game and need to do a lot of travelling. Though I'd spent so long on the first wolf section that by then I'd forgotten how to actually call her, and spent a decent amount of time running around the vast expanses between towns on foot.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-08 07:34 am (UTC)In this game, I especially liked the fight scenes with the bulbokins (or orcs as they are really called as Can't remember there proper name). It took me ages to complete some of those missions with them. I am also glad it was a rather decent ending to the game.
I also went for the crossbow training as I enjoyed the western style shoot out so much in the game.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-08 03:45 pm (UTC)It did have a lot of variety in what it asked you to do, with those jousting bits, the game where you had to zoom around the cage collecting the lights, even the dreaded escort mission - maybe even approaching the minigame count of FF7, and that's saying something.
And I've just remembered what you meant by the Western-style shootout - that was definitely unexpected :) Though I got about five enemies in before abandoning all pretence of stealth whatsoever.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-08 06:10 pm (UTC)I also didn't get the zoomy thing for firing at far targets. Apparently squinting does just as well when shooting at people. Yes the escorted mission was fun, with having to change between 3 weapons.I think that, the lancing, the fight in the field took me 45-60 minutes each to complete. Incidentally I only understood what I had to do out of frustration as I thought I was being smart taking out all the little guys first. Finally I went "Grrr, I may as well go out in a blaze of glory and attack the big guy" and after dying after I hit him realising that that is what I should have been doing from the start.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-08 07:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-08 01:19 pm (UTC)I do think the ending battles are some of the best in any game around. Definitely made the whole game worth it.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-08 03:48 pm (UTC)As I didn't know what was happening coming into this game, the idea of having the two very distinct sections of the game in the form of the light and dark worlds was a complete surprise to me - it took me a while to realize that the same thing happened in Link to the Past, which I actually did play but never got very far in. I loved it when the first resident of the dark world cheerily addresses you with "Hello, mister bunny" while you're wandering around completely confused as to what's going on... that was as far as I ever got.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 06:41 pm (UTC)So the N64 ones are also on the list of things to try...
no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-27 11:29 pm (UTC)