Wii Review: Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Review by: Trogdor390

Sharpen your sword. Fletch and nock your arrows. Mount your steed and move out, the long awaited Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is here. Nintendo's silent, Epic Hero Link is back and better than ever. Some say that is perhaps better than the Ocarina of Time, widely considered the best Zelda game ever. Is it? Let's find out…

Let's talk about Story, since this is an Adventure game and adventure games are built around stories. Similar to all Zelda games before it, You start out as a young farm boy in a remote forest town (Skywalker, anybody?) named Link (you can change the name, but Link is the default and general given name for the character). All is well and good until a band of goblins starts wreaking havoc and capture you and you friends, mainly your love, Ilia, and the kids of the town. You learn that the world has been taken over a strange Twilight and once dragged into it, you become a wolf. Yes, a fuzzy little wolf. But soon a strange creature called Midna comes and decides to help you out and get the world back to the way it was. Without giving away to much more, the story is of epic proportions and rivals that of fellow video games like Final Fantasy VII and the Tales of Symphonia, and even movies like The Lord of Rings and (dare I say it?!) Star Wars. There are some good plot twists and you WILL get choked up at the end of all of this. My one and only beef is I would've liked more voice acting rather than just yells and gasps. Could move past text-only, please?!

Now controls. I am a firm believer that game play alone makes the game, and I was dreadfully afraid that Nintendo would be idiots and jack-nail the game to fit the Wii. Not so! You don't slash so much as you waggle. That's it. That's all. Waggling for sword slashes is a simple and easy to do maneuver to do while using the nunchuck for movement and lock-ons. Aiming for the Bow and arrows is nothing more than point and click, but some times precise aiming is a chore with out the scope (known as the Hawkeye), and good aiming in the heat of battle with the scope is difficult and cumbersome. In battle I much more like to lock on and fire than aim, especially when on horseback. But the controls are simple and easy, and that's the way they should be, because once you get the hang of them, it is actually quite fun and addictive.



Now in such an epic game, epic sound is needed. Sound effects are realistic sounding and fit with the Zelda franchise. Maestro Koji Kondo has done it again with music akin to that of Lord of the Rings or the Chronicles of Naria. It is regal a majestic at times, and dark and unsettling at others. The music more than overdoes it with the mood and I love it! It gives it a mature tone to it that I think was long over due when the too kid-ish Wind Waker came out. I personally have no beefs with though my friends have said that he has abandoned the classic Zelda music and ruined some of the songs. But I'm not one to dwell on the past too much so I can put it past me…

Now my least favorite section to review: Graphics. But this one made me smile. The light side is bight and colorful. The twilight is dark and over saturated. Link is heroic and amazing looking. Ganondorf and Zant are evil and crazy looking a hell. All is as it should be. Some people continue to whine about the game looking like "GameCube 1.5" and that the look last-gen. I will admit that if the Wii was the Xbox360 or the PS3, I would be wanting to eat my TV because the graphics look so amazing and tasty, but the Wii's hardware, I think, is pushed to overdrive in this and, for a Wii game, this is the best looking Wii game out there.

Lastly, is replay value. Much like Guitar Hero III, you're pretty much done, once you have beaten the game, that's it. You're done. There is some extra stuff for those completists out there, like getting all the hidden bugs and all the hearts, but there's not a lot. That's all I really have to say about that. It's a one-player adventure, not a party game, so it scores very low here but I'm not going to weigh it as much.

So is this game good? Yes. Amazing? Oh God Almighty, yes! Better than the Ocarina of Time? Well, no… it's a great game, don't get me wrong! But, it is not the Ocarina of Time, though it may as well be breathing down its neck with how close it is.